Interpreting Incident at Hawk’s Hill through the Autism Lens

How are we to make sense of the 1971 novel Incident at Hawk’s Hill and the actual 1873 event at its root?

In 2004, Prof. Kenneth Kidd wrote about Allan W. Eckert’s novel for the children’s literature journal The Looking Glass. In that paper, titled “Leave It to Badger,” Kidd reported that he’d found no corroboration of Eckert’s claim that he had based the book on a real incident.

At the time, digital book and newspaper archives were in their infancy, so it wasn’t as easy to find the period sources I quoted back here, or the intervening secondary sources I analyzed here. Not only did Eckert have reason to believe he was working off a report of a real incident, but it’s clear that a lost little boy was indeed found in a badger hole in 1873 Manitoba. Would that knowledge have changed Kidd’s analysis?

Kidd made sense of the novel by applying the thinking in his book Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale. He discussed the story through the lens of folklore. Many cultures have stories about children being raised by animals, including such famous western examples as Romulus and Remus, Mowgli, and Tarzan. Viewed entirely as fiction, Eckert’s novel fits into that paradigm. Kidd saw an Oedipal dimension to such stories in general and Eckert’s novel in particular.

Of course, when the event at the core of Incident at Hawk’s Hill—a little boy lost on the prairie who survives by finding shelter in a badger’s hole—is real, then the ways people tell that story aren’t new examples of old folklore but attempts to understand what really happened. (Or, in the case of Eckert’s acknowledged fiction, to present what might have happened.)

Bruno Bettelheim’s paper “Feral Children and Autistic Children,” published in the American Journal of Sociology in 1959, was an attempt to explain similar events. Bettelheim posited that the root of many of those stories of children raised by animals is autism, a psychological condition he was groping to understand. Throughout history, he wrote, people had seen “severe cases of infantile autism with seemingly animal-like traits and habits” and explained that behavior by believing the children had been raised by animals.

Bettelheim’s own theory of autism was deeply flawed. In that same paper he posited that it was largely or entirely due to “extreme emotional isolation combined with experiences which they interpreted as threatening them with utter destruction.” As for the source of the emotional isolation, Bettelheim mostly blamed mothers (of course), saying they were the real “feral” ones.

While Bettelheim’s theories about autism and how to respond to it have fallen by the wayside, his suggestion that autism explains many examples of “feral children” has caught on. Uta Frith analyzed some historic cases of "feral children” in Autism: Explaining the Enigma (1989) and elsewhere. She suggested, “an unduly high proportion of feral children suffered from autism before they were abandoned. Indeed autism, with its often severe conduct problems, may be the cause for the abandonment in the first place.”

Frith’s book and others have helped to make our culture much more aware of autism since Incident at Hawk’s Hill appeared in 1971. We now recognize a spectrum of related conditions under the autism label. Not only do we better distinguish autism from other cognitive conditions, but we acknowledge autistic ways of thinking and viewing the world in high-functioning individuals.

That knowledge allows us a new perspective on how authors from earlier generations discussed the story of the little boy lost on the Manitoba prairie. The initial reports said almost nothing about the boy himself, only that he was scared when men came by. It’s not clear how much detail in the oral traditions is based on fact and how much was added by people seeking to comprehend the mystery. Nonetheless, the more detailed recounting by Ernest Seton Thompson and the fictionalized story of Allan W. Eckert lend themselves to interpretation through the lens of autism.

Seton was quite clear about little Harry Service not being normal:

He was a strange child, very small for his age, and shy without being cowardly. He had an odd habit of following dogs, chickens, pigs, and birds, imitating their voices and actions, with an exactness that onlookers sometimes declared to be uncanny.

For Seton, this affinity with animals was a strength. He linked kindness to animals with general goodness, and equated cruelty to animals with cruelty to people. Seton’s tale contained an explanation for how this boy survived in the badger’s hole—because the badger, having lost her own young, showed maternal kindness to this unusual newcomer. And he concluded with an optimistic suggestion that Harry’s experience with the wild badger cured him of his most obvious strangeness.

In Incident at Hawk’s Hill Eckert picked up on those details and made a major subplot of the boy’s parents wrestling with what we’d now call their youngest son’s special needs. Early in the novel, Bill MacDonald tells his wife:

“Oh, what’s the use of trying to fool ourselves? He isn’t normal, Esther, and we both know it, whether or not you’re willing to admit it. He not only isn’t normal physically, he’s not normal mentally, either. Look how he acts toward animals.”

When Eckert finally shifts his narration into the little boy’s own perspective, it states:

Ben had no idea why he was so afraid of people. He was not, as his father seemed to think, retarded in his mental processes. He was, in his way, quite intelligent. He could think things through very well for his age and he retained a surprising percentage of what was taught him by his mother and the others. It was just that he kept what he learned to himself. He didn’t like to talk to people.

Was this Eckert’s attempt to depict an autistic child? Someone he knew, something he felt? Or was he picking up imaginatively on the hints in Seton’s story? I have no idea. In the end, Eckert followed Seton’s line and portrayed the experience out on the prairie as making Ben open up more than ever, especially to his father.

Reflecting the greater awareness of autism today, many recent readers of Incident at Hawk’s Hill interpret Ben forthrightly as on the autism spectrum. Monado at Book Crossing describes him as “a boy, whom these days we’d describe as autistic,” while Lori Steinbach at enotes says he probably has “a condition something like autism.” The Home School Book Review said, “Ben would probably be considered somewhat autistic today.” At Goodreads, the Shayne-Train wrote, “now that I [re]read it with adult eyes, it may be the first novel I’d ever read that had an autistic protagonist.” And the study guide for the novel at Bookrags includes a whole section on autism.

Such a diagnosis is of course only a partial explanation for the character, or the history deep behind it. Did the little Service boy who got lost on the Manitoba prairie have some form of autism? How did that affect his lost time, or his family’s and neighbors’ interpretations of it? What experiences with autism, a condition not yet isolated and named in the early 1900s, did Seton have? What about Eckert, writing in 1971? Is it just coincidence that this modern example of a “feral child” story fits so easily with an autism reading, or are we still seeking an explanation with the partial knowledge we have?

