The newly designed Technorati site changed the image-size parameters for personal photos. Don't ask me why, because since then, everyone's head is vertically squished. It took me the longest time to figure this out, but I finally did. Seems that 64x64 pixels is the perfect size. Except at that size, my face is sorta chopped. Ah well. What're ya gonna do? What I decided to do was to make a bunch of different images so I can keep changing them -- which turns out to be pretty easy. Once you figure it out, that is. Good luck. If you look down a bit in the left column, you should see one of these babies. Now my ID can change with my mood swings...

...and speaking of ID, here's a little shout-out to badboy Eric Norlin at Ping Identity -- in fond hopes that he'll share the wealth. C'mon man, the SEC is never gonna know!

from: Ping Identity gets $7.5 million in venture capital
source: The Denver Post, 11 May 2005
via: HighBeam™ Research

Denver-based software company Ping Identity announced $7.5 million in new funding Tuesday from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, one of the biggest names in the venture capital industry. Draper is a $3 billion fund with headquarters on Silicon Valley's famed Sand Hill Road. It also funded Hotmail.

Draper managing director Raj Atluru said Ping interested him because it is a pioneer of federated identity, a new technology that allows Internet users to sign in once and then roam freely and securely to a huge variety of websites.

Other huge competitors, such as Microsoft, IBM and Computer Associates, are racing Ping to develop similar software....

Remind me to remind these guys never to use "huge" more than once in a press release. Never would be even better. But hey man, only kiddin around over here. I still get the money, right?

Last night while I was sleeping, Robin built a really cool rocketship in the backyard. She stocked it with popsicles and ham sandwiches, so it looks like we'll be summering on Mars -- in the caves beneath The Face, where we have mutual friends. NASA has agreed to let us piggyback on its ne plus ultra planetary WI-FI net, so there should be no appreciable interruption in these posts. Barring sun spot activity, that is. And the like.

S

from: Nothing To Do With You-Know-What 2000 by G. Chris Koepfer
source: Modern Machine Shop, 1 August 2000
via: HighBeam™ Research

With all the hype and hoopla about the upcoming "event" [???] in Chicago, I thought it might be nice to provide a respite... There's a ton of good information in this robust edition. However when it gets to be too much, take a break and relax with the following disconnected bits of trivia:

It takes 3,000 cows to supply the NFL with enough leather for a year's worth of footballs.

The only 15-letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable (kind of like this column).

111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321

Long ago, when a group wanted to get rid of someone in the village, they would burn down his or her house. Hence the term "to get fired."

The mask used by Michael Myers in the original Halloween was actually a Captain Kirk mask painted white.

The Eisenhower interstate road system requires that one mile in every five must be straight. These straight sections are usable as airstrips in case of war or other emergencies.

The three most valuable brand names on earth are Marlboro, Coca-Cola and Budweiser, in that order. [BG (before-Google)]

Stewardesses is the longest word that can be typed using only the left hand. [BIM (before IM)]

The airplane that Buddy Holly died in was the American Pie (thus the name of the Don McLean song).

Pearls melt in vinegar.

The sentence, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" uses all of the letters in the alphabet. It was developed by Western Union to test telex machines.

"...the myriad ways in which people relate to, interact with, and, in their interior structures, are even composed of, each other."

Constructing and Healing the Self Through Writing

In The Impossibility of Sex: Stories of the Intimate Relationship Between Therapist and Patient, author Susie Orbach presents a course of psychoanalytic psychotherapy with a woman she calls Belle. Although Orbach never uses the word, Belle is clearly a narcissist -- a label with near-universal pejorative connotations. What's brilliant about the piece, however, is how it makes clear that narcissism is not merely an annoyingly overamped assessment of one's own worth, or, as is increasingly thought these days (though this is seldom articulated in so many words) an unproblematic and ethically neutral life-style choice. What comes across is that narcissists are damaged, broken in some fundamental way, in some essential inner heartspace. And they pass this damage along to others so they don't have to feel it in themselves.

Not surprisingly -- if you've ever been there yourself -- much of the story centers on lying...

