Thursday, July 30, 2020

COVID19--Mask Rejection, Freud & -- THE DEATH DRIVE




"...If we may assume as an experience admitting of no exception that everything living dies from causes within itself, and returns to the inorganic, we can only say  'The goal of all life is death‘, and, casting back, 'The inanimate was there before the animate‘ " (Freud, S., Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920) 


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     (Lab107)---  Just before the beginning of summer, when it appeared the pandemic might break in the heat, the mayor of Los Angeles took a stand on the issue of facial coverings, as reported in Newsbreak;
    "Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti (D) to CNN's Chris Cuomo: 'I appreciate what you said about masks. I don't know if it's a guy thing but real men wear masks and we shouldn't be afraid of being seen with masks.' " (Newsbreak)


     There are, in fact, two things going on in the mayor's statement; the first that "real men" exist, and the second, that what they do is known as a "guy thing." The 1994 Hartford Courant article that was supposed to explain what a "guy thing" is, doesn't. It does, however, give a description of, beyond what one might expect it is, something as a backlash to feminism and doesn't need an explanation. The original article was written by Bill Keveney and can be found in the Los Angeles Times;
     "...the difficulty of defining this throwaway line is that men haven’t given a whole lot of thought to their macho eccentricities, introspection not being at the top of the list of guy things....(and) At the heart of the phrase is the notion that certain activities, by nature or nurture, are particular to one sex, and perhaps not very well understood by the other..." (Keveney, LA Times, 1994)
     The article itself expects the reader to bond with the macho, "stereotypical male" in a "post-feminist world," the reader is supposed to understand without any real explanation what a real man does, and why he does it. The author fails to make his point, just as Garcetti did back in May; the nation is at a total standoff over the facial protective covering mandate.
     Documenting all the reports of mask-rejection, commercial flight turnarounds and vids-gone-viral over the face mask issue is futile since there are currently hundreds in the news and perhaps thousands unreported. A gender reveal of the expression first emerged in a Brattleboro Reformer article dated from 1990 by Joyce Marcel in relation to Warren Zevon;


     "Warren Zevon turned out to be a guy thing. Out of the approximately 700 people at Pearl Street in Northhampton, Mass., last Thursday easily 600 were guys.  They were fixated on Warren, eyes glassy, waving their fists in the air, singing the words to every song along with Warren....those guys might have marched out there and retaken Kuwait."  (Marcel, Reformer, 1990)
     The tiny nation of Kuwait was invaded by Iraq a few months earlier that year and wasn't liberated until the following February in Operation Desert Storm. 



     On the same day in 1990 when Joyce Marcel gave her negative review of Zevon, another columnist, Stu Bykofsky wrote an article titled "When Nature Calls on New Year's Day," published in The Philadelphia Daily News on the topic of "public urination;"


     "Which brings up this question: Why are guys the usual offenders? Answer: It's probably anatomy.  Anyway, it's a fact that the Festival of Wall Wetting is entirely a male operation.  OK, it's a guy thing, but how come there are so few women offenders?  I have two ideas:  Women drink less therefore need to relieve themselves less. Or, women are genetically superior to men."
The columnist relates the second explanation to sexism. (Bykofsky, Daily News, 1990) The phrase came out of the closet and was initially used to describe militants jacked up on Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner and the whiz brigade in the City of Brotherly Love.  But a deeper, more meaningful explanation is in order, perhaps from the  "Founder of Psychoanalysis," Sigmund Freud (1856-1939).
     Oxford reference defines a controversial theory of the famed psychoanalyst's "death drive" as;
     " the death-drive manifests in the psyche as a tendency toward self-destruction, or more precisely the elimination of tension, which can also be turned outwards, whereby it becomes aggression." (Oxford)
 Daniel T. O'Hara, in "On Freud's Femininity," noted in the boundary 2 journal, that;
     "Freud concludes this rather startling section of the essay by returning to his initial point: that all resistances to a cure, and especially any resistance to any streamlining of analysis, reveal the death drive." (O'Hara, boundary 2, 1999)
     "All resistances to a cure," including wearing facial protective coverings, are considered automatic. First of all, then, we have to draw in conclusion that mask-rejection isn't just a guy thing, as witnessed in news stories of women being viral videoed going berserk in department and grocery stores for refusal to wear masks.  (ABC News) Second, it may be an indication of the death drive in action.

Arizona woman who destroyed Target mask display in viral video says she regrets behavior

Melissa Rein Lively's spiral in an Arizona Target was caught on video for all to see. She recorded herself destroying a mask display in early July - something she now says she regrets and is in treatment for mental illness.

References
Guy Thing, https://www.newsbreak.com/california/los-angeles/news/1557704992055/la-mayor-eric-garcetti-real-men-wear-masks
Marcel, J., Warren Zevon, Brattleboro Reformer, 20 Dec 1990, Page 9.
Desert Storm, https://www.defense.gov/Explore/Features/story/Article/1728715/desert-storm-a-look-back/
Bykofsky, S., Public Urination, Philadelphia Daily News, 20 Dec 1990, Page 43
Keveney, B., Hartford Courant via LA Times, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-11-21-ls-35-story.html
Death Drive, https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095704767
O'Hara, Daniel T. “On Freud's Femininity.” Boundary 2, vol. 26, no. 2, 1999, pp. 193–198. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/303799. Accessed 28 July 2020.
Mask refusal, https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/News/video-womans-tirade-refusing-wear-mask-trader-joes/story?id=71505060
Freud, S., Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/assets/pdf/freud_beyond_the_pleasure_principle.pdf
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), Wikipedia ref, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud

Freud Image, Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939) in his office in Vienna, circa 1937. Photo taken by Princess Eugenie of Greece, daughter of Marie Bonaparte. (Photo by Bourgeron Collection/RDA/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) https://cdn.historycollection.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/s-13b8314699ad77b9aa12fe48f6db9192e0d6c2111-1024x666.jpg

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