The Truth of True Grit

Charles Portis’s True Grit is a straightforward manhunt story elevated into a great American comic novel by the narrative voice.

The narrator is Mattie Ross, a fourteen-year-old determined to track down the man who killed her father and bring him to justice—at an affordable price. To do this she hires one-eyed deputy marshal Rooster Cogburn and forms an awkward alliance with Texas ranger LaBoeuf.

The very first paragraph ends with an accounting of the money Mattie’s father had on him when he was killed. Mattie knows that figure because she manages the business of the family farm. She speaks with the fiercest emotion when striking a financial bargain with horse traders, bounty hunters, and other men. At the end of the novel we learn that she’s grown up to run a private bank.

But Mattie Ross doesn’t want money for its sake, or for luxuries. She’s ready to endure privation and danger, defying the bounty hunters’ commands that she go home and leave the tracking to men. Money matters to Mattie because it’s how she measures fairness in the world, and fairness is her real concern.

Mattie is not out to make friends. She speaks bluntly and judgmentally to everyone she meets. She exasperates Cogburn and LaBoeuf until eventually they realize her integrity, and that they’re not getting rid of her. By the end of their trek, they risk their lives to save her. Then the three characters go their separate ways, never seeing each other again.

Others perceive the potential sexual tensions in a young girl traveling through unsettled territory with older men. LaBoeuf tells Mattie that he first thought she was pretty. But Mattie herself never shows any feel for sexual or romantic attractions. As an adult, she is a contented maiden lady.

I came to view the character of Mattie Ross through the lens of autism spectrum disorder, and I’m not the first to do so. Caroline Narby wrote such an interpretation for Bitchmedia. This Goodreads member named Stephanie did the same.

When Portis wrote True Grit in 1968, pretty much only psychiatrists knew about autism, and the syndrome was widely attributed to “refrigerator mothers” and other nonsense. The term “Asperger syndrome,” which seems to be the closest category to describe Mattie’s character, wasn’t coined until 1976. The recognition that some people with autism function well in certain fields, such as financial analysis, while having trouble with everyday social relations was well in the future.

But goldurnit if Mattie Ross doesn’t come off as one of the most incisive portraits of a character on the autism spectrum. While she looks for “true grit” in Cogburn, she demonstrates that integrity, drive, and unwillingness to compromise in herself.

There have been two movie versions of True Grit, the first made in 1969 when the book was still new. John Wayne played Rooster Cogburn as a semi-parodic version of his usual persona and won an Oscar for his troubles. However, writer Marguerite Roberts, director Henry Hathaway, and actress Kim Darby never seem to have a handle on Mattie Ross’s character, portraying her as a teenager with the stubbornness of a child.

In contrast, Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2010 version of True Grit is built around Mattie. The scene of the ferry crossing shows the difference: in the first movie, we arrive at the ferry with Cogburn and LaBoeuf and view Mattie’s crossing at a distance. In the second film, it’s the other way around.

Portis’s narrative voice and dialogue fit right into the Coens’ usual combination of high and low rhetoric. Hailee Steinfeld played Mattie with the right exasperating exactitude, her determination not childish but single-minded.

Parts of the first True Grit movie are entertaining, but the second is really good. And the novel is a masterpiece.

Heading Out to Oz

“In May I began describing, photographing, and re-housing a discrete collection of posters within the Ludlow-Santo Domingo (LSD) Library collection,” Rachel Parker writes on the blog of the Houghton Library at Harvard. “Tackling the Ludlow-Santo Domingo Library poster collection has been exciting, in part because of the descriptive challenges in title creation.”

Elsewhere the library explains, “The Ludlow-Santo Domingo Library is the world’s largest private collection of material on altered states of mind.” Which is to say, “The 50,000-plus-item collection documents psychoactive drugs and their physical and social effects.”

One suspects the initials LSD don’t just stand for Ludlow–Santo Domingo, even if the collection was produced by “Julio Mario Santo Domingo Jr.’s acquisition and integration of the Fitz Hugh Ludlow Library of San Francisco in 2001.”

The Houghton library blog credits the poster above to “James McMullen” at an unknown time. That artist spells his name James McMullan. Another website credits it to “The Push Pin Graphic, Issue 52 (1966).” (Seymour Chwast authored a 2004 book looking back on The Push Pin Graphic, and some poster-reprinting websites carelessly credit the image to him.)

In other news, I’m heading out to OzCon this week.

Off His Meds?

The New York Times article on the arrest of pharmaceutical investor Martin Shkreli begins:

It has been a busy week for Martin Shkreli, the flamboyant businessman at the center of the drug industry’s price-gouging scandals.

He said he would sharply increase the cost of a drug used to treat a potentially deadly parasitic infection. He called himself “the world’s most eligible bachelor” on Twitter and railed against critics in a live-streaming YouTube video. After reportedly paying $2 million for a rare Wu-Tang Clan album, he goaded a member of the hip-hop group to “show me some respect.”

All in one week? That makes me wonder if something biochemical is going on, and Shkreli’s famous obnoxiousness is fueled by mania. Like his alleged decision to do fraudulent things with people’s money.

Carol Tilley on “When Comics Almost Died”

On Monday night I had the pleasure of attending a lecture by Carol Tilley of the University of Illinois on Dr. Fredric Wertham’s crusade against comics in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

I knew that basic story well from Jules Feiffer’s Greatest Comic Book Heroes and more recent books. In fact, I remember finding a copy of Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent in a library during a high-school summer and wondering at its form of argumentation.

Tilley’s research has filled out that picture in several ways. One was, as I noted back here, to document how Wertham edited his notes on counseling sessions when he wrote his book, making his young patients say what fit his thesis and leaving out significant evidence that would undercut it.

Another, and for me this was a highlight of Tilley’s talk, was to collect and display the letters from young comic-book readers to Wertham arguing against his conclusions. They pointed out, sometimes eloquently, that they were more representative of kids who enjoyed comics than the juvenile delinquents and troubled youth he saw in his psychiatric practice.

