Joan Rivers is right about Lindsay Lohan. Sadly, her comment that Ms. Lohan will not survive another ten years of her current lifestyle appears reasonable and prescient.

But equally troubling is the punitive call to lock her up and punish her.  This is outrageous envy and hateful herd mentality toward someone who “should” be grateful for what the public has given her, but is not following that script.

Lindsay Lohan is mentally unwell.  I know the term “mental illness” sounds as harsh as Joan Rivers does to the average ear.  However, while Joan is a comedian who cares, as a therapist, I am not interested in using terms like “mental illness” glibly or to talk trash for shock value.

People seem to be exclusively hooked on the substance abuse angle of Lohan’s story.  Substance abuse is just a symptom of a psychological disease; only a piece of the picture.

I am not defending drunk driving or liberally explaining away any of Ms. Lohan’s notorious angry public acts by saying that she is mentally disturbed.  There is such a condition, even if we don’t speak of it.  In Ms. Lohan’s case, it is public and an obvious problem. To discuss a problem, it helps to first identify and understand it.  And then, of course, to care.     

For those of you who think it’s an apologetic stretch to diagnose her as mentally ill, here’s the thing.  The “bible” of psychological disorders, known as the DSM or the Psychological Diagnostic Manual, lists mental diseases and identifies “clinical disorders”, such as “anxiety, adjustment, dissociative, impulse control, mood, and substance related”, all abundantly present in Ms. Lohan’s public “performances”.

The obvious truth is that Lohan is acting out a terrible rage, to the possible point of flirting with suicide.  What is she trying to say? (No, it’s not a simple nail-painted “F*ck You”, Nancy Grace).

Neither is it pretty to watch, but unless we personally know her, we do not know her, and media analysis is nothing more than conjecture, often common toxic gossip, revealing vicious righteousness and arrogant interpretation.  Why?  Why the rage against her? I’ll say it again. She is not mentally well.  Is that not obvious?

I deeply wish Ms. Lohan the chance for health and recovery that can only come from becoming conscious, and finding true support for this rare time-intensive process involving authentic, competent, wise counselors and guides.

When a person is mentally unwell, answering to extremem and illegal behaviors is commonly delivered with a f*ck you attitude of defense, denial, and staunch victimization.  It is not at all surprising that Lohan feels persecuted and sees herself as a stoned Iranian woman–even though she is “stoned” in a very different way and voluntarily.  I can imagine how she internally distorts the ironically crazed masses in their responses to her, where it may feel as if she were being metaphorically stoned by people hurling hateful, angry words.

What is well worth noting is that these symptoms of mental illness are rampant today.  The rudeness, the denial, the dissociation from one another–and one’s own behavior–in public life is commonly on display.  It is fascinating that the very reactions to Lindsay Lohan mirror her own rage and carelessness.  In other words, the common public response is to hate, hate, hate her, and that is just as troubling as her own behaviors. 

This makes me think about the notion that community used to be a place where people looked out for one another.  This is a gone idea.  Today we have Nancy Grace presiding over Weekend Edition Lindsay Lohan Specials, hours where Grace can shriek uncontrolled rage about Lohan’s “bratty entitlement”.  How did Grace herself become so punishing and hateful, I wonder.

Such shows are distracting garbage for a turned-off audience, and a ratings winner, I’m sure, but what’s up with the heartlessness and the absence of intelligent commentary about mental illness?

It is an ironic parallel between Lohan’s “acting out” and how it is met with equally extreme “acting out” responses to it such as those of Nancy Grace and her audience.  When did all this extreme rage become normalized?  Lohan is a mirror of societal acting out in the extreme.  It would help to identify the parallel extremeties of our own behaviors!  (Perhaps we can start with people screaming on talk shows, sociopathic rageful driving, and the popular demand for punishment for Lohan). 

Most disheartening to me is the absence of simple kindness about any person—even the wealthy and famous among us– who suffers such destructive torment and mental dis-ease.

