Leadership at the Turn of the Millennium: Bush, Clinton and Obama

My new boss recently asked me to read Warren Bennis’ classic On Becoming a Leader. Call me a teacher’s pet, but I love it when bosses assign reading. So far, I’m particularly pleased with this recommendation because it provides a lot of key insights and it’s written in lucid, engaging prose. I’d recommend it to anyone.

One of my favorite quotes comes from the introduction, in which Bennis points out that:

Leaders have no interest in proving themselves, but an abiding interest in expressing themselves. The difference is crucial, for it’s the difference between being driven, as too many people are today, and leading, as too few people do…Those who are skilled at achieving prominence are not necessarily those who are ready to lead once they arrive…At bottom, becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself.

This statement elucidated a profound contrast that I’ve sensed for some time but haven’t had the context to adequately describe. The contrast has to do with three central figures in our political life as a nation: George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. All three have risen to prominence, but only one has traveled down the path of self-discovery necessary for true leadership.

Last September, President Bush addressed the nation on the occupation of Iraq. Of the speech, Andrew Sullivan wrote:

He seemed almost broken to me. His voice raspy, his eyes watery, his affect exhausted, his facial expression almost bewildered. I thought I would feel angry; but I found myself verging toward pity. The case was so weak, the argument so thin, the evidence for optimism so obviously strained that one wondered whom he thought he was persuading.

Indeed, the presidency appears not to have agreed with George W. Bush’s constitution. It has aged him terribly. He has coped with its pressures and oversimplified its complexities by being by turns high-handed, doctrinaire, bellicose, delusional, and intransigent. He has employed political tactics that denigrate and deem traitorous any political opposition. Would you expect such behavior from someone who has dedicated any portion of his life to self-discovery? How about from someone prepared — in any sense of the word — to lead the free world?

In Bush on the Couch, noted psychiatrist Justin A. Frank set out to explain the disastrous presidency of George W. Bush through applied psychoanalysis. From Bush’s earliest life experiences, Frank paints the pitiable image of a man whose inability to manage anxiety has lead to a lifetime of unfulfilled intellectual and emotional promise. That Bush made Iraq so central to his presidency while failing to plan for the occupation is no surprise when viewed in the context of his failings as a human being.

Nobody I know of has done an applied psychoanalysis of Senator Clinton, but I wonder how many parallels we would find between her story and Bush’s in such a text. The ferocity with which she clings to denial in the face of defeat is good evidence that Clinton is just as divorced from reality as the man she once hoped to succeed in the the presidency.

Contrast these two figures with Barack Obama who expresses himself beautifully for the sake of lifting those around him. Obama admits his imperfections and youthful indiscretions freely. He is not a saint, he is merely a great leader — or at least a young leader so far along in his self-making that he needs only a great opportunity in order to become a great leader. His rise represents the rare confluence of leadership, political acumen, and times that demand both. I will remember his victory today as long as I live.

If reading Bennis has taught me anything, it is that leadership is the pinnacle of self-actualization. It requires a lifelong dedication to learning and self-discovery. It requires intellectual curiosity precise enough to ask the right questions at the right times and the emotional and intellectual fortitude to make good use of the answers.

In these trying times, our nation and our world deserve nothing less.

Will Twinkies and TV Bring Down America the Way Bread and Circuses Brought Down Rome?

Americans today have a better standard of living than any other group of people at any time in history. Thanks to venture capital and innovation, we have such comforts as air conditioning, pillow-top mattresses, birth control pills and iPods. When we have a headache, we take an over-the-counter non-steroidal anti-inflammatory. If we sneeze from pollen or mold, an anti-histamine does the trick.

When our ancestors were hungry, they ate roots and berries. Today, we consume sugary, packaged snacks. And when we crave entertainment we watch television rather than picking up a book. As Theodore Roosevelt once feared, we have become “over-civilized.” We care more for our comforts than sacrifice. We care more for empty images flickering on a screen than we do for discourse.

