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June 8, 2002
George Sunderland
"Send
in the Weekly
Standard": The Screaming Pundits Assault Corps
June 7, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
A Crisis of Confidence
in US Leadership
June 6, 2002
Michael Colby
White House
vs. EPA:
Political Hot Air and
Global Warming
Ron Jacobs
The Indo-Pakistan Conflict:
It's Just a Shot Away
Francis Boyle
Take Sharon
to The Hague:
Prosecute Israeli War Crimes
at Jenin
CounterPunch Bulletin
60 Minutes and President Chavez's
Censored F-Word
Mark Weisbrot
Spying
and Lying:
The FBI's Shameful Past
June 5, 2002
Robert Fisk
Berlusconi the Censor
Danielle Brian
Nuclear
Plants and Terrorism
Ardeshir Cowasjee
For What Do We Fight?
George Monbiot
Kashmir
on the Brink
Michael Neumann
What is Antisemitism?
June 4, 2002
Dave Marsh
Bono the Useful Idiot
William Evan / Francis
Boyle
Kashmir:
Invoking Intl. Law to Avoid Nuclear War
Cockburn / St. Clair
The Future Wellstone Deserves
June 3, 2002
Ramdas / Makhijani
India,
Pakistan and Nukes:
A Road Map to Peace
Fran Shor
Meanwhile, Back in Afghanistan
Neve Gordon
The Caterpillar
Effect
June 2, 2002
Fidel Castro
From FDR to Mister "W.":
Cuba, the US and Democracy
Arundhati Roy
Under the
Nuclear Shadow
Bernard Weiner
Bush 9/11 Scandal for Dummies
June 1, 2002
Norman Madarasz
The
Strange Math of Roberto Carlos: Brazil v. Turkey
Gavin Keeney
Bush and Mies van der Rohe:
Architecture and Ideology
Jeff Halper
Sharon's
Post-Incursion Plan:
Incarceration or Transfer?
Walt Brasch
Crumpling the Constitution
Resources:
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About 9/11
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Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
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Photos by Allan Sekula
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Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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Weekdend
Edition
June 8/9, 2002
Night of the
Living Dead
Or, How to
Read The Nation
by Susan Davis
To go to sleep with your anger means to think
things over, to give a dispute some time to sort and settle before
making what may be a rash move. It can also mean to bank to fire
of your anger and see if it dies down and goes out. Charles Burnett
used a version of this southern proverb as the title of his wonderful
1990 film "To Sleep with Anger" starring Danny Glover.
In Burnett's story, a Los Angeles family
is disrupted by the reappearance of a long lost friend. The opening
titles of the film depict the father, Gideon (Paul Butler), sitting
on a chair,  waiting patiently for something; it's
not clear what, next to a table with a bowl of fruit on it. In
the background, someone is singing "Precious Memories."
As Gideon twiddles his thumbs, we see
the bowl of fruit burst into flames. Then flames creep up the
legs of the table, and steal around Gideon's shoes. He shows
no sign of awareness, since in fact only we can see the flames,
but as the movie unfolds, we realize that Gideon's anger isn't
asleep, and it will consume him, whether he wakes up to it or
not. It's Old Harry Mention, knocking on the door after 30 years
absence, bringing his Mississippi ways and all kinds of memories
that people would prefer to forget, who prods in just the right
places and causes the family to explode. Harry's got to go in
the interests of family peace, and depart he does in a most unexpected
way.
It would not seem a good idea to sleep
with anger, but putting it aside is trickier than the sleep advice
books make it sound. I've had what sleep experts term chronic
insomnia (more than a few bad nights a week) for more than a
decade, and if I could get rid of whatever it is that's keeping
me awake as easily as Gideon's family gets shut of Harry, I'd
convert to whatever religion or philosophy any old healer demanded.
The list of remedies that I've tried
ranges from the familiar home cures, like warm milk, vitamins,
and hot cider vinegar baths, through so-called alternative practices
such as Chinese herbs and acupuncture. Behavior modification
and stress reduction like exercise, meditation and rearranging
my bedroom and bedtime habits helped a bit. I've traveled the
rocky road from over-the-counter medicines to prescription drugs.