I’m sure this will not be agreed upon by all, but Joan Rivers expresses an almost solitary voice of compassion about Lindsay Lohan, with a depth of compassion way beyond Rivers’s own comic barbs.

It turns out that in this so-called country of “compassion”, the real thing is scarce.

Again, this is not a case only of substance abuse.  Let’s refrain from falling exclusively into the stupidity of exclusive “substance” explanations and corresponding simplistic psycho-babble solutions.

Symptoms keep us mesmerized in a blame game, to which ignorant judgements and band-aid solutions are slapped on top of deeper truths.  Rather than spending our energy on one or even a constellation of symptoms, it is essential to identify actual mental illness when it exists.

Of course, calling out this truth is inconveniently honest and not as snappy as making everything an addiction and producing reality shows featuring visually glamorous, openly cheesy, addiction spas. 

The open wound of American society oozes with irresponsibility, blame, and the normalization of ridiculous nastiness.  Our current obsession and accompanying hateful lack of generousity about Lindsay Lohan is a troubling sign that the society, itself, is in desperate need of help.

Obama is “furious” about the oil spill.  How do I know?  He told Larry King he is “furious”.  I heard him say it.  It’s a word thing—and it’s making big news that he used such a word and revealed such a feeling.

It’s too bad that it’s all about the words with Obama, and not the actions.

Looking visually back on the last three presidents, from the entitled jaws of Clinton to the dumb, glazed emptiness of Bush’s head and eyes to the now-furious Obama, it is easier to find a worthwhile summer movie than a psychologically appropriate person to be our President.

We now have a speech-giving figure of a President, and he and his teleprompter are appearing everywhere. 24/7 yakking about what “The American People” want and need. Talk is cheaper and more abundant than ever.  From what I see, people have stopped listening and are just plain angry. (Ask Joe and Jane Schmo if their economy is improving).

Backing the empty Presidential words is a media establishment who are either screaming about such nonsense as Obama’s faux birth certificate or are desperate apologists for daddy, cautioning empathy for Obama and insisting that we, the disgruntled, ignorant public, are unaware that Obama is wisely playing a subtle political game in a perilous world. 

It’s exhausting to witness inaction interpreted and spun as adroit, as well as to watch Obama’s face bristle with outrage at some latest breaking news revealing another Presidential failure.  Too little, too late, and always too staged, as in his third trip Friday to the Gulf of Mexico since the April 20 oil spill disaster.

The reason comedians alone are left to deliver the real news is that they don’t hide behind an academic pretense that they have information and knowledge the rest of us lack.  This frees them to get to the obvious and naked truth in their political analysis.  It turns out that of course the world is complicated, but behind the wizard’s curtain is the staunchly played same-old game of greed and lies.

Hypocrisies haven’t missed a beat between administrations.  It is one thing to sternly lecture the Big Banks in a public address, and quite another to bail them out. 

Is the angry speech louder than the simple act of flooding the banks with fresh cash and bonuses?  If you’re busy texting “Oh My God’s” (OMG’s) about Sandra Bullock’s love life, yes. 

The audience has been systematically shut off and dumbed down to such a degree that talk shows are analyzing not the phony wizard, but instead, white trash “reality” celebrities and their Nazi tattoos.

Wake Up, You Sleepy Heads.

Enough with the sympathy for the beleaguered leader who, in fact, clawed every inch of the way up the flagpole, helped along with piles of big bank and Wall Street cash.

As President, Obama is accountable for either showing up—or not– in his actions for a better America, to make definitive choices on important issues, and to clearly lead.  Dropping a mention of an issue into a speech doesn’t count.  A nod is not an embrace is not an action, if you know what I mean.

Obama’s War in Afghanistan remains hushed and underplayed theatrically, notwithstanding the news of American casualties. Even when he takes a decisive action—in this case, perhaps because it is such a wretched choice– he refuses to be seen aligned with it.