Tilley had also found those teens’ yearbook photos and interviewed them so she could put (perfectly ordinary) faces up on the screen beside their names and words. Evidently Wertham read through their letters, marking grammar, punctuation, or spelling mistakes, before filing them away and never answering.

After Prof. Tilley’s talk, the question came up about how Wertham, a very progressive child psychiatrist who set up a practice in Harlem and provided evidence for the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education, could be so oppressive when it came to comics. My view was that all those actions came from the same crusading desire to protect vulnerable children. These days most book challenges in America seem to come from the political right, but the anti-comics critics were all over the political spectrum.

Afterwards, a bunch of us went out for dinner and had a lot of laughs, so I should start calling Prof. Tilley “Carol” now. If you get a chance to see her “When Comics Almost Died” lecture, take it.

Teen Titans Go Younger

Back in 2010, I quoted Young Justice producer Greg Weisman talking about the audience that the show needed to deliver for its network: “I think, from an economic standpoint, we have to hit boys 6 – 14 for Cartoon Network to sell their ad space or whatever…”

As some viewers complained, the show’s pilot skewed heavily toward pleasing that demographic. It was all about young male characters running around and smashing things. The show introduced the female members of the team gradually, and for a long time one seemed like a sitcom caricature of a teen-aged girl.

By the second season, however, important elements of the show seemed well beyond the concerns of “boys 6-14.” Jumping ahead five years meant the characters who had been in their mid-teens were now of college age. What’s more, they were acting that age. Sex is what I’m trying to say:

• The second Roy Harper was raising a child with his ex, the assassin Cheshire.
• Cheshire’s sister Artemis was living with her boyfriend, Wally West.
• Dick Grayson was apparently charming the pants off several young women, one after another. (This appears more in the comic book than the TV show.)

The show introduced less mature characters in that second season, but its complex storyline seemed most suited for older viewers, and not just boys.

The audience evidently wasn’t what the Cartoon Network was looking for because it declined a third season. Instead, the network brought back a version of the Teen Titans show from a decade ago, first in shorts and finally as a half-hour show titled Teen Titans Go.

The producers make a big deal of the same voice actors coming back, and indeed they’re welcome. But many other aspects of the show have changed. The characters have been redesigned as smaller, cuter, and more “cartoony.” Each episode consists of two ten-minute cartoons instead of one adventure (or chapter in a longer storyline). The stories are about the teen heroes in their “off hours,” not fighting villains. In that respect, Teen Titans Go resembles Tiny Titans.

What’s more, the character of Beast Boy has changed in two significant ways. As some viewers noted immediately, he can now speak while in animal form, unlike in the previous cartoon series. (Of course, nothing can stop the Gar Logan of the comics from talking.) Furthermore, he’s no longer vegetarian.

In fact, both parts of the first episode were about food. One half of the show revolved around the perfect sandwich, the other was set in a pie shop. Some of the shorts also revolved around mealtime. In other words, the shift from Young Justice to Teen Titans Go is the shift from the genital to the oral stage of psychological development. We’ll see if that brings in more boys aged 6 to 14.

Fooling Ourselves: Are We Hard-Wired for Optimism?

A while back I read about a couple of studies in medical decision-making by Lucas S. Zier, Douglas B. White, and colleagues. In particular, they looked at how medical surrogates responded to doctors saying that there was very little that they could do for a dying patient.

In 2009 the team reported in the journal Chest:

Sixty-four percent of surrogates expressed a reluctance or unwillingness to believe physicians’ futility predictions. They provided the following four main explanations for this belief: a skepticism about physicians’ ability to achieve complete prognostic certainty, a need to see for themselves that a patient was incapable of recovery, a need to triangulate multiple information sources before believing physicians, and a belief that God could intervene to change the course of an illness. . . .

Surrogates who doubted physician’s futility predictions clustered into the following two general groups: those whose doubt was based on religious beliefs (n = 18); and those whose doubt was based on secular considerations (n = 15), such as past experiences with inaccurate prognostication, a secular belief that future-telling is inherently inaccurate, and a need to triangulate physicians prognostications with other sources before accepting the prognosis as true. Surrogates who doubted physicians’ futility predictions on religious grounds were more likely to request continued life support in the face of a very poor prognosis…, whereas those whose doubt was based on secular concerns were not…

Three years later the researchers published further findings in the Annals of Internal Medicine, also looking at how medical surrogates responded to doctors’ good predictions:

Participants’ interpretations of prognostic statements expressing a low risk for death were relatively accurate, but interpretations of statements conveying a high risk for death were more optimistic than the actual meaning. . . . Interpretations of the statement “90% chance of surviving” did not differ from the actual meaning, but interpretations of “5% chance of surviving” were more optimistic and showed substantial variability.

If I interpret the abstract right, people hearing “90% chance of surviving” generally interpreted that as 90%, with only a slight spread to 95%. People hearing “5% chance of surviving” spread that out into 15%, with the center of the bell curve going as high as 40%.

In interviews, the researchers found two reasons for the distortion of bad news: “surrogates’ need to register optimism in the face of a poor prognosis and surrogates’ belief that patient attributes unknown to the physician would lead to better-than-predicted outcomes.”

In other words, our brains may not process bad medical news rationally or accurately.

“A special devotee of Batman”? Not Really

The latest irregularly scheduled Oz and Ends award for Batman research goes to Carol Tilley, professor of library and information science at the University of Illinois, who recently published a paper comparing Dr. Fredric Wertham’s statements about comics in Seduction of the Innocent with his actual research notes.

The university released an unfortunately headlined press release that says:

For example, in “Seduction,” Wertham links “Batman” comic books to the case of a 13-year-old boy on probation and receiving counseling for sexual abuse of another boy: “Like many other homo-erotically inclined children, he was a special devotee of Batman: ‘Sometimes I read them over and over again. … It could be that Batman did something with Robin like I did with the younger boy.’ ”

What Tilley found in Wertham’s notes, however, was that the boy preferred “Superman,” “Crime Does Not Pay” and “war comics” over “Batman,” and that he had previously been sexually assaulted by the other boy – all information that Wertham left out.

