Has apocalyptic thinking contributed to some of our nation's biggest problems—inequality, permanent war, and the despoiling of our natural resources? From the Puritans to the present, historian and public policy advocate Betsy Hartmann sheds light on a pervasive but—until now—invisible theme shaping the American mindset: apocalyptic thinking, or the belief that the end of the world is nigh. Hartmann makes a compelling case that apocalyptic fears are deeply intertwined with the American ethos, to our detriment. In The America Syndrome, she seeks to reclaim human agency and, in so doing, revise the national narrative. By changing the way we think, we just might change the world.
No one is better equipped than psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton-a leading scholar of thought control and mass violence- to make sense of the extreme moment. From Hiroshima survivors to Nazi doctors, from Vietnam veterans to the cult that sarin-gassed the Tokyo subways, he has explained to us global apocalyptic urges, the ravages of psychic numbness, and the psychology of the survivor. Now, as al- Qaeda's desire to purify the earth of "evil" meets the unilateral urge to dominate the globe's sole superpower, Lifton believes we have arrived at a remarkably perilous moment. The United States-from its leaders to much of its people-feels itself painfully vulnerable and thinks of itself as a survivor nation. The combination of such feelings roiling through the land over the last year and an administration with unprecedented military power bent on dominating and purifying the earth adds up to an intensely dangerous atmosphere-in fact, a "syndrome." Unfortunately, there is no therapy available for empires-or rather, the only therapy available is self-prescribed. But while Lifton can't be therapist to the earth's last superpower, he can bring together a half century of wisdom and apply it to Superpower Syndrome.
In The Icarus Syndrome, Peter Beinart tells a tale as old as the Greeks - a story about the seductions of success. Beinart describes Washington on the eve of three wars - World War I, Vietnam and Iraq - three moments when American leaders decided they could remake the world in their image. Each time, leading intellectuals declared that history was over, and the spread of democracy was inevitable. Each time, a president held the nation in the palm of his hand. And each time, a war conceived in arrogance brought untold tragedy. In dazzling colour, Beinart portrays three extraordinary generations: the progressives who took America into World War I, led by Woodrow Wilson, the lonely preacher's son who became the closest thing to a political messiah the world had ever seen. The Camelot intellectuals who took America into Vietnam, led by Lyndon Johnson, who lay awake night after night shaking with fear that his countrymen considered him weak. And George W. Bush and the post-cold war neoconservatives, the romantic bullies who believed they could bludgeon the Middle East and liberate it at the same time. Like Icarus, each of these generations crafted 'wings' - a theory about America's relationship to the world. They flapped carefully at first, but gradually lost their inhibitions until, giddy with success, they flew into the sun. But every era also brought new leaders and thinkers who found wisdom in pain. They reconciled American optimism - our belief that anything is possible - with the realities of a world that will never fully bend to our will. In their struggles lie the seeds of American renewal today. Based on years of research, The Icarus Syndrome is a provocative and strikingly original account of hubris in the American century - and how we learn from the tragedies that result.
Written early in 2010 and initially published in September 2010, The Obama Syndrome predicted the Obama administration’s historic midterm defeat. But unlike myriad commentators who have since pinned responsibility for that Democratic Party collapse on the “reform” president’s lack of firm resolve, Ali’s critique located the problem in Obama’s notion of reform itself. Barack Obama campaigned for the presidency by promising to escalate the war in Afghanistan, and his economic team brought the architects of the financial crisis into the White House. Small wonder then that the “War on Terror”—torture in Bagram, occupation in Iraq, appeasement in Israel, and escalation in Pakistan—continues. And that Wall Street and the country’s biggest corporations have all profited at the expense of America’s working class and poor. Now a thoroughly updated paperback continues the story through the midterms, including a trenchant analysis of the Tea Party, and Obama’s decision to continue with his predecessor’s tax cuts for the rich. Ali asks whether—in the absence of a progressive upheaval from below—US politics is permanently mired in moderate Republicanism. Already called “a comprehensive account” of the problems with Obama (The Huffington Post), this new edition is sure to provide a more “powerful boost to Obama dissenters on the left” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette).
This book focuses on the 'Vietnam Syndrome' - the effects for the United States of the American defeat in the Vietnam War. It argues that a full understanding of the Syndrome requires a proper appreciation of key shaping elements in Vietnamese and American history. Attention is given to the racial genocide that attended the birth of the United States, to US imperialism and capitalism, and to the Cold War framework. The nature of America as a plutocracy is emphasised, followed by profiles of policy options and three specific issues: post-war Vietnam, El Salvador and Iraq.
