Pythia Peay's Blog
November 11, 2015
Honoring My World War II Veteran Father: More the Hero Than I Ever Knew
As the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War II draws to a close, I think of my father often. Each interview with one of the war’s surviving veterans tugs at my heart—and my conscience. For like many in my Baby Boomer generation, I was late to arrive at an appreciation for my gruff-spoken, close-to-the-chest, Greatest Generation father’s military service. Maybe it was years of dealing with his alcoholic, crazy parenting. But having only the fuzziest idea of what he’d done during the war, I grew up in the belief that Joe Carroll had been no great hero at all.
Partly this was my father’s own fault. A scant collection of cryptic half sentences was the most he shared with his four children about his wartime experience: “Got sent to Natal, Brazil. Flew cargo planes. Repaired planes and took plane parts back to Africa. It was a staging ground for the invasion of Japan. Had a Brazilian girlfriend, boy was she sweet. Loved Rio, man it was “beeeooouutiful.”
Growing up, sometimes my siblings and I would even tease my father about what a “hardship” his military service must have been. “Oh, Brazil,” we’d chortle, rolling our eyes. “Must have been tough!” Facing his four accusers, his prowess as a man on the line, Joe would raise his head, wave his Pall Mall in one hand, his can of Budweiser in the other, and yell defensively, “It was dangerous! Planes crashed in the jungle!” Or, “We were preparing to invade Japan. We thought we were going to die!”
Fifteen years after my father’s early death at 71 in 1995, I began to realize how mistakenly I’d judged him. Indeed as I was to discover while researching my father’s life for the memoir I was writing, his wartime experience had been far more eventful—and more life-threatening—than he’d ever let on.
After tracking down Air Force historians to help me fill in the narrative that Joe had left mostly blank, I learn that my father had served in one of the war’s lesser known branches of service: the “ATC,” or the Air Transport Command.
A division of the Army Air Corps, the ATC had been formed after Pearl Harbor when the need for a speedier worldwide system of air transport to the far-flung theaters in Africa, China, India, the Philippines, and Australia, had become urgent. To help transport the thousands of tons of cargo that had begun building up at ports, commercial planes were refitted as supply carriers, reservist pilots were called to active duty, and hundreds of civilian pilots were made “service pilots.” Airline executives were commissioned for key command posts, while veteran pilots became pioneers of developing distant military air routes over land with rudimentary landing conditions.
Though not as romantic as the bomb squadrons and fighter pilots, the ATC added a new dimension to warfare, creating a global air transportation system that had never existed before. Like my father, many of the ATC’s scrappy pilots and sharp-eyed navigators downplayed the risks involved, jokingly describing their planes as little more than a trucking business or a flying boxcar.
Yet without the supply operation they ran in the workhorse C-87, the Allied forces could not have won. Artillery, ammunition, toilet paper, metal wastebaskets, engine parts, fuses, bombs, surgical instruments, Chinese money, mail, medicine, wounded soldiers, military personnel, gasoline, German prisoners, steel girders, and all the “depressing junk of war,” as ATC pilot Ernest Gann wrote in "Fate is the Hunter," weighed the planes down, making it difficult at times to maintain a safe altitude.
One of the ATC’s key bases, and the largest American air-and Navy base outside US territory, was the South Atlantic Wing located in Brazil at the Natal airbase of Parnamarim. The closest point in the Western hemisphere to Africa’s Gold Coast, the region offered an ideal jumping off point for the limited-range planes of that time, and quickly became the fulcrum of the most important air route between hemispheres.
With a steady stream of incoming and outgoing troops, and planes landing and taking off every three minutes, Life magazine headlined the beach paradise “the wartime crossroads of the world.” The War Department designated it “one of the four most strategic points in the world,” along with Suez, Gibralter, and the Bosphorus. To historians, the Natal airbase was the “air funnel to the battlefields of the world” and a “trampoline to victory.”
To those ATC pilots and crews making the run—including my young father—it was known as “Fireball run,” or “the Fireball Express.” The route began at Morrison Field in Miami and extended through the Caribbean and Brazil to Natal, where it turned eastward across the Atlantic narrows to the African coast and then reached across central Africa to Khartoum, where it divided.
Undeterred by exhaustion, cramped cockpits, or dangerous flying conditions, plucky pilots and navigators fueled with youth and patriotism climbed into their planes eager to begin the 28,000-mile relay run from Miami to India and back again, often in as few as eight or ten days.
By 1944, the reputation of the ATC and its intrepid crews had spread. Reporters and photographers vied to hitch rides on flights girdling the globe on the modern-day version of the Pony Express, where the crews changed but the planes kept going. Photographs and tales of their adventurous exploits were splashed across the pages of American magazines like Life and the Saturday Evening Post.
“The Fireball is the longest, fastest, air-freight line in the world. It is a sort of emergency ambulance for tired and battle- scarred planes,” wrote the Post’s war correspondent David Wittels. “It has been operating only a few months and has been a military secret most of that time. Now it can be revealed that the Fireball is the backstage reason for much of the recent success of our Air Force in the China– Burma–India area.”
The most legendary feat of the ATC was the passage across the Himalayan Hump. In 1942, the Japanese invaded Burma and cut the Chinese off from the world. It became necessary to airlift thousands of tons of fuel and food to the forces of General Chennault. Passing over the jagged mountain peaks of India and Tibet, the ice and snow and the dizzying, disorientating altitude led to a high accident rate.
As far as I know, Dad didn’t make it as far as India or the Himalayas. From what I can piece together, Joe’s leg of the Fireball run was probably up and down the coast of Brazil, across the Atlantic narrows to Africa, then back again to Brazil. But these missions did indeed, as he claimed, have their dangers. Even at the time my father flew in the summer of 1945, after the fall of Germany, enemy subs lurked offshore.
Then there were the patched-together planes of wartime guided by rudimentary systems of navigation. In recounting ATC flights he flew over Brazil, Gann describes flying with no oxygen over mountain peaks whose heights were unrecorded; large areas marked on maps UNEXPLORED; rainforest canopies so dense he feared crashing into them more than the ocean; and cumulonimbus clouds off the Gold Coast so gigantic and threatening he named them the “grandfathers” of thunderstorms.If a plane went down, it was gone.
As legendary as the Himalayan Hump and as dangerous as the Brazilian rainforests was the transatlantic hop from Brazil to Africa—especially its refueling stop. A pinpoint of red volcanic rock in the South Atlantic, Ascension Island (nick-named "Wide-awake Island")fell midway between Natal and Accra in Africa.
Pilots certainly had to be wide awake to find Ascension, as it was afloat in what a Life magazine photographer called “the landless void of sky and water,” rimmed by empty stretches of shark-infested seas. In the event that the navigator with his octant and protractor—a role my father played—missed the island, pilots made up a ditty that went like this: “If you miss Ascension / Your wife gets a pension.”
My research yielded a vivid picture of the ATC missions my father had described. But what was he doing in Brazil at the end of the war? By then, the skies over Africa and Europe had quieted. Hitler had been vanquished. Yet in that ominous summer of ’45, few thought the war had ended. As my father had hinted, one last enemy, Japan, remained.
As the Allied forces mobilized for the invasion, a top-secret redeployment plan was set in motion. Tasked to the ATC, the WHITE PROJECT involved the return of army transport and combat planes stateside. Parallel to that was the GREEN PROJECT, a program for flying troops and military personnel from the European and Mediterranean theaters to the U.S. for rest-leave before war against Japan. Somewhere in that mass mobilization was Army Air Corps Private Joseph W. Carroll.
Just as Natal had served as an air funnel for fanning troops and aircraft to the world’s battlegrounds, now it acted in reverse. According to the "Army Air Forces in World War II: Traffic Homeward Bound," the airlift home “was a tremendous demonstration of the massive airlift of manpower . . . the most striking of those marking the end of war. Nothing like it had happened before.”
ATC troops were responsible for clearing incoming planes by briefing the crews, checking aircraft for safety; war-worn planes had to be readied for battle. Doctors, nurses, and cooks serving hot meals twenty-four hours a day attended the steady stream of incoming and outgoing troops, foreign nationals, civilians, and medical evacuees. Security was tight, and counterintelligence personnel checked planes for sabotage.
But in a telling piece of aviation history, the Air Transport Command crews became fired by a nonmilitary mission of their own. It had nothing to do with war, and everything to do with American enterprise. These airmen had their sights fixed on the future—and that future was air passenger travel. Thus Air Transport Command officers, most of whom were on leave from civilian airlines, did everything in their power to convert homeward bound soldiers into passengers who, when the war was over, would be sure to fly America’s airlines.
