Feeling good
Garvey, John
by the time he took it. He tried for seven years to stay out of the case, she said. It was a small point of disagreement that only accented Shenton's contention that the church's role needs study...
...Our feelings are our contact with the self-whatever that is...
...We presume that the self is something we can work on, polishing it into the shape we like...
...Would a similar catastrophe on earth trigger a spastic nuclear reaction...
...Does a "'feeling good" declaration amount to a declaration of independence from what has really happened to you, a statement that despite everything you know you can survive...
...A religious educator told me that the children and adults she worked with suffered from poor self-images...
...Not long ago--on the morning of Friday, November 9--a computer made a mistake at the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colorado...
...Self, as a criterion, has a way of forcing everything else out of the picture...
...As for the conference, though it pointed directions, it answered no large questions...
...I don't mean to deny the reality of the feeling, which is plainly real...
...A person who makes it through a period of scary uncertainty intact can find, at the end, a surprising and deep : hopefulness...
...A close relative to the above: "I'm trying to get in touch with my feelings...
...I think we are better off with a less complete scaffolding...
...This makes sense, but it also raises questions about computer reliability...
...An ordinary pair of binoculars will show you what meteorites have done to the moon...
...But "feeling good about myself" or "getting in touch with my feelings" can't really help here, because this is the language of alienation, suggesting that I am here, and my self or Commonweal: 678my feelings are over there, waiting for evaluation or contact...
...JOHN DEEDY (John Deedy, former managing editor of Commonweal,is a free-lance writer living in Massachusetts...
...JOHN OARVEY Of several minds: Thomas Powers WAR BY COMPUTER OOPSI I REALLY MEANT TO PUSH BUTTON B i lF YOU'LL think about it for a minute, you'll see why it makes sense to fight a nuclear war by computer...
...A personality which took this too seriously would finally be insulated from anything outside itself...
...In other words, I am what I want to be--that's the best way to be, and it means feeling good about myself...
...The fact is it has all been worked out on paper and turned into software called the Single Integrated Operating Plan, or SlOP for short...
...This usually comes toward the end of a story about an affair that has ended or a collapsed marriage...
...But the public is hard to reassure on this point, 7 December 1979:679...
...It will probably enter politics soon as the only answer to Chappaquiddick...
...The Pentagon has thought about this a good deal--one hopes the Russians have, too--and there is very little chance of anything except a nuclear attack being perceived and iesponded to as a nuclear attack...
...He told library officials he would visit their exhibition of Felicani materials "privately...
...It is reason, many felt, why the Sacco-Vanzetti case cannot close, now or ever...
...It did not even supply a simple answer to the query from one participant whether this country could have another Sacco-Vanzetti case...
...The excuse was valid, btit his absence not surprising...
...The last time I tried to get in touch with my feelings they were out, so I left a note 9 . 9 Well, it does tempt, this sort of language...
...Of course the computer sounded the alert, jet interceptors scrambled in the United States and Canada, and the men deep underground at Minuteman control panels had an anxious few minutes wondering if the moment had arrived to turn the brass key...
...But that's as far as it went...
...The United States has so far resisted a policy of launch on warning, despite its obvious military advantages, precisely because it increases the danger of accidents, as well as the danger of miscalculation...
...If there is anything unanimous in most religious traditions it is the belief that you have to dispense with the self to see the world as it is: A solid sense of self, a self-image, is (like new cinnamon-colored hair) a brittle and silly thing to walk into the world wearing, whether you feel good about it or not...
...An con ago a meteorite perhaps fifty feet in diameter left a crater the best part of a mile wide in Arizona, and something devastated a large corner of Siberia back in 1907...
...Self-loathing is a refined narcissism, a back-door way of paying attention to yourself...
...Where people once said, "I'm sorry, I acted like a real jerk," now they say "I can't help howyou feel about it--I feel good about myself...
...Unfortunately, the self seems to be all we have, especially after faith in everything else has gone: "I feel (good or bad), therefore I am...
...In the case of murderers (a couple of whom have admitted to feeling bad about themselves) it stems understandable, but even there it is probably exaggerated, maybe a form of pride9 Self-loathing is a kind of hypochondria: it is like listening hard to your heartbeat, convinced that it's going wrong...