With its rock-bottom approval ratings, acrimonious partisan battles, and apparent inability to do its legislative business, the U.S. Senate might easily be deemed unworthy of attention, if not downright irrelevant. This book tells us that would be a mistake. Because the Senate has become the place where the policy-making process most frequently stalls, any effective resolution to our polarized politics demands a clear understanding of how the formerly august legislative body once worked and how it came to the present crisis. Steven S. Smith provides that understanding in The Senate Syndrome. Like the Senate itself, Smith’s account is grounded in history. Countering a cacophony of inexpert opinion and a widespread misunderstanding of political and legislative history, the book fills in a world of missing information—about debates among senators concerning fundamental democratic processes and the workings of institutional rules, procedures, and norms. And Smith does so in a clear and engaging manner. He puts the present problems of the Senate—the “Senate syndrome,” as he calls them—into historical context by explaining how particular ideas and procedures were first framed and how they transformed with the times. Along the way he debunks a number of myths about the Senate, many perpetuated by senators themselves, and makes some pointed observations about the media’s coverage of Congress. The Senate Syndrome goes beyond explaining such seeming technicalities as the difference between regular filibusters and post-cloture filibusters, the importance of chair rulings, the changing role of the parliamentarian, and the debate over whether appeals of points of order should be subject to cloture margins, to show why understanding them matters. At stake is resolution of the Senate syndrome, and the critical underlying struggle between majority rule and minority rights in American policy making.
In The Atlantis Syndrome , Paul Jordan maps the invention, abandonment, and rediscovery of the concept of Atlantis from Plato's invention of Atlantis in his moral tale of the ruining of Athens, to the present day 'alternative archaeologies' which use his analogy as their foundation. Jordan argues that contemporary archaeology has gone far beyond the need for an Atlantis to explain the distant human past and outlines contemporary archaeological thinking about human evolution, prehistory and classical history and society. Ultimately he takes in turn several of the more popular books on the Atlantis theory and critically analyses their evidence and approach. In this way he effectively shoots down several modern heroes of the modern cult of Atlantology, looking at the underlying motivations for their writings. He also warns of the `colonialist and missionary condescension' enshrined in their hyperdiffusionist ideas. This is a fascinating and much needed contextual analysis of the `Atlantis Syndrome' and should be read by anyone interested in this subject.
Winner of the Gradiva Award in Historical Cultural and Literary Analysis and The 2004 Boyer Prize for Contributions to Psychoanalytic Anthropology During the 1950's, US Army medical officers noted a new and puzzling syndrome that contemporary psychiatry could neither explain nor cure. These doctors reported that Puerto Rican soldiers under stress behaved in a very peculiar and dramatic manner, exhibiting a theatrical form of pseudo-epilepsy. Startled physicians observed frightened and disoriented patients foaming at the mouth, screaming, biting, kicking, shaking in seizures, and fainting. The phenomenon seemed to correspond to a serious neurological disease yet, as with some forms of hysteria, physical examination failed to identify any sign of an organic origin. This unusual set of symptoms, entered into medical records as "a group of striking psychopathological reaction patterns, precipitated by minor stress," and was designated "Puerto Rican Syndrome." In this lucid and sophisticated new work, Patricia Gherovici thoroughly examines the so-called Puerto Rican Syndrome in the contemporary world, its social and cultural implications for the growing Hispanic population in the US and, therefore, for the US as a whole. As a mental illness that is, allegedly, uniquely Puerto Rican, this syndrome links nationality and culture to a psychiatric disease whose reappearance recalls the spectacular hysteria that led to the discovery of the unconscious and the birth of psychoanalysis. Gherovici beautifully and systematically uses the combined insights of Freud and Lacan to examine the current state of psychoanalysis and the Hispanic community in America. Blending these insights with history, current events, and her own case material, Gherovici provides a startling, fresh look at Puerto Rican Syndrome as social and cultural phenomenon. She sheds new light on the future of American society and argues that psychoanalysis is not only possible, but much needed in the ghetto.
This "profound and provocative" work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Disgraced and American Dervish followsan immigrant father and his son as they search for belonging—in post-Trump America, and with each other (Kirkus Reviews). "Passionate, disturbing, unputdownable." —Salman Rushdie A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at its heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home. Ayad Akhtar forges a new narrative voice to capture a country in which debt has ruined countless lives and the gods of finance rule, where immigrants live in fear, and where the nation's unhealed wounds wreak havoc around the world. Akhtar attempts to make sense of it all through the lens of a story about one family, from a heartland town in America to palatial suites in Central Europe to guerrilla lookouts in the mountains of Afghanistan, and spares no one—least of all himself—in the process. One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2020 Finalist for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction A Best Book of 2020 * Washington Post * O Magazine * New York Times Book Review * Publishers Weekly
