Maggie's Farm

This is my final Larry Summers post, and I wish him the best:

Grievance-collecting, as we shrinks term it, is a personality trait which commonly serves the purpose of self-interest or self-aggrandizement. It is rarely, in normal life, a rational or justifiable mode of operating.

While it is typically associated with paranoid personality traits, our society has taught people that it can be useful as a ploy or manipulation, and that people can actually benefit from having grievances, rather than being pitied and getting plain old-fashioned attention.

In our topsy-turvy, politically-correct, hypersensitive world, having grievances becomes a badge of honor. This is psychologically perverse.

And it is perverse to claim "offense", in my opinion. Who said YOU shouldn't be offended, anyway? Surely we all deserve to be offended, and all will be whether we deserve to be, or not. But those who seek offense and collect it will surely find the most - and will invent or imagine it when they cannot find it.

Every psychiatrist has seen a woman who had a notebook, or a mental notebook, of every insenstive act or word of their husband since the day they met. What those women (yes, it's always women) never realize is that, if he wanted to, the husband could have the same notebook, but he doesn't focus on it.

What's that problem? That problem is imagining, or wishing, that the world would pander to our every little neurotic hypersensitive feeling. There is the infantile narcissism, which tends to be much more concealed or disguised where it appears in men. And in the political and academic worlds, this seeming-weakness is exploited, converted into power to control and manipulate through guilt, and to gain a free pass for one's own aggression or destructiveness.

In America today, that conscious and deliberate exploitation of this format is a dominant force, which few are brave enough to confront. Yet it must be confronted, not only because it is nuts, but because it damages the person who does it, in the long run.

In psychiatric practice, we confront victimization daily, and refuse to permit patients to use it as a cop-out and an excuse for avoiding performance, achievement, earned, positive attention, and building good relationships. There is no human dignity, and no self-respect, and no future, in a career of bitching.

Every human has tough things to deal with, whatever color, religion, nationality, sexual interest, etc. they are stuck with. Get over it, as the Eagles say, and grow up. And growing up means giving up the baby methods of power and attention...and accepting our best, small, humble contributions to life.

I have felt that those sniveling gals at Harvard who sunk Larry Summers really took the cake in this game, and I am ashamed of my association because of that ridiculous episode. But they showed their power, didn't they? The power of sniveling bitching. That does women no good whatsoever - they need to be the best in their class in Physical Chem II, Linear Algebra, and Discrete Probability, if they even want to do graduate work. Tears and hystrionic self-pity won't do it in the big world, where performance and mastery count.

Make a rocket land on Mars or circle Saturn - that means something. Some women can do that - most cannot. But neither can most men. But we can all do something useful in this world, and destroying others isn't it.

I only have a minute to post, but I
was amused both by a comment,
and by Bird Dog's response. He should have asked me to do it for him, but he would never bother me on a beautiful weekend.

Mr. Anonymous, our critical blog friend and a sporadic reader of Maggie's, seems to feel offended by Maggie's "misogyny" for referring to female's desire to breed. Misogyny? Two out of our five regulars are women, with 7 kids between us two. Breeding is our thing, and semiotics comes second! (joke)

I know Bird Dog would be happy to take on another one, too, but counting genitalia is not his thing (as far as I know, but I know him well enough to know that he would not be that wierd).

Our blog is not totally into genitalia - mostly into ideas, but we do like humor and irony (despite being a no-irony zone). And we cheerfully defy any PC bull. But let me inform Mr. Anonymous about something his daddy never told him: men are sex objects for women. We spend a heck of a lot of time and money and energy looking for good breeding partners with decent genes and morals, and when we find them, we do not give them a vacation from their manly task: we put them to work and expect that they will give us their all. I wonder what asexual world he grew up in, or what lesbian college orthodoxy he was indoctrinated into, but it is not the real world. Maybe he went to Swarthmore? True, occasionally we enjoy getting one over on you guys with our "boo-hoo-hoo," but it's just a game we play.

We do not appreciate males who do not respond to our sexual, feminine selves. In fact, we are painfully hurt and offended if you do not. Truth. (My 16 year-old daughter concurs with this statement.) If we flirt with you, you had damn well better flirt back with interest and some snappy repartee.

We lovely, charmin' women women are breeders. We are designed for it - read our hips - and you fellows know you cannot resist our charms. No doubt about it. Sometimes we take an evil delight in toying with you, using our magical, witchy powers. Almost anything else we do is for fun or money - and this is not the time to get into the life of the spirit. Got it? Enough said?

Now I have a tennis match - and my pal and I are gonna crush our hubbies. David - now there is a real man and a fine hunk, and I'd love to fantasize about trying to "receive his serve". Rock-hard, I am sure. Nude tennis - there is an idea for the club: nude mixed doubles. A good thing. No distraction whatsoever! Haha - we are not a libido-free zone at Maggie's Farm!

I noticed the comments, especially on other blogs, related to our post a week ago by Capt. Gilmore, who offered us a follow-up note on his original letter, which we have since posted there. We do not know the Captain, but I see no reason to doubt him.

