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Harry Stack Sullivan.
Posting something about a survivor of the Rev. Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple cult reminded me of an odd obituary I came across a couple months ago. It was a 1991 New York Times postmortem about psychotherapist and commune leader Saul Newton, who was an avowed enemy of the traditional family, who wanted to break our accepted bonds–chains, as he saw them–smash them to bits. He thought he could create a new reality.
I vaguely recall speaking some years ago to an old NYU professor who was a believer of Newton’s and spoke glowingly of the late doctor. I was left chilled by the conversation. From the Times obit:
His beliefs had radical political themes. Earlier he was a union organizer, an avowed Communist and a soldier in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain. In recent years, he was an ardent foe of nuclear arms and power.
‘Hated and Loved’
“He was both hated and loved,” said Esther Newton, his eldest daughter, who was not involved in his therapeutic community. ‘His ideals were lofty — the results are for others to judge,’ she said. “He was very bright and creative, charismatic and definitely difficult, handsome, attractive to women and tyrannical.”
At its peak in the 1970’s, his organization had hundreds of members living in three buildings on the Upper West Side. Its formal name was the Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis; a subsidiary group was the Fourth Wall Repertory Company, a theater organization based in the East Village.
In recent years the Sullivanians declined in membership, beset by unfavorable publicity, investigations by state authorities into charges of professional misconduct by therapists, child custody lawsuits, the organized opposition of disaffected former members and estranged relatives of members, internal disputes and Mr. Newton’s deteriorating health.
The group’s name was derived from the late Henry Stack Sullivan, a prominent American psychiatrist. In 1957, Mr. Newton and Dr. Jane Pearce, his wife at the time, split off from the Sullivan-oriented William Alanson White Institute to form their own organization. Most mental health experts view the Newton group as having distorted Mr. Sullivan’s name and theories.
Through their unique brand of psychotherapy, Mr. Newton and his disciples controlled virtually all aspects of their followers lives, former residents said.
Members were taught that traditional family ties were at the root of mental illness and needed to be broken to foster individual growth, ex-members said. They were assigned to lived in group apartments and were expected to sleep with different sex partners, changing as often as each night. Married couples did not live together. Permission was required to give birth. Children were raised by babysitters, with parental visits allowed one hour a day and one evening a week. Members often broke off contact with their own parents and other relatives. Under outside criticism, some of these practices were moderated in recent years.•
Tags: Esther Newton, Harry Stack Sullivan, Henry Stack Sullivan, Jane Pearce, Jim Jones, Saul Newton
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Abraham Lincoln, an early adopter of technology, didn’t have to worry about electronic surveillance intercepting his telegraphs, but President Obama has no such luxury. The U.S. has been pilloried recently for spying on our allies, but every nation is likely doing it. You know why? Because we can. From Michael S. Schmidt and Eric Schmitt in the New York Times:
“WASHINGTON — When President Obama travels abroad, his staff packs briefing books, gifts for foreign leaders and something more closely associated with camping than diplomacy: a tent.
Even when Mr. Obama travels to allied nations, aides quickly set up the security tent — which has opaque sides and noise-making devices inside — in a room near his hotel suite. When the president needs to read a classified document or have a sensitive conversation, he ducks into the tent to shield himself from secret video cameras and listening devices.
American security officials demand that their bosses — not just the president, but members of Congress, diplomats, policy makers and military officers — take such precautions when traveling abroad because it is widely acknowledged that their hosts often have no qualms about snooping on their guests.”
Tags: Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama, Eric Schmitt, Michael S. Schmidt
Copyright law isn’t normally the first consideration when we think back on Martin Luther King’s soaring “I Have a Dream” speech fifty years on. Those inspiring words still ring from the hilltops and mountains of every state, as famous any uttered by Abraham Lincoln in his first inaugural oration or the Gettysburg Address. King’s words belong to us all–well, with some restrictions. From Alex Pasternack at Vice:
“Martin Luther King Jr.‘s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech is considered one of the most recognizable collection of words in American history. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of a national treasure or a national park. The National Park Service inscribed it on the Lincoln Memorial and the Library of Congress put it into its National Recording Registry. So we might hold it to be self evident that it can be spread freely.
Not exactly. Any unauthorized usage of the speech and a number of other speeches by King – including in PBS documentaries – is a violation of American law. You’d be hard pressed to find a good complete video version on the web, and it’s not even to be found in the new digital archive of the King Center’s website. If you want to watch the whole thing, legally, you’ll need to get the $20 DVD.
