IMF'd

Well, the worldwide socialist takeover the Birchers have been warning us about is coming to fruition, but it's a little different than what they had in mind. It's socialism for the bank$ters, but feudalism for everyone else, and unlike the with Thatcher/Reagan '80s, there doesn't seem to be a dot-com escape hatch this time.



Devo was right. Freedom from choice is what we want, but the illusion of choice is what we've got, and now the Corporate Feudal State is upon us. But, hey, if you're not doing anything wrong, you've got nothing to worry about. Shut up. Be happy. The number one enemy of progress is questions.

Listen Up Democrats

I couldn't have said it better myself. --bdm

by John Cory

am angry.

I'm tired of pundits and know-nothing media gasbags. I'm tired of snarky "inside politics" programming. I am sick of the bigotry and hatred of "birthers" and faux patriotic cranks and their GOP puppet masters. And I'm really pissed at the Democratic Party that confuses having a plate of limp noodles with having a spine.

I'm going to vomit if I hear the word "bipartisanship" one more time.

It was "bipartisanship" that gave us this activist conservative Supreme Court. A Supreme Court that says money is free speech and corporations are persons except when real people try to hold them accountable for their greed and poisonous ways.

"Bipartisanship" gave us the Patriot Act and FISA and illegal wiretaps and two wars and "free speech zones" and "no fly" lists. God bless bipartisan America.

I get nauseated every time the Senate explains how it takes a super majority to do anything for the American people. Tell you what Senate Bozos, if it takes 60 votes to pass legislation than it should take 60% of the popular vote to get you elected.

When some Tea Party crank says, "I want my country back," I respond, "No madam, you want your country backward."

When a deficit-mongering politician says, "How do we pay for this?" Why not ask, "What did you Republicans do with the surplus we Democrats left you?"

When a compassionate conservative says, "Healthcare reform is socialism," why not answer, "No, sir it is the moral and American way to care for people."

Yes, I can hear it now: "You are naïve and simplistic. These are complicated matters and require sophisticated solutions. Democrats are a big tent and strive for balance. But Republicans block our path at every turn. We are thinking and considering new ways to work in harmony with everyone."

Bite me.

The only thing you get with "harmony" is a Barbershop Quartet.

Democrats stop being Republican Lite. Stop whining about that mean GOP and their nasty messaging. Grow a pair, get a message, get a bumper sticker and hang it out there. Get some strong vivid talking points.

G-O-P = Greed Over People.

Greed Kills - jobs, people and the economy.

Terrorism is Viagra for Republicans: The more fear - the more excited they get.

When a soldier dies for America, who dares ask if they were gay or straight?

Don't act so shocked, Democratic Party. Have you looked around lately?

You're losing the young vote that showed up to elect Obama. You're losing those old enough to remember real Democrats. Why? Because you don't talk to them any more than you talk to me. You talk at me. You talk around me. You talk down to me. You talk about me. You don't talk with me. And you don't inspire and you don't champion and without that you are nothing more than an arbitrator of compromise and abdication.

You are facing a bully. Deal with it!

Republicans want the country backwards. They champion superstition over science because it entrenches ignorance and bigotry and captures the easily frightened.

Republicans treat the Constitution the way they treat the Bible, with selective interpretation and selective application to others while exempting themselves from judgment and accountability.

Republicans preach the gospel of fear because fear is darkness and darkness covers their theft of civil liberties and Constitutional principles.

For thirty years the Republican Party has claimed the mantel of law and order but now quake in dread of the American judicial system when putting terrorists on trial. How criminal is that?

Torture is illegal. Period. John Wayne and Jack Bauer were not our Founding Fathers - only in the make-believe world of Republican drugstore-patriots.

DADT needs to be repealed. Now. It is unconscionable, immoral, and disgusting.

Empathy, compassion and equality are not pejoratives. They are American values proven again and again throughout our history.

Republicans believe that bake-sales and cookies for chemotherapy best determine the value of life and healthcare because life is a pre-existing condition and the "free market" should not have to take on such a high risk - after all, no one gets out alive, so why should the corporation be left holding the bag? Unless of course the price is right.

