PSYCHOSCAPES: Something Snapped

CC Jean Stimmell: Ice breaking up on Exeter River (2017)

I was struck by a recent essay by Timothy Denevi in the NYT about the writer Joan Didion.^⁠1 On the surface, it seems strange that I should be so affected because Didion was a conservative supporter of Barry Goldwater and distrustful of the Kennedys. On the other hand, I am an unabashed child of the Sixties who, while growing up, was inspired by President Kennedy's inaugural address challenge: "Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.^⁠2

Something snapped in me when Robert Kennedy, JFK’s brother, was assassinated: I found myself sobbing uncontrollably as I watched the news unfold. His death was too much to bear: I see now it was the final straw, causing an irreparable rip in the fabric of America I had been taught to believe in.

Something snapped in Joan Didion, too, despite our differences. As RFK lay dying, his last words were, “Is everybody OK?”^⁠3

Neither of us was – along with a lot of other people.

It was the final blow in the sickening series of assaults on our image of what America stood for in the aftermath of the murders of MLK, Malcolm X, and President JFK, not to mention America’s massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai and Charley Manson’s California killing spree.

It caused Joan Didion to have a mental breakdown, “an attack of vertigo, nausea and a feeling that she was going to pass out,” for which she underwent an extensive psychiatric evaluation and was prescribed amitriptyline, an antidepressant."^⁠4 As for me, recently back from the rivers of Vietnam, it completely unmoored me from the reality of what my country represented, catapulting me on a crazy drunken ride through the frenzied times that lay ahead.

Didion was a master storyteller detailing how the unprecedented changes of the 1960s caused America to fragment, according to Michiko Kakutani of the NYT. She questioned whether our nation would survive, quoting lines from Yeat’s famous poem: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre, The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”^⁠5

Of course, the center did hold – but at a high cost: The rabid polarization that divided us in the 1960s caused social fractures that didn't heal. Whereas previously, our nation was like a new puncture-proof tire guaranteed for 50,000 miles, we were now an out-of-balance retread, patched with distrust.

“It turns out that Didion was also remarkably prescient in writing about the fracturing of truth as people increasingly filtered reality through the prism of their own prejudices”^⁠6 It was only a matter of time before these wounds reopened. And indeed, they have: once again, we are living through times of chaos and uncertainty, contending with epidemics, insurrection, racial hatred, and mass shootings in our schools.

Yet this time around, I am too old to snap – only sag further. But with age sometimes comes wisdom, and in that spirit, I will suggest what has been lost: our sense of community – the linchpin that really made America great.

Again, I find common ground with Joan Didion: In an interview before she died, she acknowledged that folks “no longer count themselves as part of the community.” Too many Americans “didn’t really care about any of it; the broader narrative of patriotism and pride was just an excuse for doing what they wanted — for their self-interest — a narrative they could apply and discard from one situation to the next as they saw fit.”^⁠7

One thing that would help revive our sense of community is mandatory national service.

Here's an example from my own life I've written about before. On one occasion, my ship had a major crew turnover: almost a quarter of the crew was new. On our return trip back to the rivers of Vietnam, "all hell broke loose in a crude kind of diversity training, representing as we did, a cross-section of the nation: East coast, highly educated, college dropouts and midwestern kids who hadn't finished high school; hip city slickers and country folks right off the farm; We had Native American, Hispanic, and black sailors, along with staunch segregationists from the south.”^⁠8

At first, fights and animosity reigned, but we were thrown together in a situation where we had no choice but to work together: As we got to know each other, we learned that underneath, we were more alike than different. It was no love fest, but we came to respect one another. Most importantly, we had an overarching dedication to a common purpose, prompting us to do our jobs like well-oiled machines.

Don’t mistake my example as an endorsement for war. The Peace Corps is a perfect example of mandatory national service. So is working in a hospital, cleaning up after a natural disaster, planting trees, or pulling the detritus of our consumer society out of our dying rivers.

Joan Didion is right: Without a sense of community, things will continue to fall apart and, this time, maybe the center won’t hold.

xxx

anImage_17.tiff