Monday, May 7, 2012

Politically calculating

I've been swamped with work lately and in boredom found this article on the new tell-all book about Barack Obama.  The book includes descriptions about Obama from several people that knew him in his younger days, including contemporaneous accounts about him from his ex-girlfriends letters and diaries.


"The success of 'Dreams' has given Obama nearly complete control of his own life narrative, an appealing tale that has been the foundation of his political success. But Maraniss's biography threatens that narrative by questioning it: Was Obama's journey entirely spiritual and intellectual? Or was it also grounded in the lower realms of ambition and calculation?" Dylan Byers and Glenn Thrush write.

Obama granted Maraniss a 90-minute interview, some surmise in an effort to control his image. Cooke's diary entries, however, reveal that Obama's struggle over what to reveal has been ongoing -- since his youth.

"Friday, March 9, 1984 It's not a question of my wanting to probe ancient pools of emotional trauma ... but more a sense of you [Barack] biding your time and drawing others' cards out of their hands for careful inspection -- without giving too much of your own away -- played with a good poker face," she wrote.  "And as you say, it's not a question of intent on your part -- or deliberate withholding -- you feel accessible, and you are, in disarming ways. But I feel that you carefully filter everything in your mind and heart -- legitimate, admirable, really -- a strength, a necessity in terms of some kind of integrity. But there's something also there of smoothed veneer, of guardedness ... but I'm still left with this feeling of ... a bit of a wall -- the veil."


Doesn't this sound like a sociopath?  I have read a lot of people calling Obama a sociopath before but have never really put much stock in it until now.  Let's just say I wouldn't reject the thought of him being a sociopath, and I mean that in the nicest way.


Sunday, May 6, 2012

Sociopaths in literature: Yeats' "A Man Young and Old"

I. First Love

THOUGH nurtured like the sailing moon
In beauty's murderous brood,
She walked awhile and blushed awhile
And on my pathway stood
Until I thought her body bore
A heart of flesh and blood.

But since I laid a hand thereon
And found a heart of stone
I have attempted many things
And not a thing is done,
For every hand is lunatic
That travels on the moon.

She smiled and that transfigured me
And left me but a lout,
Maundering here, and maundering there,
Emptier of thought
Than the heavenly circuit of its stars
When the moon sails out.

II. Human Dignity
Like the moon her kindness is,
If kindness I may call
What has no comprehension in't,
But is the same for all
As though my sorrow were a scene
Upon a painted wall.

So like a bit of stone I lie
Under a broken tree.
I could recover if I shrieked
My heart's agony
To passing bird, but I am dumb
From human dignity.

Saturday, May 5, 2012

It never entered my mind

I'm mildly to medium-ly obsessed with the song "It never entered my mind."



To me there is only one thing that really can haunt me, and this sensation, whatever it is, is so perfectly incapsulated by this song.  It is partly a worry that I am missing out on something, but it's worse than that.  It's more the worry that I will regret the decisions I have made because I have missed out on something.

One of my favorite movies is the Woody Allen comedy Sweet and Lowdown.  The protagonist is a completely pompous jazz guitarist from the early half of the last century: a delusional, raging narcissist, beautifully talented, but without any real emotion in his playing.   He meets and (sort of) falls in love with a mute girl named Hattie, played incomparably by Samantha Morton.



She puts up with him like no one else will and he finds that even the simplest pleasures of life are made more pleasurable with her beside him.  Still, he feels like he deserves better (or just more) so breaks up with her about halfway through the movie:



He continues his hijinks through the second half of the movie and even marries an icy femme fatale played by Uma Thurman.  Near the end of the movie he runs into Hattie again.  She is married now and even has children.  He is disappointed, but tries to play it off.  Later that night he tries to console himself by doing some of his favorite activities: shooting rats by the train station and playing the guitar.  Frustrated and emotionally overcome he grabs the guitar by the neck and slams it into a nearby tree, shattering it.  He is a man whose only goal was his own happiness, who has consistently chosen without compunction whatever he thought would make him most happy, and yet he is not happy.  As he clubs the tree with the guitar over and over again he screams, "I made a mistake!  I made a mistake!"

This scene haunts me.  This man thought he was choosing happiness, and chose as wisely as he could, but still ended up crippled by regret.  But it's not the fact that he happens to end up alone that's disturbing.  I acknowledge that much of life is chance and all sorts of bad things might happen to me during life.  I'm fine with that.  The thing that haunts me more than anything else is the thought that I could unwittingly be the author of my own unhappiness -- unhappiness so surprising that it never entered my mind that things could play out that way.  It is the ultimate in powerlessness -- not just the thought that nothing I do really matters, but that things I do could matter and actually make things worse.

Of the negative emotions I feel, regret is the saddest and strongest.

It never entered my mind:
I don't care if there's powder on my nose
I don't care if my hairdo is in place
I've lost the very meaning of repose
I never put a mudpack on my face
Oh, who'd have thought that I'd walk in a daze
Now I never go to shows at night but just to matinees
Now I see the show and home I go

Once I laughed when I heard you saying
That I'd be playing solitaire
Uneasy in my easy chair
It never entered my mind
Once you told me I was mistaken
That I'd awaken with the sun
And order orange juice for one
It never entered my mind

You have what I lack myself
And now I even have to scratch my back myself

Once you warned me that if you scorned me
I'd sing the maiden's prayer again
And wish that you were there again
To get into my hair again
It never entered my mind

Friday, May 4, 2012

Bad guy

I walked in on my flat getting burglarized today.  I live in the worst neighborhood.  I was burglarized the first week I was here, luckily before my stuff had even arrived from the movers.  I thought about moving again but it was such a pain.  And I don't really have anything to steal.  I'm very anti-consumerist, I hate owning things, so anything valuable tends to be gifts from other people that I don't care much about.

