… seeks a path to affirmation. Schubert’s meditations on death, in the last piano sonata, D960, the slow movement of the String Quintet in C, D956, and the incomparable String Quartet in G major, D887, are among the profoundest testimonies in art to the beauty of life and the pain of losing it; they are also true gestures of acceptance – since that which is accepted is neither sentimentalized nor set aside, but confronted in all its unspeakable darkness.”
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[A] man of extraordinary intellect, learning and humour, a great supporter of central European dissidents, and the kind of provocative – sometimes outrageous – conservative thinker that a truly liberal society should be glad to have challenging it. Timothy Garton Ash
… on the crisis Ross Douthat is writing about here, go here. UD said quite the same thing fifteen years ago.
And by the way. Read the post directly under this one, which has to do with a crisis in another discipline – psychiatry – and you’ll see that the same principle is in play, whether the field in tatters is English studies or psychiatry. If you lack any agreement about the specific set of things you are collectively studying, and about how to use and value those things, your discipline is going to expand and expand until it explodes. A late-stage, pre-eruptive sign is that your discipline is increasingly taken over by amoral political actors. Note that responsible psychiatrists are indeed trying to respond to Bandy Lee (and by extension Justin Frank and other ideologues) by reasserting the discipline boundaries and ethical rules of psychiatry.
Specifically: You do not abuse the integrity and credibility of your profession by weaponizing it against people and ideas you hate.
UD once sat on a committee, at George Washington University, with a colleague from psychiatry who, whenever it was his turn to talk, mainly recited his cv. I got this award; I’m noted around the world for that… We all stared at each other and shifted uncomfortably when he spoke…
Regan Books published this man’s masterwork, Bush on the Couch, an idiotic psychoanalysis of George W Bush (UD, a deep-blue democrat, has nothing good to say about that president, but knows a hatchet job when she sees one). Discerning readers from Fidel Castro to some LaRouchie loved the book and it’s become an instant classic among people who couldn’t give a shit about the Goldwater Rule (you’re not supposed to psychoanalyze people you’ve never even met, let alone exchanged two words with). In her naivete, UD thought she’d seen the end of this hugely embarrassing genre.
Now another president UD can’t stand – the current one – is on the receiving end of a far more insidious psychiatrists’ campaign, one that – as Jeffrey Lieberman points out – does significant damage to a discipline whose scientific status – with people like UD‘s colleague around – is already mighty shaky. Led by Yale’s Bandy X. Lee, a bunch of psychiatrists published a … multivariate? … psychoanalysis of Trump, with Lee insisting he’s so nuts he has to be butterfly netted or the world will come to an end. As Andrew O’Hehir puts it, in Lee’s “strand of the multiverse, Trump is heading for a catastrophic health crisis or … an involuntary psychiatric hospitalization, and we won’t have to worry about defeating him in the November election because he’ll be dead or on a ventilator or shouting at the walls in a padded room.”
Amy Barnhorst, a UC Davis psychiatrist who works with people who really do need involuntary psychiatric holds, comments:
I think it’s a really bad way to go. It’s not just inappropriate and would be really ineffective, but I think it’s very damaging to our profession and the patients we take care of to suggest something like that.
A mental health hold is a very delicate tool that we use for people who very badly need treatment but aren’t able to accept that treatment. It’s not something that should be thrown around as a punishment for your enemies.
… Surgeons don’t go around lopping off the feet of their enemy in order to debilitate them. We shouldn’t go around applying mental health holds to people we don’t like in order to debilitate them.
A writer at WBUR, a person with mental health problems, amplifies her point:
Lee’s comments are … disturbing because they paint with such a broad brush. Like Trump’s insults being parroted by his followers in everyday conversation, it is easy to take Lee’s words and swing them in any direction, not just at Trump.
What is astonishing is the degree to which we embrace this kind of [thing]. We seem unable to accept the idea that the president’s behavior is not abnormal even if it is abhorrent.
Indeed, Lee does seem rather in the line of the notorious Soviet psychiatric establishment, swinging damaging charges of mental illness in any direction.
And there’s some sort of mondo bizarro logic in her having now swung directly into the tortured path of none other than Alan Dershowitz. Dershowitz has sent a formal complaint to Yale about her, because she called him nuts too. In response to Dersh, she’s gone full Joan of Arc and I tell you, mes petites! It’s a mad mad mad mad world.
… this New York Times editorial. “Prince Harry and Meghan should not be lamented as defectors from the old order, but celebrated as the heroes of the next installment, as modern royals renouncing some level of privilege to seek their fortune in the real world,” the NYT writes; and it’s as Katherine Anne Porter says in her great short story, “Holiday”:
[A]ll my tradition, background, and training had taught me unanswerably that no one except a coward ever runs away from anything. What nonsense! They should have taught me the difference between courage and foolhardiness. … I learned finally [to] take off like a deer at the first warning of certain dangers. … We do not run from the troubles and dangers that are truly ours… and if we don’t run from the others, we are fools.
Whatever becomes of these two, their story so far is about the guts and clarity to free oneself from a destructive life narrative that someone else has laid out for you. But in here it is I must kill the priest and the king, says Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, as he taps his head. Mind-forg’d manacles are no joke, okay? Imagine how powerful they are when they’re royal. Nothing wrong, UD thinks, with being led to some extent in your life by the title of Graham Greene’s memoir: Ways of Escape.
