The Dish

The Physical Markings Of Psychic Pain

In a review of Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, Shaoni Bhattacharya describes trauma as “one of the West’s most urgent public health issues”:

[Van der Kolk] explains how trauma and its resulting stress harms us through physiological changes to body and brain, and that those harms can persist throughout life. Excess stress can predispose us to everything from diabetes to heart disease, maybe even cancer. … The book has gut-wrenching stories: about Vietnam veterans who committed war atrocities, incest survivors, broken adults that were terrorised as children or shunted between foster homes. Van der Kolk draws on hundreds of studies to back up his claim that “the body keeps the score”.

We meet a woman who had suppressed the memory of being raped at age 8 by her father, but when she ferociously attacked a new partner for no reason, she signed up for therapy with van der Kolk. Soon after, her eyesight started to fail: an autoimmune disease was eroding her retina. In a study, his team found that female incest survivors had abnormalities in the ratios of immune cells, compared with untraumatised women, exposing them to autoimmune diseases.

In an excerpt from the book published last month, van der Kolk endorses writing as a form of therapy:

As far as I’m aware, the first systematic test of the power of language to relieve trauma was done in 1986, when James Pennebaker at the University of Texas in Austin turned his introductory psychology class into an experimental laboratory. Pennebaker started off with a healthy respect for the importance of inhibition, of keeping things to yourself, which he viewed as the glue of civilization. But he also assumed that people pay a price for trying to suppress being aware of the elephant in the room.

He began by asking each student to identify a deeply personal experience that they’d found very stressful or traumatic. He then divided the class into three groups: One would write about what was currently going on in their lives; the second would write about the details of the traumatic or stressful event; and the third would recount the facts of the experience, their feelings and emotions about it, and what impact they thought this event had had on their lives. All of the students wrote continuously for 15 minutes on four consecutive days while sitting alone in a small cubicle in the psychology building. …

The team then compared the number of visits to the student health center participants had made during the month prior to the study to the number in the month following it. The group that had written about both the facts and the emotions related to their trauma clearly benefited the most: They had a 50 percent drop in doctor visits compared with the other two groups. Writing about their deepest thoughts and feelings about traumas had improved their mood and resulted in a more optimistic attitude and better physical health.

Van der Kolk adds, “Numerous experiments have since replicated Pennekbaker’s findings. Writing experiments from around the world, with grade-school students, nursing-home residents, medical students, maximum-security prisoners, arthritis sufferers, new mothers, and rape victims, consistently show that writing about upsetting events improves physical and mental health.”

Lumbersexuals: The Triumph Of The Bears

It’s now eleven years since I wrote an early piece on bear culture for Salon. But I was obviously onto something bigger than I imagined:

“Bears” almost all have facial hair — the more the better. Of all the various characteristics of Beardom, this seems to be one of the most essential. The Ur-bears have bushy beards that meander down their necks and merge with a large forest of chest and back-hair to provide a sort of all-hair body environment … Bears at their most typical look like regular, beer-drinking, unkempt men in their 30s, 40s and 50s. They have guts. They have furry backs. They don’t know what cologne is and they tend not to wear deodorant.

Bears were partly a reaction to the whole ghastly metrosexual moment when straight men, for some elusive reason, decided to shave, product and starve themselves so as to look more like women (at the behest of those Queer Eye minstrels). And exactly the same kind of hirsute transition is now – a decade later – well under way among straights.

I regard this, in the spirit of Tim Teeman, first as a huge achievement for gay male America. Not only are we more comfortable in our own unpolished masculinity, we have created a cultural space for straight men to be the same. To put it another way: gays have helped redefine masculinity for straights – and for the first time, straights have not responded by feeling in any way tainted or discomfited by the association. In the process (don’t tell anyone), the gays have craftily transformed the public space by exponentially increasing the number of men we might have a hankering or a fetish for. Win-win!

