Anglonautes > English vocabulary > Feelings

PUEBLO, Colo. — On a summer night not long ago, Maureen White sat alone in her living room staring at a DVD she had avoided watching for years.

On the screen was her older brother, Richard Paul White, the person who taught her how to ride a bike and who tried to protect her from their mother’s abusive boyfriend when they were children. He was confessing to murdering six people.

Toward the end of the videotaped police interrogation, Ms. White reached for a razor blade and began to slice her left leg.

“I felt such rage and anger and so many emotions I did not know what to do,” said Ms. White, 34. When she was done, she needed dozens of stitches and staples.

Mr. White, 39, will spend the rest of his life in prison for three of the murders, to which he pleaded guilty in 2004. Ms. White, whose life has always been fragile, is still struggling.

Like relatives of other violent criminals, she has found herself ill prepared to deal with the complex set of emotions and circumstances that further unhinged her life after her brother’s crimes. Under treatment for anxiety and depression, among other conditions, she has nightmares about serial killers and snipers. She is startled by loud noises and gets nervous around strangers.

And for more than a year after viewing the video, she continued to cut herself — something she had never done before.

“By cutting myself,” she said, “I wanted people to see on the outside how ugly and bad I feel on the inside.”

In a society where headlines of violence are almost commonplace, the families of the perpetrators are often unknown and largely unheard from. But now some relatives have decided to share their stories. In interviews with members of numerous families of varying social and economic status, siblings, parents, partners, cousins and children of convicted killers recounted the hardships they have experienced in the years since their relatives’ crimes.

In the flash of a horrifying moment, they said, their lives had become a vortex of shame, anger and guilt. Most said they were overwhelmed by the blame and ostracism they had received for crimes they had no part in.

Yet many of these families stay in close touch with their imprisoned relatives. Nat Berkowitz, the father of David Berkowitz, the New York City serial killer known as the Son of Sam, said he regularly talked to his son on the phone more than 34 years after his arrest. “I am 101, and it still goes on,” he said.

A Cousin’s Livelihood

On Nov. 5, 2009, 13 people were killed and 32 others wounded at Fort Hood, Tex. By the next day, the repercussions had reached a small law office in Fairfax, Va. The head of the firm, Nader Hasan, is a cousin of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the man accused of carrying out the rampage, and the two had grown up together outside Washington.

“Our phones went completely quiet, dead,” Mr. Hasan, 42, a criminal defense lawyer, said at a large oak table in his impeccably neat office, where a painting of the United States Capitol hangs above a fireplace. “It was devastating since we relied on referrals. I lost dozens of prospective clients, and it still happens.”

Internet accounts reported that the two men were relatives. An interview Mr. Hasan gave to Fox News soon after the shooting in which he said his cousin “was a good American” created an impression to some that he was condoning what his cousin was accused of doing.

Soon after, Mr. Hasan said, a father in a custody dispute he was handling filed an appeal to a lawsuit against Mr. Hasan in which he referred to him as “the cousin of the Fort Hood shooter.” The appeal argued that Mr. Hasan should be removed as guardian of the two children in the case and highlighted his link to Major Hasan.

The petition was dismissed, Mr. Hasan said. But during the first few months after the shooting, he said, he felt such humiliation that he was loath to appear in court. “We got continuances on a lot of cases until the next year because I did not want to be seen in the courthouse since I felt so embarrassed,” he said.

The discomfort crept into his personal life. When he returned to a local school where he had been a volunteer assistant wrestling coach since 2000, he said, he was asked to leave because of his connection to the Fort Hood violence. He packed up.

By March 2010, Mr. Hasan’s situation was improving. Referrals were on the rise, and his wife was pregnant with their first child. But he was agonizing about staying silent about religious extremism. With a lawyer friend, Kendrick Macdowell, he formed the Nawal Foundation, named after Mr. Hasan’s mother, and set up a Web site to encourage moderate American Muslims to denounce violence in the name of Islam. It was not an easy thing to do.

“There was a tremendous amount of family pressure on him to do nothing public, to not remind the world we are related to the Fort Hood shooter,” Mr. Macdowell said.

Late last year, Kerry Cahill, a 29-year-old woman who lost her father in the shooting, contacted Mr. Hasan to discuss the foundation, whose message she liked. They met at his home for several emotional hours. She said that Mr. Hasan was very apologetic and that she sensed he was burdened. She recently accepted his invitation to sit on the foundation’s board.

“We are both angry at the same thing,” she said.

A Lover’s Remorse

Debra Kay Bischoff was not the woman who arranged for Ronnie Lee Gardner, a career criminal with a history of escapes, to get his hands on a gun in a Salt Lake City courthouse, a weapon that he used to kill a lawyer and wound a sheriff’s bailiff in a failed escape.

But for the nearly 25 years that Mr. Gardner was on death row for that 1985 murder until his execution, Ms. Bischoff, who is his former girlfriend and the mother of two of his children, felt a sense of responsibility for much of his violence, including a previous killing of a bartender.

Ms. Bischoff cites her decision around 1982 to move from Utah to Idaho with their daughter and son to get away from Mr. Gardner and start a new life. Though she loved him deeply, she said, he had become terrifying to her.

Nonetheless, Ms. Bischoff, now 52, said: “I felt such remorse leaving. What if? What if I hadn’t? He lost it because he lost us, the only people who ever showed him love.”

In a letter she sent in June 2010 to the prison warden and the state parole board pleading for Mr. Gardner’s life about two weeks before his execution, Ms. Bischoff wrote, “You see, he opened his heart to us and then we broke it, and I honestly believe it was too much for him to take and he reacted in violent ways to release his anger and hurt.”

That Mr. Gardner died by firing squad — a method he chose over lethal injection — has left her with an even heavier conscience. And she says she has misgivings that her husband of 27 years knows how deeply she loved Mr. Gardner.

“I never did get over Ronnie, and I don’t know it ever ended with him,” she said, adding that she is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in social work and volunteering at a youth program, all to help troubled youngsters so that they may have a better upbringing than he did.

Ms. Bischoff, her husband and the son she had with Mr. Gardner, Daniel, 31, live in a one-story house they built next to potato and grain fields in a middle-class neighborhood in Blackfoot, Idaho. Soon after the execution, Mr. Gardner’s brother Randy and his daughter with Ms. Bischoff, Brandie, were allowed to observe the bullet wounds in his chest to make sure he had died as quickly as the authorities said he would.

“To look at his face and chest has haunted me,” Randy said. “I have night sweats and nightmares.”

As for Brandie, 34, who works at a bakery earning $8 per hour, the fact that her father had been absent virtually all her life has left her bitter and distrustful of men.

“I wanted to be a daddy’s girl, but I did not have a guy to raise me or a first guy to love, and that affected my relationships with men,” said Brandie, who had an eight-year marriage that fell apart. “I have kept myself walled off so I won’t get hurt again by any man.”

Brandie was in alcohol rehabilitation by the time she was 14, she said, and more recently was charged with felony domestic battery after fighting a man while drunk. “I have been destructive like a tornado because I have been so mad,” she said. Soon after the execution, Brandie said, she attempted suicide by downing large quantities of pills and washing them down with beer. She ended up in the hospital for about three days.

Less than a month later, she was drinking Jack Daniel’s and swallowing more pills.

“The last time I tried to kill myself, honestly, I felt like I was done,” Brandie said, standing in a bedroom of the worn bungalow she rents on a tree-lined street in Idaho Falls. In her hands was a plastic box containing some of her father’s ashes.

A Brother’s Fears

Ever since Aug. 18, 2005, Robert Hyde has been leery about what perils may lie outside, beyond his home near the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

That was the day his older brother, John, long plagued by mental illness, embarked on a homicidal spree that spanned about 18 hours and left five people dead in scattered parts of the city, with two police officers among the victims.

Mr. Hyde had never known his brother to be violent or cruel. He understood that John, who like himself was adopted but from different biological parents, had been paranoid and odd, but he did not think John was prone to violence. Knowing now that John had descended into such savage behavior has changed the way Mr. Hyde perceives people.

“The world is darker to me now; I am more nervous when I go out,” Mr. Hyde, 51, said as classical music softly played in the living room of his modest Pueblo revival-style house. “Who knows who else is out there somewhere who could change so drastically?” he said. “Maybe anyone could.”

The first time Mr. Hyde traveled after the shootings, on a trip to a lake with his girlfriend, they feared that others there might assault them. “It was paranoia,” he said. “It was a degree of post-traumatic stress.”

Then there was simply the matter of his last name. He was self-conscious when it was called at a doctor’s office. His son, he said, a high school senior when the shootings occurred, endured nasty taunts from fellow students: “Are you going to go Hyde on me?”