That’s because the King estate, and, as of 2009, the British music publishing conglomerateEMI Publishing, owns the copyright of the speech and its recorded performance. While the copyright restriction isn’t news, EMI’s unusual role in policing the use of King’s words – the first instance of the company taking on a non-music based intellectual property catalog – hasn’t been widely reported.”
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Afflictor: Thinking I’ve found the shower curtain design I’ll use for the rest of my life.
Previous shower curtain design I used.
Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman, two great figures of their age, never shook hands or spoke despite their often close proximity, which was made all the closer as a result of the poet volunteering as a nurse during the Civil War. From Jamie Stiehm at the New York Times’ Disunion blog, a passage about their “relationship”:
“Above all, Whitman studied the stars and waves of Lincoln’s mercurial character the way a great sculptor might gaze at his craggy countenance or larger-than-life hands. The poet came to know the routes of the president’s carriage. When he saw it passing by, he stood with hat in hand. He kept a lookout in the summer months, when Lincoln rode daily along Seventh Street out to a peaceful family retreat at the Soldiers Home, three miles away from crush of his callers. Whitman was once inside the executive mansion to see John Hay, the president’s secretary. He was standing close to Lincoln, who was animatedly engaged in another conversation, but went on his way, loath to interrupt him.
As Whitman later recounted, he exchanged nods, bows and waves with Lincoln several times over a few years and saw the president shake hundreds, if not thousands, of hands at a party. But not Whitman’s. In one of American history’s closest calls, the two never spoke a word to each other. (Though it is believed that Lincoln, 10 years older, read some of the poet’s work aloud back in Springfield, Ill.)
Whitman nevertheless felt he got a good fix on Lincoln. ‘I love the president personally,’ he declared. Well he might, because years earlier he had imagined a bearded president from the prairie, the West who was ‘heroic, shrewd, fully informed.’ Lincoln was nothing if not a shrewd, strong outsider, which helped make him the one man alive capable of settling the old sectional divide sundering the nation.”
Tags: Abraham Lincoln, Jamie Stiehm, Walt Whitman
Afflictor: Thinking that this was an election in which the PAC man…
…wasn’t able to beat the pizza man.
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The new Rolling Stone interview with President Obama is now online and ungated. It was conducted by historian Douglas Brinkley, who is not a bullshitter. An excerpt about Ayn Rand:
“Douglas Brinkley:
Have you ever read Ayn Rand?
President Obama:
Sure.
Douglas Brinkley:
What do you think Paul Ryan’s obsession with her work would mean if he were vice president?
President Obama:
Well, you’d have to ask Paul Ryan what that means to him. Ayn Rand is one of those things that a lot of us, when we were 17 or 18 and feeling misunderstood, we’d pick up. Then, as we get older, we realize that a world in which we’re only thinking about ourselves and not thinking about anybody else, in which we’re considering the entire project of developing ourselves as more important than our relationships to other people and making sure that everybody else has opportunity – that that’s a pretty narrow vision. It’s not one that, I think, describes what’s best in America. Unfortunately, it does seem as if sometimes that vision of a ‘you’re on your own’ society has consumed a big chunk of the Republican Party.
Of course, that’s not the Republican tradition. I made this point in the first debate. You look at Abraham Lincoln: He very much believed in self-sufficiency and self-reliance. He embodied it – that you work hard and you make it, that your efforts should take you as far as your dreams can take you. But he also understood that there’s some things we do better together. That we make investments in our infrastructure and railroads and canals and land-grant colleges and the National Academy of Sciences, because that provides us all with an opportunity to fulfill our potential, and we’ll all be better off as a consequence. He also had a sense of deep, profound empathy, a sense of the intrinsic worth of every individual, which led him to his opposition to slavery and ultimately to signing the Emancipation Proclamation. That view of life – as one in which we’re all connected, as opposed to all isolated and looking out only for ourselves – that’s a view that has made America great and allowed us to stitch together a sense of national identity out of all these different immigrant groups who have come here in waves throughout our history.”
Tags: Abraham Lincoln, Ayn Rand, Barack Obama, Douglas Brinkley, Paul Ryan
Pete Hamill refers to the evening of the first Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier fight, which took place on March 8, 1971 at Madison Square Garden, as “perhaps the greatest night in the history of New York City.” Maybe. Of course, it would have been amazing to be in Times Square when WWII ended or to hear Abraham Lincoln speak at Cooper Institute in 1860 or to be there in 1927 to watch the ticker-tape parade for Charles Lindbergh after his transatlantic solo flight.
