O'Brien was looking down at him speculatively. More than ever he had the air of a teacher taking pains with a wayward but promising child.

'There is a Party slogan dealing with the control of the past,' he said. 'Repeat it, if you please.'

'"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,"' repeated Winston obediently.

'"Who controls the present controls the past,"' said O'Brien, nodding his head with slow approval. 'Is it your opinion, Winston, that the past has real existence?'

Again the feeling of helplessness descended upon Winston. His eyes flitted towards the dial. He not only did not know whether 'yes' or 'no' was the answer that would save him from pain; he did not even know which answer he believed to be the true one.

O'Brien smiled faintly. 'You are no metaphysician, Winston,' he said. 'Until this moment you had never considered what is meant by existence. I will put it more precisely. Does the past exist concretely, in space? Is there somewhere or other a place, a world of solid objects, where the past is still happening?'

'No.'

'Then where does the past exist, if at all?'

'In records. It is written down.'

'In records. And --?'

'In the mind. In human memories.'

'In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?'

'But how can you stop people remembering things?' cried Winston, again momentarily forgetting the dial. 'It is involuntary. It is outside oneself. How can you control memory? You have not controlled mine!'

O'Brien's manner grew stern again. He laid his hand on the dial.

'On the contrary,' he said, 'you have not controlled it. That is what has brought you here. You are here because you have failed in humility, in self-discipline. You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity. You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one. Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. That is the fact that you have got to relearn, Winston. It needs an act of self-destruction, an effort of the will. You must humble yourself before you can become sane.'

-- George Orwell, 1984, Book 3, chapter 2.

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Photographer Robert Capa snapped this shot of the first wave going ashore at Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944. As he toiled through the surf, he endlessly repeated a phrase he had learned during his forays in the Spanish Civil War: "Es una cosa muy seria." ("This is a very serious business.")

He took 108 color photos, but all but eleven were ruined by a film developer's error. The rest came out in a grainy black-and-white. Even so, they were instant classics.

Robert Capa (1913-1954)

The Work of Photographer Robert Capa

The Magnificent Eleven: The D-Day Photos of Robert Capa

Ten of the eleven surviving frames:

Photo taken September 27, 1962, Oxford, Mississippi.

Left to right: Sheriff John Henry Spencer, Pittsboro. Sheriff James Ira Grimsley, Pascagoula. Sheriff Bob Waller, Hattiesburg. Sheriff Billy Ferrell, Natchez (holding club). Sheriff Jimmy Middleton, Port Gibson. Deputy Sheriff James Wesley Garrison, Oxford. Sheriff John Ed Cothran, Greenwood.

James Meredith, the first African American to integrate the University of Mississippi in 1962, reflecting on this photo some four decades after it was taken: "It wasn't this element that truly terrified me when I integrated Ole Miss. It was the element below this element. It was the element that wanted to be this element. First of all, every one of these men is what you'd call a leading citizen in Missississippi, My knowledge of this is what enabled me to defeat Mississippi in 1962. I knew these people better than they knew themselves." (Qtd. Paul Hendrickson, Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy [2003])

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8 - Part 9 - Part 10

But besides the achievement of this functional and corporate aim, the rote-learning and repetitive form and the categorical, reductive quality of officer-training has an important and intended--if subordinate--psychological effect. Anti-militarists would call it de-personalizing and even de-humanizing. But given--even if they would not give--that battles are going to happen, it is powerfully beneficial. For by teaching the young officer to organize his intake of sensations, to reduce the events of combat to as few and as easily recognizable a set of elements as possible, to categorize under manageable headings the noise, blast, passage of missiles and confusion of human movement which will assail him on the battlefield, so that they can be described--to his men, to his superiors, to himself--as "incoming fire, "outgoing fire," "airstrike," "company-strength attack," one is helping him to avert the onset of fear or, worse, of panic and to perceive a face of battle which, if not familiar, need not, in the event, prove wholly petrifying.

-- John Keegan, The Face of Battle

Diagnostic Criteria for Major Depressive Episode

For a diagnosis of a major depressive episode, these are the signs and symptoms doctors are looking for:

A. Five (or more) of the following symptoms have been present during the same 2-week period and represent a change from previous functioning; at least one of the symptoms is either (1) depressed mood or (2) loss of interest or pleasure.

Note: Do not include symptoms that are clearly due to a general medical condition, or mood-incongruent delusions or hallucinations.

1. depressed mood most of the day, nearly every day, as indicated by either subjective report (e.g., feels sad or empty) or observation made by others (e.g., appears tearful) Note: In children and adolescents, can be irritable mood.

2. markedly diminished interest or pleasure in all, or almost all, activities most of the day, nearly every day (as indicated by either subjective account or observation made by others)

3. significant weight loss when not dieting or weight gain (e.g., a change of more than 5% of body weight in a month), or decrease or increase in appetite nearly every day. Note: in children, consider failure to make expected weight gains.

4. insomnia or hypersomnia nearly every day.

5. psychomotor agitation or retardation nearly every day (observable by others, not merely subjective feelings of restlessness of being slowed down)

6. fatigue or loss of energy nearly every day

7. feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt (which may be delusional) nearly every day (not merely self-reproach or guilt about being sick)

8. diminished ability to think or concentrate, or indecisiveness, nearly every day (either by subjective account or as observed by others)

9. recurrent thoughts of death (not just fear of dying), recurrent suicidal ideation without a specific plan, or a suicide attempt or a specific plan for committing suicide.