Republicans believe that government should keep its hands off healthcare but should put its hands inside a woman's body.

Republicans believe in small government - small enough to hold the "right" people and small enough to be owned and operated by the "right" people. And who are the "right" people? Them. Not you.

Democratic Party, DNC, DLCC, DSCC or whatever your acronym - I have only one question for you: Really?

You can't win against these guys? You can't get your message out against these guys? You can't give America leadership against these guys?

Really?

Crimes R Crimes

So George W. Douche says his biggest failure was not privatizing Social Security, a sentiment shared by Republicans in Congress. Meanwhile, Obama wants to make cuts to Social Security in order to balance the budget. So as usual, our choices are shitty or really shitty.

Well, here's what pisses me off about the Social Security debate and about Americans in general:

In France, the president -- a conservative, mind you -- suggests raising the retirement age by two years and people go apeshit. They halt oil production and disrupt trains and clash with riot police and so forth. In this country, the president -- a liberal, mind you (nominally at least) -- suggests the same thing and...nada, zilch, crickets chirp, leaves rustle.

Cutting Social Security is considered A-OK simply because it's less bad than the Republican plan. But the secret no one wants us to hear is that there's nothing wrong with Social Security. It's fine. The way to balance the budget is to end our two (or more) illegal, un-winnable foreign occupations and return the tax schedule to pre-Bush levels. I mean, it's a simple fix and nobody is suggesting it, except for a few non-viable types like the Green Party and Bernie Sanders, etc.

America is over. When your choices are between two Wall Street hookers, the only option is to stock up on toilet paper and brace for the worst. We are getting the government we deserve.

EDIT: I don't know what the fuck is up with this piece of shit blogging software. I've changed the fourth paragraph to the same motherfucking font as the rest of the paragraphs 20 motherfucking times, but it insists on staying like that. You would think that Google, with all their trillions of dollars, would be able to come up with a rudimentary blogging program, but I guess they're too busy colluding with Verizon to give a fuck about little details like text consistency in their shitty fucking software. Fuck this fucking country. I CANNOT WAIT to see this fucking shit hole go down in flames. I will waste my last breath laughing.

Jet Fuel?

Andrew Breitbart's Racist Lizard Brain

From Digby:

"Breitbart had edited the video, of course, and he refuses to release the whole thing, naturally. But that didn't matter in this case any more than it mattered in the ACORN case. It's nothing but a play to America's racist lizard brain."

UPDATE: Monkey Muck sums up my feelings succinctly:

President Obama is a weak kneed, lily livered, scaredy cat. He's the cowardly lion who got taken in by a bunch of right wing nitwits. He tossed a decent and good public servant under the bus to avoid being made fun of by the crying Mormon and the man behind the Acorn non scandal.

And you know I'm right when one of his biggest supporters calls him out for being such a wuss.

I've said it before and unfortunately, I'll have to say it again, GROW A PAIR and stop being afraid of your own fucking shadow Obama. Stop starting from a compromised position and you won't have to give in as much. Stop being such a timid version of Jimmy Carter and start being a lion like FDR.

It's Official

We officially live in a police state now, especially if you're black.

God, I fucking hate people.

Okay, so I'm at the Blue Line station on my way home from work. I need to add money to my stored value card or else I won't have enough to get to work tomorrow. But the machine doesn't take credit cards, so I have to get $20 out of the nearby ripoff ATM, which is located inside a tiny convenience store inside the station. If I hurry, I can make it to my bus before it pulls away from the station. Unfortunately, this stupid, fat she-beast who just bought a bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos is standing right in front of the ATM, and she won't move until the clerk gives her a bag. The clerk is already helping the next customer, so the stupid fat she-beast has to wait for the bag that she doesn't even fucking need but that she thinks the clerk owes her because she just bought a 99-cent bag of Doritos. Of course, she won't move her fat motherfucking ass so I can gain access to the ATM; I have my card out & she looks right fucking at me, so I know she knows what I'm trying to do, but she still won't move until the clerk gives her the plastic fucking bag that she so richly deserves. Finally, the clerk finishes helping the other customer and asks the stupid fat she-beast what she wants even though he already knows what she wants.

