Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire

Republican Representative-elect George Santos has admitted that he lied about his professional experience and educational history. No, he admitted, he never graduated from Baruch College: he never attended Baruch College or any other institution of higher learning! No, he acknowledged, he never worked at Citigroup or Goldman-Sachs. And oh, no, his grandparents did not survive the Holocaust as Ukrainian Jewish refugees from Belgium who changed their surnames. Santos explains, “Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background I said I was Jew-ish.” Unless he wrote that out, who would recognize the difference? I don’t understand that claim at all, but, oh well, whatever! As a Republican I guess he feels free to make any claim he feels like making: the wilder the lie the better the chance that it will be believed by those already inclined to believe lies. Think of the Trump minions who yet hold on to the possibility that the former President will be reinstalled in office once the fraudulent elections are discovered. And the Republican leadership remains silent.
           Now that he has been exposed, I’m waiting to hear from those who have been deceived: the voters who elected him to office under completely false pretenses. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me! First Trump now Santos. With Kari Lake squeezed into the mix. Before the first vote had been counted she claimed that if she didn’t win there had to be some fraud involved, and now insists that the courts declare her the winner even though she lost the election by 17,000 votes. Who holds onto these fantasies? And why? As for Santos, despite having lied to voters, and thus stealing an election by representing himself as he was not, Santos remarkably claimed that he “wasn’t a criminal.” He said that “To get down to the nit and gritty, I’m not a fraud

 . . . I’m not a criminal who defrauded the entire country and made up this fictional character and ran for Congress.” Well, of course he is a fraud and yes, he did make up a fictional character. He said a lot of people know him but . . . hmnn. Who is it they think they know? Nevertheless, Santos assertion raises a number of questions. When people voted for Santos they were voting for a man who represented himself to voters as a college graduate, a successful business man, and Jewish. But that isn’t the man who ran for office. He had no college degree, was not a successful business man, and had no Jewish ancestry.
           This particular incident suggests something more nefarious, I think: lying is no longer a bad thing. Telling lies has become an acceptable practice—this follows the two years of Trump and his minions promoting the Big Lie that the election which he soundly and legitimately lost and that he should be President. And that is besides the lies Trump told during his four-year reign. Lying will no longer make one’s nose grow longer, rather it opens the door to a greater deception: I don’t have to be who I am: I can be whoever I wan to be. The electorate is stupid: I’ll be anybody who can get elected. It is only lying. Trump used that lie all the way to the White House and beyond.

           And the Republican leadership remains silent.

Words, words, words

 This has been the days and nights of Hanukkah. Each night for eight nights I lit the candles and recited the blessings. I think it is comforting to add light to the wintry darkness. This past week, as well, occurred the longest night of the year. On this date I inevitably think of Daisy Fay Buchanan who complains that she always waits for the longest day of the year but then misses it!  I think that I wouldn’t regret missing the shortest day of the year; here in the Midwest it is always so damn cold and very dark! Anyway, this year I remembered a Hanukkah almost 60 years past. We always lit the candles in our home, and in the competitive environment surrounding Christmas our parents gave us children a present on each of the nights though as financial resources became less available, first night gift-giving became the practice. I don’t remember how old I might have been on this particular Hanukkah night, but I must have certainly graduated from high school because such resources were not then available or even spoken of in class. But on this first night, I received as a gift the two-volume Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary purchased with books of S&H Green Stamps my mother had collected over many, many shopping trips. Having these books changed my life: from them I recognized that language had history; language was not static nor insular. Words could come and go; the meaning of a word changed, and with that change so did reality. In possession of those volumes, I had yet another key to understanding. When I learned what a word had meant then, I believed I had gained some insight now, though I am not certain that then I knew to what that insight really meant. Nevertheless, in possession of these volumes and the knowledge they contained, I felt rich.
            I find in my journal that I have copied the following confession from Montaigne’s essay, “On Vanity.” He admits, “I write my book for few men and for few years. If it had been durable matter, it would have had to be committed to a more stable language.” As I had earlier learned from my OED, language was never stable, though I must acknowledge that the bound complete works of Montaigne suggests that his book has been, indeed, durable matter. But his is a very modest admission and the very opposite of vanity. Language is unstable and hardly static, something that the reactionary Supreme Court justices do not understand. Alas, I know what it is to write for few men!
           I learned, too, that language was fun, not exactly a reference to what Wittgenstein meant in his designation of ‘language games,’ but an exciting game nevertheless. An ordinary instance: When someone expresses pleasure in an object, an event or even another person, Cool acts as an expression of pleasure, an acknowledgement that something is good and pleasing: We might say, “Ah, this is so cool,” or “he’s cool,” or “that outfit is cool.” Ironically however, when we want to express displeasure with something we employ the extreme: “He acts so cold to me.” “That’s cold, man.” Of course, in the Midwest to say “It’s cold” is a common description of the weather from November to April, and it is certainly not in that instance a very positive measure! But the moderate ‘cool’ expresses approval and the extreme measure ‘cold’ continues as a negative assessment.
           The opposite is sometimes true with another temperature metaphor. Whereas the word ‘cold’ expresses disapproval, the use of the adjective ‘hot’ can often express admiration: “That nightclub is so hot, I love being there;” we say “Ah, that person is so hot.” These turns of phrase are considered as complimentary expressions of approval. And the less sizzling ‘warm’ also suggests an expression of compliment. We might say, “The boss responded to my idea warmly.” But the expression ‘lukewarm’ does not express approval; rather, referring to something as ‘lukewarm’ is not meant as positive assessment and suggests that the idea might be rethought or abandoned altogether. But when baking bread the yeast is to be softened in lukewarm water. Knowing the rules of the game in which language occurs creates the meaning of language. The rules of the game includes the social, historical, cultural and personal context from which the word(s) arrive and into which it enters. These contexts are neither static nor durable. And I think that is a good thing.

