Caught Our Eye Archives

November 14, 2008

Obama and the new age of sobriety

‘Bush is an alcoholic who has never been treated’, said Frank. ‘[H]e needs an intervention… I think the only way to deal with him is to isolate him, and neutralise his behaviour, which would mean blocking everything he proposed, and refusing to go along with it: sanctioning him, quarantining him, censuring him, and impeaching him. He needs to be removed from office. He’s a very destructive man, who is not in touch with his destructiveness.’ Well, what are the democratic wishes of 50million American voters compared with the diagnosis of one doctor? The demand to treat Bush, or quarantine him, even to topple him, reveals the reactionary streak in the moralistic, borderline Catholic critique of his sinfulness. Many of the liberals who criticised Bush for his denigration of liberty and democracy in the name of politics seem happy to denigrate liberty and democracy in the name of therapy.

Obama, in contrast to Bush, is not only healthy and organic, he has also talked openly about his former ‘abuse’ of drink and drugs (though he still struggles with his addiction to cigarettes). This is one of the essential differences between Obama and Bush, argues the influential commentator Juan Cole: Obama wrote about his personal problems, and ‘honesty is the highest form of leadership’. In other words, Obama seems to accept the Gospel According to Oprah, built upon the Old Testament of Alcoholics Anonymous, which decrees that we must all accept our personal powerlessness and open ourselves up to external intervention. The spectre of the religious right was always partly the product of fevered liberal minds; the far more powerful religious force in the US today is the religion of therapy, with its emphasis on self-esteem over self-belief and meekness over ambition. At least part of the reason why members of the cultural elite are loudly celebrating the victory of healthy Obama over self-destructive Bush is because he better represents their irrational faith.

"Obama and the new age of sobriety," by Brendan O’Neill, Spiked!, November 10, 2008

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November 12, 2008

Real Estate Downfall

“We had some very good years but a lot of people over-capitalised,” he says. “They bought $300,000 new boats, $300,000 new houses, and new trucks, never putting anything away for a rainy day. But here it is, pouring rain.”

"Maine lobstermen suffer as prices fall," by Rebecca Knight, FT.com, November 10 2008

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July 26, 2008

"Society is the same in all large places."

"Society is the same in all large places. I divide it thus:
1. People of cultivation, who live in large houses.
2. People of cultivation, who live in small houses.
3. People without cultivation, who live in large houses.
4. People without cultivation, who live in small houses.
5. Scrubs."
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.) (writing while a medical student at Harvard)

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July 04, 2008

"Bachelorhood And Its Discontents"

It wasn't just that the bachelor was untrustworthy, wrote [George] Ade, he was also a “draft dodger” and a “slacker,” one who had exchanged the traditional male role of provider for that of refusenik. Or, as another wag put it, “The bachelor is a selfish, undeserving guy who has cheated some woman out of a divorce.” Until quite recently the office bachelor was seen as a serious liability, and earned considerably less than his married counterpart. Vance Packard, in his 1962 book The Pyramid Climbers, noted that, “In general the bachelor is viewed with circumspection, especially if he is not well known to the people appraising him…[However] the worst status of all is that of a bachelor beyond the age of 36. The investigators wonder why he isn’t married. Is it because he isn’t virile? Is he old-maidish? Can’t he get along with people?” By contrast, the married man was the steady one, the stable lot, not least because, in Tallyrand’s memorable phrase, "a married man with a family will do anything for money.”

"Bachelorhood And Its Discontents," by Christopher Orlet, New English Review, July 2008




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May 25, 2008

Bumper stickers: "both popular and ineffective"

It is a fact that white people will never turn down an opportunity to enlighten other people on the correct way to think. While this is very easy to do through email or face to face conversation, it is exceptionally difficult to do while driving a car. Fortunately for white people there is a solution that is both popular and ineffective: bumper stickers.

#100 Bumper Stickers, Stuff White People Like

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January 19, 2008

"Humanity, thou art sick"

"In my mother’s generation, shy people were seen as introverted and perhaps a bit awkward, but never mentally ill."

So writes the Chicago-based research professor, Christopher Lane, in his fascinating new book Shyness: How Normal Behaviour Became a Sickness. ‘Adults admired their bashfulness, associated it with bookishness, reserve, and a yen for solitude. But shyness isn’t just shyness any more. It is a disease. It has a variety of over-wrought names, including “social anxiety” and “avoidant personality disorder”, afflictions said to trouble millions’, Lane continues.

Lane has taken shyness as a test case to show how society is being overdiagnosed and overmedicated. He has charted - in intricate detail - the route by which the psychiatric profession came to give credence to the labelling of everyday emotions as ‘disorders’, a situation that has resulted in more and more people being deemed to be mentally ill.

"Humanity, thou art sick: Shyness is now ‘social phobia’, and dissent is ‘Oppositional Defiant Disorder’. How did everyday emotions come to be seen as illnesses?" a review by Helene Guldberg of "Shyness: How Normal Behaviour Became a Sickness," by Christopher Lane, in spiked, December 2007



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