Reverie, reflection,
(... & reptile brains in charge)
Greetings, with favorite blooms right in time for Ash Wednesday — so very Lenten of them!
Last week’s discussion of positive “weaving it forward” practices during Lent has set up a lovely minimalist mode for newShrink.
Meanwhile, there’s nothing minimalist about the week’s array of major breaking stories with national to global impacts.
There’s news, and lots of it — also very newShrink.
So today is the first sampler news-roundup edition in a while.
It’s a wide assortment capturing mostly news and headlines. Single-topic editions in weeks ahead will feature some of them in multi-dimensional deeper dives. One under way soonest will be Fani Willis, Atlanta’s Fulton County District Attorney and Trump-racketeering-case prosecutor, who’s been in dramatic spotlight this week.
PBS Friday evening again provides a good broad brush week’s recap (both video and transcript here.) Brooks and Capehart on death of Putin critic Navalny and Trump’s latest legal blow.
The news-week here is organized roughly chronologically as the week unfolded and in loosely topical clusters.
reptile brains in charge
On Monday or Tuesday soon after the Kansas City Super Bowl win, I had a lively bantering online exchange with a couple of guys who are smart, kindred-spirited longtime friends (since high school, egad!) One had posted the above cartoon meme of Chiefs Coach Andy Reid (illustrated above at bottom left.)
Barely a day later, the topic and our ensuing discussion proved to be so painfully prescient that I’m sharing the entire verbatim-exchange here:
Original post from David, with the Coach Andy meme:
Amazing how many people who have never been on a football field or been on a football team past Jr High or maybe High School are bent out of shape about 20 seconds of the Super Bowl - Andy & Travis!!!
How many have tried to talk to someone wearing noise cancelling head phones with music or 60,000 people screaming - a "Ah Coach, can we chat" doesn't work that well!!
Andy Reid said about the incident:
"There's nobody I get better than I get him," Reid said. "He's a competitive kid. He loves to play. He makes me feel young. But my balance is terrible."
Before my posted comment in response, I should note that I was egged-on by my good friend Robert, who has a rare knack for both humorously encouraging and poke-provoking my soapbox tendencies all at once. Here he playfully alerts all to: “Watch out! Someone is in Analytic Mode!” (Capitalizations are his.)
Well OK, yeah I was. Many points here may be familiar from newShrink discussions:
All of the second guessing about this today brings up the nerdy-shrink in me. Both of these guys [Coach Reid and Travis Kelce] are performing at max level, neurological razor's edge between peak arousal adrenaline-rush and yet also ability to hold it enough to go the distance. This is exactly what they are both paid the big bucks to do.
It's biological survival mode, and whipping teams and players up so that will happen is what a lot of the cheering, yelling and crazy-tough physical heart-pumping moves are for. Fight/flight/freeze reptile brain is in charge, and strategic thinking/impulse control functioning shuts down enough to serve survival — or those final Super Bowl-winning moves.
Awareness about this is the reason EMTs and soldiers headed to triage judgment situations are trained not to run and to breathe calmly, for their executive judgment needs to be functioning spot-on.
Kelce on the trophy platform was obviously still in that over-the-top, irrational- arousal state, which likely took hours to cycle down. (And by the way, experience with performing at this high-pitched level, while still able to contain it intentionally, is likely something he and Taylor Swift have in common, though their mobbed milieus are very different.)
As with reactive gun and mob violence, fully analyzing or understanding is just not possible solely (and later) from a logical-intellect state of mind. The impulse-controlling intellect is not the dominant, much less the only, brain/neurological function in charge when any of us is in a state of high arousal — in any form, from any cause.
Just a day or two later on Wednesday afternoon came chilling, too-graphic case example.
2 Teens in Custody in Kansas City, Where Police Say Dispute Led to Mass Shooting (NYT)
A Story in Photos: Parade Celebration to Deadly Shooting Scene (USA Today)
This occurs with this week’s anniversary of the 2018 gun massacre of 15 students, a coach and an athletic director at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Miami suburb Parkland, Florida.
A lot is now known, has been mapped and can be known, about how everyone’s brain and nervous system works in settings full of joy, excitement, celebration — and adrenaline rush-arousal. How does one not think of that with some sense of dread, fear or at least extra vigilance in every kind of mass gathering? And in those settings how exactly do more carried guns, open or hidden, make us more, not less, safe?
If like me you’re an occasional or more frequent fan of streaming any of the British, Scandinavian and other European detective and crime procedurals, maybe you too have noticed how many of the story-crime plots would never happen or be solved in America — because someone would have long since pulled guns. For so much crime-solving to be done by unarmed law enforcement officers is astonishing, and rather comforting. For me the same is true of the capacity to rely on CCTV, routinely available in public spaces, that is so commonplace, relatively calm, civilized. (An expectation of "privacy,” via invisibility, while plainly visible out in public does not seem logical or reasonable to me.)