Lies told in personal relationships are unpleasant. We may excuse a white one because it saves face, but most people are uneasy with a habitual or a purposeful liar because lying is an affront. To accept it tarnishes us. It makes us a cuckold by sweeping into our nest a bad egg not of our making. Lies perpetrated in friendship or in the family are especially disapproved of and the offensive action is quickly pushed away so as not to taint the recipient. (p. 54)

There are reasons a person adopts narcissism -- and at some point it is a conscious choice to defend the damaged self in this particular way. If not "conscious" in the usual sense, let's just say it requires a significant effort to remain unconscious of the destructive impact narcissism has on others.

The lies and conceit that had structured much of her sense of self could be understood as ways in which she was putting together a life and creating a story about herself. There was much to it... but in essence it was not so much about being a liar as it was about creating stories for herself to live by. (p. 62)

This explains the appeal of "collective archetypes" and other such personality accessories available in better New Age boutiques everywhere. Thus the Campbell cover. Let's be clear on this: it's there for spot color, not as a buy recommendation. But back to Orbach. The strategy of the narcissist is to idealize, then devalue. Endgame is the summary kiss-off.

Belle dismissed how much people gave her and their commitment to her. She had a capacity to stir up in others a great desire to meet her, look after her or make things better for her. she always drew people to her -- those who had helped her after she had moved to Britain, the men who had bailed her out of difficulties, her friends who had lived through her anguish over abortions and rootlessness -- and these people gave tremendously of themselves. For all her saying how marvelous they were, she could not acknowledge their value and their meaning. In time she would betray them or feel betrayed by them. Disaster surrounded the endings of nearly all her relationships, so they we never there to rely on or go back to -- or finally to matter. (p. 65)

Ultimately, narcissism is a form of spiritual usury that depends on the belief of others, then undermines that belief by absorbing it into a delusionally inflated sense of autonomous, anti-relational self. Vampirism comes to mind, and not just by way of poetic analogy.

I wanted Belle to be able to tell me about the lie because I knew its utterance between us was significant. The lies that she proffered to keep people interested in her (so much more interesting to be mugged than to lose car keys) made those very same people less valuable to her when they believed her fabrications. Their belief in her stories turned them into gullible fools whom she privately, or at least unconsciously, mocked. (p. 72)

That is the meaning of a word strongly associated with narcissism: contempt. But it's worse than that...

She did not like to see or feel herself as empty and in need of others to fill her up or attach herself to. It panicked her and it was part of why she hustled. She needed to make herself busy lest a gap she could not cope with opened up and reveal the terrible emptiness inside her. So if someone became too important, she needed to claw back what she had invested in them and in this disengaging show herself she could go without, thus experiencing a short-term high. (p. 65-66)

Yes, that was your soul getting sucked through a crack pipe. Oh well. Best move on. Somehow, the DSM-IV doesn't convey the full feeling, doesn't quite flesh out the MO. Susie Orbach does. Here's the more prosaic version...

from: Psychotherapeutic assessment and treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorder by Shannon D. Smith source: Annals of the American Psychotherapy Association, 1 July 2002
via: HighBeam™ Research

...the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (APA, 2000) has grouped Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) together under "Cluster B" personality disorders with its sister disorders (including Borderline, Histrionic, and Antisocial Personality Disorders). Beginning in early adulthood, an individual must demonstrate at least five of the following DSM-IV diagnostic criteria in any combination to qualify for NPD: a grandiose sense of self-importance; a preoccupation with fantasies of success, power, beauty, or brilliance; a belief that he/she is special and unique; a need for excessive admiration; a sense of entitlement; interpersonally exploitative behaviors; a lack of empathy for the needs of others; envy toward others and a belief that others are envious of him/her; and finally arrogant, haughty behaviors.

I picked up the Orbach book after I found out she was deeply associated with attachment "theory" (although it was reviled for decades by the Kleinian Borg of the British Psychoanalytic Association, the best psychoanalytic minds these days no longer consider it so theoretical). Here's a clip from a piece Orbach wrote on the subject in 1998, connecting attachment with social issues that go beyond the child development concerns with which it's usually associated.

WHY IS ATTACHMENT IN THE AIR?

... When Thatcher stated that there is no such thing as society only the individual, she shocked a nation with her barbarity, her daring and her stupidity. That phrase more than any other crystallised the effort of her administration. It spoke to the corrupt values we were all supposed to ascribe to in the eighties in which money replaced relationship and the individual displaced the community. While it is easy to deride Thatcherism, we have to be able to account for her popularity... I would suggest that she very cleverly tapped into... the individual's needs for self expression. However... she then created the conditions under which individual fulfillment was an impossibility.

