Disciples Of The Heart

Against this supercharged backdrop, the Anoka-Hennepin school district finds itself in the spotlight not only for the sheer number of suicides but because it is accused of having contributed to the death toll by cultivating an extreme anti-gay climate. “LGBTQ students don't feel safe at school,” says Anoka Middle School for the Arts teacher Jefferson Fietek, using the acronym for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Questioning. “They're made to feel ashamed of who they are. They're bullied. And there's no one to stand up for them, because teachers are afraid of being fired.”

“One Town's War on Gay Teens”

“l'enfer, c'est les autres”

By focusing on symptoms, on fixing people, “mental health” leads us to attend to the needs of society rather than of patients. Stop the suicide attempts, make the girl eat, reduce explosive outbursts, get back to normal. The patient ... identifies this as degrading and, frankly, she is right. Her friends died and no one did anything about it. She knew that they died because people hated them, because they couldn’t take the abuse anymore, and so she alters her eating patterns in an attempt to be good enough for people to treat her like a human being. She is angry and confused and in mourning and all people want to talk about is what is wrong with her. Of course she would internalize judgements and feel she deserved what she got because the identifications of her symptoms were located within her. She is depressed. She is angry. She has suicidal ideation. Nowhere is there an understanding of the things which caused these symptoms to manifest.

“Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain”

But for power to truly feel menaced, it must somehow sense itself in the presence of another power—or, more accurately, an energy—which it has not known how to define and therefore does not really know how to control. For a very long time, for example, America prospered—or seemed to prosper: this prosperity cost millions of people their lives. Now, not even the people who are the most spectacular recipients of the benefits of this prosperity are able to endure these benefits: they can neither understand them nor do without them, nor can they go beyond them. Above all, they cannot, or dare not, assess or imagine the price paid by their victims, or subjects, for this way of life, and so they cannot afford to know why the victims are revolting. They are forced, then, to the conclusion that the victims—the barbarians—are revolting against all established civilized values—which is both true and not true—and, in order to preserve these values, however stifling and joyless these values have caused their lives to be, the bulk of the people desperately seek out representatives who are prepared to make up in cruelty what both they and the people lack in conviction.

James Baldwin - No Name In The Street, p. 88

Once upon a time, way back in the stone ages, when Noam Chomsky was first writing about these propaganda techniques in Manufacturing Consent, our leaders felt the need to conceal – or at least sugar-coat – these Orwellian principles. It was assumed that the American people genuinely needed to feel like they were on the right side of things, and so the foreign powers we clashed with were always depicted as being the instigators and aggressors, while our role in provoking those responses was always disguised or at least played down.

But now the public openly embraces circular thinking like, “Any country that squawks when we threaten to bomb it is a threat that needs to be wiped out.” Maybe I’m mistaken, but I have to believe that there was a time when ideas like that sounded weird to the American ear. Now they seem to make sense to almost everyone here at home, and that to me is just as a scary as Ahmadinejad.

“Another March to War?”