So it was that tired privates battered by war were given forms to record their impressions of their flight home. Hot meals were served and, because these were the days before cabins were pressurized, blankets were handed out to keep the soldiers warm at high altitudes.
As my father lay dying of cancer and a lifetime of alcoholism, musing back over his life, he added an unexpected coda to the wartime story of my childhood. He’d flown secret missions from Los Angeles to Rio de Janeiro, he rasped hoarsely to my sister and me one night, by way of the Andes Mountains. In the dark of night and with no lights so the enemy wouldn’t detect them, he and his crew had piloted their plane through steep mountain passes.
He’d flown some of the earliest flights through the Andes, he’d said; there had been no instruments and at times they’d been so turned upside down they’d hung from the ceiling. It was, my father mused, the first time he’d realized his gift for navigation. Even during such heart-stopping moments, he could always tell at what altitude the plane was flying.
By the end of the war, the Air Transport Command girdled the globe, and had become the largest airline in existence. Routes had been established to never-before-seen, unmapped regions. Runways had been gashed into jungles and etched into the icescapes of Newfoundland, bringing civilization to deep wilderness. As the ATC pilots and their crews grew intimate with the weather and topography of North America, Europe, Africa, India, and South America, they absorbed, writes Gann, “an entirely new world which previously no man knew very much about.”
After all I discovered through my research, I now marvel at all my father didn’t say. He was more the hero than he’d ever allowed or that I, the daughter who had struggled to love him through his addiction, had ever guessed possible. And besides, how much of his drinking had been due to the traumas of war he’d borne silently over the decades? Unless I’d made the effort to dig deeper into his story, I’d never have discovered that Joe Carroll, like others his age, had risen to the cause of his time and done what was asked of him—without a trace of self-importance.
As one Air Force historian remarked, “If your father didn’t distinguish himself by getting injured or killed in the line of duty, he vanished into obscurity. It’s up to relatives like you to bring someone like him to light again.”
By telling my World War II veteran father’s story, I hope with all my daughter’s heart that I’ve helped to do just that.
This article was adapted from "American Icarus: A Memoir of Father and Country" (Lantern Books, 2015).
Partly this was my father’s own fault. A scant collection of cryptic half sentences was the most he shared with his four children about his wartime experience: “Got sent to Natal, Brazil. Flew cargo planes. Repaired planes and took plane parts back to Africa. It was a staging ground for the invasion of Japan. Had a Brazilian girlfriend, boy was she sweet. Loved Rio, man it was “beeeooouutiful.”
Growing up, sometimes my siblings and I would even tease my father about what a “hardship” his military service must have been. “Oh, Brazil,” we’d chortle, rolling our eyes. “Must have been tough!” Facing his four accusers, his prowess as a man on the line, Joe would raise his head, wave his Pall Mall in one hand, his can of Budweiser in the other, and yell defensively, “It was dangerous! Planes crashed in the jungle!” Or, “We were preparing to invade Japan. We thought we were going to die!”
Fifteen years after my father’s early death at 71 in 1995, I began to realize how mistakenly I’d judged him. Indeed as I was to discover while researching my father’s life for the memoir I was writing, his wartime experience had been far more eventful—and more life-threatening—than he’d ever let on.
After tracking down Air Force historians to help me fill in the narrative that Joe had left mostly blank, I learn that my father had served in one of the war’s lesser known branches of service: the “ATC,” or the Air Transport Command.
A division of the Army Air Corps, the ATC had been formed after Pearl Harbor when the need for a speedier worldwide system of air transport to the far-flung theaters in Africa, China, India, the Philippines, and Australia, had become urgent. To help transport the thousands of tons of cargo that had begun building up at ports, commercial planes were refitted as supply carriers, reservist pilots were called to active duty, and hundreds of civilian pilots were made “service pilots.” Airline executives were commissioned for key command posts, while veteran pilots became pioneers of developing distant military air routes over land with rudimentary landing conditions.
Though not as romantic as the bomb squadrons and fighter pilots, the ATC added a new dimension to warfare, creating a global air transportation system that had never existed before. Like my father, many of the ATC’s scrappy pilots and sharp-eyed navigators downplayed the risks involved, jokingly describing their planes as little more than a trucking business or a flying boxcar.
Yet without the supply operation they ran in the workhorse C-87, the Allied forces could not have won. Artillery, ammunition, toilet paper, metal wastebaskets, engine parts, fuses, bombs, surgical instruments, Chinese money, mail, medicine, wounded soldiers, military personnel, gasoline, German prisoners, steel girders, and all the “depressing junk of war,” as ATC pilot Ernest Gann wrote in "Fate is the Hunter," weighed the planes down, making it difficult at times to maintain a safe altitude.
One of the ATC’s key bases, and the largest American air-and Navy base outside US territory, was the South Atlantic Wing located in Brazil at the Natal airbase of Parnamarim. The closest point in the Western hemisphere to Africa’s Gold Coast, the region offered an ideal jumping off point for the limited-range planes of that time, and quickly became the fulcrum of the most important air route between hemispheres.
With a steady stream of incoming and outgoing troops, and planes landing and taking off every three minutes, Life magazine headlined the beach paradise “the wartime crossroads of the world.” The War Department designated it “one of the four most strategic points in the world,” along with Suez, Gibralter, and the Bosphorus. To historians, the Natal airbase was the “air funnel to the battlefields of the world” and a “trampoline to victory.”
To those ATC pilots and crews making the run—including my young father—it was known as “Fireball run,” or “the Fireball Express.” The route began at Morrison Field in Miami and extended through the Caribbean and Brazil to Natal, where it turned eastward across the Atlantic narrows to the African coast and then reached across central Africa to Khartoum, where it divided.
Undeterred by exhaustion, cramped cockpits, or dangerous flying conditions, plucky pilots and navigators fueled with youth and patriotism climbed into their planes eager to begin the 28,000-mile relay run from Miami to India and back again, often in as few as eight or ten days.
By 1944, the reputation of the ATC and its intrepid crews had spread. Reporters and photographers vied to hitch rides on flights girdling the globe on the modern-day version of the Pony Express, where the crews changed but the planes kept going. Photographs and tales of their adventurous exploits were splashed across the pages of American magazines like Life and the Saturday Evening Post.
“The Fireball is the longest, fastest, air-freight line in the world. It is a sort of emergency ambulance for tired and battle- scarred planes,” wrote the Post’s war correspondent David Wittels. “It has been operating only a few months and has been a military secret most of that time. Now it can be revealed that the Fireball is the backstage reason for much of the recent success of our Air Force in the China– Burma–India area.”
The most legendary feat of the ATC was the passage across the Himalayan Hump. In 1942, the Japanese invaded Burma and cut the Chinese off from the world. It became necessary to airlift thousands of tons of fuel and food to the forces of General Chennault. Passing over the jagged mountain peaks of India and Tibet, the ice and snow and the dizzying, disorientating altitude led to a high accident rate.
As far as I know, Dad didn’t make it as far as India or the Himalayas. From what I can piece together, Joe’s leg of the Fireball run was probably up and down the coast of Brazil, across the Atlantic narrows to Africa, then back again to Brazil. But these missions did indeed, as he claimed, have their dangers. Even at the time my father flew in the summer of 1945, after the fall of Germany, enemy subs lurked offshore.
Then there were the patched-together planes of wartime guided by rudimentary systems of navigation. In recounting ATC flights he flew over Brazil, Gann describes flying with no oxygen over mountain peaks whose heights were unrecorded; large areas marked on maps UNEXPLORED; rainforest canopies so dense he feared crashing into them more than the ocean; and cumulonimbus clouds off the Gold Coast so gigantic and threatening he named them the “grandfathers” of thunderstorms.If a plane went down, it was gone.
As legendary as the Himalayan Hump and as dangerous as the Brazilian rainforests was the transatlantic hop from Brazil to Africa—especially its refueling stop. A pinpoint of red volcanic rock in the South Atlantic, Ascension Island (nick-named "Wide-awake Island")fell midway between Natal and Accra in Africa.
Pilots certainly had to be wide awake to find Ascension, as it was afloat in what a Life magazine photographer called “the landless void of sky and water,” rimmed by empty stretches of shark-infested seas. In the event that the navigator with his octant and protractor—a role my father played—missed the island, pilots made up a ditty that went like this: “If you miss Ascension / Your wife gets a pension.”
My research yielded a vivid picture of the ATC missions my father had described. But what was he doing in Brazil at the end of the war? By then, the skies over Africa and Europe had quieted. Hitler had been vanquished. Yet in that ominous summer of ’45, few thought the war had ended. As my father had hinted, one last enemy, Japan, remained.