As the con disintegrated and even people in the mass media who had taken up Thatcher's call could not fail to recognise the devastation that was now Britain, a new value system began to be adumbrated. ...it found a new metaphor, a new way of explaining from whence came the individual and individual agency and uniqueness.

For this Attachment theory and theories of intersubjectivity were at the ready. They understand how the individual is made and held within relationship, how there can be no such thing as an individual outside of relationship, that it is relationship -- the fact that we are in relation with one another -- that makes human endeavour, human individuality as we know it possible. Anthropology shows us that everything we associate with being human is experienced in culture. Attachment, relationship, the transmission of culture is a unique human enterprise: without attachment we cannot hope to be human let alone individual.

The depth and implications that this attachment perspective poses are now beginning to get a hearing outside the clinic. This is extremely welcome. For the challenge that attachment stimulates and the roads it opens up for us are far more profound than the rhetorical and worryingly reactionary agenda of communitarianism.

Attachment however is easily misunderstood, used as a buzzword to make a consensus where sharp differences exist. This is as true within psychoanalytic politics as it is in discourse about the public realm. We need to position ourselves so that the revolutionary edge of attachment theory, not simply its nice cosy sounding edges are engaged with. We need to position the discussion on attachment so that it isn't only about the heart as in some journalistic uses of it, but to put forward the idea that equality, reciprocity, mutuality, the key features of attachment are at odds with many of the ways we currently organise our social relations.

Susie Orbach © 1998
Psychoanalytic Dialogues
Volume 19, No. 1 (1999)

Don't know what it was that struck me about this one. Something. Web as shared scrapbook. But it's more than that. All the pictures you could ever want are out there somewhere. It's the glue that holds them together that's often missing. I'm the same age as Doc. Not sure where I was living in 1955. DC, I think. Just before we moved to California. Mountain View, Sunnyvale. I had a dog out there named Lightning. I watched Vertigo a few nights ago and remembered that the 1955 Pontiac was my favorite car back then. I could tell you make and model of everything on the road in those days at 200 yards. My eyesight was better. And there were a lot fewer cars.

"I just found this picture of Kim, in a wheelbarrow with myself and my sister Jan. I'm holding him by his collar from behind. This was in 1955, when I was eight." Doc Searls

Here's another shot of Doc (center) a few years later at the Digital ID 2002 conference in Denver, flanked by David Weinberger on the left and myself on the right. I tend to hate this picture of myself, but it's the best I've ever seen of David, capturing that just-beneath-the-surface snarky almost twinkle -- either that, or he really is a psycho killer, as I've long suspected. Also notice that he's the only one seems to be aware we're being photographed. David has just landed a contract from Times Books for his next publishing project, Everything is Miscellaneous.

Starting in the Fall of 1998, Doc, David and I began a lengthy online conversation that eventually morphed into The Cluetrain Manifesto. And the rest is history, as they say -- especially the advance we got for the book. The New York Times reviewed it ("the general thrust is on the mark" the reviewer wrote, the kindest by far of the things he had to say), and ran a good chunk of the first chapter. Here's a sub-chunk...

WE DIE.

You will never hear those words spoken in a television ad. Yet this central fact of human existence colors our world and how we perceive ourselves within it. "Life is too short," we say, and it is. Too short for office politics, for busywork and pointless paper chases, for jumping through hoops and covering our asses, for trying to please, to not offend, for constantly struggling to achieve some ever-receding definition of success. Too short as well for worrying whether we bought the right suit, the right breakfast cereal, the right laptop computer, the right brand of underarm deodorant.

Life is too short because we die. Alone with ourselves, we sometimes stop to wonder what's important, really. Our kids, our friends, our lovers, our losses? Things change and change is often painful. People get "downsized," move away, the old neighborhood isn't what it used to be. Children get sick, get better, get bored, get on our nerves. They grow up hearing news of a world more frightening than anything in ancient fairy tales. The wicked witch won't really push you into the oven, honey, but watch out for AK-47s at recess.

Amazingly, we learn to live with it. Human beings are incredibly resilient. We know it's all temporary, that we can't freeze the good times or hold back the bad. We roll with the punches, regroup, rebuild, pick up the pieces, take another shot. We come to understand that life is just like that. And this seemingly simple understanding is the seed of a profound wisdom.

