6/12/23

 Monday, June 12, 2023

In bed by 9, awake and up at 4:54. 44℉, almost cold enough for a fire in the fireplace, high of 65℉, wind NW at 9 mph, 5 to 11 mph today, gusts up to 18 mph.  Sunrise at 5:11, sunset at 8:32, 14+20.

Katherine is leaving after a wonderful 4-day visit.

Ode I. 11

BY HORACE

TRANSLATED BY BURTON RAFFEL

Leucon, no one’s allowed to know his fate,

Not you, not me: don’t ask, don’t hunt for answers

In tea leaves or palms. Be patient with whatever comes.

This could be our last winter, it could be many

More, pounding the Tuscan Sea on these rocks:

Do what you must, be wise, cut your vines

And forget about hope. Time goes running, even

As we talk. Take the present, the future’s no one’s affair

Weltanschauung, Cult, and Trump.   "We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were early implanted in his imagination; no matter how utterly his reason may reject them, he will still feel as the famous woman did about ghosts, Je n'y crois pas, mais je les crains,—"I don't believe in them, but I am afraid of them, nevertheless".  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

How is it that so very many of the Russian people believe Vladimir Putin's spin on the"special military operation" against Ukraine?  How is it that so very many Americans believe that (1) the 2020 presidential election was stolen by Democrats, and (2) Donald Trump is guilty of nothing in his attempts to subvert the election that ousted him or in looting classified and other documents from the White House?  For that matter, how is it that most Americans so readily believed that we were 'protecting our freedoms' and 'protecting Democracy' when we invaded Vietnam and Iraq?  How is it that so few Americans see the necessity for militarism and economic imperialism to sustain a vigorous American capitalism's need for raw materials and markets?

Two feature pieces in this morning's WaPo caught my eye.  The first is a review of two recent books by Jade McGlynn: "What we’ve misunderstood about Russian motivations for the war in Ukraine."  The books reviewed are RUSSIA'S WAR and MEMORY MAKERS.   The second feature by Rachel Zimmerman is "How does trauma spill from one generation to the next?  Intergenerational trauma has become a hot topic as people seek to explain the poor state of mental health among younger generations."  McGlynn's books, especially the memory book address the widespread sense of grievance, lost stature and dignity, and victimization by 'the West' in Russia.  The Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union, once great, mighty, and hegemonic over its European neighbors have been brought low, unfairly diminished by 'the West.'  It reminds me of attitudes I've heard expressed by Serbs, by "Lost Cause" American Southerners, and by Trump, his MAGA Republicans, and White Nationalists generally.  That sense of frustrated entitlement, vulnerability to hostile neighbors, and of being violated and threatened by them, subordinated to and victimized by them is also widely seen among Israelis Jews and Palestinian Arabs. 

The article on intergenerational trauma interested me in part because of the research I did on 2nd generation PTSD while working on my memoir, but also because of its relevance to the idea of collective or social memory, weltanschauung, mass delusion, and confirmation biases.  While reliving childhood experiences growing up with my father's combat-based PTSD and my mother's sexual assault-based PTSD, I wondered about the effect of all that trauma on my sister and me.  In my 80s, I still wonder.  "It’s not the traumatic experience that is passed on, it’s the anxiety and world view of the survivors, said Ed Tronick, a developmental and clinical psychologist at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School in Worcester. Many Holocaust survivors developed a view that the world is a dangerous place where terrible things can happen anytime. Their children intuitively sensed this fear. “Children are like anxiety detectors,” Tronick said, and they pick up and adapt to these cues.  Even the great-great-grandchildren of enslaved people can experience the anxiety their parents feel about the danger of sending them out into the community. In response to parents’ behavior, a child’s “body has already begun to experience the world as dangerous, even though he doesn’t understand the dangers at that young an age,” Tronick said."

"“Collective” intergenerational trauma and “racial trauma” refer to the psychological distress passed through generations as a result of historic events, including colonization, slavery and other forms of oppression.  This type of trauma reaches far beyond individuals and families and is a shared experience among a particular group, such as descendants of the 120,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals who were detained in incarceration camps during World War II.  Such trauma can manifest in many ways, from heightened anxiety, depression, and insomnia to other mental and emotional health problems."

I'm not at all sure how all these thoughts fit together in terms of the Russians' belief in the justness of the assault on Ukraine or in terms of the utterly different perceptions of reality by the MAGA Republicans and the rest of us.  I'll try to think about this some more today.   I guess what I am thinking is that nations or groups of related people suffer injuries, disappointments, setbacks, or traumas in some of the same ways that individuals do.  Groups can come to feel injured, disrespected, cheated out of some perceived benefit that the group was entitled to, etc., and the injury can be traumatic and lead to some sort of psychic or emotional stress in the form of a deep-seated grievance.  Many Russians believe that Ukraine 'belongs' to Russia and has no right to an independent, separate existence.  White nationalists believe that the U.S. is a White, [Protestant] Christian nation being taken over by non-White, non-Christians fixed upon subordinating Whites to an unAmerican culture.  Many, perhaps most, Israeli Jews believe that Israel belongs to them despite the long history of Palestinian Arab Muslims who lived there.  Palestinians believe the land belongs to them precisely because of their people's long history of living there.  The Serbs and Kosovo, the French and the Germans and Alsace-Lorraine,   I'm thinking perhaps foolishly that where we find a strong sense of Nationalism especially when coupled with Revanchism we will find some sort of collective PTSD, a sense of frustrated entitlement and grievance and that the same is true of race and class-based nationalism as of state-based nationalism.   The MAGA people, like their cult leader DJT, believe they have been cheated out of the power and respect, the hegemony that they are entitled to.  Like Howard Beale in "Network," they're mad as hell and aren't going to take it anymore.  The belief is deep-seated and they see the world with the help of confirmation biases through grievance lenses.