As the Allied forces mobilized for the invasion, a top-secret redeployment plan was set in motion. Tasked to the ATC, the WHITE PROJECT involved the return of army transport and combat planes stateside. Parallel to that was the GREEN PROJECT, a program for flying troops and military personnel from the European and Mediterranean theaters to the U.S. for rest-leave before war against Japan. Somewhere in that mass mobilization was Army Air Corps Private Joseph W. Carroll.
Just as Natal had served as an air funnel for fanning troops and aircraft to the world’s battlegrounds, now it acted in reverse. According to the "Army Air Forces in World War II: Traffic Homeward Bound," the airlift home “was a tremendous demonstration of the massive airlift of manpower . . . the most striking of those marking the end of war. Nothing like it had happened before.”
ATC troops were responsible for clearing incoming planes by briefing the crews, checking aircraft for safety; war-worn planes had to be readied for battle. Doctors, nurses, and cooks serving hot meals twenty-four hours a day attended the steady stream of incoming and outgoing troops, foreign nationals, civilians, and medical evacuees. Security was tight, and counterintelligence personnel checked planes for sabotage.
But in a telling piece of aviation history, the Air Transport Command crews became fired by a nonmilitary mission of their own. It had nothing to do with war, and everything to do with American enterprise. These airmen had their sights fixed on the future—and that future was air passenger travel. Thus Air Transport Command officers, most of whom were on leave from civilian airlines, did everything in their power to convert homeward bound soldiers into passengers who, when the war was over, would be sure to fly America’s airlines.
So it was that tired privates battered by war were given forms to record their impressions of their flight home. Hot meals were served and, because these were the days before cabins were pressurized, blankets were handed out to keep the soldiers warm at high altitudes.
As my father lay dying of cancer and a lifetime of alcoholism, musing back over his life, he added an unexpected coda to the wartime story of my childhood. He’d flown secret missions from Los Angeles to Rio de Janeiro, he rasped hoarsely to my sister and me one night, by way of the Andes Mountains. In the dark of night and with no lights so the enemy wouldn’t detect them, he and his crew had piloted their plane through steep mountain passes.
He’d flown some of the earliest flights through the Andes, he’d said; there had been no instruments and at times they’d been so turned upside down they’d hung from the ceiling. It was, my father mused, the first time he’d realized his gift for navigation. Even during such heart-stopping moments, he could always tell at what altitude the plane was flying.
By the end of the war, the Air Transport Command girdled the globe, and had become the largest airline in existence. Routes had been established to never-before-seen, unmapped regions. Runways had been gashed into jungles and etched into the icescapes of Newfoundland, bringing civilization to deep wilderness. As the ATC pilots and their crews grew intimate with the weather and topography of North America, Europe, Africa, India, and South America, they absorbed, writes Gann, “an entirely new world which previously no man knew very much about.”
After all I discovered through my research, I now marvel at all my father didn’t say. He was more the hero than he’d ever allowed or that I, the daughter who had struggled to love him through his addiction, had ever guessed possible. And besides, how much of his drinking had been due to the traumas of war he’d borne silently over the decades? Unless I’d made the effort to dig deeper into his story, I’d never have discovered that Joe Carroll, like others his age, had risen to the cause of his time and done what was asked of him—without a trace of self-importance.
As one Air Force historian remarked, “If your father didn’t distinguish himself by getting injured or killed in the line of duty, he vanished into obscurity. It’s up to relatives like you to bring someone like him to light again.”
By telling my World War II veteran father’s story, I hope with all my daughter’s heart that I’ve helped to do just that.
This article was adapted from "American Icarus: A Memoir of Father and Country" (Lantern Books, 2015).
October 11, 2015
Analyzing America's "Gun Complex"
The fact that America has been unable to reach a cultural "breakthrough" moment around guns -- the way it did around gay rights with the recent passage of the Gay Marriage Rights Act, for instance -- is psychologically telling. So is the question that few are asking, but that begs to be asked: why is this happening in America?
In wondering why America continues to suffer the unrelenting tragedy of repeated mass shootings and why the country has a higher rate of gun violence compared to other countries, I was reminded of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung's famed word association tests in the early 20th century, from which he developed the theory of a "complex": a constellation of unconscious emotions, images, and memories that can suddenly erupt in an individual, interfering with everyday life.
Psychologists today understand that when individuals act against their own better interests, unconscious processes in the form of a complex are most likely at work. These same unconscious processes can also operate in a nation's psyche: that force field made up of symbols and historical memories accumulated by a people over time.
Certainly by that definition, America could be said to have a "gun complex." As each senseless shooting massacre of innocents blurs into the next (Umpqua Community College was the 294th mass shooting event in 2015) and still the country cannot come together to find a way to prevent guns from falling into the hands of the mentally ill, enact stronger background checks and sensible legislation that will keep assault weapons off our streets -- protective measures that a majority of Americans would like to see -- then the American body politic is in the grip of a stubborn cultural complex.
When logic and reason fail, psychology's standpoint can prove useful, as it works from the baseline of what is rather than what should be. When trying to gain some control over the hidden hand of a complex as it wields its influence over an individual's life, for example, psychologists will first acknowledge its power, and then seek to trace its roots in a person's history. For nations, this process falls under the domain of psychohistory.
One of psychohistory's principle founders is Robert Jay Lifton, M.D. Now 89, Lifton is notable for his research into war and genocide. It was in an interview with Lifton that I gained new insight into certain traits ingrained early in the nation's developing character that, in his observation, continues to influence contemporary American attitudes toward the gun.
In Lifton's view, for instance, America's relative youth when measured against older cultures has had much to do with its relationship with guns. The country's foundation on patterns of continuous immigration and a "constantly moving frontier," he told me, has contributed to the fact that "our identity has always been shaky." That uneasiness around who we are, he said, has made us emphasize what history we do have all the more strongly. Together with the nation's constitutional right to self-defense as set forth in the Second Amendment, the gun has filled that gap, he continued, functioning as a "major compensation" for the nation's lack of tradition.
America's gun complex could also be called our "John Wayne complex," as the gun, according to Lifton, "is also tied up with our American ideal of the heroic." From the start we saw ourselves, he said, "as conquering the wilderness and the native peoples. And the gun was key to that." Also frequently referred to as the 'great equalizer,' Lifton pointed out that the gun became as well an expression of "personal power that gave individuals some sense of control over life and death," also compensating the "terror and fear that many people must have felt in this country in its early decades" upon arriving on the shores of a raw wilderness.
Thus the gun in American culture, Lifton continued, became over time "a symbol on many levels of a kind of organizing principle; as an expression of individualism and individual power; and as a way of dealing with anxieties about death and vulnerability." For all these reasons, in Lifton's words, "the gun became more important to us than perhaps to any other culture." In terms of American violence, he regretfully and mournfully concluded, "much begins with... the near deification of the gun in terms of American violence."
Now, deification seems a strong word to use in connection with guns. And yet according to Italian psychoanalyst Luigi Zoja, Ph.D., who has written widely on violence and the psychotherapy of modern Western culture, a gun is not just any ordinary object, such as "a toaster or a camera," but has a universal dimension independent of a specific culture.
In general, this means, said Zoja, echoing Lifton, that there is something "almost religious" about guns. In his view, we cannot deal with the topic in a logical way, because people "feel as if you're taking something sacred away from them."
This is even more complicated in America, observed Zoja, because in the absence of a state religion, democracy has become our religion -- and "the gun is a symbol of democracy, and therefore sensitive in the American unconscious." Thus partly because of its history in our country's development, he said, "guns in America are imbued with a mythic, religious quality."
It is this non-rational, mythic current described by both Lifton and Zoja that continuously erupts and disrupts any attempt around common sense gun legislation, and that is conveniently exploited by the NRA to its own ends. Indeed these psychological perspectives shifted my own thinking away from the charged topic of increased gun regulations to the idea that there ought to be more gun consciousness -- more psychologically oriented debates in the media, not just about the mental health of individual shooters, but about the psychology of America and the gun's place in our culture.
And in fact there's an argument to be made, I have come to believe, for taking seriously the notion of the gun as one of America's dominant symbols that no amount of moral exhortations or recitation of statistics around its tragic misuses can strip out of our cultural fabric.
If the gun became less polarized into a good or evil object, for instance, and became accepted instead as a part of our American history with deep cultural roots and imbued with patriotic symbolism, then maybe those gunmen who mow down innocents would be judged not only guilty of mass murder, but publicly shamed as treasonous cowards for desecrating a part of our heritage: the equivalent, say, of splattering paint on the Washington Monument, trampling on the flag, or spitting on veterans.