B. The symptoms do not meet criteria for a Mixed Episode [i.e., a Mixed Bipolar Episode in which manic and depressive features are simultaneously present].

C. The symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.

D. The symptoms are not due to the direct physiological effects of a substance (e.g., a drug of abuse, a medication) or a general medical condition (e.g., hypothyroidism).

E. The symptoms are not better accounted for by Bereavement, i.e., after the loss of a loved one, the symptoms persist for longer than 2 months or are characterized by marked functional impairment, morbid preoccupation with worthlessness, suicidal ideation, psychotic symptoms, or psychomotor retardation.

Reference: These criteria are excerpts from Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-IV, p. 327, © 1994, American Psychiatric Association.

Adapted from HealthyPlace.com

National Public Radio interview with Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (you'll need RealPlayer to access; it's worth it)

Son, we live in a world that has powerpoint. And those slides need to be produced by men with bars. Who’s gonna do it? You? You with an oak leaf? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for my briefings and you curse my formatting. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that my briefings, while drawn out, probably save lives. . . You don’t want the truth. Because deep down, in places you don’t talk about at meetings, you want my presentations. You need my presentations.

We use words like diagram gallery, paste special, clipboard . . . we use these words as the backbone of a job spent briefing something. You use them as a punch line. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain why I formatted an object to a man who briefs and gets promoted by the very presentation I make, then questions the way in which I format it! I’d rather you just said Thank You and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you make your own slide, and give a briefing. Either way, I don’t give a damn what you think the slide should say.

(Hat tip to MAJ Robert Bateman)

The Dunker Church, Antietam Battlefield


The bigger the material mass, the more easily it entraps us: mass graves and pyramids bring history closer while they make us feel small. A castle, a fort, a battlefield, a church, all these things bigger than we that we infuse with the reality of past lives, seem to speak of an immensity of which we know little except that we are part of it. Too solid to be unmarked, too conspicuous to be candid, they embody the ambiguities of history. They give us the power to touch it, but not to hold it firmly in our hands--hence the mystery of their battered walls. We suspect that their concreteness hides secrets so deep that no revelation may fully dissipate their silences. We imagine the lives under the mortar, but how do we recognize the end of a bottomless silence?

-- Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995)

Photograph by Will Burnham

Hero's Journey in the Film Platoon, as interpreted by screenwriter and teacher Stuart Voytilla

Interview with Stuart Voytilla concerning Myth and the Movies

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Warrior


Warrior


Warrior


Shadow Hero (Grandstander Bully)


Shadow Hero (Coward)

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From Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine :

There is much confusion about the archetype of the Hero. It is generally assumed that the heroic approach to life, or to a task, is the noblest, but this is only partly true. The Hero is, in fact, only an advanced form of Boy psychology--the most advanced form, the peak, actually, of the masculine energies of the boy, the archetype that characterizes the best in the adolescent stage of development. Yet it is immature, and when it is carried over into adulthood as the governing archetype, it blocks men from full maturity. (p. 37)

The two dysfunctional or "shadow" aspects of the Hero are the "Grandstander Bully" and the "Coward."

The boy (or man) under the power of the Bully intends to impress others. His strategies are designed to proclaim his superiority and his right to dominate those around him. He claims center stage as his birthright. If ever his claims to special status are challenged, watch the ensuing rageful displays! He will assault those who question what they 'smell' as his inflation with vicious verbal and often physical abuse. These attacks against others are aimed at staving off recognition of his underlying cowardice and his deep insecurity. (p. 37)

The boy possessed by the Coward, the other pole of the Hero's bipolar Shadow, shows an extreme reluctance to stand up for himself in physical confrontations. . . . It is not only physical fights he will avoid, however. He will tend to allow himself to be bullied emotionally and intellectually as well. . . . When he has had enough of this, however, the hidden grandiosity of the Grandstander Bully within him will erupt and launch a violent verbal and/or physical assault on the other, an assault for which the other is totally unprepared. (p. 40)

Nevertheless, the Hero embodies in archetypal form a necessary stage in a boy's development:

The Hero throws the boy up against the limits, against the seemingly intractable. It encourages him to dream the impossible dream that just might be possible after all, if he has enough courage. Ir empowers him to fight the unbeatable foe that, if he is not possessed by the Hero, he might just be able to defeat." (p. 40)

What is the end of the Hero? Almost universally, in legend and myth, he "dies," is transformed into a god, and translated into heaven. . . . The "death" of the Hero is the "death" of boyhood, of Boy psychology. And it is the birth of manhood and Man psychology. The "death" of the Hero in the life of a boy (or a man) really means that he has finally encountered his limitations. He has met the enemy, and the enemy is himself. He has met his own dark side, his very unheroic side. He has fought the dragon and been burned by it; he has fought the revolution and drunk the dregs of his own inhumanity. He has overcome the Mother and then realized his incapacity to love the Princess. The death of the Hero signals a boy's or man's encounter with true humility. It is the end of his heroic consciousness.

True humility, we believe, consists of two things. The first is knowing our limitations. And the second is getting the help we need. (p. 41)

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8 - Part 9 - Part 10