The desire, on the part of many, to deny that his letter was true seemed odd to me, until I realized that it must represent the desire to deny that 9-11 actually happened and was a Jihadist attack - or who would care?

It did happen, and it was a Jihadist attack. How many others have there been over the past 15 years? Plenty. Why desire not to believe it?

Because if you believe it, you have to do something about it. Much more comfortable to imagine that the attacks in London, and the attack on the Cole, and the first WTC attack, and all the others, were performed by an evil Bush-Israeli conspiracy for some dark but as yet-uncoded purpose. But, wait a minute - Bush wasn't Pres during most of them, was he? Well, maybe Bush and Clinton were in on it together...along with the rest of the government. Sure...that makes perfect sense: When Clinton was Pres, he probably said "George, I'll take a pass on killing these suckers, if you promise you will get them, after I rig your election, so you will get the credit and I will get...more Monica."

Trying to think like a paranoid is exhausting. We try to be sane, but if the blogosphere is a loony bin, I want out.

If I had the time today, I would go into this more deeply, but I cannot. But when I look at this thing on AOL News today - vote and check the numbers - one truly has to wonder about the irrationality, conspiracy cranks,  and wierd distrust that is going around. It is Bedlam. Maybe it's caused by fluoridation? (joke)

Sometimes I feel like adding comments, such as "Have you taken your medicine today?" However, I resist that impulse, since it would not lead to any civil exchange. One last thought: If a Dem were in office right now, and going to war against Jihad, he would be the "Franklin Roosevelt" of our generation. No doubt. 'Nuf said.

Editor's Note: More on this sad subject - "Whack Jobs Convene" - at Atlas.

"You know something is happening
here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?"

I have always thought of the capacity for irony as a good, rule-of-thumb IQ test.

Language without an occasional twist of irony is like language without metaphor.

However, if you don't get the definition of the word correctly, you can't use the concept. The word is only properly used to refer to something addressed to a dual audience, or "as if" to a dual audience: one in the know, and one not.

The usage has been contaminated by the illiterate, and is now sometimes used to apply to the "incongruous" or "unexpected", as in "Ironically, we both showed up at the wedding in the same dress." The cutest way to say that would be "Funnily enough,..."

One amusing use of irony is to say stupid things, or ungrammatical things, with the assumption that those in the know will figure that you are using irony, while others will figure that you are plain uneducated or ignorant. Start with "nucular."

Anyway, world - let's get the usage down properly: there is no excuse for abuse of English, since it has now become our "national language."

Ed: Image of Dr. Bliss added to this post, entirely without irony.

A quote from Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep, after Lee's semi- boyfriend Cross loses a basketball game:

When the buzzer sounded, I looked at Cross and was astonished to see that he was crying. I looked away reflexively, then looked back; his face was scrunched-up and red, and he was roughly wiping his eyes and shaking his head, but he wasn't trying to hide it...

Sports contained the truth, I decided, the unspoken truth (how quickly we damn ourselves when we start to talk, how small and inglorious we always sound), and it seemed hard to believe that I had never understood this before. They rewarded effortlessness and unself-consciousness; they confirmed that yes, there are rankings of skill and value and that everyone knows what they are (seeing those guys who were subbed with two seconds left before the end of a quarter, I'd think how girl's coaches would never be that heartless); they showed that the best things in the world were to be young and strong and fast.

Kay Hymowitz reviews a new book by Flanagan: To Hell with all that: Loving and Loathing our Inner Housewife. The radical feminists hate her, but they should not: it's the radical feminists who "reinforce stereotypes." Who would want to be the kid of a radical feminist? Not me.

Quote from the excellent review:

What Flanagan might have better underscored is that her real subject is not The Question: To Work Or Not To Work. It is love. Flanagan had a fierce devotion to her own mother, whose presence haunts the book. She experienced in her mother’s pot roasts and freshly ironed laundry the embodiment of comfort, safety, and love. Despite Flanagan’s deficiencies in the domestic arts, it’s a feeling she badly wants to bring to her own family. What this talented writer reminds us of are two simple truths that are apostasy to the fundamentalists and, sadly, lost to many young women who never saw them in action: that when working properly, satisfying domestic life can embody a mother’s love for her children, the most powerful love there is; and that no matter how women choose to live, this love will forever be entangled with self-sacrifice.

Should this really be the stuff of war without end?

Whole thing at City Journal here - it's good, and funny.

Image: A young woman gazing at the ocean at Cahoon's Hollow, wondering about her identity, feminist stereotyping, male oppression, and the meaning of life - and hoping she'll meet the tall, dark and handsome man of her dreams at the bar later on.

I think it was in Annie Hall. Alvy Singer is putting together a lobster dinner for his date with Annie - the famous lobster scene. She reads from the paper about the serial killer striking again, and he replies "I was nowhere near there."

My point is not to comment on Jewish guilt. Almost every religion and ethnic group with which I am familiar thinks they have the worst case of guilt. (Not sure about Islam. Do they feel guilty if they fail to kill an infidel?)