That change was crucial because Wertham’s book linked Batman and Robin to homosexuality but didn’t make the same link for the comics that young patient actually preferred.

The press release notes other examples where Wertham’s notes and final text don’t match. For example, he left out a lot of pertinent risk factors in troubled young patients’ lives. When a patient described learning crime techniques from “the movies” as well as comics, Wertham mentioned only the comics.

I’ve previously noted how Wertham retold a news story about a boy who put on a cape and jumped off a cliff without acknowledging that the character the boy was imitating wasn’t Superman but Mighty Mouse, a character created for the movies.

(Thanks to E. J. Barnes for the alert.)

A Darker Dorothy in London

Opening next month at the Immersion Theatre in London, Dorothy in Oz, a “skewed adaptation” of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The troupe promises “a piece unlike anything that has ever been seen on the London fringe circuit.”

What does that mean? When playwright James Michael Shoberg directed his own company’s premiere of the drama in 2009, the Pittsburgh City Paper said:

Shoberg, Pittsburgh’s self-styled striver after “darker tastes in art,” usually combines a fixation with sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll and dazzling costumes with cumbersome scene changes and sloppy projections. Forcing the often-rambling style of Shoberg and/or his players onto a smaller stage, much closer to the audience, focuses the production. . . .

His Dorothy in Oz includes winking references from various versions of the story—The Wiz as well as generous dollops of the iconic 1939 movie—as he twists the familiar characters and their journey. The new setting is a psychiatric hospital for the unfortunate Dorothy, here named Dottie. . . .

The most fun comes from Carrie L. Shoberg’s glitzy and ditzy portrayal of Glinda, and from the stunning ensemble—costume, props and performance—of Brittany Spinelli as the doctor’s secretary. The three companions are a mixed bag: Chucky Hendershot almost boneless as he wrestles with gravity and a heroin addiction as a Goth “Skarekrow”; Sean Michael Gallaher appropriately loud as the anger-challenged multi-pierced punk “Rusty Tinneman”; and Joseph A. Roots totally smooth as the repulsive “Harry Lyons.” In the title role, Adrienne Fischer is credible and credibly brave, but the character just doesn’t have the fun the others do.

Dorothy in Oz is scheduled to run in London 26 Feb-17 Mar 2013.

The Life Behind A Wrinkle in Time

Yesterday’s New York Times Book Review asked Anne Lamott, “What book changed your life?” And she answered:

“A Wrinkle in Time” saved me because it so captured the grief and sense of isolation I felt as a child. I was 8 years old when it came out, in third grade, and I believed in it — in the plot, the people and the emotional truth of their experience. This place was never a good match for me, but the book greatly diminished my sense of isolation as great books have done ever since. I must have read it a dozen times.

The book never grabbed me that way, but it spoke deeply to many readers. Cynthia Zarin’s 2004 profile of Madeleine L’Engle included the author’s response to their passion:

One evening, while we were having supper together, I asked L’Engle about her relationship with her readers. “It scares me shitless!” she said. “Because it’s a responsibility. Over time, someone reads your book, and something happens. People want intimacy, and I have a terrible time saying no.” When people tell her, “You’ve helped me grow up, you’re my mother,” she tends to brush it off: her job, as she sees it, is to write stories, not to be known.

That warts-and-all profile appears to be a touchstone for many of the interviews in Listening for Madeleine, Leonard Marcus’s new oral history of L’Engle. The Book Reporter says of the book:

Most interesting are the voices from L’Engle’s childhood, through whom we learn about her distant relationship with her parents, particularly her father, and about her tendency to live her life through her imagination rather than through social relationships—more than one interviewee describes L’Engle as aloof or standoffish compared to her peers. Marcus seems to suggest that her lonely childhood and longing for her dad contributed to the number of absent fathers in her work, most notably Meg’s quest to rescue her father in A Wrinkle in Time.

One of those interviews, with a L’Engle cousin, is available from Macmillan. Publishers Weekly published three from colleagues. Kirkus noted in its review:

An actor by training, L’Engle consciously constructed her own public persona, transforming her biography and history into “mythic material,” as with the ever-expanding number of rejections she received for A Wrinkle in Time.

The Oz and Ends take on that legend back here.

OIP Derangement Syndrome and Conspiracy Theories

On Sunday the Boston Globe plumbed the depths of OIP Derangement Syndrome in Leon Neyfakh’s article headlined “Revealed! Obama’s Secret Agenda”:

On the fringes of American politics, on conservative radio, and even on the campaign trail, a whole parallel Obama has emerged over the course of the 2012 race—a shadowy figure who has craftily concealed his ideological extremism and is merely awaiting his second term to unleash it. Taken as a whole, this other Obama—and what you might call his “Muahahaha strategy” of post-election bait and switch—offers a vivid picture of the fears that the president has inspired in some critics, fears that appear only to have grown during a real-life first term that has failed to produce much in the way of radical legislation.

As fanciful as they may sound, these rumors reflect something real in the nation’s political imagination—and shine a light on the particular kind of distrust that tends to accumulate around those in power. And they’re also seeping into mainstream political discourse, even into the race itself. Mitt Romney has invoked the issue of Obama’s secret intentions, telling a group of newspaper editors recently that Obama “doesn’t want to share his real plans before the election, either with the public or with the press,” and that it was up to journalists to make him come clean. “His intent is on hiding; you and I are going to have to do the seeking,” Romney said. “He wants us to reelect him so we can find out what he’ll actually do.”

Of course, Romney is keeping plenty of secrets himself, both about his personal finances and about the cuts he’d have to make to keep his outlandish budget promises.