Not long after John, now 55, was arrested, he told his legal guardian that he wanted to kill Mr. Hyde and their cousin Christian Meuli, a recently retired physician. “I was so scared John was shrewd enough to escape that I was prepared to flee from my home,” said Dr. Meuli, 60. For the next four years, he carried a 3-by-5 index card on which he had written phone numbers and other critical information he would need in case he had to disappear.

Mr. Hyde used to work in the field of substance abuse research and now makes a living selling antiques and other collectibles. He has devoted time to speaking about the need for better access to quality behavioral health care and greater communication between providers. He says he believes that could have made a difference in his brother’s mental health and possibly in preventing the crimes.

“I have tried to get more involved in this issue, but I don’t have the power,” Mr. Hyde said. “My last name is a hindrance.” A Sister’s Guilt

In 2003, life looked promising for Danyall White, another sister of Richard Paul White. After a difficult childhood, everything seemed to be falling into place. She was studying to be a court reporter at a school outside Denver and had a job answering phones for a pay TV provider.

For about a year, though, her brother had been telling her that he had killed women throughout Colorado. But Mr. White, then 30, often “said off-the-wall things,” she recalled. She dismissed the morbid claims as fantasies.

One day Mr. White told her that he had fatally shot a close friend by accident, another tale that she considered imaginary.

That was until he showed her a newspaper article about his friend’s death. The article said it might have been suicide, but Ms. White, imagining the guilt the victim’s parents might feel, decided she should inform the police about her brother’s claim. He was arrested on first-degree murder charges. Soon after, Mr. White confessed to killing five women he believed to be prostitutes (though the police found the bodies of only three of them).

Now, Ms. White is grappling with her own guilt. “It wasn’t just the guilt of my brother being behind bars, but the guilt of watching everybody’s life falling apart because of what I did, the phone call that I made,” said Ms. White, 37. “Some of my family shunned me, and it ate away at me.”

Soon enough, Ms. White said, she found “a friend and confidant” who never left her side: alcohol. For several years, her days were soothed by Jack Daniel’s and dozens of bottles of beer.

After the arrest of her brother, Ms. White abandoned her studies and was dismissed from her job because, she said, the company told her it could not assure her safety against colleagues’ threats and insults.

When her ailing mother died, Ms. White could barely function. She said life’s toll since turning in her brother had led her to attempt suicide four times.

In 2010, Ms. White entered an alcohol rehabilitation program and says she had been sober for 20 months before briefly relapsing recently. “I told no one in rehab who I was, that I was R. P.’s sister,” she said. “In sobriety, I have realized that I was taking responsibility for someone else’s actions. A lot of the guilt has subsided.”

Research was contributed by Jack Styczynski, Toby Lyles and Sheelagh McNeill.

Killers’ Families Left to Confront Fear and Shame, NYT, 4.2.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/us/killers-families-left-to-confront-fear-and-shame.html

Absorbing the Pain

February 25, 2011
The New York Times
By BOB HERBERT

Philadelphia

Lynda Hiller teared up. “We’re struggling real bad,” she said, “and it’s getting harder every day.”

A handful of people were sitting around a dining room table in a row house in North Philadelphia on Wednesday, talking about the problems facing working people in America. The setting outside the house on West Harold Street was grim. The remnants of a snowstorm lined the curbs and a number of people, obviously down on their luck, were moving about the struggling neighborhood. Some were panhandling.

The small gathering had been arranged by a group called Working America, which is affiliated with the A.F.L.-C.I.O., but the people at the meeting did not belong to unions. They were just there to talk in an atmosphere of mutual support.

What struck me about the conversation was the way people talked in normal tones about the equivalent of a hurricane ripping through their lives, leaving little but destruction in its wake.

Ms. Hiller had come in from Allentown. She’s 63 years old and still undergoing treatment for breast cancer. Her husband, Howard, who was not at the meeting, had been a long-distance truck driver for 35 years before losing his job in 2007, the same year Ms. Hiller received her diagnosis. Mr. Hiller thought at the time that with all of his experience he would find another job pretty quickly. He was mistaken.

“He looked for two years,” Ms. Hiller said. “He applied every place he could, sometimes four or five times at the same company. He went everywhere, to every job fair you can think of, to every place where there was even a mention of an opening. But for every job that came available, there were 20 people or more who showed up for it.”

Last fall, Mr. Hiller took a part-time job as a dishwasher at a Red Lobster restaurant. “It’s a job,” Ms. Hiller said. “It’s not fancy. It’s not truck driving.”

And it was not enough for them to keep their home. Ms. Hiller lost her job at a bank when she became ill. With both paychecks gone, meeting the mortgage became impossible. The Hillers lost their home and are now living day to day. “If my husband can get 30 hours of work in a week, then maybe we can pay some bills,” Ms. Hiller said. “If he can’t, we can’t. We’ve downsized our lives so much.”

The meeting was in the home of Elizabeth Lassiter, a certified nursing assistant whose job is in Hatfield, Pa., about 45 minutes north of Philadelphia. She doesn’t earn a lot or get benefits, but it’s a big step up from last year when she was working part time in Warminster and for a while had to sleep in her car.

“Back then I was working for a nursing agency and they kept saying they didn’t have full-time work,” she said. Until she could raise enough money for an apartment, the car was her only option. “I needed someplace to lay my head,” she said. “It was very hard.”

These are the kinds of stories you might expect from a country staggering through a depression, not the richest and supposedly most advanced society on earth. If these were exceptional stories, there would be less reason for concern. But they are in no way extraordinary. Similar stories abound throughout the United States.

Among the many heartening things about the workers fighting back in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere is the spotlight that is being thrown on the contemptuous attitude of the corporate elite and their handmaidens in government toward ordinary working Americans: police officers and firefighters, teachers, truck drivers, janitors, health care aides, and so on. These are the people who do the daily grunt work of America. How dare we treat them with contempt.

It would be a mistake to think that this fight is solely about the right of public employees to collectively bargain. As important as that issue is, it’s just one skirmish in what’s shaping up as a long, bitter campaign to keep ordinary workers, whether union members or not, from being completely overwhelmed by the forces of unrestrained greed in this society.

The predators at the top, billionaires and millionaires, are pitting ordinary workers against one another. So we’re left with the bizarre situation of unionized workers with a pension being resented by nonunion workers without one. The swells are in the background, having a good laugh.

I asked Lynda Hiller if she felt generally optimistic or pessimistic. She was quiet for a moment, then said: “I don’t think things are going to get any better. I think we’re going to hit rock bottom. The big shots are in charge, and they just don’t give a darn about the little person.”

Absorbing the Pain, NYT, 25.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/26/opinion/26herbert.html

First Comes Fear

January 11, 2011
9:09 pm
The New York Times
By ROBERT WRIGHT

People on the left and right have been wrestling over the legacy of Jared Loughner, arguing about whether his shooting spree proves that the Sarah Palins and Glenn Becks of the world are fomenting violence. But it’s not as if this is the only data point we have. Here’s another one:

Six months ago, police in California pulled over a truck that turned out to contain a rifle, a handgun, a shotgun and body armor. Police learned from the driver — sometime after he opened fire on them — that he was heading for San Francisco, where he planned to kill people at the Tides Foundation. You’ve probably never heard of the Tides Foundation — unless you watch Glenn Beck, who had mentioned it more than two dozen times in the preceding six months, depicting it as part of a communist plot to “infiltrate” our society and seize control of big business.

Note the parallel with Loughner’s case. Loughner was convinced that a conspiracy was afoot — a conspiracy by the government to control our thoughts (via grammar, in his bizarre worldview). So he decided to kill one of the conspirators.

It’s not clear where Loughner got his conspiracy theory. The leading contender is a self-styled “king of Hawaii” who harbors, along with his beliefs about government mind control, a conviction that the world will end next year. But it doesn’t matter who Loughner got the idea from or whether you consider it left wing or right wing. The point is that Americans who wildly depict other Americans as dark conspirators, as the enemy, are in fact increasing the chances, however marginally, that those Americans will be attacked.

In that sense, the emphasis the left is placing on violent rhetoric and imagery is probably misplaced. Sure, calls to violence, explicit or implicit, can have effect. But the more incendiary theme in current discourse is the consignment of Americans to the category of alien, of insidious other. Once Glenn Beck had sufficiently demonized people at the Tides Foundation, actually advocating the violence wasn’t necessary.

By the same token, Palin’s much-discussed cross-hairs map probably isn’t as dangerous as her claim that “socialists” are trying to create “death panels.” If you convince enough people that an enemy of the American way is setting up a system that could kill them, the violent hatred will take care of itself.