It is also the source of a deep hunger that pervades modern life -- a longing for something entirely different from the reality reinforced by everyday experience. We long for more connection between what we do for a living and what we genuinely care about, for work that's more than clock-watching drudgery. We long for release from anonymity, to be seen as who we feel ourselves to be rather than as the sum of abstract metrics and parameters. We long to be part of a world that makes sense rather than accept the accidental alienation imposed by market forces too large to grasp, to even contemplate.

And this longing is not mere wistful nostalgia, not just some unreconstructed adolescent dream. It is living evidence of heart, of what makes us most human.

MIT's Technology Review was less than impressed with the book, though the review itself was less scathing than its title would suggest...

from: Manifestly Clueless by Wade Roush
source: Technology Review, 1 March 2000
via: HighBeam™ Research

Bold and irreverent to the point of being smart-alecky, the Manifesto makes a fun, thought-provoking read. It helped me to recognize that, in my day job as the editor of an industry Web site, my role is not just to serve up prepared content but also to fuel conversation with and between readers. I also felt compelled to examine my own writing style for corporatespeak and ivory-towerism. Thousands of other Netizens have become signatories, and the manifesto's authors -- a quartet of journalists and marketing consultants-have become gurus of the Web economy.

The four deserve kudos for highlighting how the Internet is changing the balance of knowledge and power in the marketplace, and how intranets are doing the same within the workplace. Their effort to save corporations from their own fear of these facts is also valiant. The truth is, though, that the Manifesto's 95 theses boil down to a handful of ideas; the rest is attitude. And while this gonzo voice produces a frisson in limited doses, it becomes suffocatingly smug at book length. Isn't this what the Manifesto warns companies against?

My advice: Skip the book. Go look at the Cluetrain Web site (www.cluetrain.com), read the theses twice, then come back in a week or two and read them again. Then, to keep yourself from taking it all too seriously, go see the wickedly funny parody site, www.gluetrain.com. Thesis No. 17: "If you use lots of really big words like 'metaphysical,' you can stretch four or five ideas into 95 theses."

Remarkably, the Gluetrain parody is still up. We all thought it was quite wonderful at the time, and said so -- which seemed to deeply perplex its authors, who bitterly complained that they were trying to piss us off and why were we being so nice? Anyway, still worth a look. Theses #37 and #42 ain't bad. And #48: "When corporate intranets are not constrained by fear and legalistic rules, the type of conversation they encourage sounds remarkably like the squealing of pigs at a hog market." Ah yes, those were the days, my friend!

Bits and pieces all over the place. Quotes, grafix, chunks of HTML. A chaos of half-formed ideas. This post has grown and grown. Then grown some more. I've been wrangling with it for days now. Then I read an article this [Saturday] evening in which a parenthetical aside seemed to capture the feeling perfectly...

The issue for the magazine was never that Hunter wasn't the funniest, cleverest, most hilarious writer, sentence to sentence or paragraph to paragraph. The editor's role was getting those sentences to pile up and then exhibit forward momentum. (Hunter called this process "lashing them together.")

-from A Technical Guide for Editing Gonzo Hunter S. Thompson from the other end of the Mojo Wire Robert Love, Columbia Journalism Review, 1 May 2005 via HighBeam™ Research

Not that this will be all that clever or hilarious, but where's my whip? Even better, where's my bullhorn? Ah, here it is! OK, I'm flipping on the um ON button... [a deafening 200-decibel hum emerges from the business end of the device] ... You there! Reader! Place your hands where I can see them and...

Here's my problem. (Prepare yourself for some blanket statements.) Anytime anyone uses a word like "capitalism" everybody gets all squirrelly and starts whipping out their copies of Atlas Shrugged. Which is pretty much why nobody in this country very often talks about anything that makes any goddam difference. No wonder the rest of the world thinks we're stupid. We are. So look, I don't care what Atlas did, or might have done if he'd been as demented as America's favorite faux filosofer, twisted sister supreme, Ayn Rand -- whose sales of the above-mentioned after 50 years in print are edged out only by The Holy Bible. Good God. I feel a gargantuan rant coming on here. And it could take a while. But I mean, can we talk?

this is your kid... on capitalism

The image of the scowling girl comes from the cover of a book titled The Epidemic: The Rot of American Culture, Absentee and Permissive Parenting, and the Resultant Plague of Joyless, Selfish Children. Rot. Permissive. Selfish. I see.