Neyfakh acknowledges that there’s long been a paranoid strain in American politics, but not on this scale:

But in modern times, no presidential candidate has been accused of keeping more secret plans in his back pocket than Obama. Part of it is rooted in suspicion of his strange name and his ethnic background, of course, but it’s more than that. The speed of his ascent to national fame, his early days as a hipster in New York, even the fact that he may or may not be sneaking cigarettes outside the Oval Office, have all combined to fuel a frothy, nightmarish vision of a comic-book-style supervillain: frightening, fascinating, and very good at hiding things.

As the Globe noted, people on the far right have spread and expanded upon their rumors without being able to point to much in Barack Obama’s policies to support them. For example, even after two highly publicized mass shootings by lunatics who bought extra-big ammunition clips to kill more people, the White House hasn’t campaigned for reasonable gun control. But that doesn’t stop conspiracy-minded  lobbyists!

Perhaps the most widely circulated theory about Obama’s secret intentions is that he’s going to go after the rights of gun owners and eventually abolish the Second Amendment. NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre has called it a “silent but sophisticated long-term conspiracy,” . . . As for the actual long-term plan that Lapierre has alluded to, [NRA spokesman Andrew] Arulanandam declined to be specific, returning instead to Obama’s existing record. “Who knows what he’s cooking up?” he said.

When one has no evidence whatsoever, it’s always wise to decline to be specific. Because people in the throes of OIP Derangement Syndrome don’t need evidence. The lack of evidence is evidence enough:

But the most significant reason why there have been so many theories about Obama’s radical second-term plans may be rooted in something less intuitive: namely, that his first term, so far, has turned out to be surprisingly—that is, suspiciously—moderate. And while the president’s most ardent critics on the right may disagree, the fact is his approach to foreign policy has been downright hawkish, while his signature domestic policy achievement to date is a health care plan whose most controversial provision was originally hatched by a conservative think tank.

For his most vocal detractors, that can only mean one thing: He’s been deliberately prudent, so as to save up his political capital for when he no longer has to worry about reelection. The less evidence of his radicalism, in other words, the stronger the case that he is, in fact, hiding something.

Especially for people who find the sight of this President disquieting all by itself.

Opposition “at every opportunity”

The New Yorker examines what I call OIP Derangement Syndrome with an article by Ezra Klein of the Washington Post on how Republicans shifted positions on the “individual mandate” for health insurance.

The approach was invented the Heritage Foundation, introduced into Congress by Republicans, pushed here in Massachusetts by Republican governor Mitt Romney, and championed as recently as 2009 by party leaders. But as soon as President Barack Obama agreed to include it in his health-insurance proposals, Republicans branded their party’s idea not only undesirable but unconstitutional.

Klein’s article highlights how Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) made an individual mandate part of a bill he designed during the Bush-Cheney administration:

“Between 2004 and 2008, I saw over eighty members of the Senate, and there were very few who objected,” Wyden says. In December, 2006, he unveiled the Healthy Americans Act. In May, 2007, Bob Bennett, a Utah Republican, who had been a sponsor of the Chafee bill [that also included the mandate], joined him. Wyden-Bennett was eventually co-sponsored by eleven Republicans and nine Democrats, receiving more bipartisan support than any universal health-care proposal in the history of the Senate. . . .

This process led, eventually, to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—better known as Obamacare—which also included an individual mandate. But, as that bill came closer to passing, Republicans began coalescing around the mandate, which polling showed to be one of the legislation’s least popular elements. In December, 2009, in a vote on the bill, every Senate Republican voted to call the individual mandate “unconstitutional.”

This shift—Democrats lining up behind the Republican-crafted mandate, and Republicans declaring it not just inappropriate policy but contrary to the wishes of the Founders—shocked Wyden. “I would characterize the Washington, D.C., relationship with the individual mandate as truly schizophrenic,” he said. . . .

Even Bob Bennett, who was among the most eloquent advocates of the mandate, voted, in 2009, to call it unconstitutional. . . . Explaining his decision to vote against the law, Bennett, who was facing a Tea Party challenger in a primary, says, “I didn’t focus on the particulars of the amendment as closely as I should have, and probably would have voted the other way if I had understood that the individual mandate was at its core. I just wanted to express my opposition to the Obama proposal at every opportunity.”

Drawing on work by professors of law, psychology, and political science, Klein explores why the Republican Party reversed course so quickly and completely on one of its own policy ideas. But at its core the opposition arose just as Bennett described it: “I just wanted to express my opposition to the Obama proposal at every opportunity.”

Sendak as a Born Curmudegon

Among all the encomia for Maurice Sendak that have appeared in recent days, I particularly appreciated Michael Patrick Hearn’s clear-eyed remembrance posted at Educating Alice. Rather than focus exclusively on Sendak’s storytelling talent and contrarian statements about childhood, Hearn wrote about the personality that produced that work:

Almost every conversation began with the kvetching. Oh the kvetching! It was not a word I really knew until I met Maurice Sendak. He was constantly upset with this and that, with that person and this person. His anger fueled him. Look in the dictionary under the noun kvetch and you will find:

1. A chronic, whining complainer.
2. A nagging complaint.
3. Maurice Sendak, American picture book artist-author.

But once he got that off his chest, he was the funniest person you could ever meet.

Hearn also writes about how Sendak “loved being the provocateur,” and “was emotionally needy.”

Such comments reminded me of Leonard Marcus’s recollection of meeting Sendak in Publishers Weekly:

I arranged to be introduced to Maurice at the giant children’s breakfast at ABA, and at first he didn’t really look me in the eye. “Another interview?” he must have been thinking, as he commented on the banquet hall’s sprinkler system, which he said reminded him of a Nazi gas chamber.

That remark would make sense for someone who’d actually been threatened by, you know, a Nazi gas chamber. But Sendak was born in Brooklyn in 1928. He lost Polish relatives in the Holocaust (the same sort of foreign relatives he cited as the scary inspiration for the Wild Things), and later described that news as introducing him early to thoughts of death. But Sendak was already eleven when Hitler invaded Poland, and I’m pretty sure every American child growing up during World War 2 had to think about death.