When left and right contend over the meaning of incidents like this, the sanity of the perpetrator becomes a big issue. Back when Major Nidal Hasan killed 13 people at Fort Hood, the right emphasized how sane he was and the left how crazy he was. The idea was that if Hasan was sane, then he could be viewed as a coherent expression of the Jihadist ideology that some on the right say is rampant in America. In the case of Loughner, the right was quick to emphasize that he was not sane and therefore couldn’t be a coherent expression of right-wing ideology. Then, as his ideology started looking more like a left-right jumble, and his weirdness got better documented, a left-right consensus on his craziness emerged.

My own view is that if you decide to go kill a bunch of innocent people, it’s a pretty safe bet that you’re not a picture of mental health. But that doesn’t sever the link between you and the people who inspired you, or insulate them from responsibility. Glenn Beck knows that there are lots of unbalanced people out there, and that his message reaches some of them.

This doesn’t make him morally culpable for the way these people react to things he says that are true. It doesn’t even make him responsible for the things he says that are false but that he sincerely believes are true. But it does make him responsible for things he says that are false and concocted to mislead gullible people.

I guess it’s possible that Beck actually believes his hyper-theatrically delivered nonsense. (And I guess it’s possible that professional wrestling isn’t fake.) But in that case the responsibility just moves to Roger Ailes, head of Fox News, and Rupert Murdoch, its owner. Why are they giving a megaphone to someone who believes crazy stuff?

The magic formula of Palin and Beck — fear sells — knows no ideology. When Jon Stewart closed his Washington “rally to restore sanity” with a video montage of fear mongers, he commendably included some on the left — notably the sometimes over-the-top Keith Olbermann. The heads of MSNBC have just as much of an obligation to help keep America sane as the heads of Fox News have.

To be sure, at this political moment there is — by my left-wing lights, at least — more crazy fear-mongering and demonization on the right than on the left. But that asymmetry is transient.

What’s not transient, unfortunately, is the technological trend that drives much of this. It isn’t just that people can now build a cocoon of cable channels and Web sites that insulates them from inconvenient facts. It’s also that this cocoon insulates them from other Americans — including the groups of Americans who, inside the cocoon, are being depicted as evil aliens. It’s easy to buy into the demonization of people you never communicate with, and whose views you never see depicted by anyone other than their adversaries.

In this environment, any entrepreneurial fear monger can use technology to build a following. You don’t have to be the king of Hawaii to start calling yourself the king of Hawaii and convince a Jared Loughner that there’s a conspiracy afoot.

So I’m not sure how much good it would do if you could get a Glenn Beck to clean up his act. With such a vast ecosystem of fear mongers, his vacated niche might be filled before long. But I think Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch owe it to America to at least do the experiment.

Postscript: Encouragingly, Roger Ailes said in the wake of the Tucson shooting that “I told all of our guys, shut up, tone it down, make your argument intellectually.” So stay tuned. Also encouragingly, two journalists from liberal and conservative magazines — the American Prospect and National Review — had an extremely civil discussion about the Tucson shooting, about 24 hours after it happened, on my Web site Bloggingheads.tv.

First Comes Fear, NYT, 1.11.2011, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/before-hatred-comes-fear/

At Victim’s School, Shock, Sorrow and Nightmares

January 10, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNIFER MEDINA

TUCSON — For the children at Mesa Verde Elementary School, the questions are endless. First, they asked, again and again, why would a stranger kill Christina Green, who had attended school here since kindergarten? Then, some asked quietly, would that man come back to try to shoot them, too? And is it still safe to go to the supermarket?

As classes at Mesa Verde resumed for the first time since the shooting on Saturday that killed six people, including 9-year-old Christina, the school grappled with how to talk about the tragedy with the young students here. Many of them have never known anyone who has died. Now, one of their own had been killed — a loss that was difficult for many adults to deal with.

In the two nights since the shooting, nightmares had already interrupted sleep for many of the children — images of puppies suddenly dying, mothers crossing invisible lines and abruptly disappearing, or somebody coming to kidnap their friends in the middle of the day. The impact was raw and deep. Some children screamed and sobbed inconsolably, while others were stoic, promising their mothers that, yes, they understood, and, no, they did not need to talk.

They brought their stuffed owls and friendship bracelets and flowerpots as offerings for the growing memorial to Christina that lined the fence at the school. And her third-grade classmates hugged one another tightly in the yard before classes began.

“Are you sure you’re O.K.?” one asked a group of friends. “My mom said it’s O.K. to be sad.”

Kayley Clark, a classmate who had been friends with Christina for years, said, “I just feel shocked and very, very sad. She was very, very smart and very, very nice. She was such a fun person, and I really wish she could come back.”

Many students were already chattering about ways they could honor Christina. Could they name a local park in her memory? Or perhaps a baseball field, a tribute to the game she loved? Could they try to be more helpful to other students, as they had seen her do?

As parents escorted their children to class just after dawn, a few said they were worried about what their children would hear about the attacks, but many more said they felt a sense of relief that somebody else could help their children grieve.

And parents were mourning not only the death of a bright and popular young student, but also a sense of innocence for their children.

Tamara Clark, Kayley’s mother, said that when she told her daughter that Christina was the young girl killed on Saturday, she immediately burst into tears. Then, there was silence. Hours later came the anger “in a way I have never seen,” Ms. Clark said.

“She would say over and over that she hated the guy who did it,” Ms. Clark said. “ ‘Hate’ is a word I never really heard her use before.”

With fewer than 400 students at the school, nearly every child had at least seen Christina on the playground or at student council or with a tutoring program where she volunteered.

A team of psychologists arrived at the school early Monday, preparing to stay all week. Teachers began the day by telling students that the school was “like one big family, and we are all here to support each other in this time.” With that, students were encouraged to share memories of Christina in class.

“They told them it’s fine to be happy when you think about Christina and it’s fine to feel sad,” said Christine Parrish, whose 8- and 9-year-old daughters had known Christina for most of their lives.

School officials were trying to make the day stick to a normal schedule, although the circumstances were anything but.

“This is a multifaceted tragedy for this community,” said Vicki Balentine, the superintendent of the Amphitheater Public Schools district. “We want to give them space to do whatever we need to be supportive. And at the same time, we have to move forward.”

One class gathered in the schoolyard and held hands in a circle for the national moment of silence, as a car stereo blasted the sound of a single bell. The scheduled Family Library Night on Monday was replaced with a support gathering for families.

For many parents and more than a few students, there are the persistent thoughts of “what if?”

“There’s no reason we couldn’t have been there at that time, too,” said Betty Ordonez, whose granddaughter, Jordan Zepeda, is also in third grade at Mesa Verde. “That was the first thing I thought when I heard about it — where are my babies?”

Jordan said, “Now, I feel scared, just very scared.”

Ms. Balentine said the students seemed to be doing as well as could be expected, adding, “Children are remarkably resilient.”

Indeed, one of the most cogent messages (complete with misspellings) on the growing memorial came in a letter from Rachel Cooper-Blackmore, a fifth grader.

“Christina you will be missed by everyone,” it began, each “i” dotted with a heart. “I am so sorry for your family and I hope in their hearts you can guide them on the right pathway of live because yours was taken short.”

At Victim’s School, Shock, Sorrow and Nightmares, NYT, 10.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/us/11schools.html

United in Horror

January 9, 2011
The New York Times
By ROSS DOUTHAT

When John F. Kennedy visited Dallas in November of 1963, Texas was awash in right-wing anger — over perceived cold-war betrayals, over desegregation, over the perfidies of liberalism in general. Adlai Stevenson, then ambassador to the U.N., had been spit on during his visit to the city earlier that fall. The week of Kennedy’s arrival, leaflets circulated in Dallas bearing the president’s photograph and the words “Wanted For Treason.”

But Lee Harvey Oswald was not a right-winger, not a John Bircher, not a segregationist. Instead, he was a Marxist of sorts (albeit one disillusioned by his experiences in Soviet Russia), an activist on behalf of Castro’s Cuba, and a man whose previous plot had been aimed at a far-right ex-general named Edwin Walker. The anti-Kennedy excesses of Texas conservatives were real enough, but the president’s assassin acted on a far more obscure set of motivations.

Nine years after Kennedy was killed, George Wallace embarked on his second campaign for the presidency. This was the early 1970s, the high tide of far-left violence — the era of the Black Panthers, the Weathermen, the Symbionese Liberation Army — and Wallace’s race-baiting politics made him an obvious target for protests. On his final, fateful day of campaigning, he faced a barrage of coins, oranges, rocks and tomatoes, amid shouts of “remember Selma!” and “Hitler for vice president!”

But Arthur Bremer, who shot Wallace that afternoon, paralyzing him from the waist down, had only a tenuous connection to left-wing politics. He didn’t care much about Wallace’s views on race: he just wanted to assassinate somebody (Richard Nixon had been his original target), as “a statement of my manhood for the world to see.”

