Spinning It Just Right

Was the President angry enough at BP?  Too angry?  It’s interesting to see the range of opinion.

*Charles Blow in The New York Times thought he ran the risk of seeming too detached and ineffective.

*Adam Serwer of American Prospect complained that his “kick ass” comment, stepped over the line.

*Lori Ziganto, blogging on RedState, thought the problem was he just didn’t do it convincingly enough.

*CNN’s John Blake warned that the American public doesn’t like angry black men.

*Greg Sargent of The Washington Post thought the public will judge Obama on the substance of his response.        Political commentators are too eager to rush into filling the gap. (In Newsweek see, “Is Obama Angry Enough?”)

There seem to be as many points of view as there are commentators, which is reassuring in a way.  Obviously different sectors of the population have different reactions.  It doesn’t surprise me, for example, that Charles Blow, who is black, wants our first black president to be more assertive, while Lori Ziganto, blogging for a conservative site, takes a skeptical and dismissive stance.  But what is the rush?

On one level, it’s obvious that this is what commentators do.  Journalists and bloggers are keeping themselves and their readers busy with a steady stream of interpretation, cultivating an illusion of understanding what is really going on in the world, what we need to think.  The public verdict is far from having been delivered, but, as usual, it is being anticipated and shaped.

At the same time, though, I wonder if the public verdict isn’t also being forestalled.  Before one has much of a chance to have a reaction of one’s own, the whole range of potential reactions is on display.  The instant and insistent stream of commentary virtually occupies the space of public discourse.  In a sense, it has become the public discourse.

Have commentators become afraid that people won’t have their own ideas, that they are standing in for a public that is confused and inarticulate?  Perhaps the public itself is becoming hesitant to speak its mind without their opinions being vetted by some journalistic authority.  Or is the commentary simply irrelevant?

It’s hard enough to have an original idea – much less a new perception — as those who study human consciousness know all too well.  The brain holds on to its past formulations pretty firmly.  But this barrage of all conceivable opinion virtually ensures that we will keep on talking to each other in all the old familiar ways.

Sooner or later, of course, a consensus will emerge about Obama and the oil spill, one that it will then be up to historians to challenge and reshape.  But now we seem to want to ensure that the dead hand of the past comes down hard and fast, before anyone has too much time to think about what is really happening.

What Is the Right Language?

Our ordinary language has always had colorful terms to describe emotional and mental disorders.  “Vapors” was particularly popular in the late nineteenth century, soon succeeded by “nervous breakdown” and “crack-up.”  Other terms included “lunacy,” “bonkers,” “mad,” “mental,” “unhinged,” “loopy,” “bananas,” and so forth.  Now we have added “stress” and “burnout” at one end of the spectrum, and “freak outs” at the other.

Never a real diagnosis, nervous breakdown “always struck most doctors as inexact, pseudoscientific and often misleading,” according to an article in The New York Times.  “But those were precisely the qualities that gave it such a lasting place in the popular culture, some scholars say. ‘It had just enough medical sanction to be useful, but did not depend on medical sanction to be used,’ said Peter N. Stearns, a historian at George Mason University.”  (See, “On the Verge of ‘Vital Exhaustion’?”)

Today, however, members of the general public seem to feel increasing pressure to diagnose themselves with professional accuracy.  Are we Bi-polar?  Do our children have ADHD?  Or just ADH?  Are we depressed?  Perhaps it is just an Adjustment Disorder?  Moreover, patients not only want to know their exact diagnoses, they also often seek to prescribe and find their own medications on the internet.

But mental health professionals themselves are not always happy with the categories and codes they are required to apply to patients by insurance companies.  An exact nomenclature implies a degree of certainty that seems often unwarranted.  So they have cultivated a certain skepticism and detachment.  Yes, they use the terms.  They have to in order to help patients get the services they need, but they are also aware of the danger of believing in them too firmly.

The paradox is that just as the authority of professional knowledge is increasing with the general public, supplanting the informal language of popular culture, the authority of mental health professionals is eroding.  The public increasingly appears to believe in the certainty of the diagnoses professional are required to provide while losing access to the detachment and skepticism of those who have learned to question their usefulness.

The decline in the authority of professionals is widespread, not just confined to the field of mental health.  The irony is that the public is losing confidence in their judgment at just the point we are coming to understand that much of the value they have to offer to others is not in what they know but in what they know they don’t know.

Inhibited Thinking, Awkward Speaking

I am continually impressed by the stereotyped and mentally gagged quality of American responses to Israel.  We sound virtually impaired.  “It is almost impossible,” as Tony Judt put it in The New York Times, “to discuss the Middle East without resorting to tired accusations and ritual defenses.” (See, “Israel Without Cliches.”)

We tend to fall into polarized positions, unqualified justification for its actions or denunciation of its atrocities.  Somewhere between these extremes there are occasional halting expressions of regret for some unfortunate incident, usually including the obligatory reference to our “special relationship” that remains strong  Beneath the surface, there are strong and frequent hints of frustration.

This is in remarkable contrast with Israeli’s capacity to criticize and even ridicule the actions of their own government.  The recent attack on the boats bringing relief supplies to Gaza is a case in point.  The Israeli daily Haaretz proclaimed:  “Gaza Flotilla Drives Israel Into a Sea of Stupidity.”

Obviously an outsider is more likely to be thought of as intrusive, insensitive or uninformed. But given the level of interaction between our two countries, there is an exceptional degree of knowledge on both sides.  Why can’t we speak more freely?