As with the Lindbergh kidnapping (another memory Sendak invoked, this one really from his early childhood), the Holocaust seems more likely to have provided a focus for his anxiety and fears rather than their cause or inspiration. He explored themes of endangered children in his later books, when he could tell any story he wanted, because that situation struck deep chords with him.

Not that Sendak wasn’t also a charming person and a terrific picture-book creator, as both Hearn and Marcus describe. His critical writing was often very insightful, but I think it was at its best when he wrote about other people’s work rather than when he made pronouncements about childhood and literature based on his own idiosyncratic world-view.

Back to Hearn:

No matter how many other directions he went into and how far he grew as an artist, everyone wanted another Wild Things. Once a book was published, he was through with it. He did not go back. He never wanted to repeat himself. He was constantly evolving. He called Wild Things the first in a trilogy that also embraced In the Night Kitchen and Outside Over There. But their artistic connection is dubious. What they did have in common was that Maurice was working out his therapy through them. The traumas of his childhood came out as metaphors. The books are fraught with Freudian symbols.

Hearn calls attention to Sendak’s 2005 edition of Ruth Krauss’s Bears, a “sequel of sorts” to Wild Things since it included a wolf-suited Max. It was “one of the most delightful of Sendak’s books in many years,” Hearn says, but “almost universally ignored by the reviewers and the public.”

The Psychoanalysis of Superheroes and Their Fans

This image, by Norm Breyfogle, adorns Spencer Ackerman’s article in the new Pacific Standard on “Comic Con on the Couch: Analyzing Superheroes.”

It’s a profile of Robin [yes] Rosenberg, a clinical psychologist who edited the essay collection The Psychology of Superheroes. She’s also written about psychological issues in the Harry Potter, Twilight, and Girl with the Dragon Tattoo books, and has a blog at Psychology Today titled “The Superheroes” as well as her own.

Rosenberg’s website promises some more books this year, including What Is a Superhero? coedited with Peter Coogan, Superhero Origins: What Makes Superheroes Tick and Why We Care, and What's the Matter with Batman? She’s already written “What’s Wrong with Bruce Wayne?” for Dennis O’Neil’s Batman Unauthorized.

As part of her research, Rosenberg visits comics conventions interviewing cosplayers about their costume choices and what those heroes mean to them. Ackerman reports:

Usually therapy takes weeks or months to cultivate the trust in a doctor necessary for patients to open up. But when Rosenberg asks even the least invasive of questions — Why are you dressed like this hero? — the cosplayers can respond with a surprising amount of intimacy. One cosplayer in a black cloak and orange wig, acting out a part from an obscure Japanese anime show, explains that, just like his character, “I never really knew my father.”

Rosenberg, who loves cosplay and cosplayers, gets reactions like that more often than you might expect. At conventions, “people are so open, so nice and so friendly,” she says. When the orange-haired fellow shuffles on, she adds, “This guy was very psychologically insightful. He understood how he felt. Those people can get quite personal.”

Rosenberg is banking on that. Her unconventional career choice is based on two related hunches. First, superhero fans, used to viewing their idols as allegories for the good (or bad) life, are actually hungry for psychological insight. Second, those allegories provide a prism to introduce and popularize psychology.

I’m sure Rosenberg has considered the irony of hearing honest and open remarks from people in disguise—often masked. Does the costume or the persona provide an extra layer of visual or physical protection that empowers more emotional vulnerability? Or does the melodramatic style of superhero comics and similar cosplay-attracting genres encourage fans to bring emotions to the surface?

The Hunt for Dr. Wertham’s Sources

It’s been three years since Oz and Ends last announced its award for Batman research, which is of course far too long. So today we’re spotlighting Stephen O’Day’s Seduction of the Innocent website, where O’Day and readers have identified three of the stories that Dr. Fredric Wertham alluded to when he analyzed Batman comics in chapter 7 of Seduction of the Innocent.

As you might recall, Wertham briefly interpreted Batman and Robin as lovers. (Someday I’ll discuss how that reading undercut the main point of his anti-comics book.) The doctor’s evidence consisted of details like this:

Batman is sometimes shown in a dressing gown. As they sit by the fireplace the young boy sometimes worries about his partner: “Something’s wrong with Bruce. He hasn’t been himself these past few days.” It is like a wish dream of two homosexuals living together. Sometimes they are shown on a couch, Bruce reclining and Dick sitting next to him, jacket off, collar open, and his hand on his friend’s arm.

Those panel descriptions and deathless monologue come from World’s Finest, #44, dated February-March 1950. (The same magazine also shows a crime scene that Wertham described elsewhere.)

Like the girls in other stories, Robin is sometimes held captive by the villains and Batman has to give in or “Robin gets killed.”

The three quoted words appear in Batman, #67, with a cover date of October-November 1951. The same story was reprinted in Batman: From the ’30s to the ’70s, which included an angry denial of the Wertham interpretation. That means a lot of people saw the panel before anyone saw the ironic connection between those two books—which just shows how often the Boy Hostage found himself in similar situations.

If she [“a girl”] is after Bruce Wayne, she will have no chance against Dick. For instance, Bruce and Dick go out one evening in dinner clothes, dressed exactly alike. The attractive girl makes up to Bruce while in successive pictures young Dick looks on smiling, sure of Bruce.

That describes a scene in Batman, #64, dated April-May 1951.

And there’s some fine “Golden Age” exposition as well.

Crowd-sourcing the search, LostSOTI.org lists descriptions from Wertham’s book that have yet to be linked to specific comics. However, that list doesn’t seem to include two more Batman references:

• “One young homosexual during psychotherapy brought us a copy of Detective Comics, with a Batman story. He pointed out a picture of ‘The Home of Bruce and Dick’ a house beautifully landscaped, warmly lighted and showing the devoted pair side by side, looking out a picture window.”
• “Violence is not lacking in these stories. You are shown Batman and Robin standing in a room with a whole row of corpses on the floor.”

And I suppose we could throw a few panels of “beautiful flowers in large vases” in stately Wayne Manor onto the wish list. They probably all lurk in the same stretch from the late 1940s to the early 1950s.