"You didn't give me no bag," she explains, her words dripping with injury.

The clerk glances at me, recognizing my building rage, chuckles, and laboriously pulls a plastic bag from the hanger and carefully spreads it open for her to deposit her precious motherfucking Nacho Cheese Doritos. Finally, the obese food tube waddles off allowing me, at long last, to access the ATM, which, despite the fact that it's charging me two dollars and fifty cents to access my own money, takes for fucking ever. After chirping and grinding and wheezing for an eternity, it finally spits out my measely twenty. I snatch it and dash to the stored value card vending machine. But by this time, there is a line of people waiting to put money on THEIR stored value cards. The line is long, in part because the other vending machine is out of order (naturally), and in part because two motherfucking thirds of my fellow countrymen have not yet figured out how to operate these things. They are hell on wheels when it comes to texting their post-literate friends, but when it comes to reading pictograms on a vending machine rivaling a PlaySkool infant's toy in simplicity, they turn into stone cold imbeciles.

Anyway, by some miracle, I am able to add the twenty dollars to my stored value card and make it to my bus moments before it leaves the station. And guess who I see on the bus. Come on, guess. That's right! The very same fat, cretinous whore who wouldn't get the motherfuck out of my way until she got the plastic motherfucking bag for her stupid goddamn fucking Doritos, which she doesn't fucking need anyway. And guess what I see on the floor of the bus beneath her idiotic hooves. Go ahead, guess. That's right! The plastic fucking bag that she wouldn't move until she got because it was owed to her.

This meat puppet, this disgusting, worthless food tube is exactly why people go postal. She will go through her entire pointless life consuming and consuming and consuming while producing nothing of value until she dies and begins decomposing, which can't happen soon enough. Every bite of food that has sustained her, every stitch of clothing that has kept her warm, every brick, piece of lumber, slab of concrete, tile, shingle, rug that has sheltered her, every tidbit of knowledge her teachers tried in vain to ram through her thick skull, every gallon of gas that has moved her carcass around, every satellite that has been launched and every megabyte of bandwidth that has been used so she can text her backward, half-witted motherfucking friends has gone one hundred percent to waste. She is a monumental drag on civilization, and, unfortunately, there are millions just like her. They waddle around prattling on and on about god knows what, consuming every idea and resource like matter down a black hole and leaving nothing in their wake but a trail of discarded wrappers and stains and crumbs. God it's great to be American. Thanks for listening (and by listening, I mean reading.) I'll be here all week.

Happy Memorial Day

Imagine

Imagine if the Tea Party was Black

by Tim Wise

Let’s play a game, shall we? The name of the game is called “Imagine.” The way it’s played is simple: we’ll envision recent happenings in the news, but then change them up a bit. Instead of envisioning white people as the main actors in the scenes we’ll conjure - the ones who are driving the action - we’ll envision black folks or other people of color instead. The object of the game is to imagine the public reaction to the events or incidents, if the main actors were of color, rather than white. Whoever gains the most insight into the workings of race in America, at the end of the game, wins.

So let’s begin. Read on.

Liberals Piss Me Off

Yeah, you read that right.

Liberals.

Piss me off.

I've written before about how moderates piss me off, but these days, liberals are becoming almost indistinguishable from moderates. Just by standing still, I've moved to the radical Left. It is gratifying, therefore, to see that at least one other person feels the way I do.

After too many mornings waking up feeling guilty about mean things I've said, sometimes drunkenly, to dipshits who deserved it, and despite the fact that I'm probably the least religious person on the planet, I've made an effort to take this bit of Buddhist wisdom to heart:

The origin of suffering is attachment to transient things.

If ever something was transient, it's this infestation of early 21st century politics by spineless, cheerleading, pseudo liberal shitheads who have made it their life's work to achieve Wall Street's objectives by adopting formerly right-wing policies.

Of course, if I were truly taking that bit of Buddhist wisdom to heart, I wouldn't even be posting this, but it helps me to (sometimes) remember to say my piece and move on, rather than stewing over something.