Nothing has worked for more than a short time. The only things
I haven't tried are hormone therapy and exorcism, and those two
are out for safety reasons.
As extreme as it sounds, my night of
the living dead scenario isn't unusual. Chronic insomnia occurs
among about 35 million people in the United States and has given
rise to an enormous sleep therapy, sleeping pill and sleep advice
industry. In 1999, 56 percent of adults surveyed by a Harris
poll reported more than occasional trouble sleeping. Women are
twice as likely to be insomniacs as men, and one-fourth of people
over age 65 are up for a lot of the night, according to Sleep
Medicine Associates of Texas.
It doesn't seem like a stretch to point
out that women carry a huge load of family as well as job stress;
they have less cultural permission to unload their anger. It
seems fairly obvious that older people are vulnerable to extra
worries and loneliness. Less attention has been paid to the connections
between work and sleeplessness, but some recent studies show
that good sleep declines sharply as the work week exceeds 40
hours.
In this country, where the 40 hour week
is a dream from the 1950s, an OSHA study of 40,000 industrial
shift workers (night workers) showed they are especially sleep-deprived:
77 percent get six hours or less of sleep in a workday; 44 percent
sleep less than five hours in every 24. I'd imagine that this
is due to the double shift of home and family, as well as the
inability to control hours of work. People on rotating shifts
often have their body rhythms badly disrupted and find they can't
conk out even when they need to.
Increasingly, OSHA sees sleep deprivation
as a safety risk on the job, but it's a mental health problem,
too. Doctors think that insomnia can be caused by depression
and anxiety, but they also know that depression and anxiety are
often caused by insomnia. In other words, you might be sleepless
because you're unhappy, but being sleepless can make you seriously
miserable and, as torturers the world over know, cause suicidal
thoughts and hallucinations.
The Buddhists claim that it's wrongheaded
to fight insomnia. If wherever you are is where you're supposed
to be, and that's wide awake at 2 AM, that's fine, and you should
just go with it. The problem with this is that the true insomniac
isn't really awake; she's only half awake and groggy. So if I
tried to take advantage of the small hours to do something constructive,
like writing or cooking or gardening, my chances of success would
be small. There was the time I tried to bake a cake at 3 AM.
I got it into the oven, and nodded off, waking up just in time
to greet the fire department. Safer to sit on the back porch
and try to learn night bird calls and constellations.
The other problem is exhaustion and inefficiency.
Buddhists apparently don't have to be alert during the day time,
but I do. From time to time I come up with a new nonmedical,
nonpsychiatric solution to the problem. The main point is to
become really, really bored. Back before I had cable I used to
watch old U-Boat movies on a scratchy black and white screen,
and they always put me under. Now things are too exciting, or
more precisely, too clear and threatening in the cable universe.
For a while, an excellent history of
the relationship between the AFL-CIO and the Democratic Party
served as the perfect soporific. It was written with such care,
and the subject was so predictable, that I went under in less
than two pages. It took me years to finish that book. Right now,
what's working is to read the Nation magazine without my glasses.
The combination of the Nation's fuzzy ideas and my farsightedness
is perfect. The brain works hard on a puzzle that is unsolvable
-- what do these sentences say and why would anyone write them?
Until it gives up. Since I can't understand it, it can't make
me angry, and I can go to sleep. See Charles Burnett's "To
Sleep with Anger". It has a star turn by Jimmy Witherspoon,
and it's terrific.
Susan Davis
teaches at the University of Illinois, Champaign Urbana and is
the author of Spectacular
Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience,
published by the University of California Press.
She can be reached at: counterpunch@counterpunch.org
Today's Other Features:
Susan Davis
Sleepless
in the Suburbs
Curing Insomnia: a new use for The Nation?
George Sunderland
"Send
in the Weekly
Standard": The Screaming Pundits Assault Corps
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