One night a few months ago there was a banging on my door just after midnight.  I had just gone to bed and wasn't yet asleep, reading from my phone.  I just let them keep banging, figured it was a case of mistaken identity and eventually they would give up.  People had mistaken my flat before.  In fact, exactly a week before someone had left a love note after some loud middle of the night banging: "Don't think, act.  Meet me at the XXXX.  Hearts and kisses!"  I assumed it was a case of mistaken identity.  This time the banging wouldn't stop, though.  Was this the love note writer's spouse, angry to discover an infidelity and both of them still unaware mine was the wrong flat?  After more than a minute of  pounding, I finally got up and walked over to my door to peep outside, but they were gone.  A few minutes later there was pounding on my back door.  Someone had managed to climb up the fire escape.  They tried the door knob several times, then they seemed to be trying to shake the small door from its hinges.  I turned on a light.  They must have seen I was not who they were hoping for and ran off.

This time I walked in on two guys.  At first I didn't realize what was happening.  They of course did and scurried off out the back window where they had come in.  I ran after them just a little bit, but then figured that most of my stuff seemed to be piled up in the center of the room, so what was the point.  The police came, at my neighbor's insistence.  I had no idea how to act.  Scared?  Concerned?  I ended up just being friendly, but it came off as being flirty.  Maybe that's ok.  It's these unusual circumstances that are certain to trip me up in terms of acting normal, I realized for the hundredth time.

The afternoon blown on conversations with police and neighbors, I finally got ready to go take a swim but couldn't find my waterproof ipod.  Those bastards.  The thing that really bothered me is that they wouldn't even recognize that it is waterproof, at 5 times the normal cost.  To some pawnbroker, it would just be an outdated ipod.  So wasteful.  Goodbye dear ipod, we had such lovely moments together.

Because I couldn't listen to music, instead I thought about these burglars of mine and wondering, do they think they are bad guys?  See, I'm so much more interested in the stories we tell ourselves rather than our actual behavior.  And I had just spent hours listening to my neighbors and the police say what pieces of human trash the burglars were.  It was sort of a dick move to take my external harddrive, which couldn't be worth that much to anyone but me, who had a million personal files stored on it.  They were about to take my mobile charger.  What?  How much could they get for that, versus how annoying would it have been for me to go right then to a shop to replace it because I had just lost my spare.  And it's obviously dangerous work.  What if I had a weapon?  Or they did leave their gloves, which apparently can keep fingerprints themselves.  And I yelled disparaging things at them as they ran away like scaredy cats.  That must not feel good to the old ego, right?  I wondered quite honestly, how do they justify the dickishness and the danger for a pile of useless crap?  Do they paint themselves as some sort of dramatized villains?  Or good guys that have fallen on hard times?  Or are they sort of like me and don't really "feel" anything at all about it.  That would make sense.  I could see that.  And that was weird to think about, in the same way it's weird to see two identical twins, one of them fat and rundown and the other one smoking hot.

Thursday, May 3, 2012

Neurodiversity = asset

A lot has been written about neurodiversity and how unfair it is to treat poorly people who fall out of the mental norms.  Despite the push of the neurodiversity movement, things are still labeled with pejorative terms like "disorder" and "syndrome" and the focus has been on "treatment" and integration as if being neurodiverse is equivalent to being handicapped.  In Wall Street Journal article titled "The Upside of Autism," Jonah Lehrer makes a contrary case:

Because of these obvious shortcomings—humans are supposed to be social animals, after all—most people regard autism as a disease, a straightforward example of an impaired mind. But there's compelling evidence that autism is not merely a list of deficits. Rather, it represents an alternate way of making sense of the world, a cognitive difference that, in many instances, comes with unexpected benefits.

That's the lesson, at least, of a new study from the lab of Nilli Lavie at University College London. A few dozen adults, both with and without autism, were given a difficult perceptual task, in which they had to keep track of letters quickly flashed on a computer screen. At the same time, they also had to watch out for a small gray shape that occasionally appeared on the edge of the monitor.

When only a few letters appeared on the screen, both autistic and normal subjects could handle the task. However, when the number of letters was increased, subjects without autism—so-called neurotypicals—could no longer keep up. They were overwhelmed by the surplus of information.

Those adults with autism didn't have this problem. Even when the task became maddeningly difficult, their performance never flagged.

What explains this result? According to the scientists, autism confers a perceptual edge, allowing people with the disorder to process more information in a short amount of time. While scientists have long assumed that autistics are more vulnerable to distraction—an errant sound or conversation can steal their attention—that's not the case. As Prof. Lavie notes, "Our research suggests autism does not involve a distractibility deficit but rather an information-processing advantage."

These perceptual perks have real-world benefits. The scientists argue, for instance, that the ability to process vast amounts of data helps to explain the prevalence of savant-like talents among autistic subjects. Some savants perform difficult mathematical calculations in their head, others draw exquisitely detailed pictures at a young age. These skills have long remained a mystery, but they appear to be rooted in a distinct cognitive style shared by all autistics. Because they can process details that elude the rest of us, they can perform tasks that seem impossible, at least for the normal mind.
***
The larger lesson is that, according to the latest research, these "deficits" are actually trade-offs. What seems, at first glance, like a straightforward liability turns out to be a complex mixture of blessings and burdens.

Of course you would never see an article in the Wall Street Journal titled "The Upside of Sociopathy" and for that it's a little hard for me to take the neurodiversity movement seriously.  But I like this idea of one sense being gone so your other senses fill the gap.  It reminds me of this classic tale of blindness and talent...  you're welcome!


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