This unwillingness to stand for something and act on it comprehensively, in full voice, is confusing to a synthetically overstretched and disturbed public.  The response has produced a louder American rage and a new spin on civil unrest: the utter entitlement of incivility.  

If Obama lacks the true heart to care for the American people, if he requires a teleprompter for caring, then he must hire not just speech writers, but brilliant minds who can shadow-lead, a la Dick Cheney, only this time for the positive.  Yes, I know there are those who will say Rahm Emanuel, et al, already have this gig.  If that is the case, take a lesson from the Dick Cheney power playbook and hire a fiercer, and truer, progressive cast, one more likely to lead us up from the extreme pits of distresses we face.

So far, in Obama’s White House, we are trapped in a theatre of indication. 

We cannot continue laying the blame on either the House or Presidential fatigue for Obama’s inability to be a quality President.

We, too, are tired.

Narcissism is exhausting. 

General Stanley McChrystal has submitted his resignation over his statements in a Rolling Stone magazine interview.

The news of the very fresh and famous Rolling Stone Interview with  McChrystal, is blowing out with such speed that the missing piece–the actual content of the interview– is going, like totally, AWOL.  No one is listening to what the General said in the interview!

What a study in spin and public relations.  The actual interview, featuring McChrystal’s complaints about Obama and Obama’s aids and their incompetence regarding the Afghan War, apparently has no relevance to commentators, other than sparking and re-sparking debate over McChrystal’s losing his job.  Should he be allowed to remain or should Obama sack the rude employee?  There are polls being opened to public opinion, as if we are Romans in the arena of blood and guts and our participation somehow lets us all in on the juicy story.  But this is not a reality show.

Why isn’t the media paying attention to the actual points of exasperation that the General is speaking about?  Whether or not it was appropriate to air those points in a Rolling Stone interview, given his high profile military employment under Obama, is naturally a matter to question.

However, if the man is not simply a loose canon, a borderline personality, or a total nut, as I suspect he is not, in light of the President’s former stamp of approval, then let’s turn away from the salacious question of his punishment.  Who are we in this country if that alone interests us?  Do we dare look at the inside story that McChrystal may be telling about how the country is being militarily led?

I am a communications analyst, not a military expert.

There is no doubt that McChrystal knew he was speaking on the record in the Rolling Stone interview and no doubt that he wanted to complain very publicly. 

Here’s the question: If McChrystal is not crazy, if he did not simply have a cranky afternoon which led to leaking his professional dismay and disapproval with how Obama is handing the Afghan War, then he must be saying something worth hearing and knowing.

It is very possible that McChrystal deliberately granted the interview exactly as it appears.

Perhaps he had not been successful in prior attempts to communicate directly to Obama and others intimately involved in the war.  The only thing we know for sure is that he wanted to be heard.  And still, no one is listening.

Yesterday, Kip Williams, co-founder of the activist group GetEqual, interrupted Obama’s San Francisco fundraising speech for Senator Barbara Boxer.  He heckled the President on the progress of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”.  

Loosely calculated, it is said that one response to a published blog represents something like 2,000 readers of that blog.  Likewise, it might be possible that this one heckler represents all gays, shouting in a crowded auditorium to a resolutely—albeit transparently defensive– indifferent Obama on the issue of support for civil rights for gay people.

It’s upsetting to shout publicly.  Most of us would never stoop to that.  There is a desperation, a rage, that only the dismissed, disenfranchised, and the double-crossed would understand.  Something the Black community used to know about intimately, and many still do.

Putting aside my idiosyncratic belief that “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is absurd, because:  #1. Turning away anyone willing to die for America is the essence of a hateful, stupid position; and #2.  It does nothing for the advancement of gay people to allow this moronic aphorism to die, at the same time that it would allow gay soldiers to die.  The overturning of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ only serves as an item  conservatives can point to to indicate a phony support for gay rights, in my opinion.  That aside.

Since many brilliant political advocates for civil rights believe in this as “advancement”, I rest their case and turn the focus back on Obama.

