BRUCE LERRO—The Sullivanian Institute was a spin-off organization that broke away in 1957 from the work of Harry Stack Sullivan. Sullivan was sensitive to the social side of psychological dynamics and among other insights blamed the nuclear family for the formation of the ideal capitalist consumer. Both Dr. Jane Pearce and Saul Newton took these criticisms of the nuclear family much further. In 1963, Pearce and Newton coauthored a book called Conditions of Human Growth. In that book they identified the family as socially isolating the individual from developing healthy relationships with friends, especially in adolescence and adulthood. Open-ended friendships, both sexual and otherwise, were the way out of the infantilization of the nuclear family and the road to maturity. For them, friendships are the first potential of experience of love between equals.
CULTURE & HISTORY
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JOHN HELMER—According to Steenhuis, the US was asked once again “if there is any possibility to take cognizance of the [satellite] data” and for the court to judge the satellite evidence in its verdict. The Dutch request explicitly asked the Americans “to offer the investigating judge, as a judge, the same opportunity as the public prosecutor [Minks] received in August 2016, which was to have the opportunity during an intelligence briefing by the officer of the Director of National Intelligence to see the [satellite] data that are at the basis of this memorandum and to make an official record” [Min 40:49].
The official US reply, dated April 22, 2021, was: “we have concluded that the circumstances and considerations previously described remain unchanged. Thus, regrettably, we are unable to provide assistance beyond that outlined in the memorandum from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence dated 23 August 2016” [Min 41:30].
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Apartheid Does Not Have the Right To Defend Itself, Or To Exist
43 minutes readJIM KAVANAGH—So it is good, finally, to see “apartheid” and the “colonization of Palestine” being named and opposed by Democratic activists and prominent politicians, including Palestinian-American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, on the floor of the Congress, and AOC and her squaddies tweet-storming “Apartheid states aren’t democracies.”. And it’s good to see legislation introduced by Congresswoman Betty McCollum, with “more than a dozen” supporters, to prevent U.S. aid to Israel from “paying for the military detention and abuse of Palestinian children, the demolition of Palestinian homes, or the annexation of Palestinian land.” It took a long time to turn the Democratic Party away from its long-standing alliance with Jim Crow apartheid in America. It took a lot of images like those of Emmet Till, and Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, and Bull Connor’s cops and dogs, and the taking up of arms by black groups, and burning of American cities, broadcast on the media of the day, to help make that happen—to get the Democratic Party and the political and media elite to see that it was just plain wrong, and there could be no more asking black people to be patient and wait—just a little more, until we figure out all the complications, hem, haw—for the end of American apartheid. Now take the difficulty of that transformation and multiply it. Keep going.
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GHOSTS OF HIGHWAY 20 REVISITED: HOW BEING A SELF-EDUCATED STREET INTELLECTUAL MAY HAVE SAVED MY LIFE
34 minutes readBRUCE LERRO—One of the things I tried to do in hitchhiking was stay off the interstate highways because they bypass the towns where people live. Riding on them gives you no sense of local life. So, in heading up to Seattle I didn’t go on Interstate 5 or even US 101. I stayed on the slower roads. On these roads, if I got stuck I could either find a motel, a park or even the outskirts of a farm to spread out my sleeping bag and conk out.
In those days, there were a lot of freaks on the road, coming and going without any thought-out plans. People would hitchhike together for 50 to 100 miles and then part ways. I was with two other guys on U.S. 20 heading west for the coast. They were headed south for the SF Bay Area and I was headed north for Seattle. During these times, hitchhikers have a sense of which cars are likely to pick you up and which aren’t. VW bugs and VW vans were the most likely to stop. Pickup trucks were often driven by right-wingers, so we had to be prepared to have beer cans or other trash thrown at us as they passed. It was rare that women gave any of us a ride.
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ED CURTIN—Billy Bush chuckled and pointed to a spot in the river where the fast water hit a big rock and turned back to create a whirlpool. “There you are,” he said, “that’s an eddy. Eddys always run contrary to the main current, so you’re in good company.” The man laughed, which made the boy laugh. Then the man told him that he was not really a hermit but lived in the old farmhouse up the hill near Brown’s sheep farm but that he found it amusing that people created this legend about him and so he played along. He said he had once been a philosophy professor who came from the city to his sister’s country house to be alone and think and write while his family stayed in the city. Since he was only here off and on and loved to wander through the woods down along the river people had for some reason come to create a legend about him. “I have found,” he said, “that people are so afraid of being alone that they create weird stories like the one about me being the Hermit of the Esopus to scare themselves to death.”