(We’ve been quietly doing this for quite a while, of course. One reason every film star in an action movie looks like Arnold Scharzenegger is that gay men adopted steroids in the 1990s and strode around town with huge pecs and tight abs and traps that could lift a tow-truck – thereby upping the ante for the now relatively-puny straights. Yes, steroids in sports – especially football – also ramped up muscle culture. But the sexual and aesthetic appreciation of it – often suppressed in public female discourse – encountered no such restraints among the gays.)

The new vibe has many parts. It seems to me driven by a little cultural balancing of the high-tech 21st Century by the mores of the low-tech 19th – whether it be local brews, carpentry or sturdy all-weather clothing. This doesn’t mean being an actual lumberjack of course, as Holly Baxter explains:

I like the poseur who sits beside me at a nauseatingly hip cafe with his cold brew, Barbour jacket and anchor tattoos – I can’t deny it. He isn’t telling me he’s anything but a freelance web designer who can grow an impressively bushy moustache. He isn’t sitting at home, crying over his laptop and wondering why he can’t just get out there and be a “real man”. Instead, he’s playing with the concept of what masculinity looks like and does. He is at the same time both aggressively attached to the traditionally masculine look and completely removed from the lifestyle that it advertises.

Attaboy! It was the same idea that caused Victorian men to adopt the beards of those returning from the Crimean war – which was the first war that, because of the severe cold, allowed British soldiers to grow beards. No one mistook the newly bearded civilians for actual war heroes of course, but it was the heroic aesthetic that had cachet – and begat a new trend that lasted decades. There’s a minor parallel to that today as well. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq also gave us real Special Ops heroes who grew big beards to melt into the surrounding population more easily. Of course, bearded hipsters are not actual war heroes, but they sure don’t mind looking like one. And what greater fantasy of male derring-do than a bearded, horse-riding badass chasing the Taliban in the mountains of Af-Pak?

I can’t help but wonder also if this public display of raw masculinity isn’t also a reaction to the relative decline in male power in American life and culture. As girls beat boys in school, and as women increasingly beat men in college, and as women out-pace men in vast swathes of the economy, and as old patterns of allegedly sexist male culture are policed and patrolled with ever-greater assiduity, the beard and the old-school manliness of the lumbersexual become new ways to express masculinity which cannot be denigrated or dismissed as sexist. It’s a way to reclaim manliness without running afoul of the new prophets of gender justice.

And it’s a default. If many cannot concede the power of testosterone in creating male culture, they surely have to concede its power in growing a beard. Think of it as testosterone’s last permissible stand against the forces of relentless sameness. And all you have to do to display it is … nothing.

(Photo: from our Beard of the Week last June.)

A Massacre In Mexico, Ctd

Juliana Jiménez Jaramillo follows up on the 43 Mexican students who disappeared in late September in the southwestern state of Guerrero:

Authorities believe the police delivered the students to the local drug cartel, Guerreros Unidos. The mayor of the town, José Luis Abarca, and his wife, María de los Ángeles Pineda, were later arrested and charged with ordering the police to capture the students out of fear that they would cause a disturbance. Three of the gang members confessed this week to murdering the students, burning them, and throwing the remains in plastic bags in a nearby river and garbage dump. The remains are so badly charred that local forensics investigators haven’t been able to confirm their identities. An outside commission from Argentina had to be called to perform further tests.

This is not the first, biggest, or most gruesome mass disappearance during Mexico’s past eight years of brutal drug violence. More than 106,000 have died in what government data term “executions,” “confrontations,” and “homicide-aggressions” since former President Felipe Calderon informally declared his war on drugs in 2006. But the tragedy of Ayotzinapa is different. Rarely has the collusion between local authorities and the cartels been so obvious and the consequences so dire.

