Young Mitt Romney: Pro- War Draft Avoider, Dog Torturer, Prep School Punk, and now...Fake Cop!

(Right)  Young Mitt Romney protesting against anti-war protesters while enrolled at Standford University.  He supported the Vietnam War but ducked the draft with deferments, in the proud tradition of Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich and quite a few other chicken hawks who supported that war and plague us with their patriotic hypocrisy today. But, wait, folks, it gets weirder:     
In  addition to the more bizarre behavior of Mitt Romney that has been well already publicized (such as the dog on the roof of the family car in the 1980's, or the hair-cutting/forced  assault on a gay student at the Cranbrook Preparatory Academy in 1965 when he was a 17-year old hooligan,) we can now another eccentric and disturbing bit of weird and unsettling behavior to the would-be president---he was a cop impersonator.
From the article in The Daily Beast: "'One former classmate told the National Memo, "He (Romney) told us that he'd gotten the uniform from his father," then the governor of Michigan. "He told us he was using it to pull over drivers on the road. He also had a red flashing light that he would attach to the top of his white Rambler."

Book Review: "Sunnyside" (2009)

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Literature & Fiction
Author:	Glen David Gold

This 2009 book follows three major story-lines. It covers the growth of United States entertainment business, the raising of its armed forces and its cultural power through government propaganda and movies in the second decade of the 20th Century.

Gold's book is rather like E.L Doctorow's best-seller "Ragtime" from the 1970's in that he gives us real characters (like Charlie Chaplin, British general Edmund Ironside and US Treasury Secretary William McAdoo) interacting with other real-life and fictional characters.

The first story is centered around Charlie Chaplin, the first male film superstar, circa 1916. On a November day in that year, there is a sudden bout of mass hysteria: all over the USA there are hundreds of reported sightings of the former English Music Hall comedian turned universal "Tramp" character in small theaters from California to Maine.

This mass-sighting event really happened. Gold reportedly read 400 books and did years if research to get the stories in the novel right and it brims with time-appropriate details that make you feel right in the past, a past now dead to the living today with only glimpses of that time in pieces in films and photographs, and in the words of those who left a record in print.

Chaplin is a sudden and unparalleled success. Women all falling all over themselves after a little cockney kid who grew up half-starved most of his childhood and was once found begging on the streets of Lambeth for food by offering a paper hat he had made from a discarded newspaper. Now he's rich. He plans to build his own film studio and, with the help of his trusted business partner and brother Syd, can make any his film he wants and however he wants.

Only three things scare the 27-year old Chaplin: the English-language press calling him a "slacker" for not joining up to fight in the "Great War" either for Britain or soon, America; the prospect of his mentally ill mother, Hannah--whom he has said in earlier interviews was dead--coming over from England to make his life more complicated, and the withering personal and professional criticism of the other greatest star in Hollywood, Mary Pickford.

Mary is Chaplin's "bete noire" : the darling golden-locked sweetheart who has a canny mind and a sharp-honed tongue has also come up from poverty and she is a business woman to be reckoned with. Chaplin has little use for Pickford and the competition she represents but he does have longings for Mary's pretty scenario writer (Frances Marion, another real-life woman and one of the few women to wield power in the industry). There is also the sticky matter of a certain 15 year old high school girl and part-time actress named Mildred Harris, whom Charlie takes a liking to after meeting her at a memorable party scene in a Santa Monica mansion owned by early movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn. It is the first of several cases where Charlie's love life will shape the public perception of the man behind the "little fellow", a jack of all trades character to some, a clown to others like Pickford and a genius who cribs bits from great books to insert in casual party conversations so he can be taken seriously as a person and in his work.

The title "Sunnyside" refers to a 1918 movie Chaplin made, his first full-on attempt to make a movie with some "serious" messaging between the kicks, pratt-falls and stunts.


By 1917-18, the growth of the motion picture industry in the United States has exploded; a small-scale Los Anglees-based industry has become a world-wide center of capitalist industry, helped greatly by the literal collapse of the movie industry in Europe after 1914.

Powerful people in New York now want to take over the picture business and turn in-dependant film stars like Chaplin, Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks into contract players working in big studio factory set-ups. Oligarchic power and loss of control makes for one more thing Charlie has to worry about. He has no plan to stay free, but his nemesis "Little Mary" and his friend Doug Fairbanks may offer a solution. But Mary and Doug have their own personal problems--both want to divorce their mates and carry on with each other. Will their divorces or news of their affair become public and ruin their careers with a a still-puritanical portion of their adoring public?

Other powers in America eye the motion picture industry with covetous intent after 1917, specifically the Woodrow Wilson Administration and the Secretary of the Treasury, William McAdoo. McAdoo is impressed that people are willing to shell out money to see movie stars. He needs to raise money for "Liberty Loans" to shore up the expense of sending America into a major foreign war for the first time in its history.

(below a clip from the 1982 Thames documentary series , "Unknown Chaplin", narrated by James Mason.)



One of the book's best scenes is a Liberty Loan Drive in San Francisco. Chaplin, Pickford and the cowboy star William S. Hart are there having previously toured all over the country to raise money for fighting "The Hun". Millions are raised and Chaplin is off the hook for being a slacker. For the first time, the United States government is also making movies. Propaganda is being brought to new heights. War fever is hot in America but ordinary folks parting with money is another matter. Combine celebrity and parades and girl scouts collection pledges and peer pressure and suddenly McAdoo has a formula to save democracy or Big Banking or any other reason there might be to fight a war.

There are groups also ordinary propagandists called" The Four Minute Men" who go theaters that show films and sell the war in pithy poetry and bathos--between the changing of movie serials and newsreels. The speakers try and get people to shell out money to send their young men "Over the Top!" in a war that has already claimed millions of lives on two major fronts in three and one half long desperate years.

One of the young men who volunteer for the job is Leland Wheeler, the young, star-struck and illegitimate son of a Wild West show impresario and a lady lighthouse keeper. When his efforts backfire and he is sent to the Western Front as an aerial observer, we see a part of the last months of the war in graphic detail.

The final part of "Sunnyside" concerns a less well-known part of American entry into European warfare---the travails of the North Russia Allied Expeditionary Force, led by a British general, Edmund Ironside. The American who is the protagonist for this part of the story is a young Texas snob named Hugo Black. Thousands of US troops--mostly those considered "C" class forces not cut out to be much use in France against the Germans-- land in Archangel, Russia, three degrees above the Arctic Circle. Black meets a couple of destitute Russian princesses who have their eyes on him being their ticket out of the nightmare of Russia at war.