Nothing about this sea change in attitude, I should add, would come easy to me personally. Not since my father put a .22 rifle in my hands as a thirteen-year-old and had me and my three younger siblings practice target shooting at a row of empty Budweiser beer cans have I ever liked anything about guns. I don't own one; the sight of one repulses me; and in fact I feel far less safe with a gun in the house or in my purse.
But if we are going to continue on our path of being a gun-loving-toting country, as it seems we are, then maybe it's time that pro-and anti-gun legislation proponents came together and accepted guns, not only as weapons for self-protection, or as emblems of our cowboy bravado, but as a psychological fact about America, inseparably woven into our historical origins and our national identity.
Maybe then we could move beyond the stalled debates around legislation, and begin generating as much heightened cultural awareness, pragmatic solutions, and even creative imagination around guns as we have brought to other social issues that have bedeviled and divided our democracy.
This post originally appeared on TheHuffingtonPost.com, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/pythia-....
In wondering why America continues to suffer the unrelenting tragedy of repeated mass shootings and why the country has a higher rate of gun violence compared to other countries, I was reminded of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung's famed word association tests in the early 20th century, from which he developed the theory of a "complex": a constellation of unconscious emotions, images, and memories that can suddenly erupt in an individual, interfering with everyday life.
Psychologists today understand that when individuals act against their own better interests, unconscious processes in the form of a complex are most likely at work. These same unconscious processes can also operate in a nation's psyche: that force field made up of symbols and historical memories accumulated by a people over time.
Certainly by that definition, America could be said to have a "gun complex." As each senseless shooting massacre of innocents blurs into the next (Umpqua Community College was the 294th mass shooting event in 2015) and still the country cannot come together to find a way to prevent guns from falling into the hands of the mentally ill, enact stronger background checks and sensible legislation that will keep assault weapons off our streets -- protective measures that a majority of Americans would like to see -- then the American body politic is in the grip of a stubborn cultural complex.
When logic and reason fail, psychology's standpoint can prove useful, as it works from the baseline of what is rather than what should be. When trying to gain some control over the hidden hand of a complex as it wields its influence over an individual's life, for example, psychologists will first acknowledge its power, and then seek to trace its roots in a person's history. For nations, this process falls under the domain of psychohistory.
One of psychohistory's principle founders is Robert Jay Lifton, M.D. Now 89, Lifton is notable for his research into war and genocide. It was in an interview with Lifton that I gained new insight into certain traits ingrained early in the nation's developing character that, in his observation, continues to influence contemporary American attitudes toward the gun.
In Lifton's view, for instance, America's relative youth when measured against older cultures has had much to do with its relationship with guns. The country's foundation on patterns of continuous immigration and a "constantly moving frontier," he told me, has contributed to the fact that "our identity has always been shaky." That uneasiness around who we are, he said, has made us emphasize what history we do have all the more strongly. Together with the nation's constitutional right to self-defense as set forth in the Second Amendment, the gun has filled that gap, he continued, functioning as a "major compensation" for the nation's lack of tradition.
America's gun complex could also be called our "John Wayne complex," as the gun, according to Lifton, "is also tied up with our American ideal of the heroic." From the start we saw ourselves, he said, "as conquering the wilderness and the native peoples. And the gun was key to that." Also frequently referred to as the 'great equalizer,' Lifton pointed out that the gun became as well an expression of "personal power that gave individuals some sense of control over life and death," also compensating the "terror and fear that many people must have felt in this country in its early decades" upon arriving on the shores of a raw wilderness.
Thus the gun in American culture, Lifton continued, became over time "a symbol on many levels of a kind of organizing principle; as an expression of individualism and individual power; and as a way of dealing with anxieties about death and vulnerability." For all these reasons, in Lifton's words, "the gun became more important to us than perhaps to any other culture." In terms of American violence, he regretfully and mournfully concluded, "much begins with... the near deification of the gun in terms of American violence."
Now, deification seems a strong word to use in connection with guns. And yet according to Italian psychoanalyst Luigi Zoja, Ph.D., who has written widely on violence and the psychotherapy of modern Western culture, a gun is not just any ordinary object, such as "a toaster or a camera," but has a universal dimension independent of a specific culture.
In general, this means, said Zoja, echoing Lifton, that there is something "almost religious" about guns. In his view, we cannot deal with the topic in a logical way, because people "feel as if you're taking something sacred away from them."
This is even more complicated in America, observed Zoja, because in the absence of a state religion, democracy has become our religion -- and "the gun is a symbol of democracy, and therefore sensitive in the American unconscious." Thus partly because of its history in our country's development, he said, "guns in America are imbued with a mythic, religious quality."
It is this non-rational, mythic current described by both Lifton and Zoja that continuously erupts and disrupts any attempt around common sense gun legislation, and that is conveniently exploited by the NRA to its own ends. Indeed these psychological perspectives shifted my own thinking away from the charged topic of increased gun regulations to the idea that there ought to be more gun consciousness -- more psychologically oriented debates in the media, not just about the mental health of individual shooters, but about the psychology of America and the gun's place in our culture.
And in fact there's an argument to be made, I have come to believe, for taking seriously the notion of the gun as one of America's dominant symbols that no amount of moral exhortations or recitation of statistics around its tragic misuses can strip out of our cultural fabric.
If the gun became less polarized into a good or evil object, for instance, and became accepted instead as a part of our American history with deep cultural roots and imbued with patriotic symbolism, then maybe those gunmen who mow down innocents would be judged not only guilty of mass murder, but publicly shamed as treasonous cowards for desecrating a part of our heritage: the equivalent, say, of splattering paint on the Washington Monument, trampling on the flag, or spitting on veterans.
Nothing about this sea change in attitude, I should add, would come easy to me personally. Not since my father put a .22 rifle in my hands as a thirteen-year-old and had me and my three younger siblings practice target shooting at a row of empty Budweiser beer cans have I ever liked anything about guns. I don't own one; the sight of one repulses me; and in fact I feel far less safe with a gun in the house or in my purse.
But if we are going to continue on our path of being a gun-loving-toting country, as it seems we are, then maybe it's time that pro-and anti-gun legislation proponents came together and accepted guns, not only as weapons for self-protection, or as emblems of our cowboy bravado, but as a psychological fact about America, inseparably woven into our historical origins and our national identity.
Maybe then we could move beyond the stalled debates around legislation, and begin generating as much heightened cultural awareness, pragmatic solutions, and even creative imagination around guns as we have brought to other social issues that have bedeviled and divided our democracy.
This post originally appeared on TheHuffingtonPost.com, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/pythia-....
October 6, 2015
A Letter of thanks to the GR Community!
Dear Goodreads community:
At the conclusion of my wonderfully successful giveaway campaign in which a combined total of almost 1200 people signed up to win a copy of American Icarus: A Memoir of Father and Country, and America on the Couch: Psychological Perspectives on American Politics and Culture, I want to say a heartfelt thank you for your interest and engagement, for your passion for books, and for taking notice of my books in particular. I look forward with excitement to sharing my work with the winners, and to hearing their responses.
But I also hope that those who didn’t win a copy might consider purchasing one or both books. Because as we head into the 2016 election season, I can think of no better time for these works-of-a-lifetime to serve their purpose of bringing deeper insight into America: through sharing my own deeply personal story of my father’s life, as it was shaped by those American myths of freedom and independence—movingly told by him as he lay dying, and by me, his oldest daughter, as after his death I go back in time to understand the roots of his alcoholism, his passion for flying and farming, and our complicated relationship—and through also sharing the insight and knowledge of the American psyche that I gained in my interviews with 37 remarkable psychologists and thinkers on issues that involve and affect us all as citizens: violence; addiction; the environment; capitalism; politics and polarization; and the soul of America.
And if you read one or both of these books, and have been affected by them, or liked or appreciated them, I hope you will consider sharing your thoughts with other readers by posting a review!
With gratitude and thanks to the readers of the Goodreads community,
Pythia
At the conclusion of my wonderfully successful giveaway campaign in which a combined total of almost 1200 people signed up to win a copy of American Icarus: A Memoir of Father and Country, and America on the Couch: Psychological Perspectives on American Politics and Culture, I want to say a heartfelt thank you for your interest and engagement, for your passion for books, and for taking notice of my books in particular. I look forward with excitement to sharing my work with the winners, and to hearing their responses.