The disappearances, the insidious corruption they revealed, and the Mexican authorities’ failure to locate the students’ remains despite uncovering one mass grave after another have sparked protests throughout the country, as citizens demand answers and accountability from president Enrique Peña Nieto and his government. Laura Carlsen focuses on how these protests relate to Mexico’s left-wing activist movement, with which the murdered students were associated:

While the demonstrators seek justice for the 43 students, what’s also driving them is a deep-seated anger at the Peña Nieto administration. The 16 rural teachers’ colleges embody that clash of cultures. No matter what fallout results from Ayotzinapa, the ongoing demonstrations have revealed the vast gulf between Mexico’s radical grassroots and its government. …

With public pressure rising and the protests showing no sign of abating, the Ayotzinapa case will almost certainly continue to ensnare government officials — the only question is how far up the chain. The Guerrero state governor, Angel Aguirre, was the first political leader forced to resign as a result of the crisis on Oct. 23; some are calling for the resignation of Peña Nieto and [Attorney General Jesus] Murillo. “This is the bad old Mexico, where local officials are inept, corrupt or in cahoots with organized crime; where life is cheap and justice elusive,” the Financial Times warned on Oct. 28 — a far cry from the modern, business-friendly image Peña Nieto has worked so hard to project.

José Cárdenas criticizes Peña Nieto’s “fitful approach to endemic security issues”:

What Guerrero puts into bold relief is the huge chasm between security efforts at the federal level, where security forces have been reshuffled and consolidated, and local levels, where weak and frequently corrupt state and municipal institutions have proved almost helpless against the armed capability and audacity of the large criminal groups, who have successfully infiltrated those same institutions and forces. Guerrero should be a watershed moment for Mexico, convincing Mexico City elites that the security situation is not a distraction from the economic agenda, but instead that dismantling the operations of criminal enterprises is indispensable to their nations’ stability and prosperity. Clearly, ordinary citizens are finding the levels of criminal violence unbearable and are losing patience with government strategies.

Anabel Hernández is less charitable:

Since Peña Nieto came to power, there have been grave regressions in Mexico, one of which is the abhorrence of transparency and public accountability, a move that was led by the presidential office and replicated by other governmental institutions. What else can be expected of this soiled government? In recent months, the military and the attorney general have presented false reports regarding crimes. Official information shows that in 2006 the number of criminal complaints not investigated by the federal government amounted to 24,000; in 2013, the number was 63,000. In Peña Nieto’s administration, law enforcement has become increasingly slow and pathetic.

(In Mexico City, Mexico on November 16, 2014 a protester holds a sign reading “Mexico is a grave” during a demonstration against Mexico’s government. By Miguel Tovar/LatinContent/Getty Images)

Is Another Shutdown Brewing?

Josh Marshall doesn’t rule it out:

After their big election win two weeks ago, GOP leaders in Washington pressed one key point again and again: No shutdowns. Certainly no impeachment. And more generally an end to the government by showdown and crisis which has been their order of the day since coming to power in early 2011. And yet here we are, not two weeks into the new era of unified GOP control on Capitol Hill (albeit in the majority-elect phase) and we’re already down to our first shutdown showdown. Indeed, shutdown is emerging as the ‘mainstream’ response to the President’s impending immigration executive order, with impeachment the preferred response of your moreforward-leaning GOP electeds and Fox News whips.

The upshot is clear and shouldn’t surprise us: government by crisis is built into the DNA of the current GOP. And leaders like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, despite their efforts since just after the 2010 election, are largely powerless to control or discipline it.

Politico reports on Republican leaders’ attempts to avoid a shutdown:

The least desirable option, according to several Republicans directly involved in planning, is a series of short-term spending bills. McConnell and Boehner desperately want to avoid a rolling set of spending fights early in the year, which would undermine their campaign promises to return Congress to regular order. An endless stream of stopgap spending bills would throw Washington back into the crisis-like atmosphere that has defined the post-2010 divided government. The dynamic amounts to the first true post-election test for Republican leaders: They want to push back aggressively on the administration without going too far.

Matthew Boyle hears “a consensus emerging among Republicans on Capitol Hill: There will be no funding for Obama’s planned executive amnesty.” But he doubts this will result in a shutdown:

First off, unlike Obamacare, executive amnesty is not the law. It’s a lot easier to make a case to block funding to use Congress’ power of the purse to stop an executive amnesty, and Lee said he expects many of the Democrats who have publicly opposed Obama’s planned executive amnesty will join in the effort to stop him.