The coalition mission is to spread democracy and stop the Bolsheviks from taking full control of the region. The Americans call themselves the "Polar Bears" and most of the troops are from the frigid area around the Great Lakes region. But the Russian winters beat Detroit cold snaps all to hell. And the "Bolos" are fighting on their own turf, or tundra as it were.


Officially the so-called Slavic-British forces do some fighting and a good deal of freezing once winter sets in. The story has obvious parallels to today's bloody contests in Afghanistan and Iraq and the results are little better. This third story is based on solid truth, although as the author notes in an afterward, it is the sort of thing that should only have happened in fiction.

"Sunnyside" is a long book (550 pages) but a rewarding one. Characters known and unknown, real and partially-real, are all absorbing and have interesting inner lives, especially Chaplin and the other "hero" of the story Leland Wheeler, a young man who just wants to get into show business even if he has to do it by training a german shepherd orphan puppy to do tricks and just maybe become famous under the name of Rin Tin Tin.

Gold tells these three main stories without forcing them all together; they are connected to each other in small but tangible ways. All in all "Sunnyside" is a fine novel fro American and European history buffs and those who wonder how human beings can use a plastic medium to both laugh at others and also get prepared to kill them.

Celebrities Gone Wild and The Curious Case of Ted Nugent

“we are patriots, we are Braveheart...We need to ride into that battlefield and chop their heads off in November.”--Ted Nugent, 2012. ( Former star  rocker and current sage of Waco, Texas) 

 

As has been pointed out by pundits of reasonable mind, America is a culture obsessed by celebrity.  You don't really even have to be a current popular celebrity in this nation, because there are so many people of my age around that millions of us remember ex-celebrities who survive on their decades-old success through "oldies" tours and restorations of past movies and DVD compilations of old television shows. 

The aged celebrity is not a footnote in American culture.  Two over-the-hill film actors have served as governor of California, one ( a certain R. Reagan) as a two-term President.  The other, blood-and-guns-blazing action star Arnold Schwarzenegger, likely would have run for president had be not be inconveniently born in Austria and therefore Constitutionally ineligible to run for the highest office.  A third celebrity, Bob Hope, went all the world roughly around Christmas time for decades entertaining the US soldier, sailor and Marine abroad.  A conscript stationed in a hellhole like Thule in Greenland or a base in the former South Vietnam could at least count on a supply of  bad jokes and alluring female pulchritude coming from the USO's biggest draw.  

During the 1960's I would argue Bob Hope made some of the worst comedy films and television specials that have ever been committed in front of a paying audience.  What once was funny was now a groaning bore. My parents tried to watch the older Hope of this time in memory of his salad days as a radio and film comic from the last generation. Even they threw in the towel, as did millions of others, when it was clear the well was dry.   Yet Hope's  popularity remained rather undiminished in many areas for what the did for "the boys overseas", all the while making millions by selling film of his USO Tour for television specials. 

Folks on the left have also gone on the celebrity-activist circuit with results less than stellar.  A classic example of this was Jane Fonda going to Hanoi in 1971 and parking her fetching rear end on a the seat of a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun, smiling away like she was watching kids at play rather than soldiers using Russian or Chinese made equipment to shoot down her countrymen.

 

Protesting the Vietnam War and calling for peace ---a good thing.

Doing it with heavy artillery as a backdrop?---well, I'd say counter-productive.  But at least Ms. Fonda apologized for that one and has more than paid her debt for a misstep in a otherwise brave mission to end the most stupid and destructive event in American history.  

 

 As Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank pointed out in a recent editorial. "We are, after all, the land of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and Snooki."   If you wanted to add people who actually had talent or had not squandered what talent they had so far, you could include Brad Pitt, Algelina Jolie, Leonardo DeCaprio, country singer Blake Shelton, satirists like Tina Fey and her co-star from "30 Rock" aged leading man Alec Baldwin (keep your eye especially on that guy going political when the right handlers rope him in and enough brown spots cover his hands. )

Throw in pop diva female singer actor Jennifer Lopez or anybody in the cast of  "Madmen" or the next winner of "America's Got Talent."    

 These are the celebrities of today and perhaps there is a future governor or President in that mix.  I rather hope not.  Social policy should not be a  game for dilettantes, a sort-of reward for the best man or woman entertainer who can play off their past casting or chart song success and pretend that is indeed who they are. "Apres Reagan, le deluge" it seems.

 

I would argue that the aged celebrity is the most likely figure to wish to recapture his or her fame in a cause that at once draws attention to an issue and also revitalizes their career.  Celebrities like Elizabeth Taylor and Charlton Heston brought their shopworn  success to specific causes like AIDS research (a very good thing) or in Mr. Heston's case, the phantom threat of loss of personal firearms rights that he championed in the last decade or so of his life (a very divisive and dubious bit of grandstanding in my view.)  How much each of these worthies were engaged in a cause they felt they could help and how much they wished to find an audience is a serious question and one that shouldn't be shrouded in ones personal political views on the subject.       

And this brings us to Ted Nugent, a past-it rocker from my youth who is known mainly for songs like "Cat Scratch Fever" and other pearls of pop testosterone poetry.  Mr. Nugent is an avid sportsman, in the Teddy Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway and Elmer Fudd mode.  He is also a flaming eccentric who shoots,bags and  guts dead animals for fun. He is outspoken on the subject of protecting the Second Amendment to the Constitution in the broadest possible terms and feels this right is under threat by the current Presidential Administration. (Which has steadfastly said almost nothing about new gun laws, holding fast to the Democratic Party playbook that states that Al Gore lost his bid for the Presidency in 2000 in part because he floated the idea of a national handgun registration law.  This angered enough rural Democrats in West Virginia and New Hampshire to swing from Gore to Bush. )

But, as any psychologist worth his salt knows, you don't have to have a threat to produce a groundswell of hysteria in a given crowd.   The "Madman of Motor City" seems to have picked up the mantle of defending gun rights via the National Rifle Association from the "cold and dead hand"  of Mr. Heston.  Again, is he supporting a cause or cashing in on past glories to stretch his time in the spotlight?  