"Take a good look around you," says the book's back cover. "You can't go into stores or restaurants without seeing joyless children..." And yes. I would have to agree. It's shocking. But wait. Why limit this observation to children? It's not as if they're surrounded by hoards of infectiously joyous, life-affirming adults. But wait again. Perhaps I'm just falling into the well known liberal trap of refusing to see that adulthood requires, is indeed defined by, a courageous acceptance of realistic limits. Yes, I can go to Harvard and get an MBA, but I shouldn't be surprised if someone has moved my cheese by the time I graduate and there aren't any jobs to repay my student loans, not to mention the mortgage. Yes, I can buy an SUV, but should not weep too hard or too long if it can't be the Beamer SUV. Yes, I can land the trophy wife, but should not expect that she'll love me. What's love got to do with it?

Psychiatrist/author Robert Shaw, M.D., counsels firm discipline to instill a sense of obedience in children. It would be uncharitable of me to suggest that this is precisely the sort of two-bit advice that plays famously to a burgeoning market of terminally confused parental book buyers. But I will. One gushing reviewer reports that Shaw "even sanctions the use of those immortal words last heard 30 years ago: 'No, because I said so.'"

Hold that thought a moment while we consider another clip from the same review...

from: The Brat Epidemic: A shocking new book says today's children are whining, manipulative monsters. Who's to blame? Cowardly parents!
source: The Daily Mail (London), 15 April 2004
via: HighBeam™ Research

Opening with a graphic description of the 1999 Columbine shootings when two teenage boys slaughtered 12 pupils and a teacher at their American high school, Dr Shaw leaves you in no doubt this is the thin end of permissive parenting.

As he warns gravely: "Wherever I go -- in stores, on the street, in restaurants, in people's homes -- I see repetitious scenes of whining and tantrums, and an increasing number of kids who look sullen, unrelated and unhappy."

"These kids are in the early stages of what I believe is a serious epidemic of disturbed children. Those who become school shooters are simply at the far end of the spectrum." It's a long way from Penelope Leach, the childcare guru who advocates "baby knows best".

But then The Epidemic is intended to be a backlash against the past 30 years of touchy-feely liberal parenting practices and a "wake up call" to the current generation of lost parents.

[permissive touchy-feely liberal emphasis mine]

I'd never heard of Penelope Leach before I read that. So I hunted around a bit and found this from Nothing Bad Happens to Good Girls: Fear of Crime in Women's Lives. The author of that book (Esther Madriz) is quoting another author (Gwen Kinkead) quoting Leach in the 10 April 1984 issue of The New York Times Magazine -- "Spock, Brazelton, and Now . . . Penelope Leach." The hand-wringing intro here is Madriz...

A recent book by Penelope Leach, the British, so-called child care guru has given women more reasons to worry and to feel guilty if they have to work. Leach claims that "unless society allows children more time with their parents in the early years, when IQ, temperament, values and a child's chances of for success are largely determined... babies harmed by part-time parenting will cost society more than it can afford later: Violence, crime, drug addiction, all the main problems of Western post-industrial societies."

So just who does Penelope Leach think she is to say there are social causes for joyless children when it's so much easier to blame the kids themselves? Evidently, feeling guilty, powerless, and guilty about being powerless are big themes for parents these days, as the following near-randomly selected titles suggest:

• The Out-of-Sync Child
• Your Defiant Child
• I'm Okay, You're a Brat!: Setting the Priorities Straight and Freeing You From the Guilt and Mad Myths of Parenthood
• Don't Give Me That Attitude!: 24 Rude, Selfish, Insensitive Things Kids Do and How to Stop Them
• Setting Limits with Your Strong-Willed Child: Eliminating Conflict by Establishing Clear, Firm, and Respectful Boundaries
• The Explosive Child: A New Approach for Understanding and Parenting Easily Frustrated, Chronically Inflexible Children
• The Defiant Child: A Parent's Guide to Oppositional Defiant Disorder
• Loving Obedience: Child Training Techniques That Work

Perhaps all this concern with getting children to behave dammit has something to do with larger issues of command and control in the adult world. You think?