Secondly, unlike Obamacare, amnesty is not implemented yet—and an effort to block funding would prevent the expenditure of taxpayer dollars being used to carry out a future action; in this case, the printing of executive amnesty documents like work permits, ID cards, and Social Security numbers for illegal aliens.

Thirdly and most importantly, with full control of both chambers of Congress, the GOP can push through appropriations bills or a partial Continuing Resolution that funds everything except for the Department of Homeland Security—separating that out for another fight.

Sargent weighs in:

Republicans will work hard to create a narrative in which their own drastic measures were only necessary in response to Obama’s extreme lawlessness.

So let’s recall a bit of context here: Republicans had previously been planning to possibly use government funding fights — which carry with them the implicit threat of a government shutdown — to reverse Obama’s already achieved policy gains. We know this because Mitch McConnell himself usefully confirmed it on the record in August. He said the new GOP Senate majority would attach riders to spending bills, designed to get Obama to agree to roll back his policies on the environment, health care, and elsewhere, or risk a government shutdown. McConnell made the same pledge in a private Koch confab with wealthy donors.

McConnell may or may not go through with that tactic; it may well have been just bluster for the base. He appears to want to move away from it now. But it’s looking increasingly like GOP leaders may have no choice.

Lastly, should the government shut down, Chait expects it to backfire on the GOP:

Republican leaders had hoped to pass a year-long bill to keep the government open. Ultraconservative dissidents have instead proposed a short-term bill, which would allow Republicans to come back and attach conditions (weakening Obama’s authority to regulate the environment and revamp immigration enforcement) to any bill to keep the government open. A bill that prevents a shutdown for a year, argues a National Review editorial, “would surrender all leverage Republicans have with government funding.”

That a shutdown gives Republicans any actual leverage, as opposed to imagined leverage, is another right-wing fantasy. It is now fairly well-established that the sole impact of a government shutdown is to make the public hate the party that controls Congress. The gun the conservatives are holding is pointed at their own head.

The Loneliest Stars

Alexandra Witze flags a report showing that “as many as half of all stars in the Universe lurk outside galactic boundaries”:

“There might be people living out there, out in the middle of cold dark space, that don’t have a Milky Way,” says Harvey Moseley, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The stars were probably tossed there when galaxies collided. A team led by astrophysicist Michael Zemcov, of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, reports the discovery in the 7 November issue of Science. … Stars normally reside within galaxies, but can be yanked out by gravitational forces when galaxies collide. Bock suspects that a lot of these renegade stars could have come from relatively lightweight galaxies, which can lose hold of their stars more easily than more massive galaxies. “If this is true, then there is an entire population of stars that’s been sitting out there, but because they are individually so faint we can really only see them in ensemble,” says Moseley.

Nicholas St. Fleur elaborates:

As a part of their research into ancient galaxies, Zemcov and his team of scientists from the U.S., Japan, and Korea, launched a rocket equipped with a built-in telescope to take an enormous picture of space. The experiment, called Cosmic Infrared Background Experiment, or CIBER, had a field of view that was 20 times larger than the surface of the moon, according to Zemcov. It offered the team a single image of millions of galaxies. When the team analyzed the data, they observed twice as much infrared light as they expected to find. To investigate the discrepancy, the team blacked out the light coming from the star clusters and observed that a lot of light seeped from between the galaxies. “It’s like looking at a LiteBrite with all of the little pegs being galaxies with clusters of stars,” said Zemcov. “We masked the light emitted from the galaxies, or pegs, and expected to see a black screen, but actually there were small amounts of light still emitted.” The findings stumped the team at first. Not until they eliminated several other possibilities did they deduce that the light was coming from large amounts of rogue stars.

(Photo: This time-lapse photograph shows the Cosmic Infrared Background Experiment (CIBER) rocket launch, taken from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia in 2013. By T. Arai/University of Tokyo.)

The Best Hangover In Fiction? Ctd

The latest in the popular thread:

You kicked off your discussion with Boris Johnson nominating Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim. I think it’s worth pointing out that Amis had his own nomination:

Perhaps Franz Kafka’s story The Metamorphosis, which starts with the hero waking up to find he has turned into a man-sized cockroach, is the best literary treatment of all. The central image could hardly be better chosen, and there is a telling touch in the nasty way everybody goes on at the chap.