It’s possible that Jared Lee Loughner, the young man behind Saturday’s rampage in Tucson, will have a more direct connection to partisan politics than an earlier generation’s gunmen did. Indeed, many observers seem to be taking a kind of comfort from that possibility: there’s been a rush to declare this tragedy a teachable moment — an opportunity for people to cool their rhetoric, abandon their anger, and renounce the kind of martial imagery that inspired Sarah Palin’s PAC to place a target over Gabrielle Giffords’s district just months before Loughner gunned down the Arizona congresswoman.

But chances are that Loughner’s motives will prove as irreducibly complex as those of most of his predecessors in assassination. Violence in American politics tends to bubble up from a world that’s far stranger than any Glenn Beck monologue — a murky landscape where worldviews get cobbled together from a host of baroque conspiracy theories, and where the line between ideological extremism and mental illness gets blurry fast.

This is the world that gave us Oswald and Bremer. More recently, it’s given us figures like James W. von Brunn, the neo-Nazi who opened fire at the Holocaust Museum in 2009, and James Lee, who took hostages at the Discovery Channel last summer to express his displeasure over population growth. These are figures better analyzed by novelists than pundits: as Walter Kirn put it Saturday, they’re “self-anointed knights templar of the collective shadow realm, not secular political actors in extremis.”

This won’t stop partisans from making hay out of Saturday’s tragedy, of course. The Democratic operative who was quoted in Politico saying that his party needs “to deftly pin this on the Tea Partiers” was just stating the obvious: after a political season rife with overheated rhetoric from conservative “revolutionaries,” the attempted murder of a Democratic congresswoman is a potential gift to liberalism.

But if overheated rhetoric and martial imagery really led inexorably to murder, then both parties would belong in the dock. (It took conservative bloggers about five minutes to come up with Democratic campaign materials that employed targets and crosshairs against Republican politicians.) When our politicians and media loudmouths act like fools and zealots, they should be held responsible for being fools and zealots. They shouldn’t be held responsible for the darkness that always waits to swallow up the unstable and the lost.

We should remember, too, that there are places where mainstream political movements really are responsible for violence against their rivals. (Last week’s assassination of a Pakistani politician who dared to defend a Christian is a stark reminder of what that sort of world can look like.) Not so in America: From the Republican leadership to the Tea Party grass roots, all of Gabrielle Giffords’s political opponents were united in horror at the weekend’s events. There is no faction in American politics that actually wants its opponents dead.

That may seem like a small blessing, amid so much tragedy and loss. But it is a blessing worth remembering nonetheless.

United in Horror, NYT, 9.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/opinion/10douthat.html

Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts

August 24, 2009
The New York Times
By ALEX WRIGHT

Computers may be good at crunching numbers, but can they crunch feelings?

The rise of blogs and social networks has fueled a bull market in personal opinion: reviews, ratings, recommendations and other forms of online expression. For computer scientists, this fast-growing mountain of data is opening a tantalizing window onto the collective consciousness of Internet users.

An emerging field known as sentiment analysis is taking shape around one of the computer world’s unexplored frontiers: translating the vagaries of human emotion into hard data.

This is more than just an interesting programming exercise. For many businesses, online opinion has turned into a kind of virtual currency that can make or break a product in the marketplace.

Yet many companies struggle to make sense of the caterwaul of complaints and compliments that now swirl around their products online. As sentiment analysis tools begin to take shape, they could not only help businesses improve their bottom lines, but also eventually transform the experience of searching for information online.

Several new sentiment analysis companies are trying to tap into the growing business interest in what is being said online.

“Social media used to be this cute project for 25-year-old consultants,” said Margaret Francis, vice president for product at Scout Labs in San Francisco. Now, she said, top executives “are recognizing it as an incredibly rich vein of market intelligence.”

Scout Labs, which is backed by the venture capital firm started by the CNet founder Halsey Minor, recently introduced a subscription service that allows customers to monitor blogs, news articles, online forums and social networking sites for trends in opinions about products, services or topics in the news.

In early May, the ticket marketplace StubHub used Scout Labs’ monitoring tool to identify a sudden surge of negative blog sentiment after rain delayed a Yankees-Red Sox game.

Stadium officials mistakenly told hundreds of fans that the game had been canceled, and StubHub denied fans’ requests for refunds, on the grounds that the game had actually been played. But after spotting trouble brewing online, the company offered discounts and credits to the affected fans. It is now re-evaluating its bad weather policy.

“This is a canary in a coal mine for us,” said John Whelan, StubHub’s director of customer service.

Jodange, based in Yonkers, offers a service geared toward online publishers that lets them incorporate opinion data drawn from over 450,000 sources, including mainstream news sources, blogs and Twitter.

Based on research by Claire Cardie, a former Cornell computer science professor, and Jan Wiebe of the University of Pittsburgh, the service uses a sophisticated algorithm that not only evaluates sentiments about particular topics, but also identifies the most influential opinion holders.

Jodange, whose early investors include the National Science Foundation, is currently working on a new algorithm that could use opinion data to predict future developments, like forecasting the impact of newspaper editorials on a company’s stock price.

In a similar vein, The Financial Times recently introduced Newssift, an experimental program that tracks sentiments about business topics in the news, coupled with a specialized search engine that allows users to organize their queries by topic, organization, place, person and theme.

Using Newssift, a search for Wal-Mart reveals that recent sentiment about the company is running positive by a ratio of slightly better than two to one. When that search is refined with the suggested term “Labor Force and Unions,” however, the ratio of positive to negative sentiments drops closer to one to one.

Such tools could help companies pinpoint the effect of specific issues on customer perceptions, helping them respond with appropriate marketing and public relations strategies.

For casual Web surfers, simpler incarnations of sentiment analysis are sprouting up in the form of lightweight tools like Tweetfeel, Twendz and Twitrratr. These sites allow users to take the pulse of Twitter users about particular topics.

A quick search on Tweetfeel, for example, reveals that 77 percent of recent tweeters liked the movie “Julie & Julia.” But the same search on Twitrratr reveals a few misfires. The site assigned a negative score to a tweet reading “julie and julia was truly delightful!!” That same message ended with “we all felt very hungry afterwards” — and the system took the word “hungry” to indicate a negative sentiment.

While the more advanced algorithms used by Scout Labs, Jodange and Newssift employ advanced analytics to avoid such pitfalls, none of these services works perfectly. “Our algorithm is about 70 to 80 percent accurate,” said Ms. Francis, who added that its users can reclassify inaccurate results so the system learns from its mistakes.

Translating the slippery stuff of human language into binary values will always be an imperfect science, however. “Sentiments are very different from conventional facts,” said Seth Grimes, the founder of the suburban Maryland consulting firm Alta Plana, who points to the many cultural factors and linguistic nuances that make it difficult to turn a string of written text into a simple pro or con sentiment. “ ‘Sinful’ is a good thing when applied to chocolate cake,” he said.

The simplest algorithms work by scanning keywords to categorize a statement as positive or negative, based on a simple binary analysis (“love” is good, “hate” is bad). But that approach fails to capture the subtleties that bring human language to life: irony, sarcasm, slang and other idiomatic expressions. Reliable sentiment analysis requires parsing many linguistic shades of gray.

“We are dealing with sentiment that can be expressed in subtle ways,” said Bo Pang, a researcher at Yahoo who co-wrote “Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis,” one of the first academic books on sentiment analysis.

To get at the true intent of a statement, Ms. Pang developed software that looks at several different filters, including polarity (is the statement positive or negative?), intensity (what is the degree of emotion being expressed?) and subjectivity (how partial or impartial is the source?).

For example, a preponderance of adjectives often signals a high degree of subjectivity, while noun- and verb-heavy statements tend toward a more neutral point of view.

As sentiment analysis algorithms grow more sophisticated, they should begin to yield more accurate results that may eventually point the way to more sophisticated filtering mechanisms. They could become a part of everyday Web use.

“I see sentiment analysis becoming a standard feature of search engines,” said Mr. Grimes, who suggests that such algorithms could begin to influence both general-purpose Web searching and more specialized searches in areas like e-commerce, travel reservations and movie reviews.

Ms. Pang envisions a search engine that fine-tunes results for users based on sentiment. For example, it might influence the ordering of search results for certain kinds of queries like “best hotel in San Antonio.”

As search engines begin to incorporate more and more opinion data into their results, the distinction between fact and opinion may start blurring to the point where, as David Byrne once put it, “facts all come with points of view.”

Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts, NYT, 24.8.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/technology/internet/24emotion.html

THE INTELLIGENT INVESTOR

By JASON ZWEIG

How to Control Your Fears In a Fearsome Market

Scientists Are Showing How to Erase Your Fright So Your Portfolio Survives

July 19, 2008
The Wall Street Journal
Page B1

What goes on inside your head when your portfolio implodes?