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Reflections here focus on past, present and/or future with a nod to the Monday holiday:
presidential matters
By way of framing this section, here’s a timely compare-and-contrast glimpse of what both a U.S. presidency and a profoundly Christian public life can look like — and has:
Jimmy Carter’s Long Goodbye (The New York Times)
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News of fierce Putin opponent Aleksei Navalny has had profound reverberations as the Biden administration works to assure and strengthen essential relations with NATO allies while continuing delicate diplomatic negotiations in the volatile Israel/Gaza crisis. Trump’s widely publicized inflammatory threats against U.S.-NATO ties, praise for Putin’s aggressions and at-best disregard for Ukraine have been sobering counterpoint. Within this NYT story are excellent embedded links and profiles that offer insights into Navalny’s work, life, evolving world-view and inspiration/motivations as well as his wife and now-young-adult children. It paints a vivid, deeply concerning portrait of life and options under Putin-style, president-for-life dictatorship.
The Kremlin’s fiercest critic, whose work brought arrests, attacks and a near-fatal poisoning in 2020, had spent months in isolation.
Aleksei A. Navalny, an anticorruption activist who for more than a decade led the political opposition in President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia while enduring arrests, assaults and a near-fatal poisoning, died on Friday in a Russian prison. He was 47…
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The next few stories regarding Donald Trump’s thicket of legal cases are clustered here to suggest we’d all best care, pay close attention — and be concerned if not alarmed, however eternally tedious it may seem.
A huge penalty for deceiving lenders about the value of his properties and his own net worth, if upheld, leaves Donald J. Trump in a perilous financial position.
‘We have a lot of cash,” Donald J. Trump boasted 10 months ago, under oath, claiming that the number was “going up very substantially every month.”
But whatever cash he had may soon be gone…
On Friday, the judge overseeing Mr. Trump’s civil fraud case issued a final ruling that inflicted a staggering financial penalty. With interest, the former president has been ordered to pay New York State about $450 million, a sum that threatens to wipe out a stockpile of cash, stocks and bonds that he amassed since leaving the White House, according to a New York Times review of Mr. Trump’s financial records. He will have only 30 days or so to either come up with the money or persuade an outside company to post a bond… [Note that some news outlets are reporting a $354 million total penalty figure that excludes the interest already immediately due.]
In the ruling Judge Arther Engoron wrote that these frauds were not insignificant, that they “leap off the page and shock the conscience.” Of defendants Donald Trump, his sons Don Jr. and Eric and their real estate organization, he wrote:
‘Their complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on the pathological… defendants are incapable of seeing the error of their ways.’
Just a couple of weeks earlier, a second jury awarded sexual assault-victim E. Jean Carroll an additional $83 million — $64 million of it punitive — in damages owed by Trump in a similar behavior pattern of disdain for the courts, rule of law and utter lack of contrition or remorse. A different jury last year had awarded Carroll $5 million in damages due her from Trump; the jury affirmed Carroll’s claim that Trump had raped her in a department store dressing room, then damaged her through extensive, repeated defamation over years . Last month’s second jury found Trump’s continued defamation of Carroll so egregious that its award was significantly higher than the amount Carroll had sought.
As is well-documented and painfully experienced throughout the Trump presidency and culminating with January 6th, Trump and Trumpism evokes, stokes, encourages fear, reactivity, and violent ripple effects — for which he and his supporters express not remorse or shared responsibility but the righteous defiance of wounded victims. Fear and violence beget projected fear and violence — unconscious, unclaimed and therefore far more dangerous. A Donald Trump increasingly threatened and financially fragile is, in a word, frightening.
Among other key Trump-related matters moving through the legal pipeline, the U.S. Supreme Court is considering his latest legal arguments for presidential immunity. This well-reported piece sheds light on the high stakes and unprecedented legal dilemmas presented by current Candidate Trump’s involvement in the January 6th effort to overturn an election and transfer of power to keep himself in office.
Trump’s Wild Pursuit of Presidential Immunity (The New Yorker)
The former President has already lost the immunity case twice, but he has also won something.