But Ali-Frazier was no doubt very special, considering the political backdrop of the former Cassius Clay being stripped of his title and two of the greatest heavyweights ever meeting while each was still undefeated. Just prior to the fight, Life magazine published a cover story by Thomas Thompson about that anticipated match, “Battle of the Champs.” An excerpt:
There is almost an obscene aura of money hanging over the fight. It might seem to be the ultimate black man’s revenge–each fighter getting his $2.5 million. But the white man will, as per custom, get his. The promoter of the fight is a 40-year-old California theatrical agent and manager named Jerry Perenchio whose clients include Richard Burton, Andy Williams, Johnny Mathis and Henry Mancini.
Perenchio is a pleasant man who wears monogrammed shirts and who would seem to be more at home beside a Beverly Hills swimming pool than at ringside of Madison Square Garden. But he is so far cleverly navigating his way through the turmoil. “I feel like I am smack in the middle of the court of the Borgias,” he said the other day. “So far I am being sued in various lawsuits totaling $58 million, and I have people calling me for tickets–the same people who, before the fight, I couldn’t even get on the telephone.”
The fight will be seen in at least 350 closed-circuit locations in America totaling 1.7 million seats, at prices ranging from $10 per ticket to $30. (Top price at Madison Square Garden is $150, but scalpers are already getting $500 per ticket.) “There’s never been anything like it in my lifetime,” says Perenchio, “very possibly since time began.”
Promoting the fight has not been without its problems. Perenchio simply took the map of America and the world, carved it out into various sections, and set a price tag on each for the closed-circuit rights. If the price was met, the rights were granted. If not, they were withheld. So far, more than 20 auditoriums in the U.S. have been withheld from potential entrepreneurs because of Muhammad Ali’s conviction on draft evasion charges.
The fight will be seen live in Canada, Peru, Argentina, Mexico, Japan, and in England at 4 a.m. There would be considerably more outlets if there were enough time. ‘We only had two months really to promote it,’ complained Perenchio. “We’re like a guy in an orchard with only a limited amount of time to pick the fruit. We can only get at the lower branches.”
Perenchio is not overlooking any way to make money from the event. Besides the expected $20 million to $30 million gross anticipated from the fight itself, he is selling the rights to the souvenir program, between-rounds commercials, a special poster and post-fight movie–to be delayed for six months–for a total of $4 million. “We haven’t sold it yet, in fact we’ve only had a few offers of $500,000 or $250,000. We just don’t want to schlock it.”
On top of all this, Perenchio actually plans to seize both boxers’ trunks and gloves so that he can auction them off later. “If they can sell Judy Garland’s red Oz shoes for $15,000, then we should get at least as much for these,” he said. “We get a little blood on the trunks, it makes them all the more valuable.”•
Tags: Joe Frazier, Muhammad Ali, Pete Hamill, Thomas Thompson
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Afflictor: Believing that Donald Trump is close to proving…
…that George Washington was actually born in the British Colonies.
From “The First Wired President,” Tom Wheeler’s smart New York Times Disunion post about Abraham Lincoln’s embrace of technology:
“Up until May 1862 Lincoln had sent, on average, a little over one telegram a month. But things changed when a telegraph office was opened next door to the White House, in the War Department. On May 24 the president had his online breakout, sending nine telegrams. That week he would send more than all his previous messages, combined. From May 24 — 18 years to the day since Morse had first tapped out ‘What hath God wrought’ — forward, Lincoln and the telegraph were inseparable.
The new telegraph office became the first Situation Room. Several times a day the president would walk into the telegraph office, sit down at the desk of its manager and begin going through the copies of all telegrams received, whether addressed to him or not. During great battles the president would even sleep in the telegraph office, just to be close to his oracle.
Using the telegraph to extend his voice was an obvious application of the technology. ‘You are instructed…to put twenty thousand men (20,000) in motion at once for the Shenandoah,’ the president ordered Gen. Irvin McDowell on May 24. Less obvious, however, was how Lincoln made the telegraph his eyes and ears to distant fields and the keyhole into his generals’ headquarters. As he sat in the telegraph office reading messages, he gained insights, felt the pulse of his Army in the field and reacted.”
Tags: Abraham Lincoln, Tom Wheeler
“I think at this point he’s obsessed with being on Mount Rushmore.” (Image by Lbertman.)
