The euphemisms for madness in the American vernacular–“nervous breakdown,” “cracked up,” “lost his marbles”–all connote a process in which the mind breaks away from the commonsense world where the normal live and takes up residence in a country without logic, a little mental Madagascar, where change comes on suddenly and without warning, where the laws of linearity and orderliness no longer apply. The madman sees things that aren’t there. The madman chitters in a language only he can understand. The images of mental illness that pervade American popular culture–often portrayed as generally embarrassing brands of craziness–reinforce the idea: bipolars vacillate between manic rage and closed-curtain depression (Mommie Dearest); schizophrenics slavishly obey their inner voices (A Beautiful Mind); obsessive-compulsives repeat the same hand-washing ritual until their skin turns cracked and flaky (As Good As it Gets). Scroll the higher-numbered cable channels after ten P.M. and chances are you’ll come across a movie involving Multiple Personality Disorder (now termed Dissociative Identity Disorder)–a villain who is his own victim, his own evil side transmogrified into another self, the me that is not me. Even postmodern theorists Jean Baudrillard and Frederic Jameson use schizophrenia as a metaphor for the schism between the images that constitute contemporary culture and the meanings those images, or signs, represent. However, the real-life schizophrenic who lunged at my wife showed me that these metaphors can have it backward. Madness may be less a fracturing than a concentration: a fixation on one thing that becomes the head of the pin upon which the entire universe must balance. The one thing becomes the Everlasting Thing: a crushing, overwhelming weight that, when it fails, results not in an explosion but in an implosion which leaves behind a black hole that draws to itself all light, hope, peace, and all difference. Madness is the overwhelming persistence of sameness; it is the absence of change. —“Hydrophobia,” David McGlynn, The Missouri Review
History classes in Polish schools have always had a whiff of politics. Since people were unable to learn about politics within the official state structures during the Polish People’s Republic (PPR), they studied history on their own. This pursuit of history reflected a dream of independence, and historical narrative was used to map a route toward the nation’s political renaissance. The years of Soviet occupation were also times of official historical indoctrination. It was perfectly clear for the Soviet authorities that history exerted great symbolic force in creating a political space, and they did not hesitate to exploit it. The authorities never missed a chance to stress the allegedly everlasting conflicts with the Germans, the pre-Christian roots of Polish statehood, and all kinds of people’s resistance to the nobility and European monarchs. At the same time, Soviet-approved history magnified the common fate of Polish and Soviet armies during the Second World War, which eventually led to a rupture in historical continuity and established a new order. It was these falsifications that Solidarity fought against. The righteous anger at these historical forgeries was one of the driving moral forces behind the changes. As Václav Havel wrote, “A person who has been seduced by the consumer value system, whose identity is dissolved in an amalgam of the accoutrements of mass civilization, who has no roots in the order of being, no sense of responsibility for anything higher than his own personal survival, is a demoralized person. The [post-totalitarian] system depends on this demoralization, deepens it, is in fact a projection of it into society. Living within the truth, as humanity’s revolt against an enforced position, is, on the contrary, an attempt to regain control over one’s own sense of responsibility.” —“The Whereabouts of the Imprisoned Polish Memory,” Wojciech Przybylski, Eurozine
South Korean defects to the North, now under “the warm care of a relevant organ”;
embracing Afghanistan’s descent into its own private Vietnam;
the joy of protest
When Eli Lilly applied for FDA approval for using HGH to treat kids with “idiopathic short stature,” meaning at or below the 1.2 percentile on the growth chart, the widespread assumption among doctors was that short stature is a psychological disability and that adding inches increases psychological well-being. Indeed, the company strove mightily to produce data showing that short children who used HGH had a measurable improvement in their psychological “quality of life.” The thing is, Eli came up empty. A consensus document approved last year by the pediatric-endocrinology community acknowledges that there’s no evidence that growth hormone enhances quality of life in short but medically normal kids. One European study compared adults who had used HGH as short children against others who were similarly short in childhood but hadn’t used the drug. They ended up essentially the same psychologically in adulthood—except that, oddly, the HGH users were less likely to have romantic partners than nonusers.–“The Science of Shortness,” Stephen S. Hall, New York