The overflowing “banquet” of urgencies Obama faces on his Presidential buffet I understand and have compassion for.  However, he may have too smugly assessed the rights of gay people as being not only a side dish, but a frivolous condiment.  He simply left their rights and quality of their lives on a strategically constructed menu of afterthoughts that never made it to the printers.

Obama still has it good with the gays.  However, his response to Mr. Williams could use more emotional intelligence and political acumen.  Even the gay voices who have patiently remained unheard will more and more be heckling for hope, Mr. President.  The understanding required while watching your defensive indifference and your outrage to an obviously ill- timed shout-out plea to you about a true broken promise, has a finished shelf life.    

“In the sense in which a man (or woman) can ever be said to be at home in the world, he is at home not through dominating, or explaining, or appreciating, but through caring and being cared for….”

Milton Mayeroff,  On Caring

Let us remember the matter of mothers this Mother’s Day.

The Hallmarking of this yearly commercial salute to Mom is like American cheese—a goopy gauze which allows us to go totally unconscious about our mothers.  Instead, we may act out the picture of having what passes as a relationship.  You know, the special menu Mother’s Day brunch, the gifts, the picture of what it all looks like.  But what about the real relationship? 

Mother also gets a lousy rap from decades of psychoanalytic literature which basically lays at her feet blame and reason for all lifetime events in her children’s lives.  Yes, our mothers are powerful in us, but we need to know that at some very specific point in time, it’s up to us. That’s a complicated subject for another day.

Today I’m turning exclusively to the subject of caring.

Caring, as a feeling state, the ability to feel on behalf of another person’s existence and condition, does not come in every human package.  It is also true that though we may be endowed with the ability to feel and care for another person, our expression of caring is not always clearly demonstrated. Caring deeply can also bring out  the worst in people.  As a child in response to a caring, imperfect mother, this can be very upsetting, to say the least.  But I believe that the presence of a mother who cares is registered in the core of the baby in a nourishing, essential way.

For those of us who are lucky in having had a mother who really cared about us, we have a lot to say about the methods, styles, imperfections, unintentional hurtfulness, and ways our mother’s caring communication seemed to go awry.

Let’s not today.   Let’s just identify the unheralded, invisible truth of the gift of having had a mother who authentically cared.

Only that.  And that alone is very big.

Ask those who did not have a mother who cared.

They know.

So here’s to my mother, a woman who never for one moment stops caring.  Happy Mother’s Day all year, Mom.

Recently, I received a piece of advice in response to my take on Obama, the comic, appearing at the Washington Correspondent’s Dinner.  Someone helpfully suggested that I dunk my head in a pool of cold water in the hope of a revival of my sense of humor.  Sounded like a great idea—the pool in my back yard was perfect for following that advice.

Alas, as refreshing as the experience proved to be, it did nothing to shift my opinion of Obama’s stand-up performance at the Correspondent’s Dinner a few nights ago.  I repeat, Not Funny.

Maybe I was missing a step, the way that one missing ingredient in a forwarded recipe can astonishingly alter a finished product.  For instance, maybe my head and my ass should have been simultaneously dipped into the pool?

I know for sure I’m missing something. Is it, after all, my sense of humor?  Has it dried totally up, like turd pellets crumbled and blown into microscopic dust in the desert air of my Los Angeles neighborhood?

Surely if Bill Maher thought Obama’s comic material was fantastic, as reported in other words by the brilliant Arianna Huffington, something in me is (seriously) amiss. I love Arianna, and she is optimistic and generous toward the President’s performance. Is loss of humor an underreported chemical side effect in my drinking water? Wherever my humor is, it is tragically N/A.

Instead, I am left to wonder, humorlessly, how we got to be in this American place of demanding the social defense of “lightening everything up” in our responses to reality. This defense is terrific news, by the way, for criminals everywhere and for corrupt politicians.  Americans can today be counted on to lighten up the bold and unbeautiful cable news-delivered nefarious deeds of just about anyone.  In fact, if there is a way to mock something or strip away any serious meaning from say, the upcoming oil drillings or spillage or middle class looting by another Goldman Sachs, for example, then “Yes, We Can”!   