Call it a catharsis.

Your Tax Dollars Hard at Work

Song I Wish I'd Written

Flagpole Sitta

I had visions I was in them

I was looking into the mirror

To see a little bit clearer

The rottenness and evil in me

Fingertips have memories

Mine can't forget the curves of your body

And when i feel a bit naughty

I run it up the flagpole and see

Who salutes (But no one ever does)

I'm not sick but I'm not well

and I'm so hot, cause I'm in hell!

Been around the world and found

That only stupid people are breeding

The cretins cloning and feeding

And I don't even own a TV

Put me in the hospital for nerves

And then they had to commit me

You told them all i was crazy

They cut off my legs now i'm an amputee (God damn you)

I'm not sick but I'm not well

And I'm so hot cause I'm in hell

I'm not sick but I'm not well

And it's a sin to live so well

I wanna publish zines

And rage against machines

I wanna pierce my tongue

It doesn't hurt it feels fine

The trivial sublime

I'd like to turn off time

To kill my mind

Kill my mind, mind

Paranoia paranoia

Everybody's coming to get me

Just say you never met me

I'm runnin' underground with the moles (Digging holes)

Hear the voices in my head

I swear to God it sounds like they're snoring!

But if you're bored then you're boring

The agony and the irony are killing me

I'm not sick but I'm not well

and I'm so hot cause I'm in hell

I'm not sick but I'm not well

and it's a sin to live this well

One, two, three, four

Finanzeinsturz

You Tell 'em, Jello...

I stu-stu-stutter.

From the Boston Phoenix:

As you may have heard, conservative attack-radio douchebag Michael Savage went postal again the other day, responding to the news of Ted Kennedy's brain tumor by taking to the airwaves with a rant that once again revealed the vicious, inhuman gutlessness of this country's so-called silent majority -- students of the P. Diddy Institute for Higher Etymology would surely recognize this as a prime bit of bitch-assedness. First he played clips of Ted Kennedy singing, interspersed with (Kennedy in-law) Arnold Schwarzenegger's infamous "It's not a tumor" clip. "The poor guy's been suffering for years, you know?," Savage said of TK. "Unfairly he's been accused of alcoholism, but we see now that it was something much more deep-seated."
Then he did something even more unforgivable: he played Dead Kennedys' "California Uber Alles," compounding the sacrilege by actually singing along. (Click here for the full clip, courtesy of MediaMatters.) A convergence of loony-fringe hatemongering and punk rock shibboleth-busting: is this where it all ends up?
We doubt that anyone would be ignorant enough to think that Savage is anything approximating an actual Jello Biafra fan, nor that anyone would be silly enough to think that Jello Biafra was in any way supportive of Savage. But we wanted to get Jello's thoughts on the matter anyway, so Phoenix Editor Lance Gould raised him on the phone. Here's what Jello had to say:

I haven't read the details yet, but I'm aware of what Michael Savage did. Obviously he took my song way the hell out of context and did it deliberately. But the bigger issue is Savage himself and how the hell he gets away with stuff like saying this, and saying that people with AIDS should be put in concentration camps. And then when people protest at the station, he calls on his own listeners to come down and beat them up.
It scares the shit out of me that the most popular radio talk-show hosts are all foaming-at-the-mouth, ultra-bigoted blabbermongers whom only North Korea or the Nazis could love.
But like it or not, Savage is the third-most popular radio-talk show host in this country behind Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Nobody from the other side is represented or promoted well enough by the big right-wing-owned radio networks to compete. That's one of the ways they mindfuck the country into being so dumb they vote for people like George Bush, Mitt Romney and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The real issue here is why aren't the big candidates calling for media reform? Once upon a time there was a law on the books called the Fairness Doctrine, and it said that if somebody like Savage or Limbaugh or that skull woman Ann Coulter said something completely fucked up and dishonest on the air, somebody else was allowed to come on the air and reply to them without being told to shut up every 15 seconds by a power clown like Bill O'Reilly. That law was on the books for 50 years but was allowed to expire in the late '80s when a Democratic-controlled congress failed to override President Reagan's veto of the law.
The damage was further compounded when your friend and mine Bill Clinton rammed through the Telecommunications Act of 1996, further deregulating how many radio stations and media outlets one corporation can own and what they can do with them and they greenlighted their long-held agenda to throw public interest out the window. And the volume and impact of the Rush Limbaughs and Michael Savages multiplied exponentially with nobody on the other side being allowed to reply. In large areas of rural and small town America, this is the only radio anyone is exposed to. That's the problem. We need to bring back the Fairness Doctrine. John Kerry had a golden opportunity to fire back at the Swift Boat liars and use that as a platform to rally the public to demand media reform. But true to form, he was too chickenshit to do it.