One of the fear centers in your brain, the amygdala, can respond to upsetting stimuli in 12 milliseconds, or one-25th the time it takes to blink your eye. These brain cells fire when an attack dog snarls at you, a spider drops down your shirt or the Dow Jones Industrial Average takes a dive.

Merely reading the words "market crash" in this sentence can instantaneously jack up your pulse and your blood pressure, the output of your sweat glands and the tension in your muscles. Stress hormones will flood your bloodstream. Your eyes will widen and your nostrils flare, making you hypersensitive to any further danger. All this occurs automatically, involuntarily and unconsciously. You can't be an intelligent investor if, without even knowing it, you are thinking with the panic button in your brain.

The countless people who bailed out of the market in the horrifying plunge of October 2002 missed out on the generous returns of 2003 through 2007, when stocks returned 12.8% annually. The same is likely to be true of those who cut and run in today's turbulent market.

Fortunately, you can train your brain to stay calm when the markets are gripped by panic. Last week, I spent an afternoon in Kevin Ochsner's neuroscience lab at Columbia University in New York, practicing what he calls "cognitive reappraisal."

I sat at a computer and viewed a series of photographs, each preceded by one of two words: look or reappraise. look was my cue to respond naturally without trying to change my feelings. reappraise told me I should "actively reinterpret" the photo, using my imagination to spin another, less emotional scenario that could have resulted in the same image.

Dr. Ochsner had warned me to eat an early, light lunch, and I immediately realized why: I gasped at the sight of a man's hand from which most of the fingers had been freshly hacked off. But my instruction had been to reappraise, so I forced myself to ask whether this image might actually be a still from a horror movie. Magically, the moment I imagined it was a film prop, the raw flesh seemed to look a bit like plastic, and I felt myself exhale.

If I can think away blood, you can calmly face the red arrows on a market Web site. "Emotions are malleable," Dr. Ochsner said, "but people often don't realize how much [of what you feel] is under your own control."

Here are some ways you can control your fears.

Reappraise. Forget what you paid for that stock or fund; instead, imagine it was a gift. Now that it is priced, say, 20% more cheaply than in December, should you want to return the gift? Or should you buy more while it is on sale? (If rethinking a fallen price this way doesn't make you feel better, maybe you should sell.)

Step outside yourself. Imagine that someone else has suffered these losses. Think of questions you might ask to give that person advice: Other than the price, what else has changed? Is your original rationale for this investment still valid?

Control your cues. Even witnessing someone else's pain, or glancing into another person's frightened eyes, can fire up your amygdala. Because fear is as contagious as the flu, quarantine yourself from anyone who obsesses over the momentary twitching of the Dow. Tear yourself away from the computer or television; better yet, while the market is closed, make an advance date with friends or family to get your mind off stocks during market hours.

Track your feelings. Fill in the blanks in this sentence: "Today the Dow closed down [or up] ___ points, and that made me feel __________." Your emotions shouldn't be hostage to the actions of the roughly 100 million other people who compose the collective beast that Benjamin Graham called "Mr. Market." You need not be miserable just because Mr. Market is.

Finally, if the market is open, your portfolio should be closed. Sleep on any sell decision until the next day, when your fears may have faded. Intelligent investors act out of patience and courage, not panic.

How to Control Your Fears In a Fearsome Market, WSJ, 19.7.2008, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121642720591866951.html?mod=home_we_banner_left

How we learned to stop having fun

We used to know how to get together and really let our hair down. Then, in the early 1600s, a mass epidemic of depression broke out - and we've been living with it ever since. Something went wrong, but what? Barbara Ehrenreich unpicks the causes of our unhappiness

Monday April 2, 2007
Guardian
Barbara Ehrenreich

Beginning in England in the 17th century, the European world was stricken by what looks, in today's terms, like an epidemic of depression. The disease attacked both young and old, plunging them into months or years of morbid lethargy and relentless terrors, and seemed - perhaps only because they wrote more and had more written about them - to single out men of accomplishment and genius. The puritan writer John Bunyan, the political leader Oliver Cromwell, the poets Thomas Gray and John Donne, and the playwright and essayist Samuel Johnson are among the earliest and best-known victims. To the medical profession, the illness presented a vexing conundrum, not least because its gravest outcome was suicide. In 1733, Dr George Cheyne speculated that the English climate, combined with sedentary lifestyles and urbanisation, "have brought forth a class of distemper with atrocious and frightful symptoms, scarce known to our ancestors, and never rising to such fatal heights, and afflicting such numbers in any known nation. These nervous disorders being computed to make almost one-third of the complaints of the people of condition in England."

To the English, the disease was "the English malady". But the rainy British Isles were not the only site visited by the disease; all of Europe was afflicted.

The disease grew increasingly prevalent over the course of the 20th century, when relatively sound statistics first became available, and this increase cannot be accounted for by a greater willingness on the part of physicians and patients to report it. Rates of schizophrenia, panic disorders and phobias did not rise at the same time, for example, as they would be expected to if only changes in the reporting of mental illness were at work. According to the World Health Organisation, depression is now the fifth leading cause of death and disability in the world, while ischemic heart disease trails in sixth place. Fatalities occur most dramatically through suicide, but even the mild form of depression - called dysthemia and characterised by an inability to experience pleasure - can kill by increasing a person's vulnerability to serious somatic illnesses such as cancer and heart disease. Far from being an affliction of the famous and successful, we now know that the disease strikes the poor more often than the rich, and women more commonly than men.

Just in the past few years, hundreds of books, articles and television specials have been devoted to depression: its toll on the individual, its relationship to gender, the role of genetic factors, the efficacy of pharmaceutical treatments. But to my knowledge, no one has suggested that the epidemic may have begun in a particular historical time, and started as a result of cultural circumstances that arose at that time and have persisted or intensified since. The failure to consider historical roots may stem, in part, from the emphasis on the celebrity victims of the past, which tends to discourage a statistical, or epidemiological, perspective. But if there was, in fact, a beginning to the epidemic of depression, sometime in the 16th or 17th century, it confronts us with this question: could this apparent decline in the ability to experience pleasure be in any way connected with the decline in opportunities for pleasure, such as carnival and other traditional festivities?

There is reason to think that something like an epidemic of depression in fact began around 1600, or the time when the Anglican minister Robert Burton undertook his "anatomy" of the disease, published as The Anatomy of Melancholy in 1621. Melancholy, as it was called until the 20th century, is of course a very ancient problem, and was described in the fifth century BC by Hippocrates. Chaucer's 14th-century characters were aware of it, and late-medieval churchmen knew it as "acedia". So melancholy, in some form, had always existed - and, regrettably, we have no statistical evidence of a sudden increase in early modern Europe, which had neither a psychiatric profession to do the diagnosing nor a public health establishment to record the numbers of the afflicted. All we know is that in the 1600s and 1700s, medical books about melancholy and literature with melancholic themes were both finding an eager audience, presumably at least in part among people who suffered from melancholy themselves.

Increasing interest in melancholy is not, however, evidence of an increase in the prevalence of actual melancholy. As the historian Roy Porter suggested, the disease may simply have been becoming more stylish, both as a medical diagnosis and as a problem, or pose, affected by the idle rich, and signifying a certain ennui or detachment. No doubt the medical prejudice that it was a disease of the gifted, or at least of the comfortable, would have made it an attractive diagnosis to the upwardly mobile and merely out-of-sorts.

But melancholy did not become a fashionable pose until a full century after Burton took up the subject, and when it did become stylish, we must still wonder: why did this particular stance or attitude become fashionable and not another? An arrogant insouciance might, for example, seem more fitting to an age of imperialism than this wilting, debilitating malady; and enlightenment, another well-known theme of the era, might have been better served by a mood of questing impatience.

Nor can we be content with the claim that the apparent epidemic of melancholy was the cynical invention of the men who profited by writing about it, since some of these were self-identified sufferers themselves. Robert Burton confessed, "I writ of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy." George Cheyne was afflicted, though miraculously cured by a vegetarian diet of his own devising. The Englishman John Brown, who published a bestselling mid-19th-century book on the subject, went on to commit suicide. Something was happening, from about 1600 on, to make melancholy a major concern of the reading public, and the simplest explanation is that there was more melancholy around to be concerned about.

And very likely the phenomena of this early "epidemic of depression" and the suppression of communal rituals and festivities are entangled in various ways. It could be, for example, that, as a result of their illness, depressed individuals lost their taste for communal festivities and even came to view them with revulsion. But there are other possibilities. First, that both the rise of depression and the decline of festivities are symptomatic of some deeper, underlying psychological change, which began about 400 years ago and persists, in some form, in our own time. The second, more intriguing possibility is that the disappearance of traditional festivities was itself a factor contributing to depression.