That’s the claim at the center of Al Gore’s new book The Assault on Reason. I’ll confess that I’m barely into it, but already I think it’s going to be a read on par with Andrew Sullivan’s The Conservative Soul.

One of the most striking aspects of Gore’s book so far is the way he uses neuroscience to explain what is happening to our country, particularly with regard to the amount of television we watch:

The parts of the human brain that are central to the reasoning process are continually activated by the very act of reading printed words…Television, by contrast, presents to its viewers a much more fully formed representation of reality — without requiring the creative collaboration that words have always demanded…

Neil Postman, said, “Every technology has a philosophy which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in what it makes us to with our bodies, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplified, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards. This idea is the sum and substance of what the great Catholic prophet Marshall McLuhan meant when he coined the famous sentence ‘The medium is the message…’ “

When a new technology emerges as the primary medium for the sharing of information — like the printing press in the fifteenth century or television in the twentieth century — those who adapt to the new technology have to literally change the way they process information. As a result, their brains may actually undergo subtle change. When millions of people experience the same changes simultaneously in the course of a few decades, their interactions with on another begin to take new forms.

An individual who spends four and a half hours a day watching television is likely to have a very different pattern of brain activity from an individual who spends four and a half hours a day reading. Different parts of the brain are stimulated repetitively.

When you consider that the average American spends about 30 hours a week watching television — almost a full work week — you start to realize why we could have elected such a dullard as president. A nation that cannot reason cannot elect a sensible leader. A nation that cannot reason cannot develop any kind of real discourse about national decisions.

A nation that is too anesthetized by television and twinkies to reason at all can do nothing to save itself from ruin. I fear that America has reached that precipice. I hope that I’m wrong.

Andy has a different perspective, which I hope he will share with us in the comments. I promise you, it’s far more uplifting than mine.

The Self-Evaluation Meme: Embracing Uncertainty

I’ve decided that I’d like to start an introspection meme and see how far it goes. So I’m posting about a personality trait of mine that can be both a weakness and a strength, depending on the situation…

I’m not terribly good with ambivalence, uncertainty or living in the grey. I usually want to commit to one extreme or the other in a hurry. Before I rest, I want to answer the question, finish the project, or complete whatever else I’m doing.

This tenacity can be an attribute during a tough climb, or when I’m dealing with a demanding project at work. But it can also create tough issues for long term personal stuff. I always want to figure it out and get on with it, but life is so often in the process and not in the conclusion. Accepting where I am, what I know and do not know and the uncertainty of the future is one of the hardest life skills for me.

If you’ve been doing some honest self-evaluation recently and you’d like to share, please trackback to this post or leave a comment here with a link to your blog post. Or you can just leave a comment.

Study: Some Gays and Lesbians Can Change Orientation, but it’s Rare

The study most frequently cited by organizations that purport to be able to change a person’s sexual orientation from homosexual to heterosexual was published by Dr. Robert Spitzer. Unfortunately, right wing groups with an anti-gay agenda have radically warped the findings of the study.

Here is Dr. Spitzer, explaining his findings:

I would imagine that it would be possible for some people to change their sexual orientation. But I can also imagine that for the vast majority of us, it’s not a choice. Ex-gay programs — like the ones that Focus on the Family advocates based on its misinterpretation of Dr. Spitzer’s study — are extremely harmful to the latter group.

Depression and Mass Murder: What Can We Do?

I must admit to a certain fascination with Seung Cho. I know it’s not entirely useful to be an armchair forensic psychologist. I should be using this space to agitate for a return to the days of mental hospitals and involuntary commitments, as I did earlier this week. I would probably be making more of a contribution to the well-being of the world if I did that.

That said, I do spend a lot of time thinking about this guy. I think part of it is because I understand him. I’ve dealt with depression and suicidal rage before. I’ve experienced what it feels like to be profoundly alienated, on the outside looking in on all the shiny, happy people having fun.