We’ll always have Tiger Woods, or we can turn to Obama’s recent co-host Jay Leno who, coming off a devastating loss in popularity numbers to winner Conan O’Brien, is now losing in comedy polls to our own President.  The Hilarious Comedy Chops of Obama is the freshly insisted-upon remake of the Emperor’s New Clothes, brought   to us this time via the Red-Carpeted Correspondent’s Dinner.

In a time when show business pros and politicians are rated and reviewed side-by-side and perform inter-changeably, there’s only one thing to do, for heaven’s sake:

Lighten up!

The first time someone said to me, “There you go”, I thought, damn, I must be getting old. Surely, the last time this was commonly expressed around me was when I was learning to ride a bicycle and my father stood watching with exactly that sentiment as I pedaled determinedly up the cul-de-sac. It seems like the phrase belongs in a ga-ga-goo-ga category. When first conversationally offered to me in recent times, I was stunned.  

I quickly searched for meaning, as if in a foreign land where primitive symbols were displayed in place of language. I thought about how “there you go” might connect to the precedent snippet of conversation and realized, this must be a new bonding phrase. As in, the encouraging, “Now you’ve put the thought together! There you go!”

Since I listen to how we use language to get a read on what’s up or down with society, I can be irritating to have a conversation with. 

Words are not just the sprinkling system of the human garden for me.

They reveal underlying feeling, motive, response.  Communication runs sweepingly by us.  We are susceptible to every new expression and the contagion of speaking a la minute with our fellows.

But what are we saying?

Today, “there you go” is seemingly the tag line in all conversation.  I hear it used to reset the theme and place a period at the end of subjects.  As in, “I’m not really listening.  I want to generically connect” or “I’m not paying much attention and don’t have anything to say” or “I want a glib moment of belonging, a quick ride of kinship without having to give anything of myself”.

Perhaps my take on current faux language strategies in social communication will be received like a slap in the face and will offend many people.  Unconsciousness always has fans. 

Words can either deliberately direct us to a more whole, present way of being alive, or words can degrade and delete the human chain of connection, entirely. 

Beware the phrases that cancel us out.  The events of language that remove us from who we are, like Facebook’s kidnapping of the word, “friend”.  When was the last time you thought about that word, as in, Who are my real friends?

Some people require psychiatric and anti-depression medications. When rightfully prescribed, medication can mean that a person is literally and mercifully given back a life to live. That’s serious business. In these cases, modern psychiatric medicine is wondrous and necessary.    

For all other people, setting aside the matter of a healthy economy, (and especially in the absence of one), what could be more wondrous and necessary than the medicine of music? That’s my drug, and it could be yours, too. That means you, yes you, en route to a pharmacy to fill a questionable prescription.

Might we finally acknowledge that times are tough and that sadness, loss, and anger are basic, human responses to real life?  This is neither a glib subject nor anything having to do with Scientology.  The social permission to naturally feel and learn to deal demands more time, space, and consideration, and is a subject that endlessly interests me.

For now, if we agree that such a thing as zeitgeist depression exists for a large number of Americans—that is, that actual political events and social changes have deep, unconscious and disturbing emotional impact—we then have the clarity to observe human social behaviors from a more compassionate perspective. 

We also have the opportunity to find non-pharmaceutical, intuitive solutions to address naturally negative feeling states.  And if we’re busy seeking personal happiness solutions, we—well—may actually feel better.

This is not meant as a simplistic antidote or pop-psych prescriptive “wipe-out” of complexity and despair.

But it wouldn’t hurt to ask ourselves what experience or activity in life brings up a good feeling.  To put it another way, what are the natural life highs we can use?

Music has always been my drug of choice, and science backs me up.  When you Google the “healing power of music”, a world of explanation is offered about how music is no stranger to the healing of mind, body, and soul.

