Getting Over It

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/11/08/041108fa_fact1?currentPage=all

by byrneseyeview • 17 years ago

31 9 17 years ago

christofd• 17 years ago

Malcolm on being old school. Damn, we need more people with names like 'Betsy' and 'Hank'.

There is a certain attraction to 40's/50's imagery - this polite simplicity masking darkness beneath... alcohol, war stories, adultery, mental issues:

“I want you to be able to talk to me about the war. It might help us to understand each other. Did you really kill seventeen men?” “Yes.” “Do you want to talk about it now?” “No. It’s not that I want to and can’t—it’s just that I’d rather think about the future. About getting a new car and driving up to Vermont with you tomorrow.” “That will be fun. It’s not an insane world. At least, our part of it doesn’t have to be.”

_debug_• 17 years ago

I find these and some other similar high-brow essays repulsive.

Basically, they subtly want to encourage the status quo : the poorer classes of society join the army and get themselves killed while doing horrible things to other people because our Leader said they have WMDs, while the middle classes with a brain go to Uni, and some of them get to write beautiful essays about how one should forget the war. And I'm not even mentioning the subtle connotations in there to forget other negative associations that war has, such as torture and the robbery of the other nation's resources. The beauty of the thing is that the subtle messages are couched in an arguable parable of a soldier who chooses to look forward, not at the past.

What the article actually is, is propaganda.

Fuck you. I will not forget the war, the people who made us go to war unnecessarily, nor the effects it has on everyone, and definitely not the poor fuck soldier veteran who got a raw deal from educated assholes who tricked him into sacrificing his life with propaganda just like this. First they massage you with the anthem and the flag to get you to war, then they massage you with such essays to calm you down from the resulting anger.

lawfulfalafel2• 17 years ago

Did you read the article? This is not about war per-say. It is about how the brain reacts to any emotion (horrors of war is only an example).

I agree that many soldiers have been given "raw deals" in the recent wars, and that it is the duty of every american to question the logic behind all military and political moves. However, that has nothing to do with whether or not most soldiers are fully functional after the war or how psychologically scarred they are.

_cbsz• 17 years ago

s/per-say/per se/ </petpeeve>

byrneseyeview• 17 years ago

1. Gladwell is fairly liberal. He probably hates the war as much as you do.

2. Regardless of that, if the science is right, it's right. There aren't pro-war and anti-war facts; there are just facts.

lawfulfalafel2• 17 years ago

This article hints at something I find quite provocative; the idea that the culture of the 1950's somehow was more open to the truth then the present is an amazing thesis. I entirely agree with the author (malcolm gladwell) in that the simple nature of the novel would definitely be a source of criticism if it were published today. The idea that presenting the simple truth would be ignored by most people (including myself) today is just baffling. I wonder if this is related to the expectations we have set by todays entertainment industry. I would love to find out what is driving this change, I can only hope mr. gladwell publishes a follow-up piece.

oz• 17 years ago

"It is a shift in perception so profound that the United States Congress could be presented with evidence of the unexpected strength and resilience of the human spirit and reject it without a single dissenting vote."

Yes, I found it disturbing. And I'm with you in wondering if this is simply due to expectations set by the media. Most people want to be 'normal' and for most people, the media defines normality.

cunard3• 17 years ago

Class war is also war. There is more to psychology than self-medication for the troubled, SSRIs for the moderately dysfunctional, and anti-psychotics for the very troubled. Isn't there? I couldn't help but notice that the little trick memory plays on our conscious minds of forgetting about trauma, kind of scabbing and healing is very like what happens on this site: We meet interesting people and get to sample their thoughts and then we immediately forget what we didn't know five minutes ago, or that we didn't know it.It seems to me that war-mongering takes advantage of these blind spots by hammering away at our attention It always seems to start with something new. Did you know they sank a patrol boat in the golf of Tonkin? Did you know...whatever, and builds from there. I have to thank MG for reminding us that we can actually get up, dust ourselves off and walk away. A lesson that doesn't require action or revenge, just awareness.

frossie• 17 years ago

I am confused by the little science that was quoted in the article. For example, it reports that college students are studied that are survivors of child abuse, and it is found that the effects they suffer as a result are small. There are two problems with that:

First, these are college students so there's a giant selection effect in action: they are by definition the child abuse survivors that were functional enough to have gotten to college.

Secondly, a lot of the problems with problematic childhoods don't express themselves until the children become parents; in other words, I don't care how well enough these kids did at college if they went on to abuse their own children. (Not that they all would; but the issue is more complicated than how it is presented).

Overall, the whole point of the article is that experience is not destiny; some people can survive the most horrific abuse and come out of it; others are completely destroyed by the experiences. This is not news. The fact that as a society we may want to worry more about the latter than the former is not, IMHO, a problem.

Getting Over It

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