Collectors evidently value comics that show up in Wertham’s book more highly, so there’s an economic incentive to identify them. For folks studying the development of Wertham’s ideas, another, perhaps more valuable sort of unidentified source is the colleague whom he seemed to credit for his reading of Batman: “Several years ago a California psychiatrist pointed out that the Batman stories are psychologically homosexual.” Wertham’s papers are now available to scholars, and maybe they name that psychiatrist.

3G, IEPs, ADHD, and Fangbone

When young prehistoric warrior Fangbone reaches “our world” in Michael Rex’s Fangbone: Third-Grade Barbarian, he tries to blend in with other children by entering a school. This might seem difficult since he’s shirtless, carrying a sword, and from a preliterate culture.

But Fangbone happens to tag along with Bill from room 3G. Bill’s teacher, Ms. Gillian, is unfazed by this new student. When she learns Fangbone can’t read, she just whispers (the lettering gets small), “You’re in the right class. Welcome to 3G. Everyone here learns at their own speed.” Of course, she hasn’t received an IEP or any of the other paperwork real schools require.

We might chalk this up to plot convenience, but the story actually foregrounds issues of disabilities. Bill takes medicine so, he tells Fangbone, “I don’t go all hyper, like BlAaAaAh!” The other kids in the class are eccentric or beyond. Two-thirds of the way through the book, Bill admits to Fangbone that room 3G “is the LOSER CLASS! . . . We’re just a bunch of messed-up LOSERS!!!”

Fangbone responds by dropping his prejudice against meaningless games and helping his friend’s class win the dodgeball tournament. In fact, he does nearly all the throwing himself. All of 3G gets “I’m a winner!” decals. But it’s worth considering what Fangbone would have done if the first student he’d met had been Duncan, the verbal bully. Would his warrior ethos have fit just fine in another classroom?

The theme continues into the book’s climactic fight. Fangbone tells Bill to relax and focus. Bill answers that he can’t because “I didn’t take my medicine!” Yet the story presents hyperactivity as a strength, not a liability. As a monster charges, Bill shouts, “I like it when things move fast!” He, Fangbone, and 3G take down their foe.

In that respect, Fangbone: Third-Grade Barbarian falls squarely into the recent trend to portray official disabilities as special powers, as Sayantani DasGupta discussed at From the Mixed-Up Files…

(Comments based on autographed advance copy from Renin Publishing Services.)

Rick Santorum’s OIP Derangement Syndrome

For this week’s example of OIP Derangement Syndrome I’m indebted to Nathan DeHoff for his pointer to this report by Charles M. Blow. Because without that evidence, I would have had trouble believing a major politician—even Rick Santorum—would come out strongly against education.

Before finishing a distant fourth or fifth in the New Hampshire primary, Santorum criticized President Obama this way:

I was so outraged by the president of the United States for standing up and saying every child in America should go to college. Well who are you? Who are you to say that every child in America go … I mean the hubris of this president to think that he knows what’s best for you. I … you know there is … I have seven kids. Maybe they’ll all go to college. But, if one of my kids wants to go and be an auto mechanic, good for him. That’s a good-paying job – using your hands and using your mind. This is the kind of, the kind of snobbery that we see from those who think they know how to run our lives. Rise up America, defend your own freedoms. And overthrow these folks who think they know how to orchestrate every aspect of your lives.

This statement exhibits OIP Derangement Syndrome in two ways. First, Santorum’s mind had obviously been unable to take in and repeat President Obama’s actual policies. For instance, in an address to Congress in February 2009, the President said:

I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training. This can be community college or a four-year school; vocational training or an apprenticeship.

Not only did Obama say nothing against becoming an auto mechanic, he acknowledged that possibility when he spoke of “vocational training or an apprenticeship.” As the Wall Street Journal pointed out, American manufacturers like educated workers.

Santorum must have felt there was something wrong in Obama’s policy simply because it came from Obama. Under OIP Derangement Syndrome, his mind came up with a distorted version of that policy that enabled him to express his actual gut response to President Obama: “Who are you [my emphasis] to…run our lives”?

Santorum vocally opposes the power of ”this [my emphasis] president to think that he knows what’s best for you.” Of course, Santorum thinks he knows what’s best for us in a lot of ways, and he thinks the government should have to power run many parts of our lives. But to him “this president” is different.

An Individual Mandate Challenge

In a comment over at my history blog, I recently threw out a challenge. A commenter had called the Affordable Healthcare Act of 2010 “taking control of the entire medical establishment.” Given that the program is designed to preserve and even drive business to private insurers, that Congress shied away from creating a public option to provide competition, and that the system falls far short of the single-payer system that works better for our neighbor Canada, that view strikes me as ludicrous.

I hypothesize that characterizations like that (other examples include “socialized medicine,” “death panels,” “baby-killer,” and so on) are so inaccurate and so ignorant of the spectrum of health-care policy proposals that they can’t be a product of rational thought. Rather, they reflect deeper fears that the critic is unable to acknowledge.

But there’s a simple way to refute my hypothesis. Show that significant figures in the Republican Party used such rhetoric about the same health-care policy before Barack Obama became a prominent proponent of that approach.

I invited anyone to find three examples of significant figures in the Republican Party calling Gov. Mitt Romney’s program for Massachusetts something like a “complete takeover of the health care system” before Barack Obama won the 2008 Iowa caucus and became a presidential frontrunner.

Those three Republican figures can even be Romney’s opponents in the 2008 race. One can even be Ron Paul. But their criticisms can’t simply be “My plan is better than Mitt’s.” They have to be at the same level of extreme vituperation and accusation that Republicans have used about the same program after it became associated with President Obama.

So far no one has replied. And with good reason. In today’s Boston Globe, Scott Lehigh explains:

…the moment Obama came out for an individual mandate, which back then was an idea acceptable to Republicans like Romney and Newt Gingrich, conservatives decided they loathed it because it was an idea acceptable to Obama. That doesn’t make much sense but, hey, that’s politics.