Why muddy the beautiful simplicity of this exchange with classes, exams, etc. etc.? The never-ending, burdensome business of school attendance, paper writing, research — why not cut to the chase and do a win-win? Students get university degrees, faculty/staff get paid and everybody keeps their trap shut about it. Da? Duh!
Naturally any conspiracy involving tens of thousands of people is going to be a little … permeabil...
The prosecutors … recorded the pro-rector as he received large bags, bottles, and envelopes. Besides money, the bribes offered by students’ parents also included meat, wine, and spirits.
Bottles, wine, spirits… Getting a sense of Romania’s largest unit of currency here…
I felt – as I so often do at that particular point – deep emotion, a heart-stopping sense of the beauty of the piece and the pathos of us all. Not sure why this transition gobsmacks me. I suspect it’s because the conversation the fugue establishes has an emotional break here. Here we’re not just dancing back and forth with one another, with ourself. Here we are letting the tears flow. Post-Bach, a walk with the dog through new parts of our forest, where we stumbled on a deer skull.
They all go into the fraud, The double dippers, the conflicted, the bogus guest speakers, The whorish expert witnesses, the whorish corporate board sitters, The twisters of research results to benefit their corporate masters, The creators of bogus companies into which to deposit federal grant money, They all go into the fraud…
To paraphrase T.S. Eliot. And as we enter a new decade, it’s good to remind ourselves just how rampant these and other forms of academic fraud are, especially in our medical, law, engineering, and business schools.
How rampant? So rampant that ProPublica has just released a helpful “reporting recipe,” a lengthy checklist of types of professorial corruption, and how you can discover/report them.
Double dipper Akhilesh Reddy, to take the latest instance, simply “did not notice” that two different universities were simultaneously paying him large salaries. And who can deny that overlooking large sources of funds from large institutions is something of which all of us are capable?
Sensing that this claim might not convince everyone, Reddy moved on to the what a tangled web we weave phase of his explanation.
The neurologist and researcher gave inconsistent statements about the money, claiming he only noticed the salary issue when he checked his account in February 2016, five months after starting at UCL, the tribunal heard… He said he thought the universities were “sharing his salary”, that there was an “overlap” in his salaries and also that he thought the large sum was just his salary from UCL... Prof Reddy said he thought “all necessary people were fully aware of the position.”
Before he could add that his dog ate his homework, the tribunal suspended him from medical practice. He has left England and moved to Pennsylvania, cuz there’s always another sucker.
The article goes to note that Italy has been spared much of the terrorist violence other countries in the region have suffered, no doubt in part because of
its program of expelling suspected extremists. Since it began in 2015, the program has resulted in 462 people being sent home, including 98 last year.
I fuckin love the way these stories get written! Here’s a totally filthy organization – among the biggest drug companies in the world, as it happens – whose self-inflicted collapse inspires The Sorrow and the Pity-strength keening all over the business media. In one short article, one writer touches on four massive ongoing criminal cases against TEVA, and the company faces far more trouble than this.
What evil agent traumatized TEVA? Why should it suffer like this?
Oh, right. Because its business model is bribe, cheat, steal, addict vast populations, bribe, cheat, steal, addict vast populations. Why can’t we just leave it alone and stop traumatizing it?
Investors take note: There is very likely no bottom.
And where, UD wonders, is the long New York Times article about the relentlessly criminal enterprise that is TEVA? Doesn’t anyone think it’s newsworthy that the world’s most powerful pharma corporation – arguably – is indescribably corrupt?
Who knew? Who knew that all the time UD spends on her balcony in Rehoboth Beach staring through binoculars at immense container ships with three immense initials painted on their sides she could be ON the ships, steaming to Hamburg? Who knew that the endless UD/Mr UD dithering about what’s on each ship, where it’s going, how it operates, what the thing’s various decks actually look like, etc., could so easily be settled?
A highlight [of my trip] was a morning’s tour of the ship, led by crew members.In addition to nearly 4,000 containers stacked on the exterior decks, there were six “roll-on, roll-off” decks carrying vehicles, ranging from a fleet of Range Rovers and transport trucks for the US army to an aeroplane fuselage. As the captain explained the complexities of the enormous operation, I marvelled at the sheer scale of everything around us, an industry responsible for transporting 90% of goods worldwide.
Cabins, with private bath, sound fine; on-deck activities are simple but fun (UD would of course play Scrabble); cruising instead of flying gives you big eco bragging rights…
Recent campaigns such as the Swedish flygskam (flight shame) had shone a harsh light on my blindness to the climate impact of air travel, and I had decided that booking a flight wasn’t an option. Since 2017, I’d emitted over 14 tonnes of carbon from flights alone. I realised that all my efforts to reduce my carbon footprint at home in Milan – I cycle to work, limit food waste and seldom buy new clothes – are wiped out by just one flight between Canada and Europe.
I’ll see your flygskam and raise you thirty years of not driving cars, taking trains everywhere, walking everywhere, living in a small house, owning one teeny, insanely fuel-efficient Prius, very seldom buying new clothes (so there!), and indeed finding virtually all of my consumer goods as brand-new castoffs in my daughter’s long-since-abandoned bedroom. The only food I waste is my once a year pomegranate martini at the beach — I can never finish it.