But I also hope that those who didn’t win a copy might consider purchasing one or both books. Because as we head into the 2016 election season, I can think of no better time for these works-of-a-lifetime to serve their purpose of bringing deeper insight into America: through sharing my own deeply personal story of my father’s life, as it was shaped by those American myths of freedom and independence—movingly told by him as he lay dying, and by me, his oldest daughter, as after his death I go back in time to understand the roots of his alcoholism, his passion for flying and farming, and our complicated relationship—and through also sharing the insight and knowledge of the American psyche that I gained in my interviews with 37 remarkable psychologists and thinkers on issues that involve and affect us all as citizens: violence; addiction; the environment; capitalism; politics and polarization; and the soul of America.
And if you read one or both of these books, and have been affected by them, or liked or appreciated them, I hope you will consider sharing your thoughts with other readers by posting a review!
With gratitude and thanks to the readers of the Goodreads community,
Pythia
September 30, 2015
I Thought I Knew You, But....
Since publishing my memoir of growing up with an alcoholic father—American Icarus—so many friends, old and new, have written to tell me that while they thought they knew me, they realized that they'd had no idea what had really gone on behind the scenes of my early family life. So on this last day of my book-giveaway campaign, here is an excerpt from Chapter 8, "Icarus' Daughter," that illustrates the truth that they were right—just as I also had little idea of what had gone on in their family lives growing up as well.
The following scene takes place in the fall of 1967, when I'd been chosen as the junior class runner-up for homecoming queen:
"One might have thought this would have pleased my father; it didn't. I was nearly sixteen, but Joe was determined to put a stop to my growing up. He'd refused to even give my mother the money to buy me a new dress for the homecoming dance. My good-looking date was the upstanding son of the school principle. But that made no difference to my father, who held to his strict "no getting into cars with boys" rule, even for this special occasion.
For my mother, who'd grown up in the vibrantly social culture of Buenos Aires, my father's obsessive control around dating was an especially bitter fate. Number one on her list of expectations for both her daughters was romance, marriage, and a husband. Tucked beneath the nightgowns in her dresser were two sealed envelopes addressed "To My Daughter On Her Wedding Night." Staring dreamily out the kitchen window over her cup of Lipton's tea, Sheila would reminisce to my sister and me about the balls she'd danced at as a young girl. "I hope one day you know the joy of putting on a beautiful ball gown and dancing a waltz with the man you love," she'd say, looking past the grain silo into her distant past. When or where she thought that might happen, I had no idea.
Now, my mother became my ally—"going to bat" for me, as she used to put it, with my father. Somehow, she'd scraped the money together out of the food budget to buy me a plum-colored A-line dress for the dance. After much hectoring, she'd even persuaded my father to agree to let my date drive me home after the dance. On the morning of the homecoming game, Sheila took me to the local beauty parlor to get my hair set. Later that evening, after a day of much primping and preening, I was led by my mother to my father's chair. "Joe, doesn't Pelly look pretty tonight?" Sheila asked proudly. My father never even lifted his head from the Newsweek on his lap. When the handsome captain of the football team placed the sparkling tiara on my carefully teased and sprayed hair, then planted a kiss on my flushed cheeks, Joe wasn't present to watch me beam in happiness. He was at home, drinking.
Not that this bothered me. It had never been Joe's habit to show up for any of our sports or school performances. He'd long ago handed that parental task to my mother. Besides, the one time Sheila had forced my father to attend one of my sister's flute performances, he'd left in the middle of it to go to the local bar. After getting pie-faced smashed, he'd arrived to pick Colleen up on the sidewalk after everyone had left. Then he'd yelled at her all the way home, calling her a slut and a whore for wearing a short skirt on stage. So having my paranoid, zany, inebriated father at a public-school function wasn't anything I particularly wished for.
The following scene takes place in the fall of 1967, when I'd been chosen as the junior class runner-up for homecoming queen:
"One might have thought this would have pleased my father; it didn't. I was nearly sixteen, but Joe was determined to put a stop to my growing up. He'd refused to even give my mother the money to buy me a new dress for the homecoming dance. My good-looking date was the upstanding son of the school principle. But that made no difference to my father, who held to his strict "no getting into cars with boys" rule, even for this special occasion.
For my mother, who'd grown up in the vibrantly social culture of Buenos Aires, my father's obsessive control around dating was an especially bitter fate. Number one on her list of expectations for both her daughters was romance, marriage, and a husband. Tucked beneath the nightgowns in her dresser were two sealed envelopes addressed "To My Daughter On Her Wedding Night." Staring dreamily out the kitchen window over her cup of Lipton's tea, Sheila would reminisce to my sister and me about the balls she'd danced at as a young girl. "I hope one day you know the joy of putting on a beautiful ball gown and dancing a waltz with the man you love," she'd say, looking past the grain silo into her distant past. When or where she thought that might happen, I had no idea.
Now, my mother became my ally—"going to bat" for me, as she used to put it, with my father. Somehow, she'd scraped the money together out of the food budget to buy me a plum-colored A-line dress for the dance. After much hectoring, she'd even persuaded my father to agree to let my date drive me home after the dance. On the morning of the homecoming game, Sheila took me to the local beauty parlor to get my hair set. Later that evening, after a day of much primping and preening, I was led by my mother to my father's chair. "Joe, doesn't Pelly look pretty tonight?" Sheila asked proudly. My father never even lifted his head from the Newsweek on his lap. When the handsome captain of the football team placed the sparkling tiara on my carefully teased and sprayed hair, then planted a kiss on my flushed cheeks, Joe wasn't present to watch me beam in happiness. He was at home, drinking.
Not that this bothered me. It had never been Joe's habit to show up for any of our sports or school performances. He'd long ago handed that parental task to my mother. Besides, the one time Sheila had forced my father to attend one of my sister's flute performances, he'd left in the middle of it to go to the local bar. After getting pie-faced smashed, he'd arrived to pick Colleen up on the sidewalk after everyone had left. Then he'd yelled at her all the way home, calling her a slut and a whore for wearing a short skirt on stage. So having my paranoid, zany, inebriated father at a public-school function wasn't anything I particularly wished for.
September 20, 2015
On Writing As An Adventure
I was well into my second decade of analysis when I hit a wall in my freelance writing career. It was early 2000, and, gathering my courage, I’d submitted a query to GEORGE magazine—with its marriage of politics and celebrity, one of the coolest “glossies” on the newsstands at the time—only to have it politely rejected. Downhearted and downcast at my next session, I indulged in some mawkish self-pity. I’d also brought in a dream from the night before: in it, a huge, whirling black hole had opened up. In a fury, I’d thrown my scorned proposal into the open mouth of this gaping maw, and then watched in horror as it had disappeared.
Nona was a calm bulwark of a woman a couple of decades older—and wiser—than myself. After I’d recounted this nightmare, she sat silent, head down, reading over the dream I’d typed out. “So, that’s it for your writing,” she said, looking up, with an unusually steely note of reproach threading her voice. “In your fury over this rejection, you’ve flushed your work down this abyss. And now it’s gone.” I was stunned, and also a little ashamed. “But, but. . .how else am I supposed to feel?” I stammered out, deeply stung. If therapy wasn’t the place where I could give vent to my darker emotions, I continued, my face flushing with anger, then what was it for anyway?
One of the things I’d always admired about my analyst was the way she never lost her composure. Now, true to her self-contained character, Nona didn’t flinch. “Isn’t there another way for you to look at this?” she asked. Thrown by her question, I had no idea what “other way” there might be for me to look at what I could only see as a failure. After a long pause she finally answered the question herself, exclaiming, “You’ve lost your sense of adventure!”
My analyst’s words and her confrontational attitude—more like a knight throwing down a gauntlet than her usual stance of compassionate listening—had an instantaneous effect. Released from the grip of a critical and self-destructive complex, courage, warm and fierce, rose up inside me. Looking back, I’m thankful that I accepted Nona’s advice. For as almost every writer and author knows from experience, the writing way is potholed with rejection and without this piece of wisdom I would have turned back long ago for safer and more secure paths.
Indeed I’ve returned to this analytic encounter, so pivotal in my personal development and in my work, countless times. My analyst’s challenge has served as a kind of pilot light, and the memory of it has repeatedly re-ignited the bold, free-spirited attitude that inspired me to become a writer in the first place. It was the motto “Why not?” in fact, that spurred the Danish author Isak Dineson to craft her first short story—a motto I’d also claimed for myself. “Why not?” I’d thought at the outset, become a freelance journalist? “Why not?” strike out into uncharted territory, and seek out thinkers to interview, and sculpt dimly perceived ideas into fully formed articles and books?
