Letters to the Editor
J.C. Miller
Published Letters: 344 Editor's Choice: 35
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not what it seems
[Read the article: Guilty of murder or seeming unmatronly?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The McCanns may in fact be completely free of agency and involvement in whatever harm has come to Madeleine McCann. If so, they would be well advised by someone close to them to stop sending signals strongly suggestive of involvement and culpability.
Reaction formation is a psychological/behavioral defense mechanism in which attempt is made to disguise a perceived shameful or intolerable aspect of self by way of pointed behaviors falsely portraying the opposite status or character (e.g. the closeted gay male behaving as heterosexual “player” or as family man). In our culture this method of covering culpability or other disowned traits with a sheen of acceptability is most commonly expressed by the ritual of donning special dress and engaging in ritualized behaviors in a special structure for this purpose (a “church”), behaviors the McCanns have conspicuously engaged in since the disappearance of Madeleine.
Another behavior that is used to afford social protection is conspicuous alliance with a figure who has the power to confer, by association, special protections and an air of protected status, as ostensibly has been afforded the McCanns by their conspicuous association with the very powerful crime boss and gang operating the worldwide protection racket out of Italy.
No adult with cognitive functions intact would suggest that these behaviors are likely to further efforts to locate a missing girl. Individuals who are not in need of protection from scrutiny and potential sanctions tend not to conspicuously engage in defensive behaviors.
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Dunlap deconstructs “race” from a regressive naiveté
[Read the article: Red State Update: Dick Cheney's family tree]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The beauty of that.
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Political Discourse
[Read the article: The Internet is making us stupid]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]in our culture is doxa, Matrix. It is what provides us with Hillary vs. Obama and our delusion of that being a choice. It is what constructs petty thugs in black robes as “Chief Justices”. It is the lie that constructs Republicanism and conservatism somehow as ideologies or forces in social discourse, to attempt to mask their essential pathology. Subsuming under “political discourse” the range of antisocial traits we euphemistically construct as a “political ideology” termed “conservatism” is no more than the need of patriarchy to maintain the lie that entitlement and control require and to protect against insight and growth. As in a sick, homeostatic family, we must be civil – remaining comfortably ill depends on it.
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Art versus artifice
[Read the article: Is electing a female president a trap?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]What a brave person Tracy is to subject oneself to the predictable objectification in these letters. Why video? So that she could demonstrate the ability of an attractive person to detach from and transcend viewers’ needs to sexualize her and to discount her content, which she effectively communicates by naturally presenting as self-assured, smart, and immune to those needs – as an anti-object.
Her performance is a model in its organic integration of form and content – that gender expectations and sexual distortions will be among the last and most difficult of social dysfunctions to overcome. As her closing example illustrates, individuals are perfectly capable of transcending biological predisposition and anatomically assigned gender expectations, for better or worse. Success in System requires the antisocial traits engendered primarily in maleness, regardless of the genitalia of the package.
Bravo.
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It’s an inside job
[Read the article: Dianne Feinstein -- Bush's key ally in the Senate -- to support telecom amnesty]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The problem isn’t Dianne Feinstein, any more than the problem is George Bush.
The problem – dear sincere, courageous and frustrated readers and writers – the problem is this: when many use or behold symbols such as “country”, “president”, “leader”, “election” “America”, “Constitution” etc., and when they utter the noises associated with those symbols, internal states are elicited that they are not aware of and that they do not access or examine. The problem is that those internal states include introjected (swallowed whole) attributions, cognitions and feelings that carry positive valuations of those symbols and, more importantly, that resonate with and are driven by archetypes of safety, protection, need, dependence, conformity, and especially parent and authority.
That is a treatable disorder of childhood, and that is the problem.
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Love and only love
[Read the article: I Like to Watch]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Kings may rudely shout “shut up” in this gray winter of our falling apart. Do they hear a woman calling to them, to make the best of being close to another’s crotch? Would Heather’s world, her hippie dream, not be a friendlier, happier, warmer place?
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Civility
[Read the article: Mind your manners online]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]is a great comforting kindness, and not near so kind as sharing truth and bearing the gift of its necessary discomfort.
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The Republican will to power remains ferocious. It will take a dauntless Democratic leader to win back the White House and restore dignity to the Constitution.
[Read the article: Goodbye, Mr. Bush]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Indeed, indeed.
And further, the Vulcan will to power remains ferocious. It will take a dauntless Tryborg elder to win back the Purple Temple and restore dignity to the Articles.
Stay tuned. Don’t go away.
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I love the image
[Read the article: American empire, going, going ...]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]and its evoked future in which our bodies are of the nutrients from the garden from the earth of the unrecognizable detritus of long gone monuments to power and authority and bondage.
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It’s an inside job
[Read the article: Is race dying? ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I didn’t get that Mr. Kamiya wants to deny or minimize structural or behavioral racism at all, but instead alludes to what a number of readers have, that the symbolic, cognitive representation (“race”) that contributes to maintaining and driving functional racism is, like “intelligence”, an arbitrary social construct whose import derives from its utility in manipulation, demagoguery, the maintenance of power and resource differentials, and most importantly the provision of psychological security.
Apart from that functional utility, these symbols and their utterances are meaning-free, illusory, and incongruent with reality as directly experienced.
What is real is the fear and insecurity associated with perceptions of in-group/out-group status and archetypal threat to survival and reproductive success - that is, tribalism. It’s real because you feel it. Part of what keeps us trapped by these fears and their behavioral expressions as racism is the illusory social reality we maintain by using made-up, maladaptive symbols like “race”, “black”, “Caucasian”, etc. Eliminating such symbols would not be the cause of change, but an expression of internal changes that would transcend our history of fear-based, essentialist, dichotomous representations being provided to children as introjects. Using the symbols is an abdication of our freedom and responsibility to construct a reality that works. Fear may be innate, but racism is not.