Now, back to that "because I said so" trope. Let's take a moment to review the concept of authority, shall we? Perhaps I should apologize for using myself as the authority in this case. But no, this is wholly consistent with our focus here. Just take the following as true because I said so. We're going to go over this fast, so hold on tight.

Once upon a time, all authority derived from God. You remember God, right? Old guy with a beard, sorta scary, all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good, from whence all goodness flows? From whence also flowed a little number called the divine right of kings. Whether he ever really said it, Sun King Louis XIV of France will forever be remembered for the catchy royal carriage bumper sticker "L'état, c'est moi": I am the state. But then a bunch of fire-brand radicals, including our very own Founding Fathers, pulled off a breathtaking feat of philosophical-theological sleight of hand called Deism, which sent the Old Man backstage where He was free to pursue His own Godly interests, creating new universes and whatnot -- this being the absentee-owner God in whom our money says "We Trust" -- and leaving the <cough> affairs of state to the sublunary likes of Ben Franklin, who at the time was spawning bastards across at least two continents, and Tom Jefferson, when he wasn't too busy getting it on with slave gal Sally Hemmings. Got all that? OK.

Then came Darwinism and its linked-at- the-hip correlative, Social Darwinism, then eugenics and scientific racism and fascist Modernism and Nazi occultism and -- hey, what's not to like? -- WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Watergate, Iran- Contra, Noriega (most Dangerous Man in the World du Jour, built from a kit by the CIA), Desert Storm, Osama Bin Laden (most Dangerous Man in the World du Jour II, built from a kit by the CIA), September 11, Weapons of Mass Destruction, the War in Iraq, the Downing Street memo... and hey, what's wrong with these joyless kids today?

But whoa! I got carried away there for a second. What I had meant to restate, on my own authority, was the ultra-brief precis of 20th century philosophy I offered in Gonzo Marketing. I said it boiled down to two essential questions:

1. Who says?
   and
2. You and what army?

Granted, this view smacks strongly of the postmodern. As it should; that's the point. These writers of prescriptions who turn back the clock thinking no one will notice, who invoke moral/ethical categories as if they were as obvious as shoes and sunshine, end up addressing serious matters in a way that cannot be taken seriously. And the kids know it. The "because I said so" argument relies on a tacit, second-order Divine Right of Parents. Which argument, more often than not, simply fails. What is being invoked in these cases is usually the Divine Right of Meta-Bling, the "meta" bit representing the intangible -- today too often dubbed "spiritual" -- elements of the encompassing Basis of Authority: power, success, knowledge (which frequently amounts to nothing more than a set of unexamined algorithmic cliches), values (which similarly sublimate on closer inspection into a cloud of pietistic unknowing), and of course that mommier-than- Mom's-apple-pie entitlement of every red-blooded American: self-esteem.

The Epidemic's back cover copy promises to cover such issues as "Promoting self-esteem and confidence rather than self-centeredness." As if one in a million readers today could sort out the difference -- if any. The self-esteem boondoggle would require a much longer rant than this one (and fear not: work is in progress on that front). I've touched on the theme several times here on CBO, perhaps most cogently (ymmv) in Magical Mystery Tours. And here's where things get a little weird.

For instance, The Epidemic states (p. 151) that: "Self-esteem as portrayed by the current generation of pop psychologists is nothing less than self-worship, narcissism." Bingo! Shaw is right on the money here. He even cites Lauren Slater's wonderful 2002 article in The New York Times Magazine: The Trouble With Self-Esteem.

The trouble with self-esteem -- and the pathological narcissism that often hides behind this feel-good buzzword -- is, as Slater suggests, not just a matter of child-rearing and personal biography. There's a deeply social and historical dimension to the story. In Constructing the Self, Constructing America, Philip Cushman brought this home for me in a big way. In a section titled "Heinz Kohut and the Valorization of Narcissism: The Self Takes Center Stage," he writes (p. 272):

Kohut's theory... was framed in and defined by the language of consumerism. Kohut described a world in which, ideally, children develop in part by using their parents -- by consuming, metabolizing, and then leaving them. Although in most of his writing Kohut thought that when the self is properly developed, the individual would become independent of the selfobject functions of others. In his last years, he revised this opinion, arguing that to varying degrees healthy individuals use others in this way throughout their lives. Thus, throughout one's life, others "show up" as commodities; the individual is pictured as consuming others and metabolizing their good qualities, in order to accomplish the building of the masterful, bounded, feeling self.

