1 Boring Old Man

Ear Worms can be a dreadful affliction – some song that plays over and over in your head that your don’t even know is there until it begins to drive you nuts. I am one of the afflicted and I have to figure out how they got there to be free of them. Recently, the theme song from the old Maverick TV show almost took me out [I saw a blurb about Jody Foster, she was in the movie version, that’s what got it started]. I’m finally free of Whitney Houston’s "I will always love you" [source obvious]. Sometimes, it’s a poem – almost always T.S. Eliot, my favorite. This time, it was sing-song versions of "Here we go round the prickly pear" or "This is the way the world ends." Both from "The Hollow Men." They’ve played intermittently for days.

As a teenager and college student, I loved that kind of literature. It was, I think, a respit from the business of being one of the guys, or hormone driven, whatever the right words are for living among peers in the years before adulthood. Not that I minded youth, but I think the writers like Faulkner, Hemingway, Woolf, or Eliot reminded me that there was something more to existence than the right-now-ness of adolescence and early adulthood. For me, "The Hollow Men" was my high school Eliot. It fit with the postwar fifties I was living in, which did have something of a background absurd feeling. "The Wasteland" was my college Eliot, the early sixties before all hell broke loose. And "The Four Quartets" followed, to this day an abiding source of reflection. But recently, it has been my old high school Eliot – "The Hollow Men" singing in my head.

^{These lines parody a children’s song that is derived from a fertility dance  done around a mulberry bush ‘on a cold and frosty morning’. A prickly pear is a desert cactus, continuing the desert imagery that is particularly prevalent at the beginning of the third section of the poem. 5:00am is the traditional time of Christ’s resurrection.  In a 1923 review Eliot quoted Frazer on "how often with the decay of old faiths the serious rites and pageants .. [primitive, religious dances] have degenerated into the sports of children." Here he has further perverted the children’s song by turning it into a modern infertility dance.  By performing an infertility dance at the moment of resurrection, we are in effect blocking and rejecting the salvation it can bring.}

Of course in this case, my ear worm has to do with what I’ve been writing about here – the DSM-5 Revision, the madness of the pharmaceutical invasion of psychiatry, and all of the absurd things that have gone on in these years. What’s the other possibility? And the era is coming to the end now – whatever it has been about.  So here’s the poem:

As a youth, I had no understanding of the last four lines. I guess I thought endings were like football games or the end of World War II. The bad guys surrendered. Truth, justice, and the American way won out in the end. I was older before I got it that "the cold war" was just a continuation of whatever all of that had been about. There was no "bang," just a whimpering transition. And closer to home, disillusionments, failed hopes, things like that didn’t come in a catclysmic moment – they just became whimpers and faded into the next thing – marked mostly with memories.  At least that’s they way it has been for me in those situations.

In spite of the negativity I’ve felt about their version of psychiatry, I surprisingly feel some empathy for Dr. Kupfer et al with their DSM-5. They had such high hopes of using the DSM-5 to usher in a dreamed-of age when psychiatry would join the ranks of the great medical specialties – clinical neuroscience with diagnostic lab tests like angiograms or anti-nuclear antibodies and interventions with the specificity of Insulin, Cycloserine, or stents. They thought that with brain imaging and genetic testing, the biological basis of mental illnesses would move from the realm of speculation to known, measurable fact. The borrowed concepts of evidence-based medicine, measurement-based medicine, translational science, personalized medicine, etc. would be the keys that opened the long closed doors to the halls of hard science. They really wanted the medicines to work better than they actually do. It didn’t happen, and it’s not even just around the corner. There’s some biology under there sure enough, but less than they thought and a lot of it more deeply buried than their current reach. The Shadow has fallen · Between the idea · And the reality. So with the rhetoric of their 2002 book [A Research Agenda for DSM-V], they sound very much like The Hollow Men · Headpiece filled with straw. And as much bru-ha-ha as there is right now about the DSM-5, the bottom line is This is the way the world ends · Not with a bang but a whimper. The DSM-5 is already irrelevant.