One thing for sure he was not--unlike the late Mr. Heston and millions of other American males who find shooting things exciting---is  a veteran. 

 He got a deferment from the Vietnam War in a way I find rather novel and creative. “(Nugent claims) that 30 days before his Draft Board Physical, he stopped all forms of personal hygiene. The last 10 days he ingested nothing but junk food and Pepsi, and a week before his physical, he stopped using the bathroom altogether, virtually living inside his pants... (OK, you get the idea) Nugent went on to say "… if I would have gone over there, I’d have been killed, or I’d have killed, or I’d kill all the hippies in the foxholes … I would have killed everybody,’ he told the Detroit Free Press in an interview published July 15, 1990.”   

So he does sound a little disturbed, right?  But he has matured since his halcyon days as a rocker? Or not.  The Secret Service is going to interview him today to find out what he meant by these recent remarks (below): 

"Nugent, who is also a columnist at the Washington Times and whose endorsement was welcomed by presidential candidate Mitt Romney, told the NRA in his speech that "If Barack Obama becomes the president in November, again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year."

Oh my.

 

But what is there to say about the USA and the gun and rifle crowd? Were that "Teddy"  could just blow off steam and make rude remarks about Obama's policies or Nancy Pelosi's hair or whatever  and  leave it at that.

But  But The Aged Celebrity in this case appears to have jumped the rails.      What will become of Ted?   LZ Granderson at CNN has some thoughts.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/18/opinion/granderson-nugent/index.html "Allowing people to threaten the life of a president, particularly during time of war, is not protecting free speech as much as it is dangerously close to treason as it is defined in Article III of the Constitution. We have an agreed-upon system to replace elected officials we don't like. It's called democracy. If people don't like the president, they can say that. They can vote against them. They can run. They can leave. But they shouldn't be allowed to go on the Internet or radio and threaten his or her life. I felt that way about George W. Bush, I feel that way about President Obama, and I will feel that way if Mitt Romney gets elected.

"That's because this conversation isn't about them or the parties they represent. It's about maintaining some level of respect for the office. How can we begin to talk seriously about "restoring America"-- whatever that means -- when we openly threaten the life of our chief ambassador?

"U.S. Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy were all assassinated. Six U.S. presidents survived assassination attempts.

I"'m not surprised to hear such comments from Nugent. But I am surprised that in a country with 106 million handguns, 105 million rifles, 83 million shotguns and four assassinated presidents, we don't take such talk more seriously."

*************************************************

These are indeed disturbing remarks the man has made , no matter who is in office. And all the more reason to heap skepticism on performers with little formal education going into a political realm, much less into high office, when  they might not be prepared to mind their own actions or what flies from their mouths.     

World War II Propaganda: "Lambeth Walk-Nazi Style" (1941) ,"A Yank in the RAF" (1941) "Mission to Moscow"(1943)

(above) Official American and British propaganda Posters from World War II.

Hollywood didn't wait until Pearl Harbor to make use of the war headlines and pro-Allied sentiment in the nation to turn a dollar or two at the local cinema. Although it seems the desperate war against the Nazi Stukas in The Battle of Britain is taking a backseat to The Battle for Betty Grable between Tyrone Power and her British suitor.******************** The most famous (or infamous) case of a big screen pro-Allied feature was the 1943 Warner Brothers spectacular feature, "Mission to Moscow", best on a best-selling book by Ambassador Joseph Davies:

The film later took center stage during the anti-Communist Witch-hunts after World War Two.  The head of Warners latter apologized for making the film, but one can how important it was in 1943 to show a film that depicted the Russian people in a a positive light given its enormous contribution to the war effort.  The inaccuracies of the Stalin Purge Trials are it's chief defect.  Seen today, it hardly seems more or less biased than the average war film of its time.  In any case, the film itself was a flop at the box office, losing $600,000 dollars.   

According to a latter-day review of the film in the New York Post: "The Roosevelt administration also viewed the film, which was widely shown in the Soviet Union (depicted as a worker's paradise), as ardent pro-capitalist propaganda. The film's brave hero is Ambassador Joseph E. Davies, a wealthy corporate lawyer who was married to Marjorie Merryweather Post, the richest woman in the United States (not that the film actually spells out the latter, which was well known to at least U.S. audiences of the time). "Mission to Moscow'' was among two dozen Hollywood features shown in the U.S.S.R. during the war -- not only pro-Soviet propaganda flicks like "The North Star'' and "Song of Russia,'' but the likes of "Charley's Aunt'' and "Sun Valley Serenade.'' They were so popular that the Commisars fretted Russians were acquiring a taste for Hollywood, and quickly turned off the spigot before the upscale likes of Deanna Durbin corrupted socialists and endangered the native film industry.

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/blogs/movies/item_OAddcpTQhPIBfvp4nZUvCM#ixzz1jwgA4uhU

The Truth About Social Security and Election Engineering

This is where the US Social Security ACT came in, August 14, 1935. Today, over seventy-six years later it still enjoys such popularity that between 65-70 percent of citizens polled on the subject say they would rather see Social Security taxes raised than see benefits cut. This includes both independent and Republican voters. (see link below)
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/05/new-polling-confirms-overwheming-majority-wants-social-security-left-alone.php
Social Security is  the one program that has had the most effect in changing the lives of elderly people, and those who have lost parents to premature death while they were still in their teens through the SSI support.  2/3rds of the elderly lived in poverty before the Act. Today that number is less than a quarter.
  It is the Jewel in the Crown of Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal", as important to his legacy as the Reagan tax cuts of 1981-2 were his supporters. Reagan himself, a former Democrat until 1962,  bowed to FDR's wisdom  when he called for a commission and later signed legislation strengthening Social Security.
So why do Republicans like Rick Perry want to kill the program?  So they can out-Reagan Reagan? 

“It is a monstrous lie. It is a Ponzi scheme to tell our kids that are 25 or 30 years old today, you’re paying into a program that’s going to be there.”

— Gov. Perry  (R-Texas, Governor and currently leading Republican Candidate for Presidential Nomination in 2012)
According to journalist Glenn Kessler of "The Washington Post" in his political analysis of last night's GOP debate, Perry are "a bubble off plumb", as my Uncle Ragnar, a union carpenter for thirty-five years, often said.