Clock's a-Tickin'

Bullies, Muggers, Thieves & Con Men

from The Independent Institute:

Four Types of Government Operatives: Bullies, Muggers, Sneak Thieves, and Con Men

December 20, 2007

Robert Higgs

Somehow it seemed as though the farm had grown richer without making the animals themselves any richer—except, of course, for the pigs and the dogs.

—George Orwell, Animal Farm

The beginning of political wisdom is the realization that despite everything you’ve always been taught, the government is not really on your side; indeed, it is out to get you.

Sometimes government functionaries and their private-sector supporters want simply to bully you, to dictate what you must do and what you must not do, regardless of whether anybody benefits from your compliance with these senseless, malicious directives. The drug laws are the best current example, among many others, of the government as bully. Our rulers presently enforce a host of laws that combine the worst aspects of puritanical priggishness and the invasive, pseudo-scientific, therapeutic state. They tolerate our pursuit of happiness only so long as we pursue it exclusively in officially approved ways: gin, yes; weed, no.

Notwithstanding the great delight that our rulers take in tormenting us with their absurdly inconsistent nanny-state commands, they generally have bigger fish to fry. Above all, the government and its special-interest backers want to take our money. If these people ran a store, they might aptly call it Robberies R Us. Their credo is simple and brazen: “you have money, and we want it.”

Unlike the sincere street criminal, however, the robber in official guise rarely puts his proposition to you in the blunt form of “your money or your life,” however much he intends to relate to you on precisely such terms. (If you doubt my characterization of these intentions, test what happens if you steadfastly resist at every step as the brigands escalate their threats: first ordering you to pay, then billing you for unpaid balances plus penalties and interest, sending you a summons, and ultimately beating you into submission or killing you for resisting arrest. Your sustained, open resistance always ends in the state’s use of violence against you, in either your forcible imprisonment or your removal from the land of the living, after which your memory will be defamed by your designation as a criminal—governments never settle for mere brutality, but always supplement it with unabashed presumptuousness.)
When I say “rarely,” I do not mean that the authorities never carry out their plunder blatantly. Throughout the land, for example, criminal courts, acting as de facto muggers, strip people of great sums of money in the aggregate by fining them for conduct that ought never to have been criminalized in the first place—drug-law violations, prostitution, gambling, antitrust-law violations, traffic infractions, reporting violations, doing business without a license, and innumerable other victimless “crimes.” The predatory judges and their police henchmen care no more about justice than I care to live on a diet of pig pancreas and boiled dandelions. They are simply taking people’s money because it’s there to be taken with minimal effort. In this manifestation, government amounts to a gigantic speed trap.

The more common way for government officials to rob you, however, involves their seizure of so-called taxes, which take countless forms, all of which are purported to be collected in order to finance—mirabile dictu—benefits for you. Such a deal! You’d have to be a real ingrate to complain about the government’s snatching your money for the express purpose of making your world a better place.

Sometimes the “political exchange” into which you are hauled kicking and screaming rests on such a ludicrous foundation, however, that honesty compels us to classify it, too, as a mugging. I have in mind such compassionately conservative policies as stripping taxpayers of hundreds of billions of dollars and handing the money over, for the most part, to rich people engaged in large-scale agribusiness and, sometimes, to landowners who don’t even bother to represent themselves as farmers. The apologies that the agribusiness whores in Congress make for this daylight robbery are so patently stupid and immoral that the whole shameless affair resembles nothing so much as the schoolyard bully’s grabbing the little kids’ lunch money and then taunting them aggressively, “If you don’t like it, why don’t you do something about it?” Every five years, when the farm-subsidy law expires and a new one is enacted, a few members of Congress pose as reformers of this piracy, but truly serious reforms never occur, and even the minor ones that come along from time to time prove unavailing, as the farm-booty interests invariably suck up “emergency relief” payments from the public treasury later on to make up for any shortfalls from the main subsidy programs.

