Cindy McCain on PTSD

Cindy McCain, from an interview with Marie Claire:

MC: You met your husband after his POW days. To what extent is that still with you — or is it a part of history?

CMcC: My husband will be the first one to tell you that that's in the past. Certainly it's a part of who he is, but he doesn't dwell on it. It's not part of a daily experience that we experience or anything like that. But it has shaped him. It has made him the leader that he is.

MC: But no cold sweats in the middle of the night?

CMcC: Oh, no, no, no, no, no. My husband, he'd be the first one to tell you that he was trained to do what he was doing. The guys who had the trouble were the 18-year-olds who were drafted. He was trained, he went to the Naval Academy, he was a trained United States naval officer, and so he knew what he was doing.

If what Mrs. McCain says is true, she has inadvertently raised the question of what responsibility the United States government bears for the damage to those draftees who weren't "trained" and thus immunized against post-traumatic stress disorder. But her breezy theorizing about PTSD is of course contradicted by reality. As psychiatrist Jonathan Shay suggests in Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (1994), anyone can incur the bad moral luck (as Shay calls it) that culminates in PTSD. To say, as Mrs. McCain does, that PTSD comes only to those who don't know what they're doing, is callous (or feigned?) ignorance. Shay knows better:

The most ancient traditions of Western culture instruct us to base our self-respect on firmness of character. Many popular melodramas of moral courage provide satisfaction through the comforting fantasy that our own character would hold steady under the most extreme pressure of dreadful events. A permanent challenge of working with those injured by combat trauma is facing the painful awareness that in all likelihood one's own character would not have stood firm. . . . We have powerful motives not to listen to the veteran's story, or to deny its truth.

As Achilles in Vietnam shows us, in Homer's Iliad and in the narratives of the veterans with whom Shay works, good character can be undone by the traumas of war.

Related posts
Gilgamesh travesty (the DoVA, Gilgamesh, and PTSD)
Jonathan Shay wins MacArthur grant

Hôtel (Apollinaire–Poulenc)

The poet Kenward Elmslie says somewhere in an interview that he has enough French to know that "Hôtel" is the most beautiful song ever written. That remark got me started listening to Francis Poulenc's music some years ago.

"Hôtel" is Poulenc's setting of a poem by Guillaume Apollinaire, from the five-song sequence Banalités (1940):

Hôtel

Ma chambre a la forme d'une cage
Le soleil passe son bras par la fenêtre
Mais moi qui veux fumer pour faire des mirages
J'allume a feu du jour ma cigarette
Je ne veux pas travailler je veux fumer

Hotel

My room is shaped like a cage
The sun puts its arm through the window
But I who want to smoke and make smoke dreams
I light my cigarette with daylight
I don't want to work I want to smoke

[My translation.]

Poulenc wrote "Hôtel" for the male voice (baritone), but women now sing it too. Here's a beautiful performance, alas anonymous: "Hôtel" (YouTube). Bernard Kruysen's recording (with Jean Charles Richard, piano, on an old LP) is my favorite.

Nineteen years after I stopped smoking, I have cigarettes on my mind. Mais je ne veux pas fumer.

Nineteen years later

You must be hard up for material if you're making yet another post about quitting smoking.

Not really. The day I smoked my last cigarette — October 8, 1989 — still sticks in my head. October 8 has become an anniversary of sorts.

Ah. So do you remember the day you began smoking?

No, but I remember my first cigarette. It was a Viceroy, smoked in a friend's backyard during a lull in a wiffleball or soccer game in said backyard. My friend had taken up smoking under the influence of his sister's boyfriend, an older guy who smoked, yes, Viceroys. The cigarette was horrible, but I was determined to master this strange ritual of what I thought was adultdom.

It's interesting that you remember not the game that was taking place but the brand of cigarette.

I suppose it is. I've always been brand-conscious. As a cigarette smoker, I developed strong associations with my favorite brands: Camels, Lucky Strikes, and Pall Malls; and Drum and Old Holborn, tobaccos for rolling one's own.

Rolling your own? Isn't that likely to look suspicious?

Maybe, but I never had any problems. I think I probably appreciated whatever clouds of suspicion the practice gathered around me, as I did almost nothing to attract such clouds otherwise.

So nineteen years later, are you sorry that you ever started?

I would be lying if I said that I am. I loved smoking, and many of the cigarettes I smoked were deeply satisfying experiences — ritualized moments of introspective selfhood. In other words, Here I am, sitting with a cup of coffee and a cigarette, thinking, thinking, alone.

Hey, those are my italics.

Sorry.

Related posts
Cigarettes and similes
No smoking
"Please Don't Smoke"
Thank you for not smoking

Domestic comedy

"I don't see McCain or his tow-headed wife."

"Tow-headed?"