I was recently reminded again of the wisdom and universal appeal embedded in the archetype of adventure while reading David McCullough’s biography, "John Adams". Of all the Founding Fathers, Adams may be my favorite: for never owning a single slave; for the extraordinary relationship of intellectual equals he shared with his wife, Abigail; for his brilliance constructing the legal foundation for American democracy; for his physical courage throughout the Revolution (if we’d lost the war to Great Britain, he’d likely have been hung for treason); for his enormous personal sacrifice to the cause of independence, often spending years away from his beloved Boston farm, and his wife and children; and for his humility and sense of humor. For sure, Adams had his faults: he could be stubborn and vain, and he had a temper. And yet somehow he stayed the course through an epic and tumultuous period in this country’s early beginnings.
At what many saw as the “crowning pinnacle” of Adams’ long career of service, he succeeded George Washington as second president of the newly minted United States of America. Yet in this passage from McCullough’s book, it seems that Adams likely didn’t see it that way:
“So much had happened in John Adams’ life—he had done so much, taken such risks, given so much of himself heart and soul in the cause of his country—that he seems not to have viewed the presidency as an ultimate career objective or crowning life achievement. He was not one given to seeing life as a climb to the top of a ladder or a mountain, but more as a journey or an adventure, even a ‘kind of romance, which a little embellished with fiction or exaggeration or only poetical ornament, would equal anything in the days of chivalry or knight errantry,’ as he once confided to Abigail. If anything, he was inclined to look back upon the long struggle for independence as the proud defining chapter. In this sense the presidency was but another episode in the long journey, and, as fate would have it, he was left little time to dwell overly on anything but the rush of events and the increasingly dangerous road ahead.”
I take inspiration for my work where I can find it. And if John Adams, who, despite all he’d sacrificed for his country, and who was frequently subjected to criticism, betrayal, and ridicule—from journalists, the citizens he’d helped give liberty to, and even from his revolutionary brothers, including his friend Thomas Jefferson—could step back and view his life as a journey, then certainly I, too, could view the tempests and setbacks I’ve faced along the road of writing, and will no doubt continue to face, not as insurmountable obstacles, but as the inevitable twists and turns of an unpredictable, eventful, but mostly incredibly interesting and engaging adventure.
After my therapy session, my sass and spunk renewed, I went home and rewrote my query letter to GEORGE. This time, it was accepted. As it happened, “All Politics is Loco,” (a light-hearted title for a serious piece about how psychologists handle political topics when they come up in therapy sessions) would appear in the last issue of GEORGE. While I was deeply saddened at the loss of such a unique publication, I also felt grateful for the opportunity I’d been given, and continued on my way.
And so as it did Adams with politics, seeing writing, with all its chance-taking and ups and downs, as an adventure and a journey has served me well over the decades since I first set out. It is an approach that has sustained me over the long haul. It has lightened my attitude, allowing me to experiment and take risks without falling victim to the fear of losing or being seen as a failure. Writing as adventure was the foundation from which I was able to write the intimate, soul-baring story of my Greatest Generation father’s American life, and to share our father-daughter relationship and his struggle with alcoholism and his dying last days in my memoir, "American Icarus."
For that’s the other thing about adventures. In the end, we don’t know where they will lead. Yet wherever they take us, there can be no failure when, no matter how seemingly ordinary or mundane, we heed the call to set forth when it comes: to create, to serve, to challenge prejudice and the status quo, and to dare our own limits by fulfilling the outlines of our larger destinies.
Nona was a calm bulwark of a woman a couple of decades older—and wiser—than myself. After I’d recounted this nightmare, she sat silent, head down, reading over the dream I’d typed out. “So, that’s it for your writing,” she said, looking up, with an unusually steely note of reproach threading her voice. “In your fury over this rejection, you’ve flushed your work down this abyss. And now it’s gone.” I was stunned, and also a little ashamed. “But, but. . .how else am I supposed to feel?” I stammered out, deeply stung. If therapy wasn’t the place where I could give vent to my darker emotions, I continued, my face flushing with anger, then what was it for anyway?
One of the things I’d always admired about my analyst was the way she never lost her composure. Now, true to her self-contained character, Nona didn’t flinch. “Isn’t there another way for you to look at this?” she asked. Thrown by her question, I had no idea what “other way” there might be for me to look at what I could only see as a failure. After a long pause she finally answered the question herself, exclaiming, “You’ve lost your sense of adventure!”
My analyst’s words and her confrontational attitude—more like a knight throwing down a gauntlet than her usual stance of compassionate listening—had an instantaneous effect. Released from the grip of a critical and self-destructive complex, courage, warm and fierce, rose up inside me. Looking back, I’m thankful that I accepted Nona’s advice. For as almost every writer and author knows from experience, the writing way is potholed with rejection and without this piece of wisdom I would have turned back long ago for safer and more secure paths.
Indeed I’ve returned to this analytic encounter, so pivotal in my personal development and in my work, countless times. My analyst’s challenge has served as a kind of pilot light, and the memory of it has repeatedly re-ignited the bold, free-spirited attitude that inspired me to become a writer in the first place. It was the motto “Why not?” in fact, that spurred the Danish author Isak Dineson to craft her first short story—a motto I’d also claimed for myself. “Why not?” I’d thought at the outset, become a freelance journalist? “Why not?” strike out into uncharted territory, and seek out thinkers to interview, and sculpt dimly perceived ideas into fully formed articles and books?
I was recently reminded again of the wisdom and universal appeal embedded in the archetype of adventure while reading David McCullough’s biography, "John Adams". Of all the Founding Fathers, Adams may be my favorite: for never owning a single slave; for the extraordinary relationship of intellectual equals he shared with his wife, Abigail; for his brilliance constructing the legal foundation for American democracy; for his physical courage throughout the Revolution (if we’d lost the war to Great Britain, he’d likely have been hung for treason); for his enormous personal sacrifice to the cause of independence, often spending years away from his beloved Boston farm, and his wife and children; and for his humility and sense of humor. For sure, Adams had his faults: he could be stubborn and vain, and he had a temper. And yet somehow he stayed the course through an epic and tumultuous period in this country’s early beginnings.
At what many saw as the “crowning pinnacle” of Adams’ long career of service, he succeeded George Washington as second president of the newly minted United States of America. Yet in this passage from McCullough’s book, it seems that Adams likely didn’t see it that way:
“So much had happened in John Adams’ life—he had done so much, taken such risks, given so much of himself heart and soul in the cause of his country—that he seems not to have viewed the presidency as an ultimate career objective or crowning life achievement. He was not one given to seeing life as a climb to the top of a ladder or a mountain, but more as a journey or an adventure, even a ‘kind of romance, which a little embellished with fiction or exaggeration or only poetical ornament, would equal anything in the days of chivalry or knight errantry,’ as he once confided to Abigail. If anything, he was inclined to look back upon the long struggle for independence as the proud defining chapter. In this sense the presidency was but another episode in the long journey, and, as fate would have it, he was left little time to dwell overly on anything but the rush of events and the increasingly dangerous road ahead.”
I take inspiration for my work where I can find it. And if John Adams, who, despite all he’d sacrificed for his country, and who was frequently subjected to criticism, betrayal, and ridicule—from journalists, the citizens he’d helped give liberty to, and even from his revolutionary brothers, including his friend Thomas Jefferson—could step back and view his life as a journey, then certainly I, too, could view the tempests and setbacks I’ve faced along the road of writing, and will no doubt continue to face, not as insurmountable obstacles, but as the inevitable twists and turns of an unpredictable, eventful, but mostly incredibly interesting and engaging adventure.
After my therapy session, my sass and spunk renewed, I went home and rewrote my query letter to GEORGE. This time, it was accepted. As it happened, “All Politics is Loco,” (a light-hearted title for a serious piece about how psychologists handle political topics when they come up in therapy sessions) would appear in the last issue of GEORGE. While I was deeply saddened at the loss of such a unique publication, I also felt grateful for the opportunity I’d been given, and continued on my way.
And so as it did Adams with politics, seeing writing, with all its chance-taking and ups and downs, as an adventure and a journey has served me well over the decades since I first set out. It is an approach that has sustained me over the long haul. It has lightened my attitude, allowing me to experiment and take risks without falling victim to the fear of losing or being seen as a failure. Writing as adventure was the foundation from which I was able to write the intimate, soul-baring story of my Greatest Generation father’s American life, and to share our father-daughter relationship and his struggle with alcoholism and his dying last days in my memoir, "American Icarus."
For that’s the other thing about adventures. In the end, we don’t know where they will lead. Yet wherever they take us, there can be no failure when, no matter how seemingly ordinary or mundane, we heed the call to set forth when it comes: to create, to serve, to challenge prejudice and the status quo, and to dare our own limits by fulfilling the outlines of our larger destinies.