...Granting that feeling bad about myself is a bad idea, is its real opposite to be found in feeling good about mysel~ Two of the people who told me that they felt good about themselves had just seen their marriages collapse not only under themselves but also under their children...
...What the plan is we don't know, but it has been programmed into a computer in the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command deep underground near Omaha, Nebraska...
...Buddhism calls our sense of an enduring self an illusion...
...No, the question doesn't bother me anymore...
...I disagree...
...The cause of the mistake is unclear, because the Pentagon isn't telling...
...One man of advanced years had the pleasure of glimpsing himself in an old f'dm of the funeral procession for the pair, following their electrocution in 1927 in Charlestown State Prison...
...Since the United States and the Soviet Union can both deliver thousands of warheads, and since launch-to-target time can vary from 9 several hours down to three or four minutes, and since the results of the first half of the war logically ought to determine strategy in the second half, the job is simply too big and complicated for anything like a traditional commander...
...The ability to feel things at all is a proof of life, and it is profoundly refreshing after a bad time...
...Sacco's son, Spencer, was expected to come from Newport, R.I., but he stayed away, citing illness in the family...
...Programmers make mistakes and computers do too, sometimes of an eerie, other-worldly kind...
...It was possible for Nazis to feel good about themselves--this was the feeling encouraged by The Triumph of Will...
...A solid sense of self is an idol, according to the desert fathers...
...A I variation: "I'm feeling good about myself now...
...I have also heard it from people who have mild doubts about their own worth and from people who have emerged in one piece from struggles involving divorce, the precarious thing we call "sexual identity" these days, career problems--this "'feeling good about myself' is nearly a virus...
...It was described, as a "mechanical error," which suggests that somebody pushed button "A" instead of button "B...
...The strut always leads to the banana peel, a cosmic law if ever there was one...
...What if a sizable chunk of nickel-iron from deep space should land on downtown Washington some hot August night...
...I have heard this kind of sentence, and you probably have too, for the past several years, usually from friends whose personal lives are in various states of disarray and who need to get some purchase on things as the ground beneath them turns to swamp...
...Mechanical error" is far from being the only possible sort...
...Of several minds: John Garvey FEELING...
...It took a few years, but now I feel good about m y s e l f . . . " ) It seems to be the bottom line in places where guilt used to lurk...
...The answer to that had to be both no and yes--no in the sense that the judicial monstrosities of the 1920s have been corrected and today there are more avenues of appeal...
...It was a small point of disagreement that only accented Shenton's contention that the church's role needs study and clarification...
...It certainly beats hell out of selfloathing, and rightly so: no one should feel bad about his very being--that's too heavy and even foolish a load to carry...
...The conference drew together three hundred persons, including several from that aged remnant that marched and protested in Boston's streets a half-century ago for Sacco and Vanzetti...
...what we want to be is what we are, say the est people, and the problem is finding out what we really want...
...but what can it mean to declare it...
...It is stupid and, given the times, inevitable...
...The fear of an accidental war runs deep, with good reason...
...I love my new cinnamon-colored hair," she says, nearly dissolving with pleasure, "because it lets me berne...
...Vincenzina Vanzetti, who was six when her brother Bartolomeo left Italy for the United States and 20 when he died, traveled from Italy for the conference, and she confessed to theBoston Globe that her bitterness with America still existed "in a certain degree--but not for the people, for the institutions...
...in some way they are criteria for judging the importance of what we live through...
...In the event of a major attack'-that is, in the event various sensing sYstems pick up the launch of many missiles and feed the information to SAC's computer--SIOP will go into effect...
...Now we worry less about what we should do than about how we should feel...
...Reaction time is so short there is little margin for error...
...On a television commercial a woman roars toward me with an expression on her face which would be alarming in any real social circumstance...
...there are many safeguards against this and other possible errors and within six minutes, according to the Pentagon, the NORAD computer was pacified, Whether SAC's computer was prodded to the ready with SIOP we do not know...
...You look for a trace of humor, and have to conclude that the person who feels bad about himself will, for all his sorry creeping around, make fewer world-class blunders than the person who feels good about himself...
...Feelings impress us as being more substantial than anything else...
...After disasters reporters stand around the grieving survivors with microphones, and the first question is always, "How did you feel...
...GOOD IT MEANS NEVER HAVING TO SAY YOU'RE SORRY J Kllll FEEL GOOD about myself...
...Self-love means never having to