One approaches the subject of "deeper, underlying psychological change" with some trepidation, but fortunately, in this case, many respected scholars have already visited this difficult terrain. "Historians of European culture are in substantial agreement," Lionel Trilling wrote in 1972, "that in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, something like a mutation in human nature took place." This change has been called the rise of subjectivity or the discovery of the inner self and since it can be assumed that all people, in all historical periods, have some sense of selfhood and capacity for subjective reflection, we are really talking about an intensification, and a fairly drastic one, of the universal human capacity to face the world as an autonomous "I", separate from, and largely distrustful of, "them". The European nobility had already undergone this sort of psychological shift in their transformation from a warrior class to a collection of courtiers, away from directness and spontaneity and toward a new guardedness in relation to others. In the late 16th and 17th centuries, the change becomes far more widespread, affecting even artisans, peasants, and labourers. The new "emphasis on disengagement and selfconsciousness", as Louis Sass puts it, makes the individual potentially more autonomous and critical of existing social arrange-ments, which is all to the good. But it can also transform the individual into a kind of walled fortress, carefully defended from everyone else.

Historians infer this psychological shift from a number of concrete changes occurring in the early modern period, first and most strikingly among the urban bourgeoisie, or upper middle class. Mirrors in which to examine oneself become popular among those who can afford them, along with self-portraits (Rembrandt painted more than 50 of them) and autobiographies in which to revise and elaborate the image that one has projected to others. In bourgeois homes, public spaces that guests may enter are differentiated, for the first time, from the private spaces - bedrooms, for example - in which one may retire to let down one's guard and truly "be oneself". More decorous forms of entertainment - plays and operas requiring people to remain immobilised, each in his or her separate seat - begin to provide an alternative to the promiscuously interactive and physically engaging pleasures of carnival. The very word "self", as Trilling noted, ceases to be a mere reflexive or intensifier and achieves the status of a freestanding noun, referring to some inner core, not readily visible to others.

The notion of a self hidden behind one's appearance and portable from one situation to another is usually attributed to the new possibility of upward mobility. In medieval culture, you were what you appeared to be - a peasant, a man of commerce or an aristocrat - and any attempt to assume another status would have been regarded as rank deception. But in the late 16th century, upward mobility was beginning to be possible or at least imaginable, making "deception" a widespread way of life. You might not be a lord or a lofty burgher, but you could find out how to act like one. Hence the popularity, in 17th-century England, of books instructing the would-be member of the gentry in how to comport himself, write an impressive letter and choose a socially advantageous wife.

Hence, too, the new fascination with the theatre, with its notion of an actor who is different from his or her roles. This is a notion that takes some getting used to; in the early years of the theatre, actors who played the part of villains risked being assaulted by angry playgoers in the streets. Within the theatre, there is a fascination with plots involving further deceptions: Shakespeare's Portia pretends to be a doctor of law; Rosalind disguises herself as a boy; Juliet feigns her own death. Writing a few years after Shakespeare's death, Burton bemoaned the fact that acting was no longer confined to the theatre, for "men like stage-players act [a] variety of parts". It was painful, in his view, "to see a man turn himself into all shapes like a Chameleon ... to act twenty parts & persons at once for his advantage ... having a several face, garb, & character, for every one he meets". The inner self that can change costumes and manners to suit the occasion resembles a skilled craftsperson, too busy and watchful for the pleasures of easygoing conviviality. As for the outer self projected by the inner one into the social world: who would want to "lose oneself" in the communal excitement of carnival when that self has taken so much effort and care to construct?

So highly is the "inner self" honoured within our own culture that its acquisition seems to be an unquestionable mark of progress - a requirement, as Trilling called it, for "the emergence of modern European and American man". It was, no doubt, this sense of individuality and personal autonomy, "of an untrammelled freedom to ask questions and explore", as the historian Yi-Fu Tuan put it, that allowed men such as Martin Luther and Galileo to risk their lives by defying Catholic doctrine. Which is preferable: a courageous, or even merely grasping and competitive, individualism, versus a medieval (or, in the case of non-European cultures, "primitive") personality so deeply mired in community and ritual that it can barely distinguish a "self"? From the perspective of our own time, the choice, so stated, is obvious. We have known nothing else.

But there was a price to be paid for the buoyant individualism we associate with the more upbeat aspects of the early modern period, the Renaissance and Enlightenment. As Tuan writes, "the obverse" of the new sense of personal autonomy is "isolation, loneliness, a sense of disengagement, a loss of natural vitality and of innocent pleasure in the givenness of the world, and a feeling of burden because reality has no meaning other than what a person chooses to impart to it". Now if there is one circumstance indisputably involved in the etiology of depression, it is precisely this sense of isolation. As the 19th-century French sociologist Emile Durkheim saw it, "Originally society is everything, the individual nothing ... But gradually things change. As societies become greater in volume and density, individual differences multiply, and the moment approaches when the only remaining bond among the members of a single human group will be that they are all [human]." The flip side of the heroic autonomy that is said to represent one of the great achievements of the early modern and modern eras is radical isolation and, with it, depression and sometimes death.

But the new kind of personality that arose in 16th- and 17th-century Europe was by no means as autonomous and self-defining as claimed. For far from being detached from the immediate human environment, the newly self-centered individual is continually preoccupied with judging the expectations of others and his or her own success in meeting them: "How am I doing?" this supposedly autonomous "self" wants to know. "What kind of an impression am I making?"

It is no coincidence that the concept of society emerges at the same time as the concept of self. What seems most to concern the new and supposedly autonomous self is the opinion of others, who in aggregate compose "society". Mirrors, for example, do not show us our "selves", only what others can see, and autobiographies reveal only what we want those others to know. The crushing weight of other people's judgments - imagined or real - would help explain the frequent onset of depression at the time of a perceived or anticipated failure. In the 19th century, the historian Janet Oppenheim reports, "severely depressed patients frequently revealed totally unwarranted fears of financial ruin or the expectation of professional disgrace". This is not autonomy but dependency: the emerging "self" defines its own worth in terms of the perceived judgments of others.

If depression was one result of the new individualism, the usual concomitant of depression - anxiety - was surely another. It takes effort, as well as a great deal of watchfulness, to second-guess other people's reactions and plot one's words and gestures accordingly. For the scheming courtier, the striving burgher and the ambitious lawyer or cleric of early modern Europe, the "self" they discovered is perhaps best described as an awareness of this ceaseless, internal effort to adjust one's behaviour to the expectations of others. Play in this context comes to have a demanding new meaning, unconnected to pleasure, as in "playing a role". No wonder bourgeois life becomes privatised in the 16th and 17th centuries, with bedrooms and studies to withdraw to, where, for a few hours a day, the effort can be abandoned, the mask set aside.

But we cannot grasp the full psychological impact of this "mutation in human nature" in purely secular terms. Four hundred - even 200 - years ago, most people would have interpreted their feelings of isolation and anxiety through the medium of religion, translating self as "soul"; the ever-watchful judgmental gaze of others as "God"; and melancholy as "the gnawing fear of eternal damnation". Catholicism offered various palliatives to the disturbed and afflicted, in the form of rituals designed to win divine forgiveness or at least diminished disapproval; and even Lutheranism, while rejecting most of the rituals, posited an approachable and ultimately loving God.

Not so with the Calvinist version of Protestantism. Instead of offering relief, Calvinism provided a metaphysical framework for depression: if you felt isolated, persecuted and possibly damned, this was because you actually were.

John Bunyan seems to have been a jolly enough fellow in his youth, much given to dancing and sports in the village green, but with the onset of his religious crisis these pleasures had to be put aside. Dancing was the hardest to relinquish - "I was a full year before I could quite leave it" - but he eventually managed to achieve a fun-free life. In Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, carnival is the portal to Hell, just as pleasure in any form - sexual, gustatory, convivial - is the devil's snare. Nothing speaks more clearly of the darkening mood, the declining possibilities for joy, than the fact that, while the medieval peasant created festivities as an escape from work, the Puritan embraced work as an escape from terror.

We do not have to rely on psychological inference to draw a link between Calvinism and depression. There is one clear marker for depression - suicide - and suicide rates have been recorded, with varying degrees of diligence, for centuries. In his classic study, Durkheim found that Protestants in the 19th century - not all of whom, of course, were of the Calvinistic persuasion - were about twice as likely to take their own lives as Catholics. More strikingly, a recent analysis finds a sudden surge of suicide in the Swiss canton of Zurich, beginning in the late 16th century, just as that region became a Calvinist stronghold. Some sort of general breakdown of social mores cannot be invoked as an explanation, since homicides fell as suicides rose.