One of the most destructive features of depression is the stubbornness it gives you. There are days when you know you should get out of bed, but you stubbornly refuse to obey the better angels of your nature. You know that it’s probably a good idea to go outside and run around. You know that the endorphins will make you feel better. You know that picking up the phone when a friend calls is the healthiest thing to do. But depression gives you immense strength to resist the kindness of the world and focus instead on its injustices. It gives you immense strength to do the unhealthiest thing possible.

This feature seems to be a unique asset if your goal is to kill a whole lot of people. As Newsweek’s Mary Carmichael writes:

Once a person has decided to commit mass murder, he’s extremely unlikely to admit to being depressed or to seek psychological help, and he may also cut off many relationships with friends who might encourage him to do so. In other words, the people who need counseling the most are those who will try hardest to avoid it.

As it turns out, there was a time when Seung Cho responded to the efforts of his classmates to include him:

At Virginia Tech, some of his classmates tried to include him. His suitemates took him to a frat party, and he indulged in drinking games, downing vodka and Kool-Aid and playing beer pong. He was adept, if a bit joyless, at lobbing Ping-Pong balls into cups of beer. “Down to the last shot, he made it, without any expression in his face,” one of his suitemates, Andy Koch, tells NEWSWEEK.

But depression has a funny way of pushing those memories from your mind. It’s so easy to focus only on the times when you have been scorned, rather than on the times when people reached out. It’s so easy to remain joyless even when those in your life want you to share in their joy. And when you’re trying to craft your self-narrative, to explain how you became the joyless human being you are. It’s very easy to remember only the sad, joyless times.

Sometimes that joylessness becomes so intense that the mind tries to make sense of the experience. Unconsciously, it can be easy to assume that there has to be a specific reason why everything feels so much harder for you than it does for everyone else. It’s possible that Seung Cho truly was sexually abused as a child, as so many have come to believe due to the nature of his written work. But it’s equally likely that those themes of incest and abuse in his writing were generated by his mind’s attempt to make sense of its own pain. Sometimes it’s not enough to just be desperately sad and lonely. You need a reason.

Depression doesn’t turn everyone who suffers from it into a mass murderer. But all of the mass murderers studied by forensic psychologists were reacting to some kind of perceived injustice. Depression is extremely efficient at generating that perception. It’s also great at reinforcing it by encouraging those who struggle with it to shut out the world. And while mass murderers may not fit a specific profile, almost all of them have some common threads that relate back to depression.

According to Newsweek:

They are not, on the whole, psychopaths, although they are often identified in the media as such. “A psychopath is someone with little conscience, little interpersonal bonding, someone who’s smooth and manipulative,” says Schlesinger. “That personality has nothing, zero, to do with mass murder.”

Indeed, the personality type most often associated with mass murder is in some ways the opposite of a psychopath. He is far from cool-headed; instead, he is aggrieved, hurt, and above all paranoid. Some mass murderers may be trying to exercise power over a world that they feel has left them powerless. “These people often feel some great injustice has been done to them. They’re angry and they want to take it out on the world,” says Schlesinger. “Then they develop the idea that committing murder will be the solution to whatever their problem is, and they fixate on it. Eventually they come to feel that there’s no other solution.”

The problems that the murderers, however horribly, are trying to “solve” can be almost anything—the loss of a job, a financial setback, or a bad breakup (several of Cho’s classmates have told reporters that he was looking for his girlfriend). But these relatively minor setbacks are merely the events that push the killers over the edge; they don’t put them near the edge in the first place. They are usually the last in a long string of perceived insults and hardships. “You don’t just get a D on your report card and then open fire on 30 people,” says Levin. “It takes a prolonged series of frustrations. These people are chronically depressed and miserable.”

So it would seem that if we want to stop to stomp out this “depressingly American” trend of gun-fueled mass murder, we need to get much, much better at recognizing and treating depression. Unfortunately, government can’t be relied upon to do this in any kind of reliable way. Other than reversing course on community mental health, there’s very little that can be done in the political sphere.

