Cutting Against The Cult of Success

One of the newest and most frightening addictions to emerge into public view is "cutting," a procedure in which a person tears long, thin, gashes into their arms with knifes, pieces, of glass and other instruments. Cutting has become popular enough that it has some cache as a cool thing to do. Hundreds of on-line message boards for self-injurers have popped up on the internet.

According to the Houston Chronicle, cutters start slicing themselves as a way to substitute physical pain for emotional distress.

Eighteen-year old Ashley Sellers began cutting herself over a breakup. "The pain was so bad, I was so hurt, that the first thing I thought of was that I'd rather feel something else . . . "

In her early nineties feminist self-help book, bell hooks argues that many addictions begin a way for people to comfort themselves in the face of emotional pain. For hooks, addictions to cocaine, alcohol, food, or work all begin as ways to seek substitutes for pain.

Of course, many factors are involved in the trend toward cutting--the established popularity of painful procedures like tattooing and piercing and the lightning communication of fads through the internet among them.

Another factor, one which has enormous consequences for American society, is our increasing intolerance of failure. "Second Place is First Place for Losers." If you fail, you're a moron, idiot, dumbass, or redneck. If things go wrong, expect no sympathy. If things go really wrong, you're on Jerry Springer. Feel bad. Too bad. Get over it! If you complain you're a WATB (Whiney Ass Titty Baby). If you can't get over it, expect people to treat you like you're a useless sack of shit. "Get out of my space," they'll tell you. "You're wasting my time!"

Well, I have bad news.

We're losing in Iraq and our Israeli allies are failing in Lebanon to boot. And we're losing in the worst way because we started as heavy favorites. When the U. S. invaded Iraq, we were Sonny Liston getting ready to fight Muhammed Ali, the Baltimore Colts running on the field for Super Bowl III, and the Soviet Union invading the backward country of Afghanistan. We were the big guns, the boss, the new sheriff in town. It was going to be our way or else.

As Americans, what we need to do now is to learn from our failure without denying what's happened in Iraq and without falling into the kind of self-destructive shell that characterizes cutting. The failure in Iraq has been systematic. The Bush administration has failed any test of competence. However, the Democrats also have failed as an opposition party and the media failed to function either as a "marketplace of ideas" or as an institution that "speaks truth to power." The same was true of a military which never learned the lessons of our failure in Vietnam and still doesn't have the skills required for effective occupation.

The Bush administration refused to consult, refused to negotiate, refused to adapt to circumstances, refused to admit mistakes even to themselves, and ended up in a situation where they were hoping for a miracle to turn the situation around. Unfortunately, the miracle arrived in the form of Zarqawi's death and things still got worse. Now, they're almost completely out of steam.

What should we do now? Much of what the U. S. public has to do at this point is suffer through the final 27 months of the Bush administration and watch the Iraq situation continue to slowly deteriorate. After that, we'll all be prepared to shift gears quickly. I don't think we can withdraw all of our troops from Iraq because much of Anbar province would be quickly Talibanized and would become a haven for global terrorists. However, there's no real danger now that Sunni insurgents are going to take Baghdad or overrun the country. The Sunni insurgents aren't even holding their own against the Shiite death squads. As a result, I believe that we can withdraw from 80-100,00 of our troops and retrain them in the art of occupying civilian populations before rotating any of them back to the Middle East. Our military desperately needs training in language skills, dealing with civilian populations, economic reconstruction, and other areas of occupation work if they're ever to be an effective occupation force. In the same way, the U. S. government needs to learn the art of balancing multilateral and unilateral initiatives and the opposition, media, and public need to develop a combination of critical perspective and tolerance in relation to the inevitable frustrations and failures. I could go on but won't.

The struggle against global terrorism is going to be a long, drawn-out affair. In order to succeed, we need to change our own culture if we are going to be tolerant enough of our current failures to learn from them.