In an application to the Supreme Court filed on Monday in a federal criminal case related to January 6th, Donald Trump’s lawyers make an extraordinary claim: “Without immunity from criminal prosecution, the Presidency as we know it will cease to exist.” It’s the kind of sentence that raises questions about Trump’s view of the Presidency—does he think that to do the job he has to be able to commit crimes? And yet there is an aspect of truth to it. If Trump loses his appeal, the Presidency as we know it might, indeed, change in a fundamental way. Contrary to the Trump team’s suggestion, though, it might change for the better; whereas, if Trump gets everything he asks for, it will certainly change for the worse…
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As mentioned above, beyond this story’s recap of this week’s dramatic hearings in Atlanta regarding D.A. Fani Willis I am reserving the multi-dimensional deeper look for after the judge issues a ruling, reportedly in the next few weeks.
At issue are allegations against Willis by the Trump defense team in the Georgia election-interference racketeering case. They have claimed, but struggled over two days this week to substantiate, conflict of interest and illicit financial-gain involving 52-year-old Willis’ having dated Nathan Wade, one of her department’s three hired outside prosecutors.
The case, and Willis, have absolutely riveted my attention on many levels from the obvious politics and legal dimensions, to the psychological and archetypal, to power dynamics and patterns around race and gender. Even if you have read or heard some coverage, if you haven’t yet watched I highly recommend viewing much of Thursday and Friday testimony — likely browsable on You Tube and elsewhere. On Thursday I would see the testimony by Wade, followed by Willis’ unexpected appearance to testify on her own behalf, and effective dominance of the room the rest of the day. Then on Friday, testimony by both former Georgia Governor Roy Barnes, then especially Willis’ international lawyer-father John Floyd, are powerful. Beyond all news coverage, even thorough and excellent ones, watching gavel-to-gavel on this one provides a dramatic closeup of how the energy and power in the room is wielded, by whom and how, and when and how it shifts across the two days. There is a rare and fascinating bit of lawyering under way, that I can’t stop watching, with this woman. The phrase “perhaps it takes a Trump to catch a Trump” keeps crossing my mind.
On this next item, perhaps you recall bits and pieces from the Trump-Ukraine-aid scandal that led to his 2020 impeachment in the House.
Charges come amid pitched accusations from Republicans in Congress over alleged informants
‘Special counsel David Weiss — who has previously filed criminal charges against President Biden’s son Hunter — announced new charges Thursday against a former FBI informant who officials say lied about the Bidens’ business dealings.
The indictment returned by a grand jury in Los Angeles accuses Alexander Smirnov of making a false statement and creating a false and fictitious record. The charges amount to a stark rebuke of conservatives, particularly Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, who touted Smirnov’s claims as he and other Republican lawmakers tried to build a corruption case against the president and his family…’
Back in 2020 Republican Trump defenders brought up, but never established substance to, these alleged, long examined and repeatedly debunked claims. (Their claims pointed still-farther back, to Biden’s vice presidency prior to the 2016 election of Donald Trump.) This has critical relevance now for several reasons. As discussed last week regarding needed immigration reform and aid legislation, Congressional Trump-Republicans are bending to Trump pressure to stall needed aid to Ukraine in its defense against Putin’s Russia, as well as Israel. This shifting Republican support for Ukraine comes this week — just as a now increasingly cash-hungry Trump blasts vital U.S. NATO alliances while rekindling his warm relations with Putin, Russian oligarchs and other dictators.
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Before closing, now a return to the minimalist spirit of that Lent-season culling and simplifying.
reverie
Above are among the curated daily so far (in addition to Lenten rose/Helleborus at center) are flowering quince at left, King Alfred daffodils at right, and at bottom floating camellias (the white ones are now blooming,)
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I leave you today with three Lenten Valentines, each from Wednesday.
Pictured as spotted at first coffee time, sparkling white and black in sunlight, are by far the largest, mature pair of loons I’ve ever spotted on the cove. They hung out like this much of the morning, rather hovering with the occasional dive for a bite.
Before that had been two pre-sunrise dream-snippets. In the first I realize that I have, and need to make note and remember, that I have seen a Purple Cow. (No photo images or illustrations apply — it’s just the fact of the sighting, as with the brief 19th Century nonsense-poem. In browsing I found there’s a Seth Godin business/marketing book by that title, from which only the meaning — something rare and remarkable in a good way, like a unicorn — resonates.)
And in the later dream snippet there is a visual — a very cute, cleverly drawn comic strip character named “Baby Boy Origen” [spelled here with an e-, as with the prolific 1st-2nd Century theologian. And this drawing doesn’t look anything like the Coach Andy Reid-baby photo meme above — I checked!] In the dream the comic strip has now been around a long time, is well-launched and regarded, and as with the Purple Cow, I am instructed to note and make sure and acknowledge Baby Boy Origen. So I am!
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And, that is all I have! Talk to you next week.
🦋💙 tish
… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”
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