Free Associations

“Powellmania” and “Forrest Gump Colin Powell”: Retired General Colin Powell spoke out in September and October, but said little about his political agenda. His book, My American Journey (New York: Random House, 1995) [643 pp., $25.95], is worth reading to understand his family background, life experiences, and manner of thought. Despite his lack of a political program, the media was cooing at how forthcoming he was since so many people felt he looked good in comparison with Clinton, Buchanan, Dole, Gramm, and the rest of the Republican candidates. It was the pre-campaign honeymoon period which would have ended even before he became an official candidate. The “non-candidate” candidate said, “People are wondering what Forrest Gump Colin Powell stands for” and “they’re about to find out” in My American Journey. Powell, currently the top-paid speaker in the USA, was raking in $60,000 a speech as he garnered support for the possible third-party Presidential run that he never made. In early October, Frank Rich in the New York Times declared “the almost papal popularity” of the enigmatic Powell to be based on his being like “a Rorschach test” “more revealing about the rudderless populace that cheers him than it is about the man himself.” Powell was all things to all people, a perfect screen on which millions of Americans could project their hopes. The candidate wisely bowed out of the race, the race others were pushing him so hard to enter, perhaps as much because of the amorphousness of the assignment as because of the lack of “fire in his belly” to be President or his wife’s history of depression.

I noted an interesting change in my own attitude towards the idea of this son of New York City running for President. At first I dismissed the notion of a general for President as a bad idea: I made comments about his being a “political” general rather than primarily a combat soldier. Grudgingly, I noted that at least he was cautious about getting America involved in war. When Powellmania began to grip the country, I liked its effect of turning the electorate’s attention away from the social agenda of the Republican conservatives which will have negative consequences for the children and the fragile of our society. He is a moderate, unlike ideologues like Buchanan, Gramm, and Gingrich — a moderate with prospects of success, for whom I could consider voting. After all, when I write on my ballot the name of my own candidate (as I have done so often in Presidential elections) it is always with regret. I realized how serious his candidacy was when major attacks were launched against it before it became official. Like so many other Americans, I now consider it unfortunate that Colin Powell decided not to run. Colin Powell is a black man for whom many Jews and other whites could easily vote.

Blacks and Jews: In the consciousness of America, these two groups play a major role which we do not begin to understand because of our difficulties in talking about race and prejudice. We are at the stage of complaining about people saying the “N” word, like little children tattling to their mothers. At times elements in each group vie for being the aggrieved minority, the victims of society. Relations between the descendants of the slaves who were brought to America in chains and those who Moses brought out of Egypt have been in the news lately. “Bloodsuckers” is what Louis Farrakhan again called some Jews and other merchants (Palestinian Arabs, Koreans, Vietnamese) in black ghettos in mid-October, two days after offering to meet with Jewish leaders to discuss differences between Jews and the Nation of Islam. On television’s valuable C-span, James Glassman (a Washington Post columnist) noted a survey in which Americans of all races, when “asked what proportion of the population is black … said it is about 25 percent” when in fact it is 11.8 percent. This reminded me of informal polls I had conducted in recent years in my Holocaust class, in which I would ask my students what percentage of the population in the USA is Jewish. Though the reality is about two-and-one-half percent, my students consistently gave answers of 20-30

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percent. I resolved to ask students who were not self-selected (by taking a course on the Jewish tragedy during World War II) the same question. The results were a medium of 27 percent. When I asked the same students about the number of Afro-Americans in our population the results were an even 30 percent. Several other classes provided similar statistics at a college and in a county in which Jews constitute about 10 per cent of the population and blacks even less. One “A” student told me there were 63 percent Jews and 75 percent blacks and completely missed my quip about black Ethiopian Jews in America. Yet, when I asked her about the percentage of people of her own ethnic group of European descent, she was accurate in her estimate.

My assumption is that Jews and blacks are unconscious delegates of powerful impulses in the general American consciousness which are mostly disclaimed. But what impulses and why are they disclaimed? And when will we as psychohistorians feel free to discuss these issues without fear of either provoking racism or being called racists?

The О J. Simpson Verdict: The public was left with a sharp sense of the different world views of blacks and whites in America when the O.J. Simpson trial ended so abruptly. Many blacks sighed with relief while millions of whites were outraged by the brevity of the jury deliberations and the television image of gleeful black Howard University students cheering the acquittal. I tried to solicit analysis from some colleagues, mostly on the West Coast, who are capable of casting profound psychohistorical insight on the subject, but none decided to write anything about this difficult subject which is very much on their minds. Perhaps some will choose to write on it when the public’s fancy has turned to another area. Displacement of feelings in the public arena is endless, but it seldom gets mentioned in the mainstream media. One exception appeared in Frank Rich’s words in the New York Times that “you don’t have to be a psychiatrist to see that the public’s anger [at NBC for planning to interview O.J. Simpson on “Dateline NBC” shortly after his acquittal] was displaced.”