Embarrassment and Shame

Apparently, I had sold the book to Half-Price Books (for much less than half its cost), and so I cannot recover the context from which I have drawn this accusation from Michael Chabon’s novel, Moonglow. I present it here then from a journal entry I had made so I do know the indictment comes from page 241 of the novel. The sentence reads, “This one said that what I knew about shame—what my entire generation with its deployment of confession as a tool for self-aggrandizement, knew about shame—would fit into one half a pistachio shell.” Alas, there is not much space in a half shell. As Chabon writes here, shame, though usually thought of as the fall-out of a difficult and traumatic emotional state, appears to be employed for positive effect. In this case it would seem that one doesn’t experience shame so much as to drape its cloak of inky black about one, and I think that such appearance hardly counts as shame.
           Confession sells but shame doesn’t, and the steady flood of memoirs and memoir-ish articles proves the point. Confession enhances sense of self for both confessant and confessor. Perhaps confessions give the confessor an opportunity to experience schadenfreude, to take pleasure in another’s pain. There is a New Yorker cartoon: portrayed is a four-lane highway separated by some fence-like barrier. On the two left lanes is a seemingly unending line of unmoving traffic. But on the two lanes opposite a solitary car breezes along. On the side of the road a sign reads “Schadenfreude, Next 20 miles.” That speeding single automobile will enjoy open road for that recorded distance while across the highway divide no one moves. Of schadenfreude Gore Vidal says, ‘It’s not enough to succeed. Others must fail.’ So might it be in the confession box and in confessional writing: on one side sits an individual in pain and on the other side another listens in, assuming a virtue one might not actually possess, and by listening the confessor promises absolution. The presumption of this power must offer some satisfaction: I am not like that, the confessor feels, as the confessant narrates their sins. Perhaps one motive for reading confessions is to assert superiority over the confessant. I am speeding along while across the way there isn’t a car in motion. Or there might be some voyeuristic motive to hearing confession, to viewing another’s suffering. I think of Phil Ochs’s song “Crucifixion”, his response to President Kennedy’s assassination. which asks “Tell me every detail, I've got to know it all,/And do you have a picture of the pain?.” Or I remember the enjoyment viewers experienced as women on Queen for a Day narrated the hardships of their dismal lives. Perhaps the confessant experiences aggrandizement by admitting to their numerous ersatz sins. The ladies on Queen for a Day certainly hoped for reward from their plaints. Aren’t I wonderful, they might think, recognizing and admitting my sins so publicly. Isn’t my misery praiseworthy?
           I believe there is a difference between embarrassment and shame. My dictionary of psychology defines shame as an emotion characterized by guilt, embarrassment, and avoidance. But I don’t think that shame is a synonym for embarrassment, nor do I think shame is embarrassment in extremis. Embarrassment occurs when one acts in a way that negatively but temporarily disturbs one’s sense of self: as when one wants to think oneself suave and self-assured but who crossing the room or the street trips over the carpet or an uneven sidewalk and looks hurriedly about to see if anyone has observed; or embarrassment occurs when one wants to appear smart and while pontificating about something mispronounces the word or gets the facts wrong. Embarrassment is a transient emotion. Shame, psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut says, is a disintegration product of pride and healthy assertiveness: shame lingers. Shame is like the radiation that a nuclear fission emits. When pride and self-assertiveness fall apart, then the self has collapsed. Shame is not a blip in sense of self, rather, it is a complete deflation of a sense of that self. With shame, the self disappears. Psychoanalyst W.R.D Fairbairn says that shame is the experience of guilt employed as a defense against the release of bad objects in the unconscious. That is, guilt is a way to keep the world safe from becoming peopled by my bad objects by holding those bad objects within but then feeling self-doubting about their presence within. Shame admits that I am filled with bad objects. 
            I think that Chabon mistakenly conflates embarrassment and shame. The deployment of confession as tool of self-aggrandizement hints not as the collapse of self but as a tool for increasing its presence and power. Confession might recount some awkward moments, but the purpose of confession is not abasement or sorrow. Confession is a strategic boasting: it announces, see what I’ve done!       