My point is to comment on neurotic guilt vs. healthy, normal guilt. Woody Allen's line is funny because it touches the neurotically guilty place in all of us. Normal people with sturdy consciences commonly have a slice of neurotic guilt in their personalities, unfortunately. It is usually a guilt about  bad thoughts, bad impulses, destructive tendencies, ugly selfish conniving, envy, cruelty, etc., or about minor, easily forgiveable moral slips. Oftentimes, such thoughts and impulses are out of our awareness, but the key is that, with neurotic guilt, one hasn't really done much to feel guilty about.

Healthy, wholesome guilt occurs to those with strong consciences when they truly cross a major line which is engraved in their hearts. It is painful, and should be painful. The warning and the punishment is self-administered, as it should be. A non-neurotic sense of guilt is, in my opinion, a matter of the spirit and not so much a matter of psychology. Everyone has stupidly or carelessly screwed up, if they have lived long enough, but a pattern of wrong-doing without appropriate self-punishment bespeaks a spiritual void as well as a non-functioning conscience. (We call that pride, or self-love, or narcissism, or sociopathy.)

Sometimes I wonder whether liberals wear guilt as a badge of pride. It is known to occur in AA meetings, where sometimes folks believe that the lower into tatoo-land they have gone, the more authority they can claim. Silly, and perversely narcissitic.

The subject comes up after reading Shelby Steele's instantly-famous essay, which basically rips apart "liberal guilt" and shows it to be the neurotic foolishness that it is.

(The subject of guilt also fits with Wednesday's post on "feelings," ...and it also comes up after reading today's post on the World Council of Churches, which contains an appalling display of public self-congratulatory hystrionic hand-wringing - so self-congratulatory, in fact, that I tend to doubt its sincerity and wonder whether it is a pseudo-humble, pseudo-contrite form of political statement. Ostentatious contrition is sometimes just the flip side of spiritual pride. If you read the whole piece at Touchstone, you will see that it's a living satire, like Woody Allen's line. I can say that, as an American citizen, I am pretty much guilt-free as far as I know, but as an individual, I am morally imperfect, and thus disconnected from God's loving but inscrutable will, despite my aspirations.)

Steele demonstrates that the undercurrent of irrational guilt in our culture, nurtured by a generation of America-haters devoted to highlighting historical imperfections and ignoring historical sources of national pride, has weakened our spine, our confidence, our common sense - and our freedom to pursue our self-interest. This is very similar to what neurotic guilt can do to an individual.

Here is short list of things about which almost all of us can say "I was nowhere near there": slavery, racial discrimination, genocide, destroying the planet, oppressing helpless people, imposing our religion on others, imperialism, evil intentions, raping and killing women and children. "Collective guilt"? Let's forget that notion: caring for our own souls is a big enough job, and a life-time job. I have no idea how preachers do what they do...

Discrimination against individuals I do not like or approve of? You bet. Always. Capitalism? Wonderful - gives everyone freedom to pursue their own path as they see fit.

There are another ten pages in this, but this is enough for now.

Image: Woody and Keaton in Annie Hall.

An afterthought: Christ set a high standard - impossibly high - in His most famous preaching, in His commentary on the Ten Commandments in the  Sermon on the Mount. Among many other things, He came close to equating evil thought with evil action, thus making all humans sinners, for sure. But Christians accept that, just as they accept the need for supernatural salvation. That is another spiritual matter, and not a psychological one.

As a psychiatrist, and a Christian, I deal with these two realities, sometimes with difficulty. Life is not meant to be easy, despite what the French want to think. "I never promised you a rose garden."

Good morning, students! I can see by the expressions on your faces that you are surprised to see me empty-handed this morning. After all, you took a test last class meeting and probably expected your results back today. But, don’t worry one little bit. I have a good reason for not grading your exams. I simply didn’t feel like doing it.

That's a quote from Mike Adams' piece titled I Feel, therefore I am at Town Hall, and in his satire it is clear that he really does "let his feelings out."

Complaining about "the kids these days" has been going on at least since Socrates and, no matter what you say, it tends to sound like a fuddy-duddy talking. Furthermore, how many of us were paragons of character in our youths?

Still, as a psychiatrist, I have to agree with Adams that the extent to which people feel entitled to elevate their feelings above the time-honored virtues like duty, discipline, consideration of others, and loyalty is a sign of the times. Most of us are lazy, at least some of the time; self-indulgent, some of the time; chose instant gratification over long-term goals, some of the time; and avoid challenges and hard things, at least some of the time. However, with good moral and character guardrails, we don't let ourselves get away with those kinds of infantilism for too long, partly because it doesn't work, and partly because it makes it impossible to respect oneself.

Blame it all on misunderstandings of Rousseau and Freud. If we are guided by emotion, rather than informed by emotion, we aren't much more than monkeys.

Read Adams' piece, and I will try to dig up an essay I wrote a few years ago on the subject, and I'll post it when I find it, buried somewhere on some hard drive.