All of us who can do so comfortably, without risking our mental or emotional health or that of a possible baby, must pledge to drink a little champagne every week. We are drinking more in the pandemic anyway, n’est-ce pas? The bubbles will cheer us up far faster than those grim vodka tonics.
Theodore Porter’s contribution to this discussion, Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity, takes a much broader perspective on the eugenics-genetics divide. Instead of seeing eugenics as either a founding contaminant in genetics, or as a temporary aberration in psychiatric science, Porter looks at the much longer history of data collection within the primary sites for psychiatry over several centuries: asylums or mental hospitals.
Simply imagining pleasant aspects of the past can make us feel like they are present again.
The point of the Rule is the power of bad things to outweigh good things. Because, evolution. The old exigencies of survival. And perhaps a malign or absentee designer of the human psyche.
Why eleven? Because I have never forgotten the findings of Harvard University education prof Carol Gilligan. After interviewing girls of various ages, she concluded that at eleven, many girls have a “moment of resistance”: a sense of purpose and an almost perfect confidence in what they see and know.
The main takeaway here should properly not center on aspects that might be extended by adjacent work, but rather on the fact that, with Bring the War Home, we have been graced with a new go-to account of the contemporary white power movement.
It is all too easy to feel crazy and old when you are alone—and you do stop caring what other people think, because there are so few opportunities to guess.
Human beings (and dogs) behave better when they are calm, and they are calm when they know there is enough. The cool truth beneath all the seething anger is that wealth is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Rather than fix that, Americans have decided to scrap amongst themselves for what is left. The enemy is not the few who own the pie but the rivals who want a piece.
Plumped up with blood and rot and supremely content, mosquitoes will mate, often in midair.