Epidemics, Climate Change, The Black Man, And Corporate Greed - Calamity Jane's Post-Menopausal Hysteria

Janie Thomas was a Nervous Nellie, always was and always would be, or so thought her ambitious parents anxious that she should succeed where they had not.  He, a bank teller and she a milliner's assistant wanted their daughter to rise above the herd, to be somebody of worth; and so it was with dismay that they saw their young daughter afraid of her own shadow. 

No matter how they tried to get her to straighten out and take the bull by the horns, the little girl stayed in her room played with her princess dolls and plodded her way to school, to church, and the corner store. More than just shy, Janie was timid, afraid to walk under overhanging limbs with the certainty they would come down as she passed, worried that the cumulus clouds gathering in the west meant tornadoes, that the rattles and shake in her father's old Ford meant disastrous engine failure on the busiest highway in the state, that hearing her mother's cough meant that she would die, leaving her motherless and an orphan. 

No one knew where this unusual fearfulness came from.  Her older brother ran up emergency room bills thanks to his wild, untamed rides in up and down Southington mountain, got pulled in  by the police for grotesque graffiti on the pillars of the Skyway bridge, failed every course at P.T. Ballard High School and rode the rails to seek his fortune in Chillicothe. 

Janie's parents didn't want her to turn out like her brother, a social renegade and shame to the family, but wished she had just a bit of his derring-do, gumption, get-up-and-go, risk-taking.  Instead as every year passed she became even more of a Nervous Nellie.  The more she understood the world, the more she saw lurking dangers, intolerable risks, assault, abuse, and poverty. 

Now, there were really only two options for a girl like Janie Thomas - keep on bumbling through life, afraid to look around corners, never going into closets at night in the dark, worried that the sky would fall; or harness her worries and do something about them.  She had never intended to be a social reformer, a woman engaged in the existential fight for a better world, but the fit was perfect.  After years of moral, physical, and emotional fear, she finally found her place. 

Yes, the world was in danger of extinction, her climate change colleagues warned.  Unless Americans were aware of the existential threat of rising global temperatures, the loss of polar ice, and the disastrous heating of the atmosphere, the earth's atmosphere would overheat and every living thing within it would incinerate.

Because of her childhood fears and innate conclusions that disaster was around the corner, she took such screeds and wild hyperbole as fact and vowed to march in the front lines and take on the capitalists, scientific naysayers, and backwater ignoramuses and teach them a lesson. 

Given her peripatetic nature, and the bevy of worries and concerns that had plagued her all her life, climate change activism wasn't enough to bank the fires that burned within, that still gave her tremors and night sweats.  The progressive canon was filled with to-do items, lists of horrible outcomes unless and until concerted communal action were taken. 

The ghetto was rising as nastily as it had back in the day of Watts, Detroit, and Newark.  Racism, black hatred, white oppression, and elitism were keeping the black man in chains worse than during slavery, Jim Crows, and segregation.  He could not fight the good fight alone, and it was up to committed, empathetic, and determined women like her to join in the battle. 

She fought on two fronts, and was as often seen in the teeming slums of Anacostia as she was on the picket line in front of the White House demanding climate sanity. 

And then COVID hit, and every fiber of her timorous, frightened, quavering fear that she had thought tamed and submerged, resonated at a fever pitch.  This indeed was The Big One, the Annihilator, the Last Judgment, the End of Days.  As we know now the whole COVID affair was a big cock-up, the scam of century, a power grab by a little marionette who in the name of epidemiology shut the country down but whose real agenda was to extend the power and reach of government and create Big Brother. 

However there were Janie Thomases everywhere, and general panic set in.  People were scrubbing their fingers to the bone, sanitizing every kitchen surface, triple-masking, never venturing out, isolating thre mail and waiting three days to bring it in.  J'accuse vigilantism spread throughout otherwise accommodating, tolerant neighborhoods; and once again, Janie thought she had found her calling.  She had been right after all to worry about an extinction-level virus that would emerge from a Chinese poultry market, mutate, infiltrate, sicken, and kill by the millions. 

She was first on the streets of University Park calling out neighbors who did not respect social distancing or mask mandates.  She was ferocious, wild, and threatening, a whirling dervish of anger, resentment, and purpose. She became known as The Madwoman of University Park, modelled after her counterpart of Chaillot.  