For my own part, I’d like to nominate the following passage from P.G. Wodehouse’s famous short story “Jeeves Takes Charge,” in which Bertie meets — and hires — Jeeves for the first time:

I shall always remember the morning he came.

It so happened that the night before I had been present at a rather cheery little supper, and I was feeling pretty rocky. On top of this I was trying to read a book Florence Craye had given me. She had been one of the house-party at Easeby, and two or three days before I left we had got engaged. I was due back at the end of the week, and I knew she would expect me to have finished the book by then. You see, she was particularly keen on boosting me up a bit nearer her own plane of intellect. She was a girl with a wonderful profile, but steeped to the gills in serious purpose. I can’t give you a better idea of the way things stood than by telling you that the book she’d given me to read was called “Types of Ethical Theory,” and that when I opened it at random I struck a page beginning:

— The postulate or common understanding involved in speech is certainly co-extensive, in the obligation it carries, with the social organism of which language is the instrument, and the ends of which it is an effort to subserve.

All perfectly true, no doubt; but not the sort of thing to spring on a lad with a morning head.

I was doing my best to skim through this bright little volume when the bell rang. I crawled off the sofa and opened the door. A kind of darkish sort of respectful Johnnie stood without.

“I was sent by the agency, sir,” he said. “I was given to understand that you required a valet.”

I’d have preferred an undertaker; but I told him to stagger in, and he floated noiselessly through the doorway like a healing zephyr. That impressed me from the start. Meadowes had had flat feet and used to clump. This fellow didn’t seem to have any feet at all. He just streamed in. He had a grave, sympathetic face, as if he, too, knew what it was to sup with the lads.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said gently.

Then he seemed to flicker, and wasn’t there any longer.

I heard him moving about in the kitchen, and presently he came back with a glass on a tray.

“If you would drink this, sir,” he said, with a kind of bedside manner, rather like the royal doctor shooting the bracer into the sick prince. “It is a little preparation of my own invention. It is the Worcester Sauce that gives it its color. The raw egg makes it nutritious. The red pepper gives it its bite. Gentlemen have told me they have found it extremely invigorating after a late evening.”

I would have clutched at anything that looked like a life-line that morning. I swallowed the stuff. For a moment I felt as if somebody had touched off a bomb inside the old bean and was strolling down my throat with a lighted torch, and then everything seemed suddenly to get all right. The sun shone in through the window; birds twittered in the tree-tops; and, generally speaking, hope dawned once more.

“You’re engaged!” I said, as soon as I could say anything.

As for the reader who suggested discussing “the best word for hangover in any language,” I submit for your consideration the New Year’s essay “How to Say ‘Hangover’ in French, German, Finnish, and Many Other Languages,” written by Sam Dean for Bon Appétit magazine, in its entirety. His “world tour of misery” is hard to beat, and a treat for any logophile. There’s just one word that Dean misses: if you wake up drunk among the Tsonga people in South Africa, you might realize you’ve been rhwe: sleeping, drunk and naked, on the floor without a mat.

Several Douglas Adams fans are also weighing in. One writes, “There’s always the Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster from Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, described as ‘like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon, wrapped ’round a large gold brick’ and ‘the alcoholic equivalent to a mugging: expensive and bad for the head.'” Another:

I’m surprised no one has offered the opening to the great Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Here you go:

At eight o’clock on Thursday morning Arthur didn’t feel very good. He woke up blearily, got up, wandered blearily round his room, opened a window, saw a bulldozer, found his slippers, and stomped off to the bathroom to wash.

Toothpaste on the brush – so. Scrub.

Shaving mirror – pointing at the ceiling. He adjusted it. For a moment it reflected a second bulldozer through the bathroom window. Properly adjusted, it reflected Arthur Dent’s bristles. He shaved them off, washed, dried, and stomped off to the kitchen to find something pleasant to put in his mouth.