"Doesn't that mean 'blonde'?"

"I don't know. Does it?"

"Yeah."

(Checks m-w.com.)

9:48 p.m., post-debate: C-SPAN shows audience members crowding around Barack ("that one") and Michelle Obama. John and Cindy McCain are nowhere to be seen. Perhaps they are surrounded by an even larger crowd, but it seems that they've left the stage.

[Update: Yes, they left the stage shortly after the debate's end.]

Related reading
All "domestic comedy" posts

Fear and hope

From one of Andrew Sullivan's readers:

What this horrible McCain/Palin campaign is doing is reminiscent of the worst of the 1930s. Whipping uneducated, mindless acolytes into a violent — perhaps literally — frenzy, stirring fear and playing our citizens against themselves and each other. . . .

I've never been an alarmist nor someone to lean towards the melodramatic, but am I wrong in feeling as though our governmental system and very freedom could be at stake in the coming weeks? This terrifies me, and has prompted me to act.

And Sullivan's response:

I have faith in the American people. They'll see through this to what we need, and make the best choice available. They made the right choice in the 1930s, unlike many other nations. They will make the right choice again. If I didn't have that faith, I wouldn't have the hope I feel.

The only response to this fear-mongering is hope-mongering, a pride in America's resilience, a confidence in her inventiveness, and a determination to get to the ballot box. This is not an election you can sit out. This is an election where we all have to take a stand, including the press. Too much is in peril for a false neutrality.

When cries of "Terrorist!" and "Kill him!" can be heard at political rallies, I know that our country is in great danger. But I think I know who'll be elected next month.

Enough with the sinks

One news outlet now reports that "the sinks are ready." An analyst wonders whether John McCain's kitchen sink strategy will work. Yes, a dying metaphor again rears its head, like Vladimir Putin, I guess.

As I wrote back in the primary season,

The idiom though involves everything but the kitchen sink, the point being that the kitchen sink cannot be removed and hurled through the air, even when one is intent upon throwing everything at hand.

The best place to watch everything but at tonight's debate: C-SPAN.

Related post
Everything but the kitchen sink

Who is the real Barack Obama?

That's easy: he's the guy who was just endorsed by bluegrass master Ralph Stanley, in a radio commercial airing in southwest Virginia.

(When I saw Ralph Stanley perform in April, his car bore a John Edwards bumper sticker. Times change.)

Ralph Stanley endorses Barack Obama (YouTube)

Five desks

1
The kitchen table was grey formica, or something like formica, in what could be called a linen pattern, thin crosshatched lines. I did my schoolwork at this table after dinner, first grade through sixth. I remember the groove where the table halves joined — dark, mysteriously sticky, a local line of longitude.

2
The dining-room table was from Ethan Allen, a colonial-furniture store that gave away little bottles of maple syrup. I worked at this table through high school, college, and two years of graduate school. I seldom saw the surface, which was protected by table-pads and a tablecloth, dark green or dark blue.

3
Boards and cinderblocks saw me through almost five years in a Ph.D. program. The holes in the cinderblocks held stationery supplies, correspondence, and light-bulbs. When I think of this desk, I think of tea, cigarettes, and typing at all hours in a bathrobe.

[As you may by now suspect, I've never had a desk.]

4
A utility table, made in Alabama, purchased from an office warehouse. It's the sort of table at which you might find a volunteer group in a mall, but it's much sturdier, with a better finish and no valley. This table once held an Apple //c and now holds the terminal (anybody's) computer in our house.

5
A second kitchen table, but it's in a room we call "the study," perhaps the only study in the world with "We love Randy Rhoads" written on its ceiling (courtesy of the previous owners' son). Elaine assembled and finished this "farmhouse" table, which is as close to a farmhouse as I'm going to get. What this table makes me think of is not a farmhouse but a library, though unlike a library's tables, this table is always already covered in books, papers, index cards, pens, pencils, and bits of life.

*

Here’s a 2015 view of my desk.

Related posts
El Pico key ring
Five pens
Five radios
Found
Messy desk

Exuviation in progress

My daughter Rachel sends news of plans to remove twenty-four words from the Collins English Dictionary to make room for "up to 2,000 more."

24 Words the CED Want [sic] to Exuviate (Shed) (Time)

(Thank you, daughter!)

Arthur Parker on "East-Central Illinois"

"I got a bad territory, see? East-central Illinois. God help me."

Sheet-music salesman Arthur Parker (Steve Martin), in Pennies from Heaven (dir. Herbert Ross, 1981)

Sarah Palin's wink did nothing for my posture, but this line from Pennies from Heaven made Elaine and me both sit up a little straighter. I wonder how "east-central Illinois," a term that only east-central Illinoisans seem to use, found its way into Dennis Potter's screenplay.