What do you guys think? What more can we do?

Back to Bedlam: Jonathan Kellerman, Community Mental Health and the Virginia Tech Massacre

It’s human nature to try to explain the inexplicable. When we are hit with a shocking tragedy, the community tries to make sense of it. So now we find ourselves struggling to understand what turned a seething young outcast into a mass murderer.

It’s easy to get lost in the “why?” Andy and I have spent a lot of time over the past week retracing the killer’s steps, writing our own profile of his last hours. We want to understand what set him off just as much as anyone. But the reality is that we will never fully understand.

But as we overcome our shock and devastation, we must move on from asking unanswerable questions. As a society, we must turn our attention to how we can prevent the next Virginia Tech.

This is the subject of Jonathan Kellerman’s excellent editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal. The piece explains the “liberationist” sentiment of the early 1970’s and walks us through the shutdown of our national system of mental institutions in favor of ineffectual community mental health centers.

He argues that if an infrastructure for mental health-based incarceration had remained in place, Seung Cho would have been involuntarily committed for the long-term in the fall of 2005 when he became suicidal after two separate women rejected his romantic advances as stalking. At the very least, he might have been placed on a list that would have made it impossible for him to buy a gun legally.

Writes Kellerman:

No one who knew him seems surprised by what he did. On the contrary, dorm chatter characterized him explicitly as a future school-shooter. One of his professors, the poet Nikki Giovanni, saw him as a disruptive bully and kicked him out of her class. Other teachers viewed him as disturbed and referred him for the ubiquitous “counseling” — an outcome that is ambiguous to the point of meaninglessness and akin to “treatment” for a patient with metastasized cancer.

But even that minimal care wasn’t given. The shooter didn’t want it and no one tried to force him to get it. While it’s been reported that he was involuntarily committed to a “Behavioral Health Center” in December 2005, those reports also say he was released the very next morning. Even if the will to segregate an obvious menace had been in place, the legal mechanisms to provide even temporary “warehousing” were absent. The rest is terrible history.

That is not to say that anyone who pens violence-laden poetry or lets slip the occasional hostile remark should be protectively incarcerated. But when the level of threat rises to college freshmen and faculty prophesying accurately, perhaps we should err on the side of public safety rather than protect individual liberty at all costs.

If the Virginia Tech shooter had been locked up for careful observation in a humane mental hospital, the worst-case scenario would’ve been a minor league civil liberties goof: an unpleasant semester break for an odd and hostile young misanthrope who might’ve even have learned to be more polite. Yes, it’s possible confinement would’ve been futile or even stoked his rage. But a third outcome is also possible: Simply getting a patient through a crisis point can prevent disaster, as happens with suicidal people restrained from self-destruction who lose their enthusiasm for repeat performances.

At the very least, in a better world, time spent on psychiatric watch could’ve been used to justify placing the Virginia killer on a no-buy gun list. I’m not naïve enough to believe that illegal firearms aren’t within reach for anyone who really wants them, but just as loud dogs deter burglars and crime rates drop during harsh weather, sometimes making life difficult for a would-be criminal is enough.

So as we overcome our national grief and dry our eyes, how do we use the momentum of this senseless tragedy to move forward nationally? After reading Kellerman’s article, I think we have a mandate to re-start our national mental health care system. Community mental health care and voluntary outpatient treatment don’t help everyone. And when we combine permanent, residential mental health facilities with the profound advances we’ve made in psychopharmacology since the 1970’s, perhaps we can do better to effectively treat our nation’s mentally ill.

This is not about being a tax-and-spend, bleeding heart liberal. Kellerman is right when he says that some people are just plain dangerous to themselves and others. For the sake of the next Seung Cho and the many people whose lives he will eventually snuff out, I hope that we are able to transform the national grief into action.

Birds Speaking a Foreign Language

The Associated Press reports that nuthatches can understand the language spoken by chickadees.