Our inhibition suggests two things:  guilt and fear.  The guilt, I suspect, is about exposing our always-present, usually-latent anti-semitism.  The recent outburst by Helen Thomas, the “Dean of White House Correspondents,” establishes that anti-semitism in America is still very much alive and not so far beneath the surface, even in sophisticated circles.  The fear is that in frankly criticizing Israel we will seem to give support to such sentiments, or even ammunition.  We would share in the guilt of letting it out of the bag.

And then there is the threat of recrimination and disloyalty.   If we allowed ourselves to voice our dismay or our criticisms, we fear we would be blamed – and perhaps even end up blaming ourselves – for contributing to Israel’s vulnerability.  What if the Arab press should pick it up what we say among ourselves and use it as further evidence of what they are already convinced is true?

So we engage in ineffectual, heated outbursts or we ritually mumble clichés.  I hope that behind the scenes diplomats can still have, as they like to say, a “frank exchange of views.”  Even if we can’t, the diplomatic process requires a bit more reality.

Our governments may be trapped in trying to balance competing – and, possibly, irreconcilable — interests.  But our being tongue-tied can hardly contribute to the thinking we desperately need to grasp these complicated issues.

Denial of Reality – or Refusal

It is now clear that for several years big banks and other financial institutions seriously denied the risks they faced with sub-prime mortgages.  Making so much money from packaging, securitizing, and “insuring” them, they fooled themselves into believing there was little if any risk.  Caught up in their competition with each other, bankers literally lost sight of reality.  But what are they doing now with the toxic assets still on the books?

According to Gretchen Morgenson in Sunday’s New York Times, some version of the problem continues:  “Among the more glaring bookkeeping fictions on big banks’ balance sheets today are the values they assign to all of the bounteous second mortgage loans, doled out during the mortgage bonanza. As any realist will attest, many of these loans are worth little, and yet there they sit, at fantasy levels, on banks’ ledgers.”

But this is not the old denial.  It’s not even a psychological issue.  In this case, Morgenson makes clear, the banks seem to know exactly what they are doing.

The two big federal mortgage giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, now in receivership, are trying to get banks to pay back the bad loans they are obligated to cover:  “Surprise, surprise: banks don’t want to repurchase these loans. So when Fannie or Freddie identify problem mortgages and request repayment, a battle royal begins.”

Morgenson points out that if “banks refuse to buy back flawed loans, taxpayers will have to cover more of the losses.”  A lot of money is at stake:  “According to March 31 figures from Freddie, for instance, the amount of problem loans that it has asked other firms to buy back stood at $4.8 billion — up 26 percent from $3.8 billion just three months earlier.”  In other words, the banks are becoming increasingly recalcitrant.

To observers who are not psychologically informed, this behavior may look the same as what went before.  But it is vital to discriminate willful behavior from mass delusion.  Morgenson writes:  “denial is a powerful thing, after all, and writing off troubled loans during a period of severe stress is, for bankers, the equivalent of getting a root canal.”  (See “Banks Say No. Too Bad Taxpayers Can’t.”

But this is different from what went on in the euphoria of the credit bubble.  It is more like the “moral hazard” so many feared would be the result of rescuing banks deemed “too big to fail.”  In refusing to pay off their debts, the banks are acting as if they’ve learned that they don’t need to be accountable.

But perhaps it is also a reflection of their increased power.  With friends in the administration and lobbyists in congress, perhaps they have come to feel that they can push back.  They don’t have to do what is against their interests.

A Personal View

A recent Gallup poll has found that people generally get happier as they age.  Published two weeks ago, the survey reveals:  “Worry stays fairly steady until 50, then sharply drops off . . . .  Enjoyment and happiness both decrease gradually until we hit 50, rise steadily for the next 25 years, and then decline very slightly at the end, but they never again reach the low point of our early 50s.”  (See, “Happiness May Come With Age, Study Says.”)

Researchers tried unsuccessfully to link the results to four variables: gender, living with children, having a partner, and employment.  So the explanation is not obvious.  But let me offer a personal view.

Our culture puts a premium on achievement.  In order to take our place in the world, we need to have goals and, inevitably, we feel pressure to achieve them.  But, as we age, that pressure diminishes.  This happens in two ways:  we actually get closer to achieving our goals as we work and struggle to understand better what it is possible to achieve.  We learn about the world.  And, then, those original goals lose their force.  New experiences lead to other goals and interests.  We acquire a better understanding of what matters and what we really want.

In short, as we age, we have the opportunity to accept who we are, instead of focusing on who we feel we need to become. We relax into being ourselves.  Our faces start to look like who we are.  And the world settles into more and more familiar patterns.  That acceptance brings diminished anxiety and a higher degree of enjoyment.

I am not talking about professional ambitions alone, but the kind of life goals that are common to most of us:  raising children, owning a home, having a decent job, becoming competent at some skill, paying back our parents, helping others, caring for animals, making a contribution to our communities, being a good friend.  I could go on, but such ambitions are the stuff of life.  When we start out, we don’t know for sure what we can achieve.  We feel an urgency not fail, not only to gain the approval of others but also to approve of ourselves by succeeding at what we value – by doing what we can.  But it is not until we are older that get begin to feel that we have gotten there.

Not everyone gets there, of course.  Emotional conflicts, insecurities, and ambivalence get in the way.  So do the accidents of life, war, financial setbacks, and illness.  And some are luckier than others in finding opportunity.  But, by and large, the statistics get better as more of us come to terms with our goals.  My hunch is that the tipping point happens, on average, in the early fifties.

We can’t work directly at being happy.  It is a by-product of a satisfying life, a life well lived.  But we do get better at living our lives, and that brings an increase in happiness.