So if we are looking for a common source of depression on the one hand, and the suppression of festivities on the other, it is not hard to find. Urbanisation and the rise of a competitive, market-based economy favoured a more anxious and isolated sort of person - potentially both prone to depression and distrustful of communal pleasures. Calvinism provided a transcendent rationale for this shift, intensifying the isolation and practically institutionalising depression as a stage in the quest for salvation. At the level of "deep, underlying psychological change", both depression and the destruction of festivities could be described as seemingly inevitable consequences of the broad process known as modernisation. But could there also be a more straightforward link, a way in which the death of carnival contributed directly to the epidemic of depression?

It may be that in abandoning their traditional festivities, people lost a potentially effective cure for it. Burton suggested many cures for melancholy - study and exercise, for example - but he returned again and again to the same prescription: "Let them use hunting, sports, plays, jests, merry company ... a cup of good drink now and then, hear musick, and have such companions with whom they are especially delighted; merry tales or toys, drinking, singing, dancing, and whatsoever else may procure mirth." He acknowledged the ongoing attack on "Dancing, Singing, Masking, Mumming, Stage-plays" by "some severe Gatos," referring to the Calvinists, but heartily endorsed the traditional forms of festivity: "Let them freely feast, sing and dance, have their Puppet-plays, Hobby-horses, Tabers, Crowds, Bagpipes, &c, play at Ball, and Barley-breaks, and what sports and recreations they like best." In his ideal world, "none shall be over-tired, but have their set times of recreations and holidays, to indulge their humour, feasts and merry meetings ..." His views accorded with treatments of melancholy already in use in the 16th century. While the disruptively "mad" were confined and cruelly treated, melancholics were, at least in theory, to be "refreshed & comforted" and "gladded with instruments of musick".

A little over a century after Burton wrote The Anatomy of Melancholy, another English writer, Richard Browne, echoed his prescription, backing it up with a scientific (for the time) view of the workings of the human "machine". Singing and dancing could cure melancholy, he proposed, by stirring up the "secretions". And a century later, even Adam Smith, the great prophet of capitalism, was advocating festivities and art as a means of relieving melancholy.

Burton, Browne and Smith were not the only ones to propose festivity as a cure for melancholy, and there is reason to believe that whether through guesswork, nostalgia, or personal experience, they were on to something important. I know of no attempts in our own time to use festive behaviour as treatment for depression, if such an experiment is even thinkable in a modern clinical setting. There is, however, an abundance of evidence that communal pleasures have served, in a variety of cultures, as a way of alleviating and even curing depression.

The 19th-century historian JFC Hecker reports an example from 19th-century Abyssinia, or what is now Ethiopia. An individual, usually a woman, would fall into a kind of wasting illness, until her relatives agreed to "hire, for a certain sum of money, a band of trumpeters, drummers, and fifers, and buy a quantity of liquor; then all the young men and women of the place assemble at the patient's house," where they dance and generally party for days, invariably effecting a cure. Similarly, in 20th-century Somalia, a married woman afflicted by what we would call depression would call for a female shaman, who might diagnose possession by a "sar" spirit. Musicians would be hired, other women summoned, and the sufferer cured through a long bout of ecstatic dancing with the all-female group.

We cannot be absolutely sure in any of these cases - from 17th-century England to 20th-century Somalia - that festivities and danced rituals actually cured the disease we know as depression. But there are reasons to think that they might have. First, because such rituals serve to break down the sufferer's sense of isolation and reconnect him or her with the human community. Second, because they encourage the experience of self-loss - that is, a release, however temporary, from the prison of the self, or at least from the anxious business of evaluating how one stands in the group or in the eyes of an ever-critical God. Friedrich Nietzsche, as lonely and tormented an individual as the 19th century produced, understood the therapeutics of ecstasy perhaps better than anyone else. At a time of almost universal celebration of the "self", he alone dared speak of the "horror of individual existence", and glimpsed relief in the ancient Dionysian rituals that he knew of only from reading classics - rituals in which, he imagined, "each individual becomes not only reconciled to his fellow but actually at one with him".

The immense tragedy for Europeans, and most acutely for the northern Protestants among them, was that the same social forces that disposed them to depression also swept away a traditional cure. They could congratulate themselves for brilliant achievements in the areas of science, exploration and industry, and even convince themselves that they had not, like Faust, had to sell their souls to the devil in exchange for these accomplishments. But with the suppression of festivities that accompanied modern European "progress", they had done something perhaps far more damaging: they had completed the demonisation of Dionysus begun by Christians centuries ago, and thereby rejected one of the most ancient sources of help - the mind-preserving, life-saving techniques of ecstasy.

· This is an edited extract from Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy by Barbara Ehrenreich, published by Granta at £16.99. To buy a copy from the Guardian bookshop for £15.99 with free p&p contact 0870 836 0875 or email support@guardianbookshop.co.uk . Barbara Ehrenreich will be speaking with Geoff Dyer at London's ICA tonight (www.ica.org.uk)

How we learned to stop having fun, G, 2.4.2007, http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/health/story/0,,2047969,00.html

'Emotional abuse' affects one in three

Sunday September 17, 2006
The Observer
Jamie Doward, home affairs editor

One in three adults say they suffered regular acts of 'emotional abuse' as children, with many admitting they were terrified of their parents when growing up. The disturbing findings, to be revealed in a report published tomorrow, have led to claims that the issue of emotional abuse has been ignored by society - to the detriment of a generation which has grown up with low self-esteem and confidence.
'Too often emotional abuse is not taken seriously when enormous damage is being done to individuals and to society,' said Mary Marsh, chief executive of the National Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the charity publishing the report. 'We urgently need to address the scale and impact of emotional maltreatment on the current generation of children. Parents who emotionally abuse children systematically destroy their sense of worth and identity. Children can grow up in despair and loneliness, constantly on edge - like being trapped in a cage.'

The NSPCC interviewed almost 2,000 adults and found that of those who regularly suffered emotional abuse, 33 per cent said it went on through their childhood. Six in ten said the abuse gradually stopped only when they got older or left home.

More than half who claimed they were regularly abused said they had been habitually shouted or screamed at, while almost one in fi ve said they were often left afraid of their father or mother. A similar number said they were often called stupid, lazy or worthless. One in 20 was regularly told: 'I wish you were dead.'

Despite such prevalence, there is concern that abuse often goes ignored - the charity found those working with children intervened to stop it only in one per cent of cases.

As part of its Be The Full Stop campaign against child abuse, the NSPCC will tomorrow call on the government to encourage greater awareness of the problem.

'Emotional abuse' affects one in three, O, 17.9.2006, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1874488,00.html

Bob Moody, left, a volunteer companion for Rocky Lepore,

fixes Lepore's collar before they go for a walk in Chicago.

M. Spencer Green, AP

Isolated Americans trying to connect

Posted 8/5/2006 2:00 PM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-08-05-lonely-americans_x.htm

Isolated Americans trying to connect

Posted 8/5/2006
2:00 PM ET
AP
USA Today

NEW YORK (AP) — In bleak nursing homes and vibrant college dorms, in crowded cities and spread-out suburbs, Americans confront an ailment with no single cause or cure.

Some call it social isolation or disconnectedness. Often, it's just plain loneliness.

An age-old ailment, to be sure, and yet by various measures — census figures on one-person households, a new study documenting Americans' shrinking circle of intimate friends — it is worsening.

It seems ironic, even to those who are affected. The nation has never been more populous, soon to reach the 300 million mark. And it has never been more connected — by phone, e-mail, instant message, text message, and on and on.

Yet so many are alone in the crowd.

"People are increasingly busy," said Margaret Gibbs, a psychologist at Fairleigh Dickinson University. "We've become a society where we expect things instantly, and don't spend the time it takes to have real intimacy with another person."

Some Americans are making a new commitment, getting reconnected in groups or one-on-one and combatting a phenomenon that can take a heavy toll on communities and individuals.

In its most pronounced forms, loneliness is considered a serious, even life-threatening condition, heightening the risks of heart disease and depression. A sense of isolation can strike at almost any age, in any demographic sector — parents struggling to adjust to empty-nest status, divorcees unable to rebuild a social life, even seemingly self-confident college students.

John Powell, a psychologist at the University of Illinois counseling center, says it's common for incoming freshmen to stay in their rooms, chatting by computer with high school friends rather than venturing out to get-acquainted activities on campus.

"The frequency of contact and volume of contact does not necessarily translate into the quality of contact," Powell said.

The trend toward isolation surfaced in the last U.S. census figures, which show that one-fourth of the nation's households — 27.2 million of them — consisted of just one person, compared to 10% in 1950.

In June, an authoritative study in the American Sociological Review found that the average American had only two close friends in whom they would confide on important matters, down from an average of three in 1985. The number of people who said they had no such confidant soared from 10% in 1985 to nearly 25% in 2004; an additional 19% said they had only one confidant — often their spouse.