Apparently, chickadees use the number of “dee”s after their “chicka” to communicate that they have encountered a predator and to give other birds in the vicinity information about what kind of predator they have observed. When chickadee calls were played to trees full of nuthatches, the nuthatches reacted the same way that chickadees did.

It’s almost crazy enough to be an April Fool prank, but I already did one of those today.

The Difference Between Negativity and Critical Thinking

There’s been a lot of talk in the blogosphere recently about the possibility that we’re all just a bunch of complainers. They say that blogworld is an overwhelmingly negative place. We ought to try to be more optimistic and less cynical, they say. I couldn’t disagree more.

Does this highly democratic medium lend itself to unfettered self-expression? Absolutely. Is unfettered self-expression sometimes less than perky? Most definitely. Is it realistic? On the whole, yes.

Here’s a factoid for you. People diagnosed with clinical depression tend to correctly estimate the amount of control they have over external situations, while people who are not depressed tend to overestimate their level of control over those same situations. In other words, our society calls realism unhealthy while holding up delusional positive thinking as a model of health and functionality. How sane is that?

Now, there’s nothing wrong with enthusiasm, optimism, passion or any of the thousands of other things that make a blog truly readable–and life truly livable–day after day. But there’s also nothing wrong with thinking critically and being skeptical about the world. There’s nothing wrong with seeing hypocrisy in a public figure and pointing it out. If we don’t acknowledge problems, what hope have we of solving them to any real degree?

This mush about negativity is the same complaint that we used to hear about the mainstream media. “Doom and gloom sells newspapers,” they said, “so the media paints an inaccurately grim picture of our world.” But if that were true, then bloggers–who do not have the same economic compulsion to fixate on the distasteful–would not be as “negative” as the media.

We write about what we see. And what we see troubles us. After all, we’ve had an incompetent president and a do-nothing Congress for the past six years. North Korea has the bomb and Iran is pursuing it. Microsoft is releasing a new version of Office that is incompatible with previous versions. There is a genocide going on in the Sudan. Dell has bad customer support. Let me see you put a positive spin on any of that and still do right by your readers.

That’s not to say that the world is all doom and gloom. There’s beauty and joy to leaven the complexity and bitterness of this life. But we need to take off the rose-colored glasses and press on. Knowing where things really stand inspires us to work for a better future. A healthy dose of skepticism and self-doubt enhances our efforts because we don’t automatically assume that everything will go as we plan. We must remain skeptical of solutions–be they political, spiritual, social or economic–that seem too good to be true. It’s called critical thinking, and it’s time that we started using it again.

1954 Popular Mechanics Article Perfectly Illustrates “Presentism” in Human Predictions about the Future

UPDATE: Robert was kind enough to point out to me that this image was a hoax. “It’s actually a picture of a submarine control booth and didn’t run in Popular Mechanics.,” he writes. Apparently, it’s also been making the rounds for about four years now. Well, I guess the joke’s on me today…

The caption read, “Scientists from the RAND Corporation have created this model to illustrate how a “home computer” could look in the year 2004. However the needed technology will not be economically feasible for the average home. Also the scientists readily admit that the computer will require not yet invented technology to actually work, but 50 year from now scientific progress is expected to solve these problems. With teletype interface and the Fortan language, the computer will be easy to use.”

I’m reading a terrific book right now called Stumbling on Happiness. No, it’s not a self-help text, even though its title sounds like one. It’s a book about the science behind why humans are so inept at predicting what will actually make us happy in the future. He spends much of the book explaining the different mechanisms by which the brain takes sensation and turns it into perception, and how those mechanisms do a special “filling in” trick based on information it has about how things exist at present. Thus, when we imagine the future, it looks an awful lot like the present.

It seems like a lot of that “presentism” stuff was happening in 1954.

What A Life Without Religious Certainty Means to Me

This past Thanksgiving, I was sitting around the dinner table with the Christian side of my family before the meal. My cousin offered up a prayer to Jesus for grace. As we were all tucking in to the delicious food, my brother asked, “what does Jesus have to do with Thanksgiving?”