 Take it away, Glenn:      
"Perhaps the governor does not know the dictionary definition of a Ponzi scheme. Here’s what Merriam-Webster says: “An investment swindle in which some early investors are paid off with money put up by later ones in order to encourage more and bigger risks.”

"This is a frequent mistake politicians make when talking about Social Security. It is not an investment vehicle; it is intended to provide income security as well disability and life insurance. Just more than 60 percent of the 54 million beneficiaries are retired workers; the rest are disabled workers, dependents or survivors.

"Social Security is a pay-as-you-go system, which means that payments collected today are immediately used to pay benefits. Until recently, more payments were collected than were needed for benefits. So Social Security loaned the money to the U.S. government, which used it for other things. In exchange, Social Security received interest-bearing Treasury securities. The value of those bonds is now about $2.6 trillion. (We have written about this at length.)

"In any case, Perry is wrong to label Social Security a Ponzi scheme. Ponzi schemes ultimately go bust and everyone (except possibly early investors) generally loses their money. Social Security faces a long-term funding issue, but one that most experts say is manageable. After all, the Social Security actuary says that Social Security’s shortfall is 0.7 percent of the gross domestic product over the next 75 years."
So why this misleading synthetic panic that reactionary politicians like Perry and the "tea party" extremists seem to want to spread.  It goes back to an idea that Ronald Reagan threw out in his first Inaugural Address as President.  "Government is not the solution. Government is the problem." 
Such sweeping generalizations always play well with the  swath of voters out there who are either looking for simple solutions to complex problems or who are "low information voters" or polling data subjects.  The former group wants to believe the worst about an institution that they see as intrusive to their lives.  By "poisoning the wells" of all government efforts that hope the programs they abhor will be undermined as well.  I believe there is really not as many voters like this as it appears, but they are usually the most active and the most likely to vote in straw polls and caucus events that require people to eschew the secret ballot. Further, they are generally loud and simplistic in their rhetoric, and so play well in the visual mediums like television news where a picture or a pithy phrase  is worth a hundred reasonable essays that measure carefully the pros and cons of a given issue.

And if you undermine people's belief in the interests of their self-government, then it is more likely that "low-information voters" will just sit out an election, felling that "they all all crooks" or "every politician is the same".  This plays into the hands of corporate-funded lobbying groups like Freedomworks, Crossroads, and the billionaire Koch Brothers various ways ot promote plutocracy over democracy and privatize everything, including the Social Security system, a process favored by George W Bush which would have been a disaster after the 2008 mortgage-backed securities meltdown on Wall Street in 2008.

Special interest groups  exert pressure on Congress and chief executives in all states by withholding cash donations and/or promising that their single-issue voters (NRA members for example, or anti-tax fanatics) will come out on primary day and remove them from office.
In other words, discourage the distracted voter out there  who is working too much or looking for  work and have too many other domestic problems (child care, bills, family budget, elder care, etc., ) to pay attention to the differences in political candidates. If they stay home on election days, single-issue groups have more power.  Further, if they only can rely on television ads to tell them about candidates, a constant stream of anti-government invective will cause many to just shrug and say "a pox on both their houses."  That's' why the Republican activists are always trying to make it harder for people to vote by forcing more and more onerous identification laws in swing states like Wisconsin--to keep the harried and the disenfranchised who cant afford  the equivalent of a passport just to vote in the country they and their parents were born, worked, lived and paid taxes in.
There are signs that  people are waking up to the draconian dreams  of Rick Perry, even with his chief challenger, Mitt Romney, distancing himself from the remarks of the Texan. But we also live in an era where the "economic royalists" are back in power as they haven't been since the 1920's.  All progressive legislation in the past 100 years is up for grabs.

This is nothing less than a fight to stay in 2011 and beyond and not to go back to the Age of Robber Baron uncertainties for average workers.  Beware those who offer radical solutions and easy fixes. 

When Did "Flaming" on the Internet Pass For Argument?

"Flaming, also known as bashing, is hostile and insulting interaction between Internet users. Flaming usually occurs in the social context of an Internet forum,  Internet Relay Chat (IRC), use net , by e-mail...and on video sharing websites. It is frequently the result of the discussion of heated real-world issues such as politics, sports, religion, and philosophy, or of issues that polarise subpopulations, but can also be provoked by seemingly trivial differences."--Wikipedia

 

I found myself checking out my You Tube website this morning, to see if any messages I left weeks and months back thanking or commenting on videos had elicited any responses. I only do this once every few months.

 

  It turned out I had several responses back to my past comments. A couple of them were nice--people acknowledging my thanking them for posting some rare video clip or something. I never expect that but its a nice gesture.

But the majority of comments on what I thought were simple corrections or reasonable rebuttals backed up by facts as I knew them, were  hostile. It was suggested that (a) I must be on drugs (b) a brainwashed idiot who takes orders from a cable television news station and (c) simply brain-dead.  A couple of the other comments were backed up by the kind of foul language I personally reserve for when I accidentally fall off the roof while mucking out the gutters.  

If you've been around the Internet, visited You Tube or a small to regional newspaper "comments" site or any website where politics, sports, religion, or any debate-able matter is open for discussion, you'll know what I mean.  You Tube itself has started to cut off commentary on many videos if they have a glut of these angry missives. Other still open have page after page of this junk that passes for "debate." I went through a couple sites today and was disheartened to see there was no end to some of the crud that passed for argument. Is this what has become of the  greatest personal communication  system since the invention of the telephone?

By now many experienced hands on the 'Net are saying "Well, what do you expect, Doug?"  Same old, same old as they say. Well, frankly, I think things are getting worse out there, not better.  And that's my point.    

 

Shouldn't more web users be getting the knack of this by now?  Why do more sites seem polluted by rancor and nastiness.  When did typing "you suck" (and that's just the lowest level of abuse) become a clever debating gambit?  What is It about the anonymity of the web that causes people to sink to the verbal level of a childhood schoolyard, or at the worst a prison exercise yard?    

CNN's Tod Leopold interviewed a communications professor on this subject for a November 2008 article. Here's a portion of it: 

  

"One reason for the vitriol that emerges on the Web, experts say, is the anonymity the Internet provides. Commenters seldom use their real names, and even if they do, the chance for retaliation is slim.

"'In the [pre-Internet era], you had to take ownership [of your remarks]. Now there's a perception of anonymity," said Lesley Withers, a professor of communication at Central Michigan University. "People think what they say won't have repercussions, and they don't think they have to soften their comments."