September 7, 2015
Labor Day Excerpt from "American Icarus: A Memoir of Father & Country"
This Labor Day, I honor my Irish grandfather George Carroll, who was a machinist for the Pennsylvania Railroad, my Irish great-grandfather William Carroll, a PRR blacksmith, and my German great-grandfather John Feser, a member of the "seat gang" for the PRR. All three were plain and simple, hard-working laborers whose lives were bound up in the rhythms of early industrial America. Here is a scene from "American Icarus: A Memoir of Father and Country," in which my father and I are contemplating these photos:
"As we sat that day gazing into the faces of these workers, Joe and I fell silent. I found myself wondering about these men who were the undergirding of my life and who also laid the first transportation grid of the country I live in today: my two great-grandfathers, my grandfather, my father and his brothers, these sons of Altoona. Profound respect for the discipline, humility, and honest devotion these ancestors gave to the labor of their lives surges through me. I note the way I draw on these qualities in my own profession as a writer, and thank them silently in my heart for this inheritance—not of money, but of character, patience, manual endurance, and physical strength. These "Pennsylvania Forty-Niners" who "found a wilderness and builded [sic] an industrial empire" and who conquered the "triumphant conversion of steam to a useful agent" were indeed, as celebrated by the Altoona Chamber of Commerce, master builders.
But as much as we inherited the bolder, brighter, virtues of courage and perseverance from our laborer forebears, so we also bear in our American psyches and on our shoulders their physical weariness. We are a depressed nation, I believe, because we have not stopped yet to rest. Exhausting one industry, we immediately begin another. We are chronically tired because we cannot halt our manic building and development, cannot stay in place and take care of what is already there. This obsession may have been magnificent at one time, but it is outworn and has exacted a steep emotional toll. It has gone on too long. From the distance of a century, I ask my ancestors, now in their eternal sleep, to dream American dreams that are more rhythmic and sustainable in nature, and to rest in the soft hills of Altoona, land of good worth, where they lie buried.
"As we sat that day gazing into the faces of these workers, Joe and I fell silent. I found myself wondering about these men who were the undergirding of my life and who also laid the first transportation grid of the country I live in today: my two great-grandfathers, my grandfather, my father and his brothers, these sons of Altoona. Profound respect for the discipline, humility, and honest devotion these ancestors gave to the labor of their lives surges through me. I note the way I draw on these qualities in my own profession as a writer, and thank them silently in my heart for this inheritance—not of money, but of character, patience, manual endurance, and physical strength. These "Pennsylvania Forty-Niners" who "found a wilderness and builded [sic] an industrial empire" and who conquered the "triumphant conversion of steam to a useful agent" were indeed, as celebrated by the Altoona Chamber of Commerce, master builders.
But as much as we inherited the bolder, brighter, virtues of courage and perseverance from our laborer forebears, so we also bear in our American psyches and on our shoulders their physical weariness. We are a depressed nation, I believe, because we have not stopped yet to rest. Exhausting one industry, we immediately begin another. We are chronically tired because we cannot halt our manic building and development, cannot stay in place and take care of what is already there. This obsession may have been magnificent at one time, but it is outworn and has exacted a steep emotional toll. It has gone on too long. From the distance of a century, I ask my ancestors, now in their eternal sleep, to dream American dreams that are more rhythmic and sustainable in nature, and to rest in the soft hills of Altoona, land of good worth, where they lie buried.
August 21, 2015
What a D.C. Cab Driver From Ethiopia Taught Me About Being a Better American
Last weekend, while out in Washington,D.C., and with the metro running behind schedule because of maintenance being done on some of their trains, I found myself in the back seat of a cab being driven by a young man from Ethiopia. He’d been in this country for four years, he told me, as we wound our way down Massachusetts Ave., past the stately embassies, and when I asked him how he liked our capital city, he replied that he’d been “to London, Paris, and Rome” and that of those cities D.C. was by far the most beautiful. He knew all its streets by heart now, he told me, and as often as he drove around them on his rounds, he never tired of the buildings and monuments, and the great mingling of people from around the world crowding the streets.
It wasn’t just Washington that my cab driver loved, though, but America, too, and his patriotism flared brightly as he began talking about how much he loved this country, and how fortunate he felt to be living here. As we passed the Lincoln Memorial, we began chatting about the Founding Fathers, a topic he knew as much about, if not more, than did I, a natural born citizen. He’d steeped himself in biographies of Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and Madison and when I asked him which of the Founders was his favorite, he reflected for a moment, and then said he thought John Adams. Then he surprised me even further by remarking that he couldn’t understand why there was no memorial to our second president of the United States: something I’d never considered, which was surprising given that I was just in the midst of re-reading David McCullough’s fine biography of Adams. As he dropped me off, I thanked him for such an interesting ride home, and wished him well in his job as a cab driver struggling to keep up with the competition from uber, and to support his wife and two little daughters.
Later I thought how our encounter had given me renewed appreciation for those newest of arrivals to our United States, who despite hardship and struggle in our oftentimes ruthless capitalist market still see through fresh eyes and a kind of purity of heart the value of our ongoing historic experiment in democracy. And it made me remember a story I’d once told to the legendary post-Jungian scholar James Hillman. We were talking about America for my book "America on the Couch," and I told him about a waitress I’d once had, also newly arrived from Africa, who’d spontaneously told me that we Americans have “such heart” and that our hearts “were wonderful.” He’d heard that so often, Hillman replied thoughtfully. “And it’s true.” Indeed, as the renowned thinker on soul Thomas Moore said in our interview about America, one way to really fulfill our democratic ideals would be to reflect on the Statue of Liberty, and “the ideal it stands for of accepting other peoples in this country.”
Instead of focusing solely on immigration as a legal issue, wouldn't taking it on as part of every citizen's psychological soul task of being American, with all this task's complexity around accepting "the other," and learning about and remembering our own immigration stories, be a fine way of being patriotic in our world today?
It wasn’t just Washington that my cab driver loved, though, but America, too, and his patriotism flared brightly as he began talking about how much he loved this country, and how fortunate he felt to be living here. As we passed the Lincoln Memorial, we began chatting about the Founding Fathers, a topic he knew as much about, if not more, than did I, a natural born citizen. He’d steeped himself in biographies of Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and Madison and when I asked him which of the Founders was his favorite, he reflected for a moment, and then said he thought John Adams. Then he surprised me even further by remarking that he couldn’t understand why there was no memorial to our second president of the United States: something I’d never considered, which was surprising given that I was just in the midst of re-reading David McCullough’s fine biography of Adams. As he dropped me off, I thanked him for such an interesting ride home, and wished him well in his job as a cab driver struggling to keep up with the competition from uber, and to support his wife and two little daughters.
Later I thought how our encounter had given me renewed appreciation for those newest of arrivals to our United States, who despite hardship and struggle in our oftentimes ruthless capitalist market still see through fresh eyes and a kind of purity of heart the value of our ongoing historic experiment in democracy. And it made me remember a story I’d once told to the legendary post-Jungian scholar James Hillman. We were talking about America for my book "America on the Couch," and I told him about a waitress I’d once had, also newly arrived from Africa, who’d spontaneously told me that we Americans have “such heart” and that our hearts “were wonderful.” He’d heard that so often, Hillman replied thoughtfully. “And it’s true.” Indeed, as the renowned thinker on soul Thomas Moore said in our interview about America, one way to really fulfill our democratic ideals would be to reflect on the Statue of Liberty, and “the ideal it stands for of accepting other peoples in this country.”
Instead of focusing solely on immigration as a legal issue, wouldn't taking it on as part of every citizen's psychological soul task of being American, with all this task's complexity around accepting "the other," and learning about and remembering our own immigration stories, be a fine way of being patriotic in our world today?
July 20, 2015
On Synchronicity and Writing
“Synchronicity therefore means the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state—and, in certain cases, vice versa.” —Carl Jung, Synchronicity
I was raised by a mother who was fond of advising me, when out shopping, that if a particular something—say a blouse, or once it was a mirror at a flea market—“spoke to me” then I should buy it. Worlds of meaning were enclosed within this simple phrase, worlds that came welling up out of her Argentine girlhood with all the force of a magical incantation. I loved my Latin-born mother for this; it was a side that made my American life just a bit different: more enchanted, more mysterious, more interesting. Her gift of sight passed down to me, allowing me to sometimes sense the interfaces between the world outside and the one inside my psyche.
For if we are to believe—as I do, as my mother and shamans do, as artists, mystics, indigenous peoples, environmentalists, biologists, and many others do—that the world itself is animated and alive, then it makes sense that the things we are drawn to are in turn drawn to us. How else to explain, for instance, that after twenty-two years of living in the same house, and after nearly that same amount of time spent working on two big books that turned on the rather grand theme of America and how its history and psychology shapes us as individuals, I suddenly found myself, after a move, living in the shadow of the George Washington Masonic Memorial Temple?