In terms of songs to ingest like medicine, examples are everywhere waiting for us, sweeter than chocolate, more thrilling than any martini. Here’s a powerful one.  

Turn on that old medicine man, Frank Sinatra, singing his January 12, 1956 recording of Cole Porter’s, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”.  Flip the volume up and breathe in that mid-song horn instrumental.

Side effects may include the startling reminder of human warmth and the singing voice; involuntary singing, dancing, snapping of fingers, and a lingering case of the smilees.

Poop Is Popular

CBS’s Harry Smith had an on-air colonoscopy last week.  This is just one example of the media embracing what I predict will become a national Poop Is Popular “movement” (you should pardon the word).

Speaking of movement, I have just returned from a spectacular trip. This journey was spread over 3 weeks and was centered exclusively in the location of my new storage room.  While paying attention not enough to it, I managed over many years to gleefully amass a giant collection of midcentury ceramics and glass from flea markets around the globe, notably France and Europe.

My late friend, the wonderful New York The New Museum founder Marcia Tucker, suggested that I exhibit what she called my “art”, generously considering that I had a serious collection.  This “collection” became a serious weight on my internal space and finally baptized me into the “less is more” religion.  As of this spacious moment, the entire production is bubble wrapped and resting beautifully out of sight.

I feel as if my house took a huge poop.

In my newfound relief, I’m thinking that the matter and metaphor of poop deserves a more prominent spotlight in our national attention.  Are political pundits on both sides of the aisle suffering from constipation that leads to toxic anger? Irrationality clogs the airwaves. Irritability is certainly everywhere.  The media has become host to verbal hate fests.  Is poop the matter? 

In this Roman Coliseum-esque time when watching personal reputations  slaughtered on national television is considered great fun, I am wondering if the bowels of America are simply too clogged to allow the common decency that fecal evacuation offers.  “Letting Go” has long been pop psychology’s pet mantra, but are we equipped for it as a nation?

How to get there? 

One thing we can do, right now, is figure out where constipation exists for us personally, and do as I did.  Flush it out!

Sh*t is being slung in public, but is anyone pooping?

This is an unsettling time in our country and it doesn’t help that the news is freely spun from no truth.  The sensationalist spin and full-frontal dishonesty on offer has most of the audience dizzy in mimicry and mental paralysis where thinking and asking questions just cease to be possible.  If this doesn’t ring a bell, it may be an indication that you’re either:  a) over-medicated or b) one of the bank bailout recipients. 

Scanning  news sites, sources, and blogs as I do to find out what people are talking and writing about is a genuinely befuddling exercise.  Yes, there are thinking people out there responding to real news, yet mostly on display is an absence of the stubborn inquiring mind that everyday reporters used to bring to their work.  This is what each of us needs to do if we are to salvage democracy.  We need to ask questions, speak out about obvious discrepancies in the stories we are told, and immediately embrace the motto, It Doesn’t Go Without Saying.

The ongoing “Dont Ask. Don’t Tell” debate  is a perfect example.  If, like myself, you are not a fan of the current wars American leaders have created and lied us into supporting,  then it doesn’t go without saying that the latest propoganda on “gay rights” is absurd.

I do not consider the overturned discrimination that will allow gays to risk their lives in dubious wars a step forward for gay rights.  Yes, the initial prejudice that bans gays from openly serving in the military is a disgrace and the law needs to be changed.  But is that really a step forward for gay rights in the way it is being advertised? If the Jews in pre-concentration camp Germany, who were forbidden to work, were  then allowed to scrub the sewers, would this have been an improved status or condition for Jewish people?

The very fact that gay people who are willing to die for America are deemed undesirable enough to be rejected by the military is sad evidence of the disease of hatred and fear.  Let’s not buy into the notion that giving gays permission to  die in American war is a vote of equality or friendliness.  That news spin is a big, bright red herring  obscuring the black and white world of prejudice that remains.