"'Contrast that with a face-to-face conversation, or even a phone conversation, where you can judge people's moods from facial movements or vocal inflections, observes University of Texas psychology professor Art Markman. "It's hard to be aggressive when you're face to face," he said.

"Moreover, he points out, aggression often carries a subtext of power.

"'A lot of times, real anger is an attempt to get control over a situation where the person doesn't usually have it," he said. In that respect, comments to blog posts are attempts to strike back.'"

http://articles.cnn.com/2008-11-03/tech/angry.internet_1_web-sites-blog-posts-nonverbal-communication?_s=PM:TECH

 

Let me first off say that I am not talking flaming from any of my regular friends here on Multiply.  People seem to be able to disagree here and there and get along okay. Those who want to spew  some kind of personal attack on me can have at it here--to a point.

Those strangers who come along to my site just to raise ire for the sake of drawing anger---well, horseman or woman, please gallop on by. 

 

Criticism I can handle.  Most people can.  But what I'm seeing on under-monitored sites is appalling. I'm curious what if other people have experienced this flaming lately and if they think this is getting better or worse?    

"House of Games" (1987) Lindsey Crouse, Joe Mantenga: Written/Directed by David Mamet

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Drama

Mike: Wait, wait, wait. What is this? What are you gonna do to me? What are you fronting off about? And if I'm this bad dude, why don't I just take out some gun, blow you to a billion parts?
Dr. Margaret Ford: I'll tell you why. Cuz I think you're just a bully.
Mike: [chuckles] Just a bully? What, you're not gonna let me carry your books? Aren't you a caution.
Dr. Margaret Ford: Let's talk turkey, pal.

This movie was the first that playwright David Mamet directed ,an adaptation of his own screenplay. The story pits a psychiatrist with a best-selling book who butts up against a steely con man named Mike (Joe Mantegna) in a seedy bar and gaming club to help one of her patients, a desperate young man who appears on the verge of suicide.

The shrink Margaret Ford (Lindsey Crouse) becomes attracted to the world of con artists and how they conduct their con games,all the bluffs and "tells" and signals and elaborate schemes which set up "marks" to turn over large amounts of money with deceptions that are tightly coordinated and on the knife edge of danger. Margaret is intrigued by both this underworld of confidence men Mike has assembled to make his illicit living, and the obvious chemistry she and Mike have as a team in this dangerous demimonde world of dark streets and dangerous situations.

The film has a group of engaging characters and enough twists and turns to keep one guessing who will come out ahead (or at least alive) in this smart highly charged suspense film.

Surrealism and Rene Magritte (with Nina Simone's "Sinnerman")

“If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is
also a translation of the dream.”







Rene Magritte (1897-1967) is my favorite of the artists who are placed in the category of Surrealists.

I admire how much he uses absurdity and humor in so many of these paintings presented here. Also the way he plays with space and imagery (like the huge rocks that appear in many of his most famous works) and the bizarre men and women who inhabit his netherworld of fantasy--a world that gives us arresting insight into our own way of seeing the world around us. A painting of a pipe that tells us, in cursive writing below, "This is not a pipe." Or a view out a living room window that is blocked by a painting of the identical landscape you'd expect to see outside.

Nature can be duplicated and its still great art (potentially) , but Magritte wants to remind us of our perceptions and the power of understanding (and not understanding) how our brains process the life around us.

This separates his work, and the work of so many other great 20th Century painters, from the old task of the painter's art to duplicate nature and its creatures and humans in the exact detail of visual simplicity.


There is a bit of an impishness to his work, but also a touch of the macabre.

The music here is Nina Simone's classic "Sinnerman".

How Democrats Are Failing to Sell Health Care Reform - George Lakoff

"George Lakoff makes plain how the words used by politicians translate to the public support for various political issues. Language matters - especially when it comes to politics."

A founder of the field of cognitive science, Lakoff takes an in-depth look at the ways in which our brains understand politics, breaking down the politics of language. This is a recent speech he gave at The Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco.

George P. Lakoff, 68, is a professor of linguistics (in particular, cognitive linguistics) at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1972. A former disciple of Noam Chomsky, he studied under him at MIT and later broke with Chomsky over some matter of linguistics.

Lakoff is also a founder with the progressive think-tank, The Rockridge Institute, and the author of the successful "Don't Think of An Elephant", whic hmade the New York Times bestseller list.

His most recent work, "The Political Mind: How You Can't Understand 21st Century American Politics with an 18th Century Brain".

Nadya "Octomom" Suleman: Motherhood as Media Sideshow

The Cult of Celebrity in America has drawn a new and so-far successful high priestess. She is Octuplets Mother Nadya Suleman and she is the woman who after already having six children went a little crazy down at Ye Old Fertility Clinic and had eight embryos put into body.  All eight were born, making her family consist of one single mother who is working on a college degree (a Masters Degree in Advanced Biology, I presume) and has little visible and legitimate means of ever supporting this baseball team of a family in the long term.  

 

 NBC News and The Oprah Winfrey Show have already done major stories about this family.   "The Today Show" in the morning devotes several minutes to this story. Only the downturn in the world economy is a bigger television story. Nadya has achieved  celebrity, for whatever short shelf-life that will bring her.  Even her mother and father are now  reluctant celebrities. . 

I have already seen the interview she did with Ann Curry on "Today". Before I could switch off  "Today" the folllowing  morning, my voyeuristic nature got the better of me. I was treated to seeing her argue with her mother on a videotape shown on "The Today Show".  Nadya's mother is having problems understanding why her daughter had so many kids after already having given birth to six.  (Grab a number and get in line, grandma.)

 It's sad.  Sad for her.  Sad for her parents, who seem like good people blindsided by the actions of their daughter.  I can only imagine what is going to happen to many of these kids when this lady suffers an inevitable breakdown when the cameras and the interviewers go away in a couple years.  (Foster Care most likely)  One television "psychiatrist" named "Dr'. Phil", whose not a real shrink but a great huckster, claims that she is "addicted  to being pregnant". Schrewd analysis there, Phil.  I would also add she is  addicted to getting her face on "People" or "Us" Magazine without going  through the trouble of becoming an actor or a model or a politician or billionaire.  