Kettle, plug, fridge, milk, coffee. Yawn.

The word bulldozer wandered through his mind for a moment in search of something to connect with.

The bulldozer outside the kitchen window was quite a big one.

He stared at it.

“Yellow,” he thought and stomped off back to his bedroom to get dressed.

Passing the bathroom he stopped to drink a large glass of water, and another. He began to suspect that he was hung over. Why was he hung over? Had he been drinking the night before? He supposed that he must have been. He caught a glint in the shaving mirror. “Yellow,” he thought and stomped on to the bedroom.

He stood and thought. The pub, he thought. Oh dear, the pub. He vaguely remembered being angry, angry about something that seemed important. He’d been telling people about it, telling people about it at great length, he rather suspected: his clearest visual recollection was of glazed looks on other people’s faces.

Something about a new bypass he had just found out about. It had been in the pipeline for months only no one seemed to have known about it. Ridiculous. He took a swig of water. It would sort itself out, he’d decided, no one wanted a bypass, the council didn’t have a leg to stand on. It would sort itself out. God what a terrible hangover it had earned him though. He looked at himself in the wardrobe mirror.

He stuck out his tongue. “Yellow,” he thought. The word yellow wandered through his mind in search of something to connect with.

Fifteen seconds later he was out of the house and lying in front of a big yellow bulldozer that was advancing up his garden path.

Meanwhile, a naughty-minded reader can’t help himself:

If you’re going to have a thread on hangovers, I’d think it’s only natural to extend the idea to another thread: the best orgasm in fiction. (Sorry, I don’t have my own selection to recommend, but I do look forward to what your other readers, er, come up with.)

The Best Of The Dish Today

Know dope:

Some further thoughts on the issue of immigration I wrestled with today from a reader:

Like you, I’m an immigrant from Europe. I went through the grinder myself in the wake of 9/11, because of my Arabic name (it is Jewish-Arabic but hey, Arabic nonetheless). That’s my theory at least, because nobody at ICE/INS was ever available to explain to me why I was held up in France waiting for my immigrant visa (I was married to a US citizen thank god and legally entitled to one).

The immigration bureaucracy is terrifying, it literally controls your body. As I am sure you know, once you fall under the jurisdiction of INS, you have no habeas corpus or right to due process. Burden of proof is reversed, and the reason why there is such prosecutorial discretion is precisely because immigration proceedings are essentially lawless. So when conservatives talk about enforcing the immigration laws, well, it’s a little less than forthcoming (to say the least). This makes you appreciate the Magna Carta and British common law even more.

It is indeed hard to convey what it’s like to be helpless in front of the immigration bureaucracy. And one thing that has been missing from this debate is that human empathy. I know that my reader and I were legal immigrants trying to find our way through a maze of prejudice and prohibition; but I’ll never forget the radical insecurity of building a life knowing that it can always at any time be taken away from you. For parents of children legally in the US, the experience is unimaginable to me. Deferring the deportation of these parents is a basic act of compassion. And if the Republicans unleash rage over it, and still refuse to provide any legal remedy, their insensitivity will resonate for decades to come.

Some posts worth revisiting from today: the reckless language of Charles Krauthammer on immigration reform; the excruciating challenge of being circumcised as an adult or child; a model village where dementia is cared for and allowed; and some of the weirder window views sent in over the last few months. Plus: David Foster Wallace on sponsored content.

The most popular post of the day was Gruberism And Our Democracy, Ctd – where readers backed up the ACA; and last night’s Best of The Dish where I waved that inappropriate shirt. More on that today as well.

Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here. You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 20 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here. Dish t-shirts are for sale here, including our “Know Dope” shirts, which are detailed here. A final email for the day:

I just got back from seeing Rosewater. It is a beautiful film. During the section that showed the rising of the Green Revolution, with people in the streets, I thought back to how involved and absorbed I had felt about it, from here thousands of miles away, because of The Dish; because of you and your team, and your passion for following what was happening; and because of the rich information and context offered by members of the amazing community you have created. Thank you for creating that space, then and now.

See you in the morning.