Government sneak thieves, in contrast, fear that they may occupy more vulnerable positions than the agribusiness gang and similarly impudent special-interest groups cum legislators, so they dare not taunt the little kids so flagrantly. Instead, they specialize in legislative riders, budgetary add-ons and earmarks, logrolling, omnibus “Christmas tree” bills, and other gimmicks designed to conceal the size, the beneficiaries, and sometimes even the existence of their theft. At the end of the day, the taxpayers find there’s nothing left in the till, but they have little or no idea where all of their money went. Finding out by reading an appropriations act is next to impossible, inasmuch as these statutes are almost incomprehensible to everyone but the legislative insiders and their staff members who devise them and write them down in a combination of Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit.

For example, for many years, a single congressman from northeastern Pennsylvania—first Dan Flood and then Joe McDade—substantially enriched the anthracite coal interests of that region by inserting a brief, one-paragraph limitation rider in the annual appropriations act for the Department of Defense. The upshot of this obscure provision was that Pennsylvania anthracite was transported to Germany to provide heating fuel for U.S. military bases that could have been heated more cheaply by using local resources. This coals-to-Newcastle shenanigan was a classic sneak-thief gambit, a thing of legislative beauty, but every year’s budget contains thousands of schemes that operate with similar effect, if not in an equally audacious manner.

Unlike the government sneak thieves, the government con men openly advertise—indeed, expect to receive great credit for—certain uses of the taxpayers’ money that are represented as bringing great benefits to the general public or a substantial segment of it. Surely the best example of the con man’s art is so-called national defense, a bottomless pit into which the government now dumps, in various forms (many of them not officially classified as “defense”), approximately a trillion dollars of the taxpayers’ money each year. The government stoutly maintains, of course, that all ordinary Americans are constantly in grave danger of attack by foreigners—nowadays, by Islamic terrorists, in particular—and that these voracious wolves can be kept from the door only by the maintenance and active deployment of large armed forces equipped with ultra-sophisticated (and correspondingly expensive) equipment and stationed at bases in more than a hundred countries and on ships at sea around the globe.

Without dismissing the alleged dangers entirely, a sensible person quickly appreciates that the threat is slight—just do the math, using reasonable probability coefficients—whereas the cost of (purportedly) dealing with it is colossal. In short, as General Smedley Butler informed us more than seventy years ago, the modern military establishment, along with most of its blessed wars, is for the most part nothing but a racket. Worse, because of the way it engages and co-opts powerful elements of the private sector, it gives rise to a costly and dangerous form of military-economic fascism. Lately, the classic military-industrial-congressional complex has been supplemented by an even more menacing (to our liberties) security-industrial-congressional complex, whose aim is to enrich its participants by equipping the government for more effectively spying on us and invading our privacy in ways great and small.

Worst of all, despite everything that is claimed for the military’s protective powers, its operation and deployment overseas leave us ordinary Americans facing greater, not lesser, risk than we would otherwise face, because of the many enemies it cultivates who would have left us alone, if the U.S. military had only left them alone. (Yes, Virginia, they are over here because we’re over there.) The president routinely declares that the hugely increased expenditures and overseas deployments for military purposes since 2001 have reduced the threat of terrorism, but, in fact, terrorist incidents and deaths have increased, not decreased. Although privileged elements of the political class gain from militarism and neo-imperialist wars, the rest of us invariably lose economic well-being, real security, and all too often life itself. In 2004, people who said that security against terrorism was their top concern voted disproportionately, by an almost 7-to-1 margin, for George W. Bush. They had been conned.

