The Season To Be Jolly? December 10, 2010
Posted by alana in Anxiety, Coping Strategies, Depression, Economy.4 comments
This is not a rant about how Christmas has become a commercialized orgy of spending that directly contradicts the spirit of peace and giving that is supposed to imbue the holiday season. Whether they frame it in socioeconomic terms, or as a tension between the secular and religious, most people are at least somewhat aware of these clashing ideologies. I expect readers of this blog have an even more acute political awareness of the class dynamics involved, recognizing that pressure on the working class to “fully enjoy” one of their few significant breaks from daily drudgery means spending as much as they can afford (and more) on decorations, gifts, and feasting, thereby increasing the profits of the elite minority who flaunt their wealth, accept tax cuts, and cut thousands of jobs. It’s nothing new this year, but given the unemployment rate and austerity measures making life even more disproportionately difficult for workers in the worst economy since the Great Depression, the notion of a “season of giving” is severely strained. The immediate economic and social pressures of holiday celebration are stressful enough, but for radicals who are conscious of the broader implications, additional layers of alienation and disillusionment can weigh heavily on us.
Instead of running down statistics on how bad things really are right now, or going through a cultural and historical critique of winter holidays from their pagan roots to today, I’m going to try something a little different. I want to discuss some concrete ways of coping emotionally with these holiday pressures and contradictions. This is something a bit more personal, drawing from my experiences with therapy, but is still very much informed by my politics. I’ve been getting feedback and suggestions from readers, which I deeply appreciate and I do take to heart (even if it does take me a while to process what you’re saying and find a way to address it), and this is an attempt to respond. Please don’t hesitate to let me know if this kind of post is helpful and whether you want to see more like it sometimes; or whether you would rather have seen a more explicitly political, economic, social, or historical analysis along the lines of previous posts. You have my sincere thanks!
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It is widely acknowledged in the mainstream that the holiday season induces extreme anxiety and depression in many people, and a quick search online will bring up plenty of ‘tips’ on how to deal with holiday stress – but they have always rung rather hollow to me. Leaving aside those that want to sell you stress-reducing products and focusing on those that are more earnest, even these lists can leave you feeling pretty hopeless.
Commercials at this time of year are always reminding you how little time there is left to do your shopping, as though all you have to be concerned about spending is your TIME. Many of these coping tips have to do with time management – for example, saying ‘no’ to some of those party invitations to leave more time for yourself. If you’re unemployed or underemployed, these commercials are laughable because you have more “free” time than you’d like, but you certainly won’t be spending it on shopping with no money to spend. Even if you’re working 40-60+ hours per week, there’s no guarantee that you have money for gifts when so many people are supporting families on low-wage jobs and are burdened with medical bills that aren’t covered by insurance, the fallout from the mortgage crisis, or astronomical student loan payments. Tips on coping with financial difficulty are stated simply: “Don’t spend more than you can afford to.” Meanwhile, the vast resources of capitalist culture are bombarding you with exactly the opposite message, and if you fail to join in the gift-giving and merry-making, you’ll be seen as someone who is stingy and isolating yourself as a killjoy scrooge. (more…)
We Are All Monsters October 29, 2010
Posted by alana in Activism, Anger, Anxiety, Depression, Marxism, Mental Illness.2 comments
Those of us who have experienced serious mental health problems have an acute understanding of what it is like to feel monstrous. Lurking in the shadows beneath the enormous weight of a cold and fathomless ocean, numb to pain but hissing a warning that tentacles are ready to strangle anyone who might attempt to move us. Tearing at pillows and stifling screams of rage into them, pacing behind locked doors to spare the would-be victims of a red-eyed, howling fury. Sweating, shaking, and paralyzed with shame as the shrieking banshee of panic rises to the drumming heartbeat drowning out the surrounding mundane conversations of people who have begun to stare. We know instinctively that monsters are repulsive, abnormal, dangerous outcasts – and we identify with them. And we’re not the only ones. The enduring, overwhelming popularity of monsters demonstrates that millions of people see something of themselves in the monstrous. We all celebrated when Maurice Sendak’s Wild Things “roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth.” We’ve cried in empathy when Frankenstein’s monster declared, “I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on.” Many of us have secretly rooted for King Kong to destroy his human attackers, and we’ve made mutants from the Incredible Hulk to Spider-Man to the X-Men our heroes. Why is that?
China Miéville, a Marxist science fiction and fantasy writer, offers this explanation in a presentation (well worth listening to in its entirety) on “Marxism and Monsters” that he delivered at the British Socialist Worker’s Party Marxism Festival in 2005:
“Why would we secretly have this kind of simultaneous repulsion but also attraction to these horrendous figures, to these monsters which are the articulations of fears? Well, what I’m going to suggest is that if you think of Grendel as the sort of archetype for the outsider monster that gets back into the inside, think about the way the outsider is so threatening. Who is the outsider the most threatening to? The outsider is most threatening to the people who are telling you that what’s inside is basically alright. It is very, very functional to the status quo that it mustn’t be messed with. Now, those of us who are Marxists, who are socialists, have a whole theory of what’s wrong with the status quo, but what we know full well that for centuries, for millennia, people on the receiving end of the status quo: the oppressed, the marginalized, the alienated, have always known (whether or not they could articulate it) – that something was wrong. That this was not how they deserved to live. And what this means, therefore, is that while King Hrothgar is absolutely horrified that Grendel gets into his hoard and starts smashing shit up – if you weren’t that in love with the status quo anyway, it could be worse. You know, all of a sudden the intrusion of this monstrous thing starts throwing things around, threatening the status quo; well, in some way that you’ve never been able to articulate, you’ve never really been that in love with the status quo anyway. So I think the fact is, the fact that monsters are such sympathetic figures, is in a tremendously inchoate, mediated fashion an expression of the fact that most of us don’t really love the status quo. And this is why, you know, we are products of our society, so we are repelled by monsters, but we are also products of our society that know something’s wrong with our society, so we kind of have a sneaking admiration for them.”
The etymological root of the word “monster” is an interesting one. It comes from the Latin word monstrum, which could mean a monstrosity, but could also mean an omen, portent or sign. It derives from the verb monere, which means to warn or advise. The appearance of monsters and the monstrous is a critical warning that something is wrong; a signal of a threat which should be paid heed to rather than treated as a threat in itself. In his 1974-1975 lectures on “abnormality” at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault describes how people who were physically, mentally and behaviorally aberrant have been criminalized, punished, and disciplined in order to try to make them conform to the status quo, which is defined by its defenders as normal and sane. As Marxists, we would be more inclined to see monstrous expressions of alienation, pain or fury as symptoms of a sick status quo which itself should be changed. (more…)