Shaw recommends as further reading A General Theory of Love, an eye-opening description of limbic resonance. He cites Becoming Attached, Robert Karen's excellent book on attachment theory -- one of the great achievements of the 20th century, news of which, nonetheless, hasn't travelled far (enough) beyond the profession. So far, these are all good pointers -- and entirely unsurprising. The Epidemic is written to a popular audience, and these are general-reader resources. But my eyebrows shot up at the bibliographic citations to Alan Shore's work: Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self and Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self. The latter are hardcore neuroscience texts, which underpin John Bowlby's original theorizing about attachment.

Shaw clearly knows the literature far better than he's letting on in The Epidemic, despite the Shore refs. And this is relevant why? It's relevant because attachment theory is essentially about parental negligence and overt abuse. And personality disorders -- which are often the direct result of such trauma -- are established in the first few years of a child's life. We're not talking about "joyless," "selfish" kids here. We're talking about severely damaged adults who pass this damage on -- not genetically, but "culturally," via intimate interactions (or lack thereof) with their children.

If this seems "parent bashing," it's not. Not strictly and solely, anyway. Parents were children once too, and there is a larger context for all this than just biography. As Philip Cushman's remarks about narcissism as psychological consumerism suggest, there's a social context, and an economic dimension. Where does child abuse begin? Who ultimately profits from it? Whether it was Deep Throat or William Goldman who coined the phrase, "follow the money" remains good advice. Parents don't want to believe they've done anything wrong by their kids. They've also been trained not to look too closely at what's being done to them by a consumer society which values neither Rachel or her children. It's a much richer mix than "because I said so" would seem to imply.

Why then the overall tone of The Epidemic, which telegraphs a cheap-shot "what's wrong with kids today" approach? Your kid's gonna turn into a Kolumbine Killer unless you buy this book! She's gonna off someone if she listens to the Insane Clown Posse. Oh please. Contradicting its apparent grounding in attachment theory, the book seems aimed -- the marketing for it certainly is -- at parents hell-bent on whipping their kids into shape and showing them who's boss.

But it's not about who's boss. It's about establishing mutual respect. Despite the holdover command-and-control idiom -- shades of Taylorist management applied to "childcare" -- respect is no longer something that can be commanded. Respect has to be demonstrated and thereby earned. Don't expect it to be forthcoming from intelligent children who are in the same boat you're in -- and know it -- and are honestly asking tougher questions than you're willing to confront yourself.

As Laurie Anderson sings in O Superman on Big Science:

'Cause when love is gone, there's always justice.
And when justice is gone, there's always force.
And when force is gone, there's always Mom.
Hi Mom!

Speaking of which, a reader review of The Epidemic on Amazon -- Well it's about time (October 1, 2003) -- says:

Parents I know - and here I mean those who have disciplined and punished their children as necessary and often been frowned upon for it - have found this book reinforcing. They've known, deep down, that they were doing a good job - the fact that their children are well behaved and polite and friendly is a testament to this. However, they've found it difficult not to question their methods when other parents glare at them in the grocery line for refusing to cave to demands for gum, candy and toys.

The bit I've emphasized above brings to mind the following. Is this entirely fair? At this point, who's playing fair? Too much candy, too many toys. Yes, yes, surely therein lies the heart of the problem.

"It would be wrong to say the soul is an illusion, or an ideological effect. On the contrary, it exists, it has a reality, it is produced permanently around, on, within the body by the functioning of a power that is exercised on those punished - and, in a more general way, on those one supervises, trains and corrects, over madmen, children at home and at school, the colonized, over those who are stuck at a machine and supervised for the rest of their lives. This is the historical reality of this soul, which, unlike the soul represented by Christian theology, is not born in sin and subject to punishment, but is born rather out of methods of punishment, supervision and constraint. This real, non-corporal soul is not a substance; it is the element in which are articulated the effects of a certain type of power and the reference of a certain type of knowledge, the machinery by which the power relations give rise to a possible corpus of knowledge, and knowledge extends and reinforces the effects of this power."

-from Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison
by Michel Foucault

So writers write and talkers talk, and in the end...

don't ask don't tell