            I did publish a memoir in March but I think it was not so much for the purpose of confession as it was for discovery. The motive was not self-aggrandizement but explanation. I felt beset with anxieties and wanted to explain these states to myself (and whoever might read the book) through some narration of my life. I think that I succeeded to define myself to myself and found (at times) I had even produced some notable writing. And that last statement is as close to confession as I will approach. But perhaps explanation in a sense is justification and appears therefore, as an instance of self-aggrandizement. See how cleverly I can explain and justify my behaviors and render them inactive! Anxious Am I? is not the product of either shame or embarrassment though it does record some behaviors of which I am not proud. But in fact, my publication of the memoir seems to me now as the opposite of shame! But perhaps not for the purpose of self-aggrandizement.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Starting over?

At the beginning of Richard Wollheim’s memoir, Germs, he writes, “For many years, and all of them before I set out, with Dr S as my pilot, to sail back up the stream of my life—an image I clung to for those strained, pipe-filled sessions in which the unity that I longed to find in my life seemed to slip further and further away into incoherent anxieties . . .” I think that what Wollheim refers to here is that his sessions with Dr. S produced not a cohesive, coherent self but rather, an awareness of a self beset by and even governed by vague and formless dangers to which he had organized defenses though he was never quite certain what the danger actually was. Such is the nature of anxiety: Freud refers to anxiety as a particular state of the individual expecting danger or preparing for it, even though that danger may be an unknown one. Freud distinguishes between anxiety and fear, the latter requiring a definite object; anxiety is unstructured and formless, spreading out like The Blob, in amoeba-like spreading movements. I have spent many years in pipe-filled sessions with my choice of a Dr. S, and I suppose I sought in these sessions some thread that would singularly and definitively explain the shape of my life, my character. Instead, and throughout the years and sessions I discovered an array of disjointed defenses for a multiplicity of innumerable and imagined dangers. In “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” Freud acknowledges that though analysis might assuage one anxiety/neurosis and that might even suggest the cessation of treatment, the erasure of the one leaves room for another to rise in its place. Alas, I am familiar with anxiety. Sandor Ferenczi, one of Freud’s inner circle, called character traits ‘secret psychoses.’ Perhaps he meant that what I take to be ‘normal’ are manifestation of anxieties. Laurence Sterne, on Tristram Shandy, referred to character traits as hobby horses, and asserted that as long upon his particular hobby horse a person did not hurt anybody then why should anybody care. I have throughout my life maintained an ever-increasing stable. But Ferenczi suggests that we are all a bit mad.
           In March 2022, I published my memoir, Anxious Am I: A Pseudo-memoir with Some Fiction and a Bit of Truth. Over the past seventeen years I had kept a blog, Of Clay and Wattles Made, in which I have continued to document my psychic comings and goings. In a moment of dubious lucidity, I decided to use my blog entries as the skeleton of a memoir over which I would stretch a somewhat porous covering and give some character and bulk to the bones. I proceeded to compile the entries from the past seventeen years, organize them into various subject headings, placed them into different colored, labeled binders and began to write a story of my life through the lens of my well-documented anxieties. I suppose I sought out in the writing to document how my anxieties had given a disordered shape to my existence. But in that search I discovered just the opposite, and came to see that the failure to discover coherence was, in fact, the only coherence. Walt Whitman said it years ago: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.”) Though I doubt that Whitman referred here to the incoherence of his self. 

            I wonder if what I am doing at present is constructing another skeleton over which I will stretch some skin and breathe life into what I have created. I’m thinking of Dr. Frankenstein whose unnamed monster desired a companion: one good anxiety deserves another. But the good doctor declined to create another. I proceed anxiously but contentedly on. Come Watson, the game’s afoot.