Surprisingly enough, I had an answer. “Jesus,” I said, “was unbelievably charismatic. He was so charismatic that some people believe he was God in the flesh. He had extraordinary power over people. He could have used that power for anything: money, women, fame, conquest. But he used it to tell people to love one another and be kind to one another. That’s something everyone can be thankful for, Christian or not.”

My uncle looked up at me and said, “maybe there’s hope for your heathen soul after all.” And we all laughed.

I wasn’t being cute when I answered my brother’s question. I really do appreciate the words of Jesus. Even if I didn’t appreciate them, I would have had to come to terms with them at some point. It seems like they’re being used everywhere these days, sometimes to justify things that he arguably would have found abhorrent.

I recently finished Lauren Sandler’s Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement. One of the central arguments of the book is that fundamentalists crave the certainty that comes when you get all your answers about life from an external, predetermined source. In the final chapter of her book, she makes an impassioned plea for non-fundamentalists everywhere to share why not being a fundamentalist lends meaning and purpose to their lives, in order to offer an alternative to the safe confines of religious certainty.

This also happens to be a central argument to Andrew Sullivan’s fabulous The Conservative Soul. Sullivan explains that conservatism is comfortable with uncertainty. A conservative should be able to rely on the muddled compass that is his conscience because he has no better tool to determine the correct course of action. He is not comfortable with giving his life over to an externally imposed set of acceptable morals and behaviors because he knows that his own ability to perceive the truth or falsity of any of these diktats is inhibited by his humanity.

This is what a life without religious certainty means to me. It leaves me free to change my mind about things. It is what allowed me to drift along the political spectrum from knee-jerk liberal to thoughtful moderate. It is what allows me to be comfortable with who I am, instead of trying to conform to a set of rules that don’t work for me. It allows me to grow from experience. Sure, it’s scary to not have all the answers. But no matter how certain you think you are about the truth of reality, life has a way of blindsiding you with possibilities you hadn’t ever considered. I feel that it’s better to be ready for the unexpected than to be certain of exactly what the future holds.

If you’re looking for a false sense of security and safety, then look no further than fundamentalism. But if you’re ready to embrace the world in all of its mysterious elegant frustrating complexity, then start questioning everything you read. Think critically about everything you hear. Examine people’s motives for saying things, rather than just taking what they say at face value. See how far it can take you. Start with this blog post.

Maybe He’s Just Ronery

Team America, World Police is one of my favorite movies ever. The reason, that song Kim Jong-il sings where he talks about how he’s really just “ronery.”

Sometimes, I think there’s more to that analysis than just some silly puppet humor. It’s possible that he doesn’t really have much in the way of real companionship. Maybe he drives people away from him. Psychologically, I’ll bet his life isn’t too pleasant most of the time. Maybe that’s why he acts out.

Now, I’m not making excuses for the guy. There’s absolutely no way to do that. Pursuing nukes is stupid, dangerous and a threat to everyone. But seeking an explanation for Kim’s behavior helps us to understand, and diffuse this situation without nuclear conflict.

Of course, we’re not even really sure that the weapon he set off was a nuclear weapon. It was less than a kiloton, so it could have been just a few hundred thousand sticks of dynamite. Knowing Kim, he might pretend he had a successful nuke, even when he didn’t. It would be a way of getting some attention. Maybe it would make him a little less “ronery.”

An iPod full of Aussies

What is it about Australians? American women go absolutely nuts for ‘em. My cousin sure likes those Aussie blokes. Meanwhile, it seems that they have the best radio programs in the world. I am seriously addicted to the The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s specialist journalism and arts network, ABC Radio National because of their awesome podcasts (iTunes).

My favorite so far is All in the Mind (iTunes), a podcast that tackles a different topic in psychology each week. I feel like it keeps me on top of developments in my major in an accessible and fun way.