 The prime reason she had all these kids, it appears to me,  was to draw attention to herself, to use fecundity to create a cult of celebrity around herself.   It has already been reported that she had facial surgery to make herself look more like Angelina Jolie. And the media and yes, consumers of media like yours truly are  enabling her with interest in these interviews. 

Maybe Nadya can finagle some money out of these enterprises.  I honestly hope she can-without having to do anything too sordid. She is going to need some major day care services in the immediate time. And since it is estimated it now takes about $200,000 to get a child into adulthood in America, she'll need all the dealing skills and kindness of strangers  she can muster.  But at some point the media is likely to walk away and leave Ms. Suleman and her vulnerable children to their own devices.  

It's very unlikely that all this will end well for her, or these children.  Fourteen children, eight of them infants and many of the others, still young, seems to be too much for two well-established parents, much less one lady who may have an attention-addiction problem. It is reported that she is now considering an offer to appear in a porno film to make a million dollars, according to the New York Post.   Most likely the state of California  will have to step in and try and deal with the wreckage of this reckless woman actions, and those of her doctor who implanted so many potential kids into a mother of six. 

Don't get me wrong. I revere motherhood and respect ordinary women who choose to raise children without a husband.  But this is not an ordinary woman in a situation remotely manageable. If anyone sees a bright side to this developing train wreck of a story I'd love to hear it.    

 

'Black Friday' Shopping: Killing Someone To Get At 'The Stuff'

LONG ISLAND, New York (CNN)

The death of a temporary Wal-Mart worker trampled by customers amid frantic Black Friday shopping could have been avoided, the union that represents retail workers said Saturday.

Jdimytai Damour, 34, was crushed as he and other employees attempted to unlock the doors of a Long Island, New York, store at 5 a.m. Friday, police said.

"This incident was avoidable," said Bruce Both, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 1500, the state of New York's largest grocery worker's union. "Where were the safety barriers? Where was security? How did store management not see dangerous numbers of customers barreling down on the store in such an unsafe manner?

***********************************

To which I would like to add:

Where was the common sense?  A man died--trampled to death--because people in a big box store in New York State could get at some after-Thanksgiving bargains in a ritual of early morning hysteria that has now infected the holiday season all over the USA.   Why did Mr. Damour have to die? 

Stuff.  Low-priced stuff.  People need stuff. Or so they think. Or so they have been programmed to think. Some need it so bad they forget they are responsible for not injuring others to acquire it.

   

I read when this incident occurred that some shoppers were actually mad that the store was closing down in the wake of the death and the four serious injuries there resulted. Why?  Because people couldn't get into the Wal-Mart Store fast enough.  Some of these early-morning mob/shoppers were actually pounding on the glass, scrambling forward like wildebeests on a migration, then bending the metal frames of the entry doors, apparently busting some of the hinges off said doors. 

  As one of my friends on Multiply, Mark/Astroguy, put it so well, it's strange what kind of behavior comes out on a holiday that is supposed to be celebrating the birth of Jesus, who even among non-believers has to be recognized as a Man of Peace. 

I've worked in retail myself for a lot of my working life in one position or another.  I can remember seeing an old lady get knocked off her feet on "Black Friday" in 1983, my first "Black Friday",  because a younger man and his girlfriend or wife had to have a "Cabbage Patch" doll for their child.  The people acted like they were somehow entitled--that the ordinary laws of civilization didn't apply. Well, they do.  

I've dealt with short-tempered and anxiety-ridden shoppers. I don't ask for any concern. My work is remunerated by what I do in helping shoppers. And that's part of the package.

But I object when people put the lives of others, not only store employees and managers, but other shoppers at risk as well. Shoppers are not free to  think collectively like a herd of buffalo and not give a damn about their actions.  (A woman during this same incident at Wal-Mart was knocked down on the ground.  She was eight months pregnant!)   

Expect good customer service, shoppers, but no one should put up with seeing a having a co-worker being physicality harmed because a storm people want a damn Gameboy or a iPod or an LCD television.  

 Why did these Wal-Mart shoppers act like spooked buffalo?  There is so excuse for the loss of human life for consumer lust.   And I think  stores promote this behavior unintentionally. It's those "come-early-early-early or lose out!" promotion plans, that "door buster" mentality that contributes to this. In a tight economy people feel more desperate to get bargains.  

I hope they catch the people who trampled Mr. Demour and I hope more human security is put into high-volume stores.  And i hope everyone who reads this takes a few deep breathes before they do their holiday shopping and, sadly, be on the lookout for unruly consumers and if you can do nothing else, stay the hell out of their way.  If they "strike" like commandos in Long Island, NY, then they can strike anywhere.     

      

 

Interesting Television: The Prisoner (1967) and its remake (2009)--Part One

This was the opening dialouge to almost all episodes of "The Prisoner":

 "Where am I?"

"In the Village."

"What do you want?"

"Information."

"Whose side are you on?"

"That would be telling…. We want information. Information! INFORMATION!"

"You won't get it."

"By hook or by crook, we will."

"Who are you?"

"The new Number Two."

"Who is Number One?"

"You are Number Six."

"I am not a number — I am a free man!"

"The Prisoner" is a unique piece of television. It addresses issues such as personal identity and freedom, democracy, education, scientific progress, art and technology, while still remaining an entertaining drama series. Over seventeen episodes we witness a war of attrition between the faceless forces behind 'The Village' (a Kafkaesque community somewhere between Butlins and Alcatraz) and its most strong willed inmate, No. 6. who struggles ceaselessly to assert his individuality while plotting to escape from his captors."--Stuart Besick, from "The Prisoner" International Movie Database Website.   

I first saw "The Prisoner" as a CBS Summer Replacment show in  1969.  I was still a kid, but had seen my share of  American  spy dramas on telelvision ("The Man From Uncle", "Mission:Impossible") and spoofs of the James Bond craze ("Get Smart").  I had even seen some of "The Avengers" which was a hybrid of both the dramatic and the tongue-in-cheek espionage series.

But none of that prepared me for this show.    Even after I had watched several episodes  of it, I wasn't sure what to make of the whole thing.    In 1978 I got reaquainted with the series in a syndication run.  This time the series, starring Patrick McGoohan, the star of "Danger Man" (or "Secret Agent Man" in the USA) had me hooked by its enigmatic qualities.  The oppressive and eclectic athmosphere of "The Village" and its allegorical views of what constitutes freedom and individual integrity had resonance now that I knew something about George Orwell's and Franz Kafka's most popular writings.  But I still couldn't get a handle on what point on the politcal spectrum the show fell on.  And the last episode of the show "Fall Out", where "Number 6/The Prisoner" (McGoohan) finally gets to meet the "Big Brother/Number One" seems to be the most perplexing  ending to any work of drama I'd seen to that date.   