Back in June 2011, Lehigh documented how the Heritage Foundation not only invented the individual mandate but had people advocating for it in the mid-2000s. (Obama, of course, ran against the individual mandate in the Democratic primaries, then moved right and adopted it to placate the insurance industry.)

If people can’t find even three examples of significant Republicans harshly criticizing the policies they now call “Obamacare” before Obama came on the scene, then that’s evidence that it’s not the plan those critics really fear. It’s the man.

Instead, this is an example of what I call “OIP Derangement Syndrome.” That’s the feeling some people have suffered ever since they realized that, despite their own preferences, Obama Is President. Their viscera go “OIP!” and they stop thinking rationally. I plan to highlight more examples of OIP Derangement Syndrome in coming weeks. There seems to be a steady supply.

“Our brain wants to turn everything into a story”

At the Tottenville Review, poet R. Salvador Reyes agues that our brains are wired not just to recognize patterns but to recognize predictive patterns because that’s biologically useful. And that wiring is at the root of our human attraction to stories:

When you think about the kinds of patterns that are useful for prediction—patterns that are defined by a certain string of actions and reactions that occur within a specific set of conditions—it is easy to see that these types of patterns are, in essence, stories. Most predictive patterns are ultimately a type of narrative. Think again about how we just defined a pattern that’s useful for prediction: a certain string of actions and reactions that occur within a specific set of conditions. Aren’t those also descriptions of plot and setting? When we step back and look at how we experience our world, aren’t we always trying to turn the data from what we study and experience into a narrative pattern that we can make some sense of—and which, consequently, we might be able to make use of in the future?

…not only does narrative provide us with a pattern that can aid in future prediction, it first connects and arranges the data we’re consuming in order to give a comprehendible form and meaning to our experiences in the present. It’s another version of the way our eye and brain translate the tree’s raw pattern data into a macro tree. Our brain wants to turn everything into a story—the same way it wants to turn line, color, texture and light into objects that can be identified and managed by our consciousness. . . .

From this perspective, narrative no longer looks like an ancillary human intellectualizing tool, used primarily to help organize and communicate stories and events between humans. Instead, narrative looks like one of our brain’s core consciousness and universe-building tools. It’s something that we were using to assemble our understanding of existence long before we were using it to assemble the plots of our novels.

So far I’m with Reyes: narrative forms reduce the complexity of life into more understandable, meaningful, or emotionally fulfilling patterns.

But why do we keep seeking out new stories, especially those in modes like fantasy or historical fiction which don’t seem to have much value to our biological survival? Reyes suggests that’s because our narrative-seeking brain is also wired to seek out new stories to make sure it experiences everything useful:

The more unique a pattern is, the greater its potential usefulness. Keep in mind that our pattern junkie is a collector, he’s out to gather and hoard every different kind of pattern he can get his hands on. But like any maniacal hobbyist, he’s always looking for the pieces that he doesn’t already have in his collection.

Actually, unique and even impossible stories would seem to have less potential usefulness than mundane ones. This strikes me as a place to argue for an evolutionary adaptation that goes beyond what’s necessary. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Reyes throws out capitalized terms like Literary Darwinism and Story Theory, and goes into more detail on the “Narrative Complexity” part of his own website.

Wisest Thing I’ve Read Today

Here’s a taste of economist and New York Times columnist Tyler Cowen’s remarks about storytelling at something called TEDxMidAtlantic (evidently the future is moving too fast for the spacebar to keep up).

I was told to come here and tell you all stories, but what I'd like to do is instead tell you why I'm suspicious of stories, why stories make me nervous. In fact, the more inspired a story makes me feel, very often the more nervous I get. So the best stories are often the trickiest ones.

The good and bad things about stories is they're a kind of filter. They take a lot of information, and they leave some of it out, and they keep some of it in. But the thing about this filter, it always leaves the same things in. You're always left with the same few stories. . . . There's monster, rags to riches, quest, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy, rebirth. You don't have to agree with that list exactly, but the point is this: if you think in terms of stories, you're telling yourself the same things over and over again.

There was a study done, we asked some people to describe their lives. And when asked to describe their lives, what's interesting is how few people said, "mess". It's probably the best answer; I don't mean that in a bad way. "Mess" can be liberating, "mess" can be empowering, "mess" can be a way of drawing upon multiple strengths.

But what people wanted to say was, "My life is a journey." 51% wanted to turn his or her life into a story. 11% said, "My life is a battle." Again, that's a kind of story. 8% said, "My life is a novel," 5% "My life is a play." I don't think anyone said, "My life is a reality TV show." Again, we're imposing order on the mess we observe, and it's taking the same patterns, and when something is in the form of a story, often we remember it when we shouldn't.

So how many of you know the story about George Washington and the cherry tree? It's not obvious that's exactly what happened. The story of Paul Revere, it's not obvious that that's exactly the way it happened. So again, we should be suspicious of stories. We're biologically programmed to respond to them. They contain a lot of information. They have social power. They connect us to other people. So they're like a kind of candy that we're fed when we consume political information, when we read novels. When we read nonfiction books, we're really being fed stories. Nonfiction is, in a sense, the new fiction. The book may happen to say true things, but everything's taking the same form of these stories.

So what are the problems of relying too heavily on stories? You view your life like "this" instead of the mess that it is or it ought to be. But more specifically, I think of a few major problems when we think too much in terms of narrative. First, narratives tend to be too simple. The point of a narrative is to strip it way, not just into 18 minutes, but most narratives you could present in a sentence or two. So when you strip away detail, you tend to tell stories in terms of good vs. evil, whether it's a story about your own life or a story about politics.

Even if we avoid the pitfall of assigning good and evil, we still face the other fallacies of seeking a well-constructed narrative: that things don’t just happen randomly, but for a reason already established in the story; that we as characters affect the outcome of events through our efforts (or fail because of lack of effort); that there’s a lesson or insight to be learned. In writing fiction, I’m eager to create good narratives. In studying history, I’m suspicious of them, yet it’s the natural way I lay out information.

Cowen’s whole talk can also be viewed as a video.