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Best-selling how-to-save-Ophelia books aside, was it even possible for any parent of a daughter in the early 1990s to do much but watch from the boat as an entire generation of girls sank beneath the surface?
The Mozart Effect Effect thrives in a realm that is neither science nor art, a realm that is far more organically American: marketing.
There is no way to know that the new America will have very little interest in learning anything accurate about the Middle East—that instead there are powerful interests that will need Americans to think of the Middle East as a homogeneous region full of terrorists. That Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia and Iraq and Iran are all the same. An acidic current of anti-intellectualism and prowar sentiment will corrode nuance, subtlety, and complexity into a dull, generalized fear.
Panic attacks serve as confirmation of the very things women spend their lives working to negate: suspicions of female silliness, stupidity, hysteria. Panic attacks involve the removal of the mind’s control over the body, and in this way are aftershocks of an earlier mind-body separation—the moment when adolescent girls realize that no amount of brains or charm will save them from life in the body.
Like most people who find themselves in a blind rage, what you really feel, beneath the anger, is helplessness.
You do not interrogate your own anger to see whether it is the righteous kind born of injustice or the selfish kind born of personal failure.
For the early twenties, a particularly cruel age to be struck down by fear, is a stage in life when tremendous bravery is required of a woman—the bravery to discover what she wants, what she cannot abide, what she needs to make a living and be among the living.
Years later it will strike you that perhaps Mr. Rogers wasn’t meant for you, a kid of the 1980s with wonderful real-life parents who indulged in imaginary play. Perhaps Mr. Rogers was intended for your parents themselves, kids of the 1950s. Your parents were raised by people of a sterner, more sinister generation.
Faking is pedagogy. Faking is teaching and faking is learning and faking is the way that all human beings grow, from babies faking speech to teenagers faking coolness to professors faking wisdom.