The history of hysteria can be traced to ancient times. In ancient Greece it was described in the gynecological treatises of the Hippocratic Corpus, which dates back to the 5th and 4th centuries BC. Plato's dialogue Timaeus compares a woman's uterus to a living creature that wanders throughout a woman's body, "blocking passages, obstructing breathing, and causing disease". The concept of a pathological wandering womb was later viewed as the source of the term hysteria,which stems from the Greek cognate of uterus, ὑστέρα (hystera) 

In the 19th century physicians thought that the stress associated with the typical female life at the time caused civilized women to be both more susceptible to nervous disorders and to develop faulty reproductive tracts.

Up until the 20th century doctors treated hysteria by masturbating female patients to orgasm (termed "hysterical paroxysm"), and that the inconvenience of this may have driven the early development of and the market for the vibrator.

All those medical claims have been rescinded by what is considered a more modern, female-sensitive, New Age psychiatry, but hysteria remains, both as an individual pathology and national, collective one. Does the following sound familiar?

The hysteric personality is characterized by mental instability, superficial and excitable emotionality, capriciously changeable tendencies, and the capacity for completely contradictory behavior. Hysterics combine inferiority feelings with the need to attract attention, role-playing, and showing-off; they take the imaginary for the real and subordinate reason and will to emotional impulse. Their attitude to the environment swings wildly and they change from sympathy to antipathy instantaneously.

Another now discredited psychological assumption is the ancillary to generalized hysteria - post-menopausal hysteria, a condition in women caused by a reversal of fortune.  What most defines a woman - her ability to become pregnant and bear children - is around the age of fifty over and done with.  Most women take it in stride, a matter of course, irremediable and final; but many others are shaken to the  roots.  Their lives are over, done with.  They are biological rejects, left on the evolutionary curb without their say-so. 

 

This is what happened to Janie Thomas, a perfect storm of natural fearfulness and timidity, female hysteria, menopause and the validation of her most upsetting fears.  She was a wreck and could barely function.  She was worthless as a wife and mother, a supernumerary in the progressive struggle for social justice (women in The Movement were afraid of her and how her unhinged screeds and St. Vitus' dancing would sully good causes), and an increasing candidate for St. Elizabeth's, Washington's Hospital for the Mentally Ill, an old-fashioned insane asylum fashioned after Bedlam and Broadmoor.  

How many women like Janie Thomas are in The Movement today?  Judging by the frenzy, the maniacal demonstrations, the inchoate and mad expressions of outrage, and the totally consuming, corrosive, and destructive social behavior, they must be in the hundreds of thousands.  The coming of the conservative wave has helped calm the waters.  These women are being called out for 'Febrile Political Hysteria (FPH) but if Janie Thomas's experience is any indication, their hysteria is more systemic, harder to quiet, and a continuing nuisance. 

Janie has disappeared, perhaps folded into the schizophrenic homeless on the streets of San Francisco, or secure in an institution more caring and understanding than the asylums of the past.  Hysteria need not be permanent, the professional literature suggests; and with proper medication and counselling it can be controlled. Or she might simply be spent. All those wild, feral energies played out, leaving her empty but at least no longer a shrewish, unpleasant woman. 

Selective Memory - The Past Is But A Fictitious Drama, A Confabulation, And We Still Demand The Truth?

Thanksgiving dinners at Aunt Tally's were always fun for us kids. Lots of ice cream and sarsaparilla and the usual fights between Tally's cousins and the Grillo brothers.  The two could never seem to agree on anything, argued over every detail, and seemed to be from different planets.  It wasn't a Ford but a Chevy.  It didn't happen on Route 15 but 72.  It wasn't Margaret Filcher driving but her retarded sister; and the poor fool died at Grace New Haven not New Britain General...and so on. 

It got so bad that Tally had to separate them, 'Now, now Harry', she said cutting him another piece of ham pie and refilling his Lambrusco, settling him down, returning the table to incidental talk about Angie's lasagna and the outrageous peonies in Mabel Schwartz's garden ('Most be hybrids' said Joey Panto. 'She could never grow them that big'). 

The point is not about the wreck that sent Margaret Filcher - or her sister - to the hospital, but the total inability of anyone to agree on anything. Was it just obstreperousness? Why would anyone dig their heels in and have a go over such an inconsequential event that may not have even happened? Harry Grillo told the same story every Easter an no version jibed. It was as though he had reworked the score, adding more trumpets and relegating the strings and revising the libretto until it soared with drama. 

