And yet publicly it's difficult to find much soul-searching or introspection on either side of the divide, or even the slightest admission of responsibility for the gridlock. What we hear instead, not only in campaigns but on editorial pages, on bookstands, or in the ever-expanding blog universe, are deflections of criticism and assignments of blame. Depending on your tastes, our condition is the natural result of radical conservatism or perverse liberalism, Tom DeLay or Nancy Pelosi, big oil or greedy trial lawyers, religious zealots or gay activists, Fox News or the New York Times. How well these stories are told, the subtlety of the arguments and the quality of the evidence, will vary by author, and I won't deny my preference for the story the Democrats tell, nor my belief that the arguments of liberals are more often grounded in reason and fact. In distilled form, though, the explanations of both the right and the left have become mirror images of each other. They are stories of conspiracy, of America being hijacked by an evil cabal. Like all good conspiracy theories, both tales contain just enough truth to satisfy those predisposed to believe in them without admitting any contradictions that might shake up those assumptions. Their purpose is not to persuade the other side but to keep their bases agitated and assured of the rightness of their respective causes--and lure just enough new adherents to beat the other side into submission.
Of course, there is another story to be told, by the millions of Americans who are going about their business every day. . . . And because politics seems to speak so little to what they are going through--because they understand that politics today is a business and not a mission, and what passes for debate is little more than spectacle--they turn inward, away from the noise and rage and endless chatter. (24-25)
Despite of all of Obama's rage, he is still just a rat in a cage. Trauma theorists, if they haven't already, will dive into this text one day and find the lucid self-awareness of Douglass with a Clintonesque (Bill, not Hillary) political way with words. They'll also see Obama's description of traumatic dissociation, the "turn inward" he ascribes to the "millions of Americans who are going about their business every day." Postmodern intellectual Mikhail Epstein confronts this disproportion between what the world has to offer and what the individual can accept in his article, "Between Humanity and Human Beings: Information Trauma and the Evolution of the Species":
Two hundred years after Malthus, a new disproportion--no longer demographic but at least as explosive--has become conspicuous. The disproportion presently is between the collective producer of information and its consumer; in other words, between humanity and human beings. (18)Thomas Malthus, who in 1798 published An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society, was a contemporary of Charles Darwin. Malthus' interests were in the food shortage sure to occur with rapid proliferation of the species, but Epstein applies the logic to the world today which is fast-tracking on the information super highway. Epstein believes this hyperinformed way of life is the road to the overspecialization then destruction of our species. E. Ann Kaplan is another postmodernist dabbling in trauma theory in her 2005 book, Trauma Culture. Richard McNally, Dominick LaCapra, and Cathy Caruth, the three leading trauma theorists of our time, make it their livelihood to discuss trauma theory and its relevance to American society.
Obama invokes the major tenants of trauma theory in the short passage above. The certain type of trauma he discusses is betrayal trauma--when a person senses the betrayal of someone or some entity that he so needs to believe in or rely on, as would a child who is being sexually abused by his primary caregiver, that he dissociates from the reality of his mother's abuse and clings to the facade of her protection. Obama witnesses this betrayal trauma in the American populous, betrayed by a government we must also look to for protection and guidance.
Trauma theorists posit a way, though, to work through betrayal trauma and its relative, fear trauma, one that Obama must have stumbled onto as well, and one that America has since 9/11 witnessed exceedingly more of than most other times in history. In fact, the trauma narrative as a healing mechanism and way of acting out/working through dissociated trauma finds its roots in basic Freudian psychoanalysis--although people have been writing their trauma as a means of healing for far longer than that. An apt example of the trauma narrative--and ironic in that it was published simultaneously with Malthus' essay--is Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland, or The Transformation, the first American gothic novel and, as deemed by some, the first American novel period.