In other pod-related news, I dropped my iPod mini one too many times yesterday while at the gym and it finally broke. It’s been a good three years with that little blue sucker. But it’s no use crying over spilt iPods, so yesterday I went out and got myself a cute little iPod Nano. I opted for white, since I got my fiancé the black model for Christmas/Chanukah this year and I don’t want us mixing up our iPods. It would be no good if he got all my Christina Aguilera music while I was stuck listening to Metallica. Not that I don’t love Metallica, but I can only take so much of screaming and yelling.

Why Condi Beats Hillary Any Given November

It’s become clear over the past month or so that Hillary Clinton is intent on being our nation’s first female president. She’s got the fundraising apparatus in place to build up quite a war chest between now and the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries, and she has no opponent to speak of for her 2006 re-election bid to the Senate.

I’ve argued before that Senator Clinton (though I adore her) is not electable. It is my guess that over half of the men in America feel castrated by her. And shameful as it is that they would feel that way, no man is going to vote for anyone that comes between him and his penis, best person for the job or not. I certainly hope that she’ll have enough money to spend the next two years reconstituting that image, but I doubt that she’ll be able to undo the distinctly unfavorable impression that many Americans have of her.

Enter Condoleeza Rice. When she’s not busy being Secretary of State, Condi plays chamber music and does fashion spreads in Vogue. She’s no tittering cheerleader, but she’s managed to maintain a non-threatening, chaste and yet absolutely feminine image.

All this leads me to believe that if it appears Hillary will gain the Democratic nomination, the Republicans will nominate Condi - and win. From a political standpoint, Rice is clearly the superior candidate.

But does she intend to run? So far she’s steadfastly denied any presidential ambitions. But this most recent New York Times article about her passion for chamber music gives a few hints to the contrary. For one, Rice has been intensely protective of her musical extracurriculars…until now. What would prompt such a fiercely private woman to open her musical kimono, let alone to such an obviously liberal newspaper?

Perhaps while Hillary announces her already disdain-provoking ambition to the world by raising money left and right, Condi is putting the horse before the cart. The chamber music article is only one in a series of publications that cement her status as the brilliant, erudite, cultured and non-threatening black woman next door. In other words, a perfect presidential candidate.

And then there’s sex - which shouldn’t really play into an election but usually does in one form or another. Condi has no sex life that we know of, which in the eye of the American public means that she has no sex life at all. She’s much too busy modeling gowns, going on diplomatic missions and playing her Chickering grand piano to even think about sex - which is still what this country thinks any single woman ought to be like.

Meanwhile, Hillary is married to a man whose sexual charisma is so thick that many women I know downloaded the audio version of his autobiography just to hear him talk. He is also arguably the world’s most famous philanderer, which unfortunately raises all sorts of questions in people’s minds. Do they really love each other, or is it just a marriage of political convenience? Was it her frigidity that made then-President Clinton so susceptible to intern Lewinsky’s charms? Is she too ambitious for him to find her attractive anymore? And on. And on.

When it comes to women and sex and politics in this country, the candidate whose sex life raises fewer eyebrows wins every time. Add unseemly ambition, some unsavory removal of White House furniture near the end of her husband’s term and a general sense of bitchiness to the mix and you get the picture: Hillary has a major image problem. Condi doesn’t.

And in a country where a president can be mistrusted and reviled and still re-elected based solely on his image as a down-home man’s man, you can bet a woman like Hillary will never stand a chance.

Thoughts on Marrying Young

Many people assume from my relative maturity level and the engagement ring on my finger that I’m in my mid to late twenties. When I tell them I’m 22, some people are a little shocked. I’ve been told by family members and strangers alike that I’m awfully young to be getting married.

Guess what? I know. I know that at 22, I still have many things to figure out. I know that people who marry right out of college are likely to get divorced. And I know that being from a divorced family myself greatly increases the odds that my marriage won’t work out. But I’m getting married anyway - for a lot of reasons.

The qualities that I value in Andy aren’t the kind that will fade with time. My favorite thing about him is that he’s a good communicator. Sure we’re attracted to one another, but the friendship, support, kindness, and compassion that we share - even from 3,000 miles away - is much more important to both of us. Perhaps most importantly of all, I trust him because he’s simply the most honest, decent person I’ve ever met and the best friend I’ve ever had.

I was reading a piece in Elle last night about Ayelet Waldman, the woman who famously wrote in The New York Times that she loved her husband more than she loved their four children. When I grow up, I want to be just like her. I want to have that passionate marriage that she shares with her husband - novelist Michael Chabon. I want to have that partnership, that gender-neutrality, and that sense of fun that pervades their lives - even as they work hard and chauffeur their kids hither and yon.

I can see myself having that kind of marriage with Andy. That’s why I will make the biggest promise of my life while I still have more zits than wrinkles and more hopes and guesses than experiences and disappointments.

After all, I want to share the latter with the best friend I’ve ever had.

Diagnosing the Devil

Former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s trial began today in Baghdad’s highly guarded Green Zone. In this article, the New York Times described the trial’s most infamous defendant as, “a shadow, physically, of the merciless figure he cut in nearly a quarter of a century as Iraq’s dictator.”

From a psychological standpoint, I found several aspects of Hussein’s courtroom behavior to be very interesting. Here are the big hits, as recounted by the Times:

• Scrawny, tieless, and in a store-bought suit provided by his American captors, he dominated the hearing with a display of defiance, saying he would not recognize the Iraqi court’s authority because it was a pawn of the American occupation, “and all things that are based on a falsehood are false.”

• Hussein, ever a showman in his years of power, made much of little with his performance in the court. He arrived carrying a green-backed Koran that he clasped on his knees, a powerful message in a country wracked by a war in which Islamic militants with Al Qaeda links have become the American troops’ most deadly enemies, and allies of bitter-end Baathists.

  He began with the Muslim holy book’s most sacred words, “In the name of God, the most gracious, the most merciful,” then moved into a verse about triumph in adversity that he had learned by heart, perhaps during the months of solitary confinement when, American officials have said, the Koran has been his constant reading:

  “Men said to them, ‘A great army is gathering against you,’ and frightened them. But it only increased their faith. And they said, ‘For us, Allah sufficeth, and He is the best disposer of affairs.’ ”
  Read more

  Written by Teresa Valdez Klein · Filed Under Current Affairs, Psychology 

  Starvation and Schizophrenia?

  October 14, 2005

  According to a brief in November’s Elle Health Newsletter, babies who were in utero during the Dutch Hunger Winter of 1944 were twice as likely as the general Dutch population to develop schizophrenia later in life. And apparently the trend isn’t unique to Holland. A group of Chinese, American and British researchers recently confirmed that babies born during the Chinese famine of 1959 to 1961 were also twice as likely to develop the disorder - which is broadly characterized by inappropriate affect, disorganized thinking and delusions.

  Possible explanations range from the obvious - “the extreme stress suffered by pregnant women due to famine (not to mention war) could affect a child in utero” to the ethological - “the genes that cause schizophrenia may offer increased chances of survical during famine…more immunity against infection, physical abilities that could protect [carriers] from predators, or, more likely, a fertility boost.”

  I’m going to reserve judgment on the claim that schizophrenia genes could offer an evolutionary advantage until I have a chance to research the subject a little more. But I do find it hard to swallow that a gene associated with such a debilitating condition could be at all helpful. Besides, if carrying some of the genes for schizophrenia made an individual more likely to survive a famine, wouldn’t you expect to see a higher instance of the disease in people concieved and born after the famine period as well?

  * More information on schizophrenia.
  * An interesting example of schizophrenic behavior (via Wactivist.com).

  The topic of this post was gleaned from Elle Magazine.

  Written by Teresa Valdez Klein · Filed Under Psychology, Science