Emil Panto had heard Harry's performances every Thanksgiving and had the same contentious objections.  Not this but that, not here but there, not her but him until the dinner was once again as messy as a doctrinal dispute. He should have known that when Harry saw or heard something, it got processed in his overheated brain, got modified, convoluted and produced according to his imagination; that facts never seemed to matter, the telling is what counted, and the more engaging, entertaining, and compelling the story was, the better. 

Besides, the old folks around the table had their own way with facts, and no one could agree on when the elms had come down, Zackin's Pharmacy closed, or when Mayor Gambino got ousted.  The confusion got worse when it came to family history.  It was as though Gibbon invented The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or that Plutarch's Lives was pure invention.  Each and everyone of the guests around Tally's Easter table had their own version of the past, the true version, the one and only version; and they were as unmovable as the Rock of Gibraltar when it came to defending it. 

There was a recent case of a drive-by shooting in the New Haven Register that left two people dead on Whalley Avenue.  The paper declined to give details because the eyewitnesses interviewed different substantially on what happened.  In fact the lawyers in the case were forced to rely on tire marks, shell casings, trajectories, and firing angles in their prosecution and defense because the three bystanders who supposedly witnessed the shooting could not agree.  It was a Ford not a Chevy.  The shooter was black not white.  It was a handgun not a rifle. There were two men in the back seat or none, only shadows. A volley was fired not just two well-placed rounds. 

Perception is a very tricky business; and much has been made recently about the inability of eyewitnesses to agree on what they see.  There have been a number of scholarly articles recently on memory and how selective it is.  It is well known that eyewitness accounts are usually wrong or conflicting.  Despite the absolute conviction of witnesses that they saw a white male, large ears, and goatee point a gun out the window of a Buick LeSabre and shoot Robert Leggings, they saw no such thing.

Scott Fraser, a forensic psychologist, provided surprising evidence in a recent interview on NPR’s Ted Talks.

Fraser researches what's real and what's selective when it comes to human memory and crime. He focuses on the fallibility of human memory and encourages a more scientific approach to trial evidence. He has testified in criminal and civil cases throughout the U.S. in state and federal courts.

In 2011 Fraser was involved in the retrial of a 1992 murder case in which Francisco Carrillo was found guilty and sentenced to two life sentences in prison. Fraser and the team that hired him staged a re-enactment of the night in question, and they showed the testimonies that had put Carrillo in jail were unreliable. After 20 years in jail for a crime he didn't commit, Carrillo was free.

Not only were the testimonies of the eyewitnesses in question, what they said they saw had no bearing whatsoever on reality.

Literature is filled with stories of subjective eyewitness memory.  Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book is a recreation of an actual event:

The Ring and the Book tells the story of a murder trial in Rome in 1698, whereby an impoverished nobleman, Count Guido Franceschini, is found guilty of the murders of his young wife Pompilia Comparini and her parents, having suspected his wife was having an affair with a young cleric, Giuseppe Caponsacchi…. The poem comprises twelve books, nine of which are dramatic monologues spoken by a different narrator involved in the case… usually giving a different account of the same events, and two books (the first and the last) spoken by the author.

The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell is the story of an event told by four different people, all with different recollections of what actually happened; and of course Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all recounted the same the story of Jesus Christ quite differently.  

We all ‘fill in’ memories after the fact.  We may have stored some essential facts or impressions of a long-ago event, and we tend to fill in the blanks based on recollections of family and friends.  It may be that it wasn’t Uncle Fred who threw up on the Persian carpet, but Uncle Pasqual.  We had the scene right, just not the actors.

So Harry Grillo 'filled in' his recollections with both his own confabulations and the asides of others, and before long, the original story had become something entirely different. 

A famous psychological experiment had young children seated in a circle.  One child was given a simply, easy to remember story - 'Mrs. Harris's dog chased the neighbor's cat up the oak tree and the fire department had to be called' -  and told to repeat it to the classmate next to him, on and on until the circle was complete. 

By the time each child had been told the story and repeated it, the version told by the last student to the experimenter bore no relationship to the original version. 

So, the combination of personalized, selective memory, plus filling in and hearing what we want to hear assures that recollection of the past is a very tenuous, shaky proposition at best. 

Much is made of 'the truth' and 'fake news' these days - as though there were actual, universally agreed upon, objective reality.  Watching reportage of the same event on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC illustrates the issue.  Although all can agree that ICE personnel have been deployed to Detroit, the way such deployment is presented differs significantly. It is either a legitimate response to crime and illegality or it is an untoward use of federal authority to usurp the power of local government.  It is either a reasonable, trained, and disciplined force, or a racist phalanx of thugs with a brutal agenda. 