Although the mugger, the sneak thief, and the con man are not the only types of government operatives, they make up a large proportion of the leading figures in government today. The lower ranks, especially in the various police agencies, have a disproportionate share of the bullies. No attempt to understand government can succeed without a clear understanding of these ideal types and each one’s characteristic modus operandi. With this understanding firmly in mind, you will remain permanently immune to the infectious swindle, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” The truth, of course, is the exact opposite: I say again, the government—this vile assemblage of bullies, muggers, sneak thieves, and con men—is not really on your side; indeed, it is out to get you.

Robert Higgs

Send email

Robert Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy for The Independent Institute and Editor of the Institute’s quarterly journal The Independent Review. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Johns Hopkins University, and he has taught at the University of Washington, Lafayette College, Seattle University, and the University of Economics, Prague. He has been a visiting scholar at Oxford University and Stanford University, and a fellow for the Hoover Institution and the National Science Foundation. He is the author of many books, including Depression, War, and Cold War.

Full Biography and Recent Publications

I Will Let You Know When I Am Not Terrified Anymore

A Positive Outlook Is Overrated
by Barbara Held
Listen Now [5 min 32 sec] add to playlist

Barbara Held is a professor of psychology and social studies at Bowdoin College, and the author of Stop Smiling, Start Kvetching. Trained as a clinical psychologist, she practiced therapy for many years. Held lives with her husband on the coast of Maine.

“I believe that there is no one right way to cope with all the pain of living. ... If we are prevented from coping in our own way, be it 'positive' or 'negative,' we function less well.”

All Things Considered, October 22, 2007 · Many Americans insist that everyone have a positive attitude, even when the going gets rough. From the self-help bookshelves to the Complaint-Free World Movement, the power of positive thinking is touted now more than ever as the way to be happy, healthy, wealthy and wise.
The problem is that this demand for good cheer brings with it a one-two punch for those of us who cannot cope in that way: First you feel bad about whatever's getting you down, then you feel guilty or defective if you can't smile and look on the bright side. And I'm not even sure there always is a bright side to look on.
I believe that there is no one right way to cope with all of the pain of living. As an academic psychologist, I know that people have different temperaments, and if we are prevented from coping in our own way, be it "positive" or "negative," we function less well.
As a psychotherapist, I know that sometimes a lot of what people need when faced with adversity is permission to feel crummy for a while, to realize that feeling bad is not automatically the same as being mentally ill. Some of my one-session "cures" have come from reminding people that life can be difficult, and it's OK if we're not happy all of the time.
This last point first became apparent to me in 1986. I came down with the flu accompanied by searing headaches that lasted for weeks afterward. Eventually a neurologist told me that a strain of flu that winter had left many people with viral meningitis. He reassured me that I would make a full recovery, but I was left traumatized by the weeks of undiagnosed pain. I really thought I had a brain tumor or schizophrenia. Being a psychologist didn't help; I was an emotional wreck.
Fortunately it happened that my next-door neighbor was a brilliant psychiatrist, Aldo Llorente from Cuba. I asked him, "Aldo, am I a schizophrenic?"
"Professor," he pronounced, "you are a mess, but you are not a mentally ill mess. You are just terrified."
I told Aldo that two of my friends insisted that I cheer up. I tried to be cheerful for a week, but that only increased my distress. Aldo told me, "You say to them: 'Friends, I would like to be more cheerful, but right now I am too terrified to be cheerful. So I will let you know when I am not terrified anymore.'"
The moment I delivered Aldo's message, I felt better. Aldo had made it OK for me to cope in my own way, to recover at my own pace, to be my own mess of a self. That is when I began to realize that I had been tyrannized by the idea that everyone must always have a positive attitude.
Having flourished in my own authentically kvetchy way, I believe that we would be better off if we let everyone be themselves — positive, negative or even somewhere in-between.

Independently produced for All Things Considered by Jay Allison and Dan Gediman with John Gregory and Viki Merrick.

I have three dollars in the bank. I don't get paid 'til a week from Friday. I just got a disconnection notice from the electric company. The landlord just left a message on my voicemail because I still owe him for September rent, and it's almost October. We have a one-party system. I feel like screaming "FUCK YOU" at everyone I meet.