  And apparently I wasn't alone. Millions of adults had seen the series in the United Kingdom when itoriginally aired in 1967/1968 and didn't know quite what to make of it either. The American host of the station that presented the series claimed that McGoohan himself had felt the need to to leave England and for Switzerland and then America because so many people were angred by the enigmatic ending to the show.

This intrigued me.  Television dramas could be interesting of course but casual viewers usually don't get so worked up over a show that the star and co-creator has to hot- foot himself and his family out of the country to avoid people who were in an uproar over what was only a James Bond genre show, right?  Didn't make sense. It's onlly after seeing a couple episodes that you see that McGoohan and producers George Markstein and David Tomblin were subverting the whole "cold war spy" series into something that was neither stoic action-drama or smug spoofery.

(Exteriors for "The Prisoner" were shot along the coast of north Wales, at the resort of Portmierion. This was the backdrop for "The Village.)   

After the show had aired a few more times in the 1970's and 80's it took on a cult status, a status which apparently was only increased by the Internet, from which several "The Prisoner" sites can be found with a quick Google search. That cult status has not escaped the notice of movie and television executives either--a new "Prisoner" television series is currently in production in Namibia and Capetown, South Africa, to be broadcast next year on the AMC network.  Here's a link below for information on the new series.

http://www.amctv.com/originals/the-prisoner/    

The premise of the original series is deceptively simple.  A man who works for some British intelligence service marches into the office of his boss in the bowels of the Parliament Building, slams down a written resignation and then takes off in his sportscar to pack for a trip to the tropics.  But he finds himself waylaid to a place called "The Vilage", an idyllic little seaport where people are generally friendly but from which no person can leave. Every one has a number they wear on a badge on their person at all times.   

(above, McGoohan's character campaigns for the office of "Number Two" in the episode "Free For All".  In "The Village" elections are held from time to time. If he manages to win, freedom will be won and things will certainly change for the citizenry. Or will they?)     

 

Almost every week "Number 6" had to deal with a new leader of the village , an administrator known only as "Number 2", usually a man but in one episode a woman.   The new "boss" would try to get him to break down and acknowledge why he resigned from the service and/or entice him to join "The Village" as a proper good citizen.  Rather than simply eliminating him, or subjecting him to brute torture, the forces behind these various Number 2s had a mission to win him over as a potential new "boss" of the Village.  Number Six is no ordinary agent, one must surmise, but has great value.  (I later learned the basic premise of the show bears some resemblance to the philosophy of Ayn Rand's Objectivism, a philosophy of extreme selfishness I cannot say I am impressed with any more than I am with the notion of mass conformity in peace-time civilization.)        

Here is a scene from one of my favorite episodes, "Hammer And Anvil", which shows a quintessential encounter between Number 6 and the authorities. Number Two is played by the fine actor Patrick Cargill.  His character has just driven Number 73, a fragile woman prisoner, to suicide.  He now works his "charms" on our hero.  

 

In the next section of the blog, I will post a few more "Prisoner" clips and talk about why I think this is one series that is worth looking out for, even if you've never seen it.  The best aspects of the show have a unique way of being thoughtful and entertaining. 

Until then, here's a bit of a taste of the previous series McGoohan starred in,'Danger Man".  It  made him a big star on the small screen and the highest paid actor in British television.  It also reportedly bored him after awhile, but  its success in the UK and North America gave him the clout to  get something as off-the-wall as "The Prisoner" off the ground.  

 

 

Spanking Little Kids and Voting Tendencies, USA

To your left you see a map  of the 2004 Electoral College breakdown.  The states in blue went with the Democratic candidate for President, John Kerry.  The red states went for George W. Bush.  As you see most of Bush's electoral strength was in the South and the Midwest.  Now please take a look at the map below this one.

 

 

 

 

  This is a 2006 map showing the number of student spankings taking place in public-funded schools in the USA.  The darker the state is,  the more frequent is the number of spankings or "paddling" with a wooden board that a child received.  (You ca nrun your cursor over the state on the second map to see the number of spankings.) The darker states had more than a thousand recorded spankings; the lighter shaded states permit spanking but more a lower ratio of corporal punishment.  The light-shaded states are states that do not permit corporal punishment in the schools.  See any similarities?  It seems with the exception of the Virginias, Nevada, Utah, Montana, Nebraska, and the Dakotas,  George W Bush carried every state that lets teachers hit kids with impunity. Coincidence?   

Maybe if Barack Obama wants to win the election this year, he and Mrs. O should start whacking their kids with wood if they get out of line. 

I remember being paddled a few times in my school in California--until they stopped by my school district in 1968, when I was starting the third grade. The state of California banned corporal punishment state-wide in 1987.    

 Personally,I only remember being paddled twice, but one time it was very painful because a grown man--the principal--laid into me and starting whacking my hand with a ruler.  The reason for my punishment? I was wrestling with another kid just after recess.  Surely a six year old should have known better!   And surely an office smacking by a large, bald middle-aged adult was the only possible way I could learn not to fight with another six-year old.  

Later on, my school developed other ways of keeping us kids in line---missing recess by standing on the edge of a grassy lawn, at attention like a soldier, right by the principal's office,or  staying after school to write long sentences on the  chalkboard (a la Bart Simpson in a future time) , or getting put out of class into detention for a hour.

  Real thick-headed offenders were threatened with suspension from school.  Very few kids crossed that line in my day, and this worked very well with me because I couldn't imagine coming home and telling mom or dad I was out of school for a week. I'd be given a good verbal dressing down and then stuck in my room most of the time I was out!  No television and no transistor radio!  This potential state of affairs was more effective to me than taking any physical punishment.  

If parents want to spank their kids, well, that's their decision.  Personally, I don't want a teacher or some principal like the chucklehead who whacked me so hard hitting a kid. I  still remember it forty years on.  Physical punishment by strangers inflicted on children is nothing I'd want any child in my care to receive. Back then, my parents could keep me in line just fine with only a limited amount of "rear end" warming.        