Why all the fuss and bother?  Of course there is no such thing as the truth and all news is fake; and for all the Sturm und Drang over morality, there is not nor never has has been a universal, absolute, unquestioned right rule of conduct. Relativity did not start with Einstein. Muslims and Christians radically disagree on the Crucifixion.  Allah would never have sacrificed one of his prophets and allowed him to be subjected to hideous torture.  There was no Resurrection, and Jesus was taken up into heaven with no imaginative, totally false assumptions. 

Progressives not only want their version of history - their particular selective memory - to be current. They want to expunge and remove all traces of alternate versions. Confederate statues must come down, army posts and streets must be renamed.  The antebellum South can no longer exist. Progressive history allows for no intrusion into their confected reality - their version of the past. 

Husbands tell their own versions of infidelity, admitting when forced their adultery, but easily shift the blame onto their hectoring, vixenish, shrewish wives. Sexual dalliance forced upon a husband is not a sin, a dereliction of duty, or an amoral act.  Uncle Joe was simply seeking love when his marriage provided nothing but dismalness and rancor.  His wandering was not only justified, it was right and proper. Did he commit adultery? It all depends. 

The truth? Fuhgeddaboudit...

The Search For Real Love - Confounded By The Hopelessly Fabulist Romanticism Of A Medieval Dreamer

The poet Petrarch (1304-1374) is credited with the creation or at least discovery of romantic love.  Petrarch was an Italian scholar and poet in Renaissance Italy, and one of the earliest humanists. Until he was smitten by ‘Laura’, the woman of his 366 sonnets, he contented himself with academic treatises on political philosophy, moral theory, and social order. After spotting her in the Church of Sainte-Claire d’Avignon, however, he was never the same.

There is little definite information in Petrarch's work concerning Laura, except that she is lovely to look at, fair-haired, with a modest, dignified bearing. Laura and Petrarch had little or no personal contact. According to his "Secretum", she refused him for the very proper reason that she was already married to another man. 

Petrarch wrote: "In my younger days I struggled constantly with an overwhelming but pure love affair – my only one, and I would have struggled with it longer had not premature death… extinguished the cooling flames.

 

Petrarch was consumed by love for ‘Laura’ but guilt and the ponderous weight of his former priesthood and the mores of the times – not to mention that ‘Laura’ was married – prevented consummation. He wanted her and at the same time was repulsed by his immoral desires. “He channeled his feelings into love poems… and wrote prose that showed his contempt for men who pursue women”.

Petrarch’s sonnets all idealize ‘Laura’.  In his verse she became a perfect but untouchable woman – a saint, the perfection of female beauty, and a goddess.  In the following sonnet, Petrarch expresses his ineffable, unattainable love for her and the permanent grief caused by her death.  His was idealistic, unrequited love; and his poems expressed the persistent romantic notion of compulsive, but often unattainable desire.

Henrietta Parsons knew all about Petrarch, his love poems, his late adolescence, and his codifying the love ballads of 11th century troubadours into a genre. Petrarch didn't exactly invent romantic love - the conditions in the early Renaissance, knights, fair maidens, courtship, and the emergence of the sybaritic court, were right; and the songs of the iterant musicians limning the beauty of sexual intimacy were just the thing to set the poet dreaming. 

Romantic love needed a beginning.  Before the idea emerged, marriages were arranged, brides and grooms were chosen for their reproductive and economic potential, for their social status, and their well-being.  Marriage was a contract to assure viability in hard times and not something vulnerable to the vicissitudes of subjective choice.

Kings were no different.  Henry VIII was not interested in love and romance but a woman who would give him a male heir. Other kings, courtiers, and varied royalty were no different.  Marriage was an official affair with invariable parameters set long ago.  Emperors, sultans, shahs, and shoguns were governed by the same rules of practicality.  No one, high- or low-born could afford the vagaries and uncertainties of romantic love. 

Be that as it may, Henrietta was lonely, unloved, and forgotten.  Well past the days of her youth and entering an age of dubious sexual interest and decreasing fertility, she despaired.  She had dressed too often in the sequins, ribbons, and frills of a princess to dismiss the idea of a Prince Charming.  She had read too much romantic fiction to see love in the most unexpected places in the most unsuspecting circumstances.