When on my first night in my new home my son took me outside, and pointed to the illuminated stone tower capped by a pyramid perched atop the hill looming behind me (the Memorial was in fact inspired by the lighthouse of Alexandria, Egypt, one of the ancient Seven Wonders of the World) and that broods over the city of modern-day Alexandria, Virginia like a set piece out of a Cecile B. DeMille movie, it was as if, well, as if George Washington himself had had something to do with my move. Perhaps that’s taking things a bit far. But still, I couldn’t help but think that some larger force operating behind the screen of my everyday life had conspired to bring me to this very spot.
America compared to other countries is not that old—newness and futurity have been our lodestars—but after my move I found myself surrounded by landmarks and historic sites that marked the country’s beginnings. Alexandria was one of the new republic’s earliest cities, and walking the historic King Street neighborhood I daily passed by the church where George and Martha Washington (accompanied by their slaves) rode in from Mt. Vernon to worship; the humble townhouse where they stayed while in town; and the local Gadsby’s Tavern, where Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, James Monroe, and other founders had gathered to drink and hash out the details of founding a democracy. Down by the Alexandria wharf, I could imagine the tall ships with their billowing sails that had once filled the harbor. I could even imagine my own ancestor, Master Commandant John Cassin—reputed to have been a friend of Washington’s since fighting alongside him during the Revolution—docking his ship and joining them all at the tavern for a drink. For that is the other thing about this move: it brings me closer to the ancestors who once lived in this area, and whose existence I only discovered while writing my memoir, AMERICAN ICARUS. It also brings me closer to America, that subject that has also preoccupied me throughout the writing of both books, including AMERICA ON THE COUCH.
I’ve been writing for more than three decades now. Because so much of writing is made up of hundreds of thousands of mundane moments searching for the right word, correcting spelling and grammar, painstakingly arranging sentences and paragraphs, and checking facts, when that time finally arrives when what you as a writer have been crazily, intently, bent on finishing suddenly coheres into a pattern and makes sense, it can feel like a kind of annunciation: a sign from the gods of writing that you, the humble wordsmith, are indeed on the right path.
In his book SYNCHRONICITY, the psychologist Carl Jung illustrated the dynamics of how this principle works with a case study. While in a session with a young woman he was treating, she began telling him about a dream she’d recently had about a golden scarab. While his patient was recounting this dream, he writes, he sat with his back to the closed window when suddenly he heard a noise behind him, “like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from the outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle . . .which contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt an urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since, and that the dream of the patient has remained unique in my experience.” Jung goes on to write that prior to this incident, his patient had clung stubbornly to an attitude of rationality and that “something quite irrational was needed which was beyond my powers to produce.”
It’s been some years since I last read this selection from Jung’s work. But as I was out walking my new neighborhood one evening some days ago, I decided to hike up the hill behind me to the Masonic Memorial Temple—that place that had come to feel like a guardian presence, a place that, as my mother might have said, spoke to me. Standing on the high steps with its commanding views spread out before me, I could see the spire of the Washington Monument and the Capital dome on the far rim of the horizon. I took in King Street with its toy-sized cars and the railroad tracks; in eerie resonance the clackety-clack, hooting sounds of a train passing through instantly summoned the spirits of my paternal grandfather and great-grandfather who’d once long ago labored on the Pennsylvania Railroad.
Descending back down the hill to my apartment, Jung’s episode with his patient and his thoughts on synchronicity came back to me as I mulled over the interlocking pieces of my move, the pattern these pieces had assumed, the timing of it all, and, call it what you will, that unseen hand that had seemed to arrange my life circumstances in an elegant symmetry of past and present. That night, as if in a further, mysterious confirmation of all that I’d been thinking, I dreamed that I opened my hand: there, on my palm, was a beautiful emerald and gold Egyptian scarab.
I was raised by a mother who was fond of advising me, when out shopping, that if a particular something—say a blouse, or once it was a mirror at a flea market—“spoke to me” then I should buy it. Worlds of meaning were enclosed within this simple phrase, worlds that came welling up out of her Argentine girlhood with all the force of a magical incantation. I loved my Latin-born mother for this; it was a side that made my American life just a bit different: more enchanted, more mysterious, more interesting. Her gift of sight passed down to me, allowing me to sometimes sense the interfaces between the world outside and the one inside my psyche.
For if we are to believe—as I do, as my mother and shamans do, as artists, mystics, indigenous peoples, environmentalists, biologists, and many others do—that the world itself is animated and alive, then it makes sense that the things we are drawn to are in turn drawn to us. How else to explain, for instance, that after twenty-two years of living in the same house, and after nearly that same amount of time spent working on two big books that turned on the rather grand theme of America and how its history and psychology shapes us as individuals, I suddenly found myself, after a move, living in the shadow of the George Washington Masonic Memorial Temple?
When on my first night in my new home my son took me outside, and pointed to the illuminated stone tower capped by a pyramid perched atop the hill looming behind me (the Memorial was in fact inspired by the lighthouse of Alexandria, Egypt, one of the ancient Seven Wonders of the World) and that broods over the city of modern-day Alexandria, Virginia like a set piece out of a Cecile B. DeMille movie, it was as if, well, as if George Washington himself had had something to do with my move. Perhaps that’s taking things a bit far. But still, I couldn’t help but think that some larger force operating behind the screen of my everyday life had conspired to bring me to this very spot.
America compared to other countries is not that old—newness and futurity have been our lodestars—but after my move I found myself surrounded by landmarks and historic sites that marked the country’s beginnings. Alexandria was one of the new republic’s earliest cities, and walking the historic King Street neighborhood I daily passed by the church where George and Martha Washington (accompanied by their slaves) rode in from Mt. Vernon to worship; the humble townhouse where they stayed while in town; and the local Gadsby’s Tavern, where Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, James Monroe, and other founders had gathered to drink and hash out the details of founding a democracy. Down by the Alexandria wharf, I could imagine the tall ships with their billowing sails that had once filled the harbor. I could even imagine my own ancestor, Master Commandant John Cassin—reputed to have been a friend of Washington’s since fighting alongside him during the Revolution—docking his ship and joining them all at the tavern for a drink. For that is the other thing about this move: it brings me closer to the ancestors who once lived in this area, and whose existence I only discovered while writing my memoir, AMERICAN ICARUS. It also brings me closer to America, that subject that has also preoccupied me throughout the writing of both books, including AMERICA ON THE COUCH.
I’ve been writing for more than three decades now. Because so much of writing is made up of hundreds of thousands of mundane moments searching for the right word, correcting spelling and grammar, painstakingly arranging sentences and paragraphs, and checking facts, when that time finally arrives when what you as a writer have been crazily, intently, bent on finishing suddenly coheres into a pattern and makes sense, it can feel like a kind of annunciation: a sign from the gods of writing that you, the humble wordsmith, are indeed on the right path.
In his book SYNCHRONICITY, the psychologist Carl Jung illustrated the dynamics of how this principle works with a case study. While in a session with a young woman he was treating, she began telling him about a dream she’d recently had about a golden scarab. While his patient was recounting this dream, he writes, he sat with his back to the closed window when suddenly he heard a noise behind him, “like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from the outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle . . .which contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt an urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since, and that the dream of the patient has remained unique in my experience.” Jung goes on to write that prior to this incident, his patient had clung stubbornly to an attitude of rationality and that “something quite irrational was needed which was beyond my powers to produce.”
It’s been some years since I last read this selection from Jung’s work. But as I was out walking my new neighborhood one evening some days ago, I decided to hike up the hill behind me to the Masonic Memorial Temple—that place that had come to feel like a guardian presence, a place that, as my mother might have said, spoke to me. Standing on the high steps with its commanding views spread out before me, I could see the spire of the Washington Monument and the Capital dome on the far rim of the horizon. I took in King Street with its toy-sized cars and the railroad tracks; in eerie resonance the clackety-clack, hooting sounds of a train passing through instantly summoned the spirits of my paternal grandfather and great-grandfather who’d once long ago labored on the Pennsylvania Railroad.
Descending back down the hill to my apartment, Jung’s episode with his patient and his thoughts on synchronicity came back to me as I mulled over the interlocking pieces of my move, the pattern these pieces had assumed, the timing of it all, and, call it what you will, that unseen hand that had seemed to arrange my life circumstances in an elegant symmetry of past and present. That night, as if in a further, mysterious confirmation of all that I’d been thinking, I dreamed that I opened my hand: there, on my palm, was a beautiful emerald and gold Egyptian scarab.