"That may be the most worrisome thing," said Lynn Smith-Lovin, a Duke University sociologist who co-authored the study. "If you lose that one person, because the relationship declines or the person dies, you have no one to support you. If we're all becoming more dependent on our spouse or partner for that kind of complete knowing of each other, we're all vulnerable to losing that."

The study suggested an array of possible causes — including an increase in working/commuting hours and expanding use of the Internet to stay in touch with other people, lessening the need for face-to-face contacts.

"We e-mail each other rather than calling or meeting, so there can be a sense of connection but also a loss of actual time spent with friends and families," Gibbs said.

Some Americans shrug off the trend, content with their ever-evolving social circles. Others, though, are unsettled at what they see and feel, and search for remedies.

MID-LIFE SINGLES

Karina Penaranda was at Mass in 2002 when it dawned on her that her peers at her Roman Catholic church in Phoenix — single adults 35 to 60 — had no fixed place in the diocese's social orbit.

"There were groups for elderly people, marriage encounters for couples — and youth groups are everywhere," said Penaranda, who is in her 40s. "Once single people reach this age they don't have a community. They don't really have a place to go where they can share their hopes and dreams."

With a few other parishioners, Penaranda founded a group called Catholic Singles Ministry. It now draws scores of people from across the Phoenix area and beyond to twice-yearly retreats and to events ranging from prayer breakfasts to bowling nights to food-bank volunteer work.

"We have people who've been divorced, been widowed, never been married," she said. "At our retreats we talk about loneliness, relationships. ... You know that you're not alone in going through this journey."

Penaranda, a project manager for a bank, has never been married. She savors socializing, but it takes conscious effort.

"The busyness in people's lives is one of things that prevents it," she said. "That happens to me — I get immersed in work, and have to step back and say, 'Time out.'"

One of Penaranda's colleagues in the ministry, Monica Smith, said community service is a key element.

"We're reaching out to others in our singleness, our aloneness," she said. "It gives us, without family, without children, a greater sense of belonging."

Singles ministries have proliferated nationwide, notably at megachurches. At Parkcrest Christian Church in Long Beach, Calif., about 150 of the 2,500-member congregation participate in a group for singles aged 35 to 65.

"They're looking to connect with other people in a society that's geared to married people, to people with families," said the Rev. Jim Vlahos, Parkcrest's singles minister.

Many of the group's members are divorced, said Vlahos, himself a never-married 41-year-old.

"Once someone gets divorced, they tend to lose their married friends," he observed. "It's not a stigma thing, it's an awkward thing — 'Oh, you're single now, and we do married things.'"

EMPTY NESTERS

Having a spouse and children doesn't insulate adults from bouts of loneliness; one particularly vulnerable subset are parents confronting the empty-nest syndrome as their children reach young adulthood and leave home.

"Some take it really really hard," said Jeanine Herrin of Inglis, Fla., who launched an Internet chat room called Empty Nest Moms. "That's all they did — they lived and breathed kids, and all of the sudden the kids are gone."

She noted that many such parents had a network of adults they knew through their children's activities — a network that can shrink or vanish when the children leave.

"Some moms are almost basket cases when they come into our group," Herrin said. "But with most of them, you can feel that sense of relief, that they're not really going crazy, that there are so many others feeling the same way."

Some husbands share the emotional rollercoaster, while others "just don't understand at all," Herrin said. "Some are thrilled to death the kids are gone."

Many of the hundreds of women who have posted messages on the website candidly acknowledge their bouts of crying and self-pity. One mother described in detail her devastation over the departure of her youngest child, and then the elation of filling the emptiness by becoming a foster parent.

Ellen Ritter, who has a doctorate in psychology, works as a "family transitions coach" in Hudson, Ohio, and often counsels empty-nest mothers. "It's really hard to make new friends," she said, "and that's why so many women are reaching out to the Internet."

COLLEGE STUDENTS

If some empty-nest parents feel a void in their lives, so do some of their absent children

"A lot of students go through periods of loneliness," said Zanny Altschuler, 20, of Menlo Park, Calif., who is completing her freshman year this summer at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H.

"The social life on campus can be crazy," she said. "Rather than sticking with close friendships that can be hard to maintain, people forge a broader circle of acquaintances."

Altschuler cited the phenomenon of Facebook.com, the social-networking website on which students can enumerate their "friends."

"You go on some profiles and they say they have 1,000 friends, and they probably don't even know half of them," she said.

John Powell, from his vantage point at the Illinois counseling center, says students increasingly have difficulty "making really satisfying connections" even though the university offers many activities to bring students together.

"All the students I work with have incredibly many pseudo-intimate relationships online — but without the kind of risk and vulnerability that goes with sitting across a cafe booth from another person," Powell said.

Sean Seepersad, who now teaches at California State University, Fresno, earned his doctorate at Illinois last year by designing an intervention program for lonely students.

Seepersad said some of the students were predictably shy and withdrawn, others on the surface seemed extroverted and socially skilled. He encouraged them to share their feelings, analyze why they felt lonely and work on their social skills.

"Lonely people may not be aware of things they're doing that perpetuate the problem," he said. "It's something that can be helped."

OLD AND ALONE

She laughs gently at her blunt self-analysis, but Helen Granath doesn't mince words.

"It's a very lonely existence — most of the time the loneliness can be excruciating and painful," says the 84-year-old widow from San Francisco. "I have very few friends. They're either ill or they've passed away or moved somewhere else."

Her husband died 30 years ago; she says her son "is very busy in the computer business. I don't see him very often."

No data set enumerates how many elderly Americans feel such pangs of loneliness, but undoubtedly there are millions who could empathize with Granath. She ventures out of her apartment for errands and movies, but is slowed by leukemia and arthritis and — after the latest in a series of hip replacements — sought help and companionship from a volunteer group called Little Brothers-Friends of the Elderly.

For the past several years, the group has sent volunteers to visit her — bringing flowers on holidays and gifts on her birthday.

Jim Doyle, 48, who does promotional work in San Francisco for a movie theater chain, started volunteering for Little Brothers this year, and has become the sole loyal friend of a 67-year-old developmentally disabled man named Frank.

"He lives by himself, and does custodial work, but other than that he didn't have a whole lot to do," said Doyle. "He'd stay home and watch a lot of TV. Now we got out to the movies, for walks — he calls me all the time. He appreciates it, and it's been great for me."

Bob Moody, a retired Chicago businessman, has been volunteering for Little Brothers since 1981 — he had been visiting his cancer-stricken mother in a nursing home and noticed that many patients didn't have visitors.

Since then, he's devoted each Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter to visits with isolated seniors, as well as making visits periodically throughout the year.

"Let's face it," Moody said. "Old people can be grouchy sometimes. With some, there's a little mistrust early on because they don't really know you. But as time goes on, they gradually open up."

One refrain he hears: "My kids don't live that far away, but they don't come to visit me."

His current Little Brothers friend is Rocky Lepore, an 85-year-old blind man who savors the visits. "He always wants to give me something," Moody said, "a box of candy, some little mints."

NEIGHBORS

If anyone was pleased by the June report on shrinking circles of close friends, it was Harvard professor Robert Putnam, who viewed it as vindication of his best-selling book "Bowling Alone."

Some academics had challenged his thesis in 2000 that civic engagement and neighborliness were on the decline, but many Americans took the message to heart.

Close to Putnam's home base at Harvard, for example, David Crowley has founded an organization called Social Capital Inc. that is striving to connect neighbors and build civic spirit in the Boston-area communities of Woburn, Dorchester and Lynn.

"People are less connected to their neighbors today, and they miss that," Crowley said.

His projects seek to use the Internet as a connecting tool.

Last winter, for example, SCI members in Woburn received an e-mail notice that one elderly, low-income resident was worried how he would get his driveway cleared of snow. Within a day, Crowley said, a neighbor volunteered to use his snowblower to the keep the driveway clear all winter.

Putnam, in an interview, said vibrant social networks have benefits for individuals in terms of health and happiness, and for communities as well.

"The crime rates are lower, the schools work better, the economy works better," he said.

The challenges to connectedness are many. Strolls through the neighborhood and visits on front porches have been replaced in many cases by retreats indoors to be entertained by TVs, computers and video games.

Spouses are more likely to be both working and less likely to have one or two other couples with whom they forge close, long-lasting ties. Instead, they may have a broader circle of couples they know only casually through their children's schools or sports leagues.

"We've brought more women into the workplace, but we have not addressed the consequences for families and communities," Putnam said. "We need to invent new ways of connecting."

Isolated Americans trying to connect, UT, 5.8.2006,
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-08-05-lonely-americans_x.htm

men / women

feelings > frustration, anger, hate

feeling > +

oh yes

homosexuality / gay rights

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