Wednesday, November 19, 2003

Posted here Wednesday, November 19, 2003 at 1:20:23 PM     From Lloyd DeMause, "Emotional Life of Nations": "Each time a nation feels too prosperous for its deprived childhood to tolerate, it imagines that it is sinful, and a national "pollution alert" is called, where the media suddenly notices such things as environmental pollution (acid rain), home pollution (dioxin) or blood pollution (AIDS)-all of which existed in reality before, but now suddenly became symbols in a fantasy of inner pollution (sin, guilt). What happens in these emotional "pollution alerts" is that the media stops overlooking real dangers, raises hysterical alarms about how the world has suddenly become unsafe to live in, and then avoids really changing anything-since the pollution that is frightening the nation is actually internal, not external." -- p. 17-18 Important to realize how much all our news, and our participation in it, is a relationship between the media and our unconscious, in the context of the life history of a society. A reporter's job is to write paragraphs that touch the hottest energy in each of us possible. Without necessarily making it conscious. I have often thought that, as a therapist, I competed with the media. Just what if Iraq, Bush, Social Security, even environment, are not the important stories. ********

Posted here Wednesday, November 19, 2003 at 8:58:52 AM     quoting In his memoirs, A World Transformed, written more than five years ago, George Bush, Sr. wrote the following to explain why he didn't go after Saddam Hussein at the end of the Gulf War: "Trying to eliminate Saddam ... would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible ... We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq ...there was no viable "exit strategy" we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land." ********