  Seems like most of my friends I kept in touch with from those days  did well as adults when they achieved maturity, despite only having the opportunity to be paddled at school after age 8, if at all.     And its interesting who gets paddled most often as you will see from the reports below, as well as the fact that all European nations---a total of 100 countries in all--don't do it anymore. Anyway, I thought this was interesting.    

The AP story below is by Libby Quaid:   

 

WASHINGTON - Paddlings, swats, licks. A quarter of a million schoolchildren got them in 2007 — and black children, American Indians and kids with disabilities got a disproportionate share of the punishment, according to a study by a human rights group.

Even little kids can be paddled. Heather Porter, who lives in Crockett, Texas, was startled to hear her little boy, then 3, say he'd been spanked at school. Porter was never told, despite a policy at the public preschool that parents be notified.

"We were pretty ticked off, to say the least. The reason he got paddled was because he was untying his shoes and playing with the air conditioner thermostat," Porter said. "He was being a 3-year-old."

 

In its study, which was being released Wednesday, the group Human Rights Watch used Education Department data to show that, while paddling has been declining, racial disparity persists. Researchers also interviewed students, parents and school personnel in Texas and Mississippi, states that account for 40 percent of kids who were paddled in the 2007 school year.

Porter could have filled out a form telling the school not to paddle her son, if only she had realized he might be paddled.

Yet many parents find that such forms are ignored, the study said.

Legal immunity
Widespread paddling can make it unlikely that forms will be checked. A teacher interviewed by Human Rights Watch, Tiffany Bartlett, said that in her Austin, Texas, school, the policy was to lock the classroom doors when the bell rang, leaving stragglers to be paddled by an administrator patrolling the hallways.

And even if schools make a mistake, they are unlikely to face lawsuits. In places where corporal punishment is allowed, teachers and principals generally have legal immunity from assault laws, the study said.

"One of the things we've seen over and over again is that parents have difficulty getting redress, if a child is paddled and severely injured, or paddled in violation of parents' wishes," said Alice Farmer, the study's author.

A majority of states have outlawed it, but corporal punishment remains widespread across the South. Behind Texas and Mississippi were Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Florida and Missouri.

 

"Memories, Dreams, Reflections", 1963 Vantage Books Edition 1989

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Science
Author:	Carl G. Jung, editor Aniela Jaffe.

"To my mind, in dealing with individuals, only individual understanding will do. We need a different language for every patient. In one analysis I can be heard talking the Adlerian dialect, in another the Freudian. The crucial point is that I confront the patient as one human being to another. Analysis is a dialog demanding two partners." --Carl Jung, "Memories, Dreams, Reflections" (page 131)



This book is a near-autobiography of Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), the second leading psychiatric figure after Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Many of the chapters were written by Jung himself in the last years of his life, some are taken from interviews be gave to and lectures he had previously given. Jung invented or helped popularize many terms in psychology --introvert, extrovert, synchronicity (a meaningful coincidence), persona (''that which in reality one is not, but which itself as well as others think one is") , archetype (that myths and fairy-tails in world literature contain definite motifs which crop up everywhere) and "the collective unconscious", a concept that would lead to Jung's lifelong quest to study and travel in close anthropological study to try and get the tools he needed to expand human understanding and not only help patients directly but also to bring forth an understanding of the subconscious to further advance the general understanding of the essential role this consciousness is a by-product of a force greater than nature. Jung was not by any stretch a conventionally religious man, but he was a deeply spiritual person none the less.

Originally, while working as a young doctor in a mental institution in Switzerland, Jung became interested in Freud's research. The two men met, traveled to America togerther , and shared ideas. For a time the younger man deferred to the great pioneer of psychoanalysis. For better or worse, Freud could only maintain a professional and personal association with Jung if he retained his authority. But he also badly wanted Jung for a disciple to promote the cause of psychoanalysis as a true science at a time--roughly the first decade of the 20th Century--which it was meeting great resistance.
This authority issue was something that chafed at Jung, who had his own ideas about the source of neurosis and more serious mental dysfunction. It was a clash of great minds and their stubborn egos to be sure. Freud placed a great emphasis on latent sexuality as the source for understanding the human mind--Jung was less convinced this was the key to unlocking the Unconscious and interpreting dreams and the stated fears of patients.

After some dramatic confrontations--two of which ended with Freud suffering a fainting fit after Jung brought up rather morbid subjects the latter man apparently thought was a wish-fulfillment to see him dead. The men went their separate ways. Jung devotes an entire chapter to the problematic relationship with the great scientific pioneer.

"In retrospect I can say that I alone logically pursued the two problems which most interested Freud: the problem of "archaic vestiges" and that of sexuality. It is a widespread error to imagine that I do not see the value of sexuality. On the contrary it plays a large part in my psychology as an essential--though not the sole--expression of psychic wholeness...Like an Old Testament prophet he (Freud) undertook to overthrow false gods, to rip the veils away from a mass of dishonesty and hypocrisies...he did not falter in the face of of the unpopularity the enterprise entailed." Jung called sexuality "the dark side of the God-image." (page 198-199)

Indeed Jung was fascinated with religious expressions and seeing the same in a generally positive light, an opinion which Freud must have found distasteful. Many modern atheists like Sam Harris (author of "The End of Faith") blame Jung in part for the continuance of religious respectability in some scientific quarters.
But Jung seems not to be a man constrained by any one culture or creed. He struck out on his own into varying directions, studying the Renaissance alchemists and delving into the culture of the East African Masai--while attending a native "N'goma" he gets so entranced he fears he may "go black"--to the Pueblo Native-American Sun Worshippers of New Mexico, and journeys to India in the late 1930's to meet Hindu and Buddhist mystics. It is the "Travels" portion of the book that we get the most personal glimpses of Jung and how he sought to tear himself apart from his comfortable European environment to gain greater knowledge of the human soul and unlock the meanings that would release us from parts of our fears about existence itself.
Having not read much about Jung, I was very taken with this book as a more "comfortable" way of delving into his life-long work. It's a book I'm sure to return to.
A reviewer on Amazon put it quite well:
*****************
I recommend this book for people who have never read Jung before. It teaches more about his approach than any of his other books. It finds the meaning in his own life, viewed through his approach to life. "Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore the equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable--perhaps everything."
***************** From a BBC Documentary, late 1950's: