“Grief is the agony of an instant, the indulgence of grief the blunder of a life.”

Thus spake Disraeli, British Prime Minister under Queen Victoria and apparently a prophet of modern ennui. The New York Times ran a story recently about proposed revisions to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, invariably described as “the bible of mental health treatment,” which wants to include grief – good, old, normal bereavement — as a new category of depression in the next edition of the book. This has sneaky implications: The DSM is the go-to reference for psychiatrists and, more critically, health insurers, who follow its recommendations when deciding to cover — or not cover – treatment for what ails ya.

In other words, if your complaint has a name and a diagnostic number in the DSM, someone’s more likely to pay for your pills. Adding a “disorder” like grief to the mix widens the margin for mistaken diagnoses and will benefit Big Pharma more than anyone else. “Current efforts to revise the manual,” says the Times, “are shaping up as the most contentious ever.”

Of course grief – acute sorrow from the death of a loved one – has been medicated forever, usually with alcohol, and in some cases, obviously, it can persist indefinitely and morph into mental illness. But up till now, taken alone, grief has been excluded from the DSM as a marketable ailment. It’s one of a host of conditions, ranging from shyness to schizophrenia, that by their absence make depression apparent in a given case. Other possibilities need to be excluded before they hand out the Prozac.

Currently, the DSM requires that patients exhibit at least five symptoms of major depression before a correct diagnosis can be made – trouble sleeping, feelings of worthlessness, “suicidal ideation,” etc. These must persist for at least two weeks and not be caused by external factors. A depressed grief-stricken person, you’d think, would present symptoms above and beyond, or anyway different from … well, grief.

But no: Under the new rules, if your husband dies suddenly and you’re still weeping about it two weeks later, you can put away the sherry and head to the pharmacy for relief.

In fairness to the industry, a lot of psychiatrists are frowning on this. “There is the potential for considerable false-positive diagnoses and unnecessary treatment of grief-stricken persons,” the Times reports, words that would cheer the heart if the experts weren’t so concerned with externals: “Drugs for depression can have side effects, including low sex drive” (as if that were the best reason for avoiding them!). Americans are already the most medicated people on earth – the pathologizing of “negative emotion” has hit epidemic levels in this country.

Take “attenuated psychosis syndrome” (A.P.S.), my current favorite for inclusion in the revised DSM. This is a label to be stuck on people – mainly young people – “who experience delusional thinking and hallucinations and sometimes say things that do not make sense.” As a predictor of insanity it’s almost useless, however, since “seventy percent to 80 percent of young people who report these strange experiences do not ever qualify for a full-blown diagnosis” of psychosis or schizophrenia, per the Times’ report.

The key word here is attenuated — as in, “We’re stretching all this a bit thin.” It’s like “generalized anxiety disorder” (G.A.D.), a fair description of the human condition and the diagnosis you’re likely to get if you turn up in a therapist’s office for anything from fidgets to a busted romance. The purpose of the label is to pay for the treatment. Ditto with “binge eating disorder” (B.E.D.), “premenstrual dysphoric disorder” (P.D.D.), “intermittent explosive disorder” (I.E.D.) or “pervasive developmental disorder — not otherwise specified” (P.D.D.-N.O.S.) – a label I’m jonesing to get for myself, since it contains the seed of all possible explanations. (“See him? He’s got P.D.D.-N.O.S. Such a waste!”)

“The world has changed,” says Dr. James H. Scully, Jr., chief executive of the American Psychiatric Association, whose job it is to approve final revisions to the DSM. “We’ve got electronic media around the clock, and we’ve made drafts of the proposed changes public online, for one thing. So anybody and everybody can comment on them, at any time, without any editors.”

That sounds right – very democratic. Meantime millions of children are medicated for “attention-deficit disorder” – a twenty-fold increase in prescriptions in just thirty years, says the Times – despite the fact that “no study has found any long-term benefit of attention-deficit medication on academic performance, peer relationships or behavior problems,” the very things it’s meant to improve.

Did you know that? Treatment for A.D.D. is basically a band-aid. It seems that amphetamines work equally well – in fact, identically — on children without A.D.D., Ritalin, Adderall and other drugs being designed to improve and make bearable the performance of “boring, repetitive tasks.” Their social utility is paramount, far more important than the subtle needs of any one kid. And the message from the experts is perfectly clear: Snap out of it! There is to be no trouble in any of our lives! Dope ‘em up, move ‘em out!

I wrote on this same theme 20 years ago, reviewing Dr. Peter Kramer’s landmark Listening to Prozac for “The New York Observer.” Text below.

*

LISTENING TO PROZAC (New York Observer, June 1993)

Does anyone remember that old “Twilight Zone” episode where the citizens of some future society are all required to look and sound alike? On reaching adulthood, everyone is given a choice of body type A or B, blond or brunette, amounting in either case to a blandly attractive, surgically perfected, absolute sameness of appearance? The plot revolved around a couple of misfits, who thought they might be happier being drab and maladjusted than flawless and not themselves.  But in the end they changed their minds, or were made to change their minds, and in those virtuous days of the 1960s, when Rod Serling was alive and the psychologists hadn’t done much more than IQ us into corners, loss of individuality was regarded as a tragedy, pure and simple.  We were against it, the way we were against Communism, atheism and fluoride in the water.

But not anymore, or not on the evidence of the books that keep pouring out of the psychotherapy industry.  The harder we’re urged these days to follow our bliss and run with the wolves the more determined are the experts, in their oily little hearts, that we stay on the straight and narrow.  No real eccentricity is permitted in the fix-it-all culture; no quirk of character or twist of sentiment is allowed to exist without reference to “pain,” “abuse” and the duty of our citizens to “grow” at all costs.  Growth for the sake of growth is the primary feature of a cancer cell, but never mind.  You are not OK the way you are, and if you don’t believe me, pick up a copy of Listening to Prozac, Dr. Peter Kramer’s riveting account of the history and future of anti-depressant drugs in America.  If and when your brain manages to absorb the dispiriting message of Dr. Kramer’s book, you might recommend it to your friends.  If, on the other hand, your hair stands up from now till Christmas, take heart:  there’s a pill out there with your name on it.

Before I make it entirely clear how disturbed I am about the imminent triumph of chemistry and psychiatry over self-awareness, depth of feeling, creativity, spirituality, subtlety, humility, discernment, intuition, experience, significance and the dignity  of the human race, I ought to say a few kind words about Dr. Kramer and his book.  I mean them sincerely.  Listening to Prozac is a fascinating, well crafted, sometimes ironic and possibly momentous contribution to our understanding of personality and the future of psychopharmacology (a fancy word for drugging the population when it gets upset).  Dr. Kramer is smart as hell, and he writes awfully well for someone named Dr. Kramer.  I have to admit, too, that I prefer the sound of an M.D.’s voice to the earnest kazooing of the psychobabblers.  Listening to Prozac is filled with “aggressive fathers” and “passive mothers,” and there’s a whole chapter devoted to formes frustes, or “low self-esteem.”  But deep down, I think, Dr. Kramer isn’t sold on the lingo.  He calls it “insulting,” and he’s right:  it is.

It’s also next to meaningless.  Pick a problem (any problem) and call it what you want.  Adult children of alcoholics, outer-directed husbands’ love-addicted wives, frenzied sisters’ younger brothers — all of them, nowadays, suffer from what Dr. Kramer describes as a “chronic condition:  heightened awareness of the needs of others, sensitivity to conflict, residual damage to self-esteem.”  Come at this from another angle and you’ve got “co-dependency.”  Fifteen years ago you had Erroneous Zones and the When-I-Say-No-I-Feel-Guilty crowd.

These rock-ordinary human attributes have been with us since the dawn of time; they are “odd indications for medication,” Dr. Kramer thinks, but I don’t.  I honestly believe we’ve been so badly damaged by a parade of shifting, pseudo-caring labels that the only cure for what ails us would be an anti-depressant, the psychologists showing no sign of pulling up stakes anytime soon and moving on, say, to poetry.  Prozac, as everyone knows, popped out of the labs in the late 1980s, and, following some trendy analysis in the newsmagazines (and on Oprah, Geraldo, “60 Minutes,” and so on), it emerged as the fanciest thing on the therapeutic circuit, the equalizing, all-embracing, all-fulfilling drug of choice for the occasionally-to-somewhat-bothered-by-lifers.

Please don’t think I’m being flippant when I say that.  Listening to Prozac isn’t concerned with the treatment of insanity or even of mental illness (where drugs to stabilize the mind and emotions obviously play a needed and charitable role).  Dr. Kramer is a practicing psychiatrist who was moved to examine the “moral” and “ethical” implications of Prozac when he observed its transforming effect, not on schizophrenics or the severely disturbed, but on the most insipidly unhappy people:  the discontented, the oversensitive, the sullen and the dull. Traits of character, the doctor says — but your grandmother knew this already — are ingrained in our nervous systems and genetic codes.  Our weaknesses and vulnerabilities have a life of their own, regardless of their “childhood” origin.  At first “psychological,” they become biological, “autonomous,” chemically rooted and malleable; Prozac wipes them out in a “substantial minority” of cases.  It actually “fixes” the personality, rendering the shy outgoing, the angry calm, the lonely and tongue-tied convivial and (by the sound of it) hot to trot.

Deadbeats, on Prozac, are “socially attractive” for the first time in their lives.  Shirkers at work become positively Japanese in their eagerness to produce.  Wallflowers blossom, losers win.  Nobody comes home without a prize except those unlucky few who, for reasons no one has yet figured out, are driven to the brink of suicide by Prozac’s mucking around with their serotonin levels.  (There is already such a thing as a “Prozac Survivor’s Support Group.”)

Try as he might, Dr. Kramer can’t escape the feeling that something doesn’t “sit right” with self-improvement on a chemical basis.  Could it be, he wonders, that “diminishing pain can dull the soul?”  The studies he provides of “successful” cases all concern people whom society rewards in their Prozaced condition:  teenagers who’ve stopped moping, wives who’ve stopped yelling, men who’ve stopped screwing around.  Dr. Kramer wants to know if the world is ready for “cosmetic psychopharmacology” and “the medicalization of personality.”

“What are the implications,” he asks, “of a drug that makes a person better loved, richer, and less constrained — because her personality conforms better to a societal ideal?”  What sort of road are we on when medicine is used, not to cure, but to control, and simultaneously to revise the concept of illness, taking standard traits of human behavior and stripping them down into “symptoms?”  Will we go quiet into that anti-depressant night, allowing “material technology, medications, to define what is health and what is illness?”

Dr. Kramer is too sharp-witted not to realize that we are standing in the shadow of the Brave New World, but in the end, I’m afraid, he’s squarely on the side of the medicators.  Psychotherapy, too, he tells us, was once lambasted “for inducing adaptation to the dominant culture,” and “asking about the virtue of Prozac [is] like asking whether it was a good thing for Freud to have discovered the unconscious.”  There are those, of course, who think it was not.  Dr. Kramer closes his book with a tribute to Woody Allen and his New Age fantasy, Alice, where an edgy Mia Farrow pops downtown to a Chinese doctor and snorts a mixture of mysterious herbs that allows her to dump her insulting husband and put the make on strangers at the zoo.  These aren’t quite the people I’d pick to recommend a vision of the future, on or off drugs, but they keep the shrinks in business, after all.

A word of advice:  if you read the book, you’ll want the dope.  Don’t say I didn’t tell you.

Sitting Shiva: You never can tell!

Today’s New York Times has an important op-ed from Kevin M. Kruse, associate professor of history at Princeton, on the manipulation of the phrase “under God” in American politics by corporate leaders and the religious right. It sent me back to the “Crank Call” archive, where I dug up this column from 2002. Read Kruse’s “For God So Loved the 1 Percent” to see why this issue won’t go away.

“UNDER GOD”

(First published 07.03.02)

Well, score one for our side, however briefly and without a prayer of success — you’ll forgive the expression.

I refer to the “God” business — that is, the “under God” business — and the decision of the 9th U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals that the inclusion of the words “one nation, under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional, a violation of the separation of church and state.

“A profession that we are a nation `under God’ is identical, for Establishment Clause purposes, to a profession that we are a nation `under Jesus,’ a nation `under Vishnu,’ a nation `under Zeus,’ or a nation `under no god,’” said Judge Alfred T. Goodwin, speaking for the court: “None of these professions can be neutral with respect to religion.”

I’ve known this since I was old enough to crawl, and I mean that literally. The first angry letter my mother sent to a newspaper was in June 1954, when Congress, pandering to fears of Communists, flying saucers and nuclear war, caved in to President Eisenhower and the Knights of Columbus and stuck “under God” into the Pledge, smack between the nation and its indivisibility. I was less than a year old at the time, but I grew up in a house where this perfidy was not forgotten.

I suppose everyone knows by now — don’t they? — that the Pledge of Allegiance was written by a card-carrying socialist, Francis Bellamy, and that it first entered the public schools in honor of Christopher Columbus. There’s a topic best avoided! The Pledge had already been altered once, over Bellamy’s protests, before the bingo crowd got their hands on it during the McCarthy years. He never lived to see the further perversion of his work. But on June 14, 1954, President Eisenhower declared:

“From this day forward, the millions of our school children will daily proclaim in every city and town, every village and every rural school house, the dedication of our nation and our people to the Almighty.”

This sounds uncannily like our own President George W. Bush, who remarked after the California ruling last week, “America is a nation … that values our relationship with an Almighty.” So elegantly stated! Of course he forgot to add the nouns: Almighty dollar, Almighty oil, Almighty blather, etc.

“The declaration of God in the Pledge of Allegiance doesn’t violate rights,” Bush insists. “As a matter of fact, it’s a confirmation of the fact that we received our rights from God, as proclaimed in our Declaration of Independence.”

Very nice — that’s “fact” twice in one sentence. But the Declaration of Independence isn’t the U. S. Constitution, which never mentions God at all and moves from there to its first amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….” This is meant to be a two-way street: In exchange for the right to keep its own laws, no religion may impose itself statutorily on any American citizen. Get it?

No matter: The California ruling has already been suspended and hasn’t got a chance in hell of standing up on review. Congress — including Vermont’s touted “Independent” delegation — has proved 100 percent craven on this issue, blustering about “values” and squawking for a Constitutional re-write.

“Let us not wait for the Supreme Court to act on this,” says Senator John Warner (R.-Virginia).

“This decision is just nuts,” answers majority leader Tom Daschle (D.-South Dakota). They want you to be thinking in slogans and cheap patriotism, the better to keep your eyes off the Almighty corruption in their coffers and halls. On the Pledge itself, Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer sounds like Eva Perón.

“This decision will not sit well with the American people,” Fleischer says. “Certainly it does not sit well with the president of the United States.”

In fact, the president of the United States has nothing to do with this decision. It is, properly if forlornly, in judicial hands, where conservative judges will make sure it’s overturned. You’ve got nothing to worry about.

According to polls, 87 percent of Americans interviewed are in favor of keeping “under God” in the Pledge. I expect this has more to do with the way they learned it than anything else. So lousy with cowardice are the press and the pundits on this issue that Sunday’s New York Times saw fit to run a front-page story under the headline, “Court That Ruled on Pledge Often Runs Afoul of Justices.”

“The court that pronounced the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional has a reputation for being wrong,” the Times reports, “and critics say its unwieldy size is to blame.” A bit farther on we learn that “wrong” doesn’t mean “incorrect” in this case — or even, you know, wrong — just that the 9th Circuit often ends up on the losing side of its cases. Way, way down in the story, where most will never go, a California law professor is permitted to explain:

“The opinions written by conservatives on the 9th Circuit are just as likely to be overturned as opinions by liberals. When you’re dealing with hard questions, a reversal rate does not mean the court of appeals was wrong and the Supreme Court was right. It means the Supreme Court got the last word.”

Y’all remember the Supreme Court? They’re the ones that put Junior into office.

If only she’d known! Gillian Anderson as Miss Havisham in BBC1’s “Great Expectations."

With the Republican primaries now in full wallop it’s time to talk about something serious: Marriage. Specifically, its decline. A friend came by the other day in a welter of gloom, discouraged by six weeks of cohabitation and the true personality of his beloved. The details aren’t important. “Into their inmost bower, handed they went” and discovered they had very different notions of togetherness. She likes to cuddle and he wants to read.

“I’m beginning to think that living alone might be easier,” he said.

“Not just easier, better,” I answered. “Better.” I never pause in my promotion of the single life. If not celibate, I am anti-connubial, seriously non-nuptial, and it seems I’m now in the majority. A new report from the Pew Research Institute indicates a “startling” drop in the U.S. marriage rate – down 5 percent in 2010 and more than 20 percent since 1960. Similar studies in Britain reveal that only 48 percent of eligible adults in the UK are currently yoked for life.

“We don’t know why,” says Pew researcher D’Vera Cohn, whose task it was to break this news to unbelievers. “We can’t really say for sure that it’s the recession or bad economic times. There are other kinds of living arrangements that are socially acceptable now, such as living with someone without being married, living on your own, or even living as a single parent. So people may feel they have options that they didn’t used to have.”

Well, yes, they do. And in Cohn’s depiction, at least, the benefits of marriage are distinctly unromantic.

“Economically speaking, married couples tend to have more income and more wealth,” she explains. “The kind of partnership marriage encourages is one in which you plan for the future, share your assets, build wealth together. There isn’t that evidence yet for people who [just] live together. If people who aren’t married are less able to build wealth, that will affect the overall wealth of the country.”

So if you’re not getting married, I guess, you’re a slacker, a drain on the economy and a threat to GDP. At the least, probably, you aren’t buying in bulk at Costco. There are, of course, “the children” to think of, a mantra guaranteed to stop any debate in America.

“There’s research indicating that children have a higher likelihood of turning out well if they come from a household where their parents are married,” Cohn insists, before backtracking and saying that no, in fact, there isn’t: “Most children turn out well regardless of whether their parents are married or not, so I’m not at all trying to suggest that children will turn out badly if their parents aren’t married.”

What is she trying to suggest?

“There’s a somewhat higher likelihood that these children will face issues,” Cohn concludes, “and some of those may include economic hardship.”

Ah, Americans. Always trying to put a shine on shit. But if the best defense of marriage is more money in the bank we might as well go back to camels and grandmother’s linen. Historically, till the Industrial Revolution, at least, athe institution of marriage rested on the backs of chattel, women and children whose job it was, not to create wealth, but to provide services for the home enterprise, which itself was not expected to turn money but to keep everyone alive. Marriage and its contract were an exchange of labor, in olden times, divorced from profit and, for that matter, romantic love.

Now, all families are owned by banks, subject to market forces and the rules of investment. This is where the gays come in. In a brave essay for Lapham’s Quarterly (December 2011), Justin E. H. Smith argues that the drive to same-sex marriage is, au fond, a triumph of commerce and not a blow for human rights. The modern nuclear family, consisting of Mom, Pop, the kids and no one else, “with only casual or symbolic ties to friends and extended family,” is such a recent invention that some well-behaved homosexuals can hardly be a menace to it.

“In this respect,” Smith writes, “gay marriage is not a reduction to absurdity of an ancient institution, so much as it is an instance of late capitalism’s voracious absorption of everything that might otherwise stand as an obstacle to it. … The rebranding of couples as ‘partners’ is the sad culmination of the modern transformation of couples into work-love units” – i.e., it’s your job to be married, with children, and shopping till you drop. Anyone can do it.

You can read all of Smith’s essay here. And don’t weep for bygone times. By stubbornly remaining single, you’ll be doing your bit for the #Occupy movement.

UPDATE: Look, it’s getting worse! Unhitched In America: Only 1 in 3 Americans Wants to Get Married, in Slate, 3 February 2012

Santorum and Lott: Pigs of a Feather

Found this in my old “Crank Call” files. Seems pertinent now. First published 30 April 2003

How thoughtful of Senator Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania and chair of the Senate Republican Conference, to take my mind off Iraq, Iran, Syria, SARS, North Korea, Donald Rumsfeld, Laci Peterson and that freak in the White House by attacking “homosexuality.”  It’s been a long time since I’ve written a screed in defense of gay sex, an issue of such burning importance to the nation that it’s eclipsed the Dixie Chicks and Charlton Heston’s farewell speech to the National Rifle Association.

For those who don’t know, Mr. Heston, stricken with Alzheimer’s, won a standing ovation at the NRA’s annual convention on Sunday, “shuffling onto the stage before a crowd of 4,000” and “strong enough to raise an 1866 Winchester rifle over his head” while gasping his trademark line, “From my cold, dead hands!”  Which, right now, to speak frankly, I wish were wrapped around Santorum’s neck.

Oh, I know — Santorum has “no problem with homosexuality,” as he told the Associated Press in the interview that caused all the fuss:  “I have a problem with homosexual acts.  As I would with acts of other, what I would consider to be, acts outside of traditional heterosexual relationships.”

These acts might include golfing, cheating, lying, stealing, bombing Iraq and leaving the toilet seat up, but let’s not pin a straight man down.  “I think this is a legitimate public policy discussion,” Santorum remarks.  “These are not, you know, ridiculous, you know, comments.”

No.  These are, you know, appalling, you know, despicable comments.  Santorum describes the abuse of children by Catholic priests as “a basic homosexual relationship,” and while acknowledging that homosexuality is not in itself, “you know, man on child, man on dog,” he sees no need to temper his words.  “And if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home,” he adds, “then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery.  You have the right to anything.”

Well!  That’s a lot to swallow, forgiving the expression.  I doubt that “swallowing” sits high on Santorum’s list of traditional heterosexual acts, although I’m sure if my cold, dead hands were to lift the sheets when he and Mrs. S. get together for the Deed, he’d resent the intrusion.  Democrats have called for Santorum to resign his Senate leadership post, and even the Human Rights Campaign, a generally insipid gay rights organization, has said that his stance is “stunning in its insensitivity — putting homosexuality on the same moral plane as incest is repulsive.”

Actually, incest is the only item on Santorum’s list that can be compared to “homosexual acts,” even if the comparison is odious.  Bigamy, polygamy and adultery are all terms defined by their relation to legal or, if you prefer, holy matrimony.  Take away the marriage vow and these entities change their names.  “Bigamy” becomes a second marriage, “polygamy” a third, fourth, or more, and “adultery” — let’s face it — is just an affair.  Outside the law, none of them has anything to do with sexual preference, positions, partners or parts.

Not so with incest, which, while also illegal, is a social taboo, powerfully and permanently proscribed by almost every society and so fraught with genetic and emotional baggage as to pop the diamond from your ring.  It, too, is widely practiced, despite its prohibition, and no matter how many times its perpetrators tie the knot.  For better or worse, the same is true of “man on man,” or “dick on dick,” if I can lapse into vulgarity for the sake of a point.  This is why Santorum can claim “no problem” with homosexuality but only with the “you know” part of it.  This is how we can tell that he’s thought about it, a lot.  The sex itself blows his mind in a way that bigamy, polygamy and adultery never could.

There’s a been a lot of pundit blather comparing Santorum’s “incendiary” comments to those of another revolting bigot, former Senate majority leader Trent Lott, whose remarks on racial segregation cost him his post at the start of the year.  Will Santorum, like Lott, resign? Who cares? No mention is made of Lott’s previous piggery, in June 1998, when he compared homosexuality to alcoholism, “sex addiction” and “kleptomania.”  Four months later, the body of Matthew Shepard was found beaten, bludgeoned and tied to a post, left to die by a couple of punks who feared he might unman them with a glance, and who, if the God Santorum says he believes in is really on the job, will be raped in perpetuity in the jail where they belong.

If there’s a hero in this scenario, it’s our own Howard Dean, who, three years ago, signed Vermont’s civil union law like a nervous nellie, virtually in the dark, but who seems to have found his courage on the national stage and says he “can’t wait to engage Republicans on that issue.”  I hope he means it.  Because — oh, irony! — while President Bush and his party keep insisting there will be no “theocratic, fundamentalist” government in the new, remodeled Iraq, we’re well on our way to getting one here.

"But it wasn't a dream. It was a place. And you - and you - and you - and you were there!"

I need a dream analyst. Here’s why:

I dreamed I was on a train to Kansas, coming south from Chicago to visit my mother. She had moved from Vermont to somewhere on the plains, but I couldn’t remember the name of the town. The train stopped suddenly and we were ordered into a diner to sample the pie. It would be a long wait, they said, and the pie was “the Best in the West.” I didn’t eat it. I kept wondering why my mother had moved to Kansas and what town she lived in. I saw a pay phone and tried to call her, but the machine repeated, “12 cents, 12 cents, please,” over and over, and I didn’t have correct change. I pulled out my cell phone but the numbers had been moved around and I couldn’t dial it. Then I saw that the train had left. A waitress came up and said, “We’re sending you to live with a Christian family but you need to take a Biblical name.”

“Peter,” I said. “Isn’t that Biblical? It’s already Biblical.”

“Old Testament only,” said the waitress. “Sorry.”

I awoke, as they say, with a start. In another dream last week I was buying a pack of cigarettes and overpaid by thirty dollars. The woman at the counter said I could have the money back if I asked the Baby Jesus.

Help me, please.

I’m used to dreams where I’m trying to get somewhere and can’t.  Usually it’s Paris, sometimes London or New York, and sometimes a town on the ocean that I seem to know intimately but can’t find my way around. Every time I head north I end up south, like Alice through the looking glass. These are standard anxiety dreams, involving lost passports and airline tickets, broken clocks, missed cabs, no money and suitcases that haven’t been packed. I accept them as part of the general conundrum, a way for the unconscious to work its stuff while the mind is busy snoring. I don’t feel frustrated in my daily life and, awake, I’m not too anxious about anything.

But Kansas? I draw the line at dreaming about Kansas. Even asleep it was a stretch to think that my mother might have moved there, a state she insists was originally settled only because a lot of pioneer women mutinied on the wagon train and refused to go a step further. I did have a great-aunt, Roberta – we called her “Aint Bert” — who lived in Wichita and said it was “God’s country.” She was born in Possum Trot, Texas, so you can see her point. And maybe it’s some atavism that has me dreaming about the Lord of the Hogs, the Corn and the Westboro Baptist Church so near to Christmas in New England.

Or maybe it’s the Republican presidential contest, a field so loaded with hucksters, charlatans and cash-soaked knuckleheads as to pop the corks of even American hypocrisy. You can see that I prefer this theory. I’ve stayed away from “politics” so far on this blog because the Web is already crawling with comment and I still haven’t recovered from eight years of Bush.** But I’ve just watched Rick Perry’s “I’m-not-ashamed-to-be-Christian” commercial and won’t be the last to observe that he looks really queer, in a Log Cabin kind of way. I think all these dudes obsessed with homosexuality should be goosed till they cough up their wallets. I don’t see how same-sex marriage and prayer-free schools amount to “liberal attacks” in a nation that forbids state religion, but they can tell you in Kansas, I’m sure. Which is why I woke up. Thank God.

**If you want to play ”Falling Bush” you can still do it here

Thanksgiving’s over, not a minute too soon. A friend in retail pops in to say that she survived Black Friday (and Saturday, and Sunday) at her local Gap-derivative by hiding in closets and shooing customers off the floor when they asked questions: “They can help you at check-out.” “Have you tried customer service?” NPR reports “a promising start” to the gruesome season: “The average holiday shopper spent $398.62 this weekend, up 9.1 percent from $365.34 last year. Total spending reached an estimated $52.4 billion.”

That’s a lot of patriotism. Imagine what could be done with the money if it were raised for something durable, like education or libraries. Roads and bridges? Family planning?

Me, I could never make it in retail. I lack a certain je ne sais quoi — obedience, mainly, and the eagerness required to make customers feel good about buying things they don’t need. I also won’t pretend to look busy when there’s nothing to do — a cardinal sin in the market place. At J. C. Penney’s, years ago – it was my first paying job – they put me on the floor selling shoes. Apart from wearing them all my life I had no training for this. I certainly didn’t know why I had to straighten them every five minutes when they were already lined up like missiles on Moscow. I thought the customer always came first. When weary mothers asked if the cheaper, Penney’s-brand sneakers would last their kids the summer, I told them the truth.

“Oh, no,” I said. I was raised on George Washington and Honest Abe: “You’d do better to buy an expensive pair now, rather than come back in August and pay twice.”

Needless to say, I wasn’t a winning member of the Penney’s team. After a month, they put me in sporting goods selling rifles (!) and then in menswear, where I spent a long evening — my last—measuring suits to be sent to the tailor. Again, no training. I just put the chalk marks where I thought they should go and never went back.

Now The Wall Street Journal warns that we are not to be misled by the jingling tills of Black Friday: “Widespread hype about stores opening on Thanksgiving night merely prodded shoppers to spend sooner, not necessarily buy more overall. Smart-phone coupons and TV and Web advertising have fooled consumers into believing this year’s deals were better than in the past.” Apparently no amount of fooling can get people to remember that all the deals are better in January and that “holiday stress” is optional. This proven willingness to be led by the nose was the spark of the #Occupy movement. Any game can be changed by refusing to play.

Of course it’s an ill wind that blows no one any good. On the bright side, Christmas does stem the tide of those endless TV commercials for car insurance, prescription drugs, cell phone service, online dating and toilet paper (“It’s time to get real about what happens in the bathroom!”). Anything that spares us a minute of “Flo” or Cymbalta® has the thanks of a grateful nation.

This just in! Cheerful Stores Drive Away Stressed Christmas Shoppers, Experts Warn

(First published in “Seven Days.”  We were  asked to write about a Thanksgiving dish.)

They asked me to write about the pumpkin pie and I said I would because I know all about pumpkins.  Pumpkins and I go way back.  You can’t trust them.

When I was nine years old, I won first prize at the Champlain Valley Fair for a pumpkin I grew in my back yard.  It was very beautiful, round and perfect.  Everybody said I had a green thumb.  But nobody told me about crop rotation, so when I tried it again the next year I got only a pathetic stunted thing that looked more like a gourd with warts.  I felt betrayed, yes, violated.  I turned my back on pumpkins for many years.

Then one day when I was getting a divorce — this was some time ago — I was depressed and decided I’d make a pumpkin pie from scratch.  God knows what I was thinking.  I really needed some TLC.  What I hadn’t counted on was the heartlessness of the pumpkin.  Pumpkins are very selfish fruits — they don’t forget.  It took me six hours to steam it, peel it, mash it and so forth, and by the time I was done I had drunk three bottles of wine and couldn’t taste the pie at all.  I called the woman I was still married to and yelled at her over the phone.  She said I was a jerk and hung up.

The moral of this story:  It’s just as good out of a can.  Pumpkins will let you down.

Whoops! Wrong channel.

I’m wondering if anyone else is sick of the sex on television. I speak from an aesthetic rather than a moral perspective. All that panting, pounding and chewing, all that “tongue action” – when did TV producers decide that kissing involved the wholesale digestion of the human face? What sex is so urgent that it can only take place on the kitchen counter or the floor? I thought women liked a little tenderness. What about foreplay? And why is the woman always on top, shot from behind, bouncing up and down as if to say, “Look! We’re really doing it!” Because they aren’t, you know.

You know that, don’t you? That it’s simulated sex? Do you really need to see it to follow the plot? I say if you want pornography, watch pornography. Leave it to the professionals. It’s more honest and they do it better. This whole bodily-function thing — it unnerves me. Hollywood doesn’t yet have trained vomiters or urinaters, but since both of these skills are now also routinely depicted in prime time, there ought to be a school for it.

Last week I tuned in to “The Slap,”an Australian miniseries currently wowing the critics, which depicts a group of ordinary Aussies in extremis, as it were. In the first ten minutes of Episode 2, four were devoted to fake fucking, with its attendant slurps, smacks, thrusts and convulsions. This was followed by a bathroom scene, where the just-fucked heroine, suspecting she is pregnant, vomits for a while. She then goes to visit her mother, a cancer patient, who promptly wets the floor. That requires a return to the bathroom for a little thigh- and bottom-wiping, whereupon we finally discover that our heroine is unhappy in her job. Who knew? It was almost as exciting as seeing Paz de la Huerta‘s water break on Episode 7 of “Boardwalk Empire.” Very dramatic — a veritable flood of amniotic fluid pouring on the floor.

Am I wrong, or aren’t there other stage devices to indicate that a woman is about to give birth? A contraction, say, followed by a sharp intake of breath, a call for the doctor and a slow sinking onto the fainting couch. Cut to morning: The sun is shining, the birds are singing and the cry of a newborn is heard through the half-opened door of Mama’s boudoir. I’m certain this used to be enough to move the story along.

About women: Television is an equal-opportunity degrader, but it likes nothing so much as carving up dames. No man would want to see himself depicted invariably as either a fuckbucket or a mutilated corpse. He wouldn’t stand for it, any more than he can stand to see himself fully naked on the screen, as women routinely are, shaking his ass and pleasuring himself, with his Johnson flying in the wind. This is why the women are always on top – a man’s privates must be covered. There’s the matter of “size,” about which all men are paranoid. Then there’s “performance”– can he really get it up? Finally, a man can’t risk the dim arousal that might ensue should he look at another male as a sex object. Not so dim, either, in many cases. Not dim at all.

That’s as political as I’m going to get at the moment. They’re busting heads on Wall Street.

***

It’s been nearly a week and I’m still not used to the time change. I wish they’d leave the clocks alone, but I said the same thing about the moon-landing in 1969 – no one listened. What was that all about, anyway? Do people now live on the moon? Can you grow things on the moon? Extract anything or sell anything? Do YOU want to go to the moon?

I find science incredibly irritating, at least that part of it that values any old thing just to prove it can be done. Daylight savings isn’t scientific, though it took me many years to realize that. I was 35 before I understood that we didn’t change the clocks because the time had changed; rather, we change the time by changing the clocks. Simple, right? But I thought something real was going on, something to do with Nature or the cosmos. I was really pissed off when I discovered the whole thing was man-made and that daylight savings time was invented just to torture little boys by making them play baseball till 9 p.m. You can forget about the farmers and children walking to school in the dark. The true purpose of daylight savings is to make men out of slackers.

Now I wish they’d just stop it. Spring or fall, I don’t care – just pick a time and stay with it. My friend Andy says this will never happen because it doesn’t give people enough to do. He thinks we should set the time ahead or back by a HALF hour now and then. It’s fair to both sides, and it could be useful if you’re running late. Likewise if you want to fire someone for tardiness.

“Like” this column if you favor “Andy’s Law.” And note how cleverly I’ve linked it to BIBLE TIME, an old column I did on (roughly) the same subject. A good citizen recycles. ‘Nuff said.

I waited till Halloween was over before starting this blog because I hate Halloween and I don’t want to make enemies right out of the gate. I preferred it when Halloween was just a holiday, not a months-long marketing season, crushing heads from July to October and punishing resisters with appeals to “the children.” Clamor is the new normal – endless repetition, overkill, excess. And Halloween indulges the current necrophiliac fad. In my own golden youth, we weren’t all practicing to be vampires and slaughtering our enemies on PS3s. We never saw blood and gore on television. It was considered dinky to wear a Halloween costume after the fifth grade. For merchants, Halloween is now the most lucrative American holiday after Christmas, outstripping even Valentine’s Day in sheer volume of peddled junk. That alone removes it from whatever meaningful – dare I say hallowed? – place it used to occupy on the calendar. I’m all for showing the kids a good time, but please! Carve a pumpkin, cut some holes in a sheet and send them out into the dark. It might develop their imaginations.

You don’t want to know what I think about Christmas. Words don’t capture the unremitting awfulness of Christmas commerce, a problem so well understood that people rail against it year after year while murdering their rivals for discounted iPods. On the flip side are those sappy reminders about “the true meaning of Christmas,” which we wouldn’t need if we actually listened to ourselves and obeyed our better natures. The anti-”War on Christmas” people should take aim at dollar signs, not atheists. Until you and I – now? this year? — drop out of the Christmas orgy and demand something more than platitudes about “Peace,” it will go on being the nightmare we could have avoided, but didn’t.

#Occupy Yuletide, that’s what I say. Pitch your tent at the food shelf.

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