The battlefield, however, was littered with bad marriages and contentious divorces.  Over half the marriages in the United States ended in dissolution - and those were first marriages.  The rate for successive ones was almost as high. Women and men who thought they had learned from the first debacle had not.  The configuration of sexual desire - to whom we are attracted - is set early on, some calculus of father-love, mother-jealousy, natural sensitivity, reserve, or hostility.  So it is not surprising that women fall into the same disastrous marriage pit again and again. 

Yet Henrietta, despite her romantic fantasies, was a very disciplined and determined woman. The had been imbued with the concept of romantic love - that is, that it does exist far beyond the poetic dreams of a Renaissance journeyman.  There is something almost spiritual in the union of two perfectly matched people.  

D.H. Lawrence came close to expressing the idea of this iconic union, but stopped at the physical.  Coming together, mutual orgasm between one who dominated and one who willingly submitted opened psychic doors and allowed the release of untapped energies and passions. 

Love was absent in this calculus as it was in Tantrism, the precursor of Lawrentian spiritual epiphany; or the philosophy of ying and yang and the necessary complementarity of the sexes.  Henrietta wanted both Tantric expression and Petrarchan romance to complete her puzzle. 

Whistlin' Dixie, of course.  Such perfection occurred only on drugstore shelves - magazines and dime-store novels filled with promise, romance, and emotional completion. Everywhere else in real life, such intimacy, romantic desire, and blissful fulfillment was absent. 

The Andersons, the Parsons' next door neighbor fought like banshees.  They 'flayed each other to the marrow' as George says to Martha in Edward Albee's play about drunken sexual brutality, the insistent, cruelly present desire to resolve disputes and return to camaraderie if not love. Was this a condition of love, Henrietta wondered? Having to go through a gantlet of abuse, bloody antipathy, and hurtful spite?

William Eakins, the Parsons' neighbor on the other side of the house, was a serial adulterer, and when the Eakins' bedroom windows were open in the summer, Henrietta could hear Martha sobbing inconsolably, waiting for her aberrant husband to return. 

Irma Carlson committed suicide by asphyxiation in a closed garage because her husband tortured her.  He never resorted to physical violence, but he disassembled the poor woman emotionally piece by piece for years until the torment was intolerable. 

Heidi Ballard loved her husband dearly, but he was a vaporous, infinitely passionless man who married because it was what one did, a kind of social anchor to a regular, predictable life.  Why she fell for such an empty vessel was another story altogether, but the misery of unrequited love was first on the list. 

There is always romance at the beginning, something befuddled by sexual desire, notions of beauty, innocence, and charm; but after a few years of sharing the same bed, the same dinner table and the same television channels, the blush came quickly off the bloom of the rose. 

So, what's a woman like Henrietta to do?  A woman with not inconsiderable intelligence, sensibility, and emotion; a woman who desperately wants a life companion but is discouraged by the detritus around her; but a woman who still believes that some modicum of happiness can be found with another. 

Women will try anything to increase their chances.  What is the gender spectrum but an opening of many doors.  The combinations and permutations are limitless, and a woman should be able to find a partner among them.  Yet the whole idea of some randomly ascribed sexuality, some invented, self-serving psycho-social category defeated the whole purpose of romantic love. 

Lesbianism offered a convenient outlet; but in all recorded history, in all ancient and modern fiction, and in all potent sexual affairs, it was only the fireworks between men and women which lit the sky.  That was what Tantrism, Lawrence, and ying and yang were all about. Something preternatural and predetermined. 

It would be a fitting ending to the story of Henrietta Parsons if Mr. Right walked into her life, they fell in love, married, and lived happily ever after; but of course that only happens in romantic fiction.  These days you've got work at marriage to make a go of it, such are the competing demands of profession, individuality, and married life; and work does not a Garden of Eden make.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was perhaps the only writer who really understood the Henrietta Parsons of the world.  Jay Gatsby was a dreamer, perhaps the only man that Nick Carroway, the narrator and Gatsby's friend knew who had an undiminished idealism and romantic hopefulness. 

The Gatsby story ends tragically but the lesson is not lost.  There is hope for the romantically driven, motivated by something more profound than anything Petrarch could have imagined, something that one should hold on to and never give up. 

Perhaps Henrietta was a Jay Gatsby, at least one hopes so, although at the same time wishing that her end is more satisfying and satisfactory.  It probably will be, because for all her heady romanticism and almost impossible idealism, she was imperturbably wise.