The 400,000 [aka Million] Man: Louis Farrakhan’s day of “atonement and reconciliation” certainly did not have to do with Afro-American reconciliation with Jews, whites, and Washington. Reverend Benjamin F. Chavis, having been dismissed from National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for misusing its treasury in a case of the sexual harassment of an employee, joined with the Nation of Islam to garner mass support. The result was a most impressive display of male (primarily middle class) black solidarity that made most whites uneasy, but that did not appreciably make it easier to talk about race in America.

The issues I have mentioned above Powellmania, the role of blacks in society, and the Simpson verdict seem to me to be connected in our collective unconscious. America focuses on blacks who are hailed for their athletic prowess or who are silently condemned in suburbia for the inclination towards crime of their younger males. While feeling incredibly racially divided, Americans long for racial healing and harmony, and lionize a retired black general. By saying we like Powell, a significant portion of white America feels less guilty about its racial fears and prejudices. The emotional needs of most blacks seem to be quite different than those of whites and, though I have lived with black next-door neighbors throughout most of my adult life, I will not hazard a guess as to what these are.

Public Relations Releases As News: It used to be that it was only naive students and people away from the centers of power who did not know the difference between press releases and real news. Now, given the mentality of the 30-second sound bite, our uncritical news media provides free advertising for many groups providing they fulfill the media’s criterion of being of interest. Why are we so gullible?

EntertainNews: I am old enough to remember when news was mostly about what is happening in the world and any entertainment in it came from the reader/listener/viewer. Now so-called television news is mostly entertainment and only secondarily “hard news.” In Freudian terms, this fits the emotional needs of the public by talking to our id much more than to our ego and superego.

Political Animals: These are no longer just Republican elephants trumpeting their 1992 “Conservative Revolution” or stubborn (though dwindling) Democratic donkeys resisting the contemporary conservative tide, but a variety of political animals: Dole like a “‘mule, draft horse, tortoise, German shepherd,’” Buchanan

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like a “‘pit bull, badger, wolverine,’” and Gramm like a “‘weasel, foxes, hyena, ferret’” as well as a “‘bulldog and tortoise.’” These animal images are from focus groups of conservative Republican voters who are being screened by the candidates’ campaign people. The New York Times reports that they even test the type of attack commercials they expect from rivals on focus groups so they can devise commercials responding to the attacks.

The process of human identification with animals is an interesting one since we project onto animals that which we have trouble accepting in ourselves. Though animal names tend to be associated with sports teams and sporty cars, there are many other usages. I recently heard myself saying, “I feel like a draft horse pulling this book on immigration psychology to completion harnessed to the coeditor.” My focus was not simply on the stamina of the draft horses I remember mostly from my childhood, but on their blinders which kept them focused on the road despite the many distractions. Our lack of criticalness of so much which comes to us via the news media perhaps has to do with our distractibility. And the entertainment news media likes it that way.

The President as Psychoanalyst and Whipping Boy: For years I have been writing that a potentially vital function of the American President is as a type of psychoanalyst to the nation who helps us express our feelings with a minimum of acting out. Last September 29 on the “MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour,” Paul Gigot (a regular commentator and Wall Street Journal columnist) complained that Bill Clinton “sounds like a national shrink, a psychoanalyst” when he described the country as being in a “national funk.” I wish Gigot were right, but I fear he is not. My complaint is that Clinton is too sensitive to the national pulse and therefore does not act enough like an analyst. At about the same time another commentator (in the New York Times) found the President from Arkansas to be too much like an eternal kid who has never grown up.

Maureen Dowd, always ready to use her psychological frame of mind to knock our President (whoever that may be) managed as usual to say some interesting things as she asserted, “Mr. Clinton is definitely talking past me. We gave up a long time ago on President Clinton as father figure. He is President as gifted teenager, elevating his undisciplined, incomplete, searching personality to a management style. The problem with this President is that he never stops learning. But why must he share all his illuminations with us? We’re out of gold stars. I would be embarrassed to tell everyone in the third year of my Presidency that I had just realized the importance of using the bully pulpit and giving Americans ‘the big picture.’” She concludes this part of her critique (or should I say assault?) by viewing Clinton as the eternal naive optimist: “Candide.” Though Clinton, the man as well as the President, may need public approval too badly to have the distance of an analyst, his youthful optimism certainly helps keep him in the political fray. And most importantly he has been able to survive the incredible personal assault on him that generates White Water and Ruby Ridge hearings that get more television coverage than vital issues that will touch all of our lives. Some good, for example the Israeli and Bosnian peace initiatives, may come from this optimism in the face of a hostile environment.

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