Cornell West is critical of President Obama in a new Financial Times interview, for a myriad of reasons. I think when all is done health-care reform, should it survive the Supreme Court, will have a monumental positive effect on wealth distribution and equity in this country. It will do more for Americans than all his critics combined have done. It’s like people dismiss the value of 30 million Americans suddenly having accessibility to health care as insignificant. An excerpt from the West piece:
“I ask him if he is hopeful that a second term for Obama will be more fruitful, once freed from the political tyranny of re-election to the White House. He is not optimistic. ‘I think at this point he’s obsessed with being on Mount Rushmore, he wants to be a great figure in the pantheon of American presidents.’ he says.
Obama, West believes, has not been willing to listen and evolve – he should have been listening to progressive economists such as Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and Sylvia Ann Hewlett – in the way that Abraham Lincoln listened and changed his views on slavery. ‘If you’re thinking about Mount Rushmore, you’re thinking about your legacy, your legacy, your legacy. Puh-lease.’
I suggest that part of the reason so many have been disappointed with Obama is that their expectations were unattainably high, and also because his supporters, especially liberals, projected their hopes on to him with little regard for his innate pragmatism. West admits this but says Obama is partly to blame. ‘When you mobilize the legacy of Martin [Luther] King and put a bust of Martin King in the Oval Office, people elevate their hopes. Martin King is not just every brother,’ he says. ‘It’s like a novelist being obsessed with Tolstoy or Proust and then he ends up writing short stories that can barely get into some middlebrow magazine. Hey, you got our hopes up man! I was expecting Proust or Tolstoy, instead it would barely get in Newsweek.‘”
Tags: Barack Obama, Cornel West
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Afflictor: Thinking gynecological exams in Virginia have changed recently.
From “The Machine-Tooled Happyland,” Ray Bradbury’s 1965 Holiday analysis of the robot-centric Disneyland:
“We live in an age of one billion robot devices that surround, bully, change and sometimes destroy us. The metal-and-plastic machines are all amoral. But by their design and function they lure us to be better or worse than we might otherwise be.
In such an age it would be foolhardy to ignore the one man who is building human qualities into robots—robots whose influence will be ricocheting off social and political institutions ten thousand afternoons from today.
Snobbery now could cripple our intellectual development. After I had heard too many people sneer at Disney and his audio-animatronic Abraham Lincoln in the Illinois exhibit at the New York World’s Fair, I went to the Disney robot factory in Glendale. I watched the finishing touches being put on a second computerized, electric- and air-pressure-driven humanoid that will “live” at Disneyland from this summer on. I saw this new effigy of Mr. Lincoln sit, stand, shift his arms, turn his wrists, twitch his fingers, put his hands behind his back, turn his head, look at me, blink and prepare to speak. In those few moments I was filled with an awe I have rarely felt in my life.
Giovanni Battista Bracelli's robot drawings, 1624.
Only a few hundred years ago all this would have been considered blasphemous, I thought. To create man is not man’s business, but God’s, it would have been said. Disney and every technician with him would have been bundled and burned at the stake in 1600.
And again, I thought, all of this was dreamed before. From the fantastic geometric robot drawings of Bracelli in 1624 to the mechanical people in Capek’s R.U.R. in 1925, others have conceived and drawn metallic extensions of man and his senses, or played at it in theater.
But the fact remains that Disney is the first to make a robot that is convincingly real, that looks, speaks and acts like a man. Disney has set the history of humanized robots on its way toward wider, more fantastic excursions into the needs of civilization.” (Thanks Longform.)
••••••••••
“We also accompanied him on a trip to Disneyland,” 1968:
Tags: Ray Bradbury, Walt Disney
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"I have collected celebrity hair since the 70's." (Image by Roy Kerwood.)
I am retiring and liquidating my collections over the next few months I have collected celebrity hair since the 70’s and will liquidated in groups.EACH PIECE COMES WITH A CERTIFICATES OF AUTHENTICITY FROM A VERY REPUTABLE AUTOGRAPH DEALER THAT I CHECKED OUT YEARS AGO,,.Mary Surratt.. movie “conspirator”…I have some of her hair possibly taken while she was hanging from the rope..The following lots will be sold 1st John Lennon $300, CIVIL WAR GROUP.. Abraham Lincoln, Mary Todd Lincoln, John Brown William Quantril, Mary Surratt (portrayer in the conspirator movie), Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis.. $2,000.OBO…..PRESIDENT’S COLLECTION: John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixo, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan..$ 2,0000 OBO … Founding fathers collection: George Washington. John Adams (SUPER RARE), Alexander Hamolton $3,000 OBO, Napoleon Buonaparte $300.
Afflictor: Believing two heads are better than one since 2009.
Afflictor: Sorely disappointing that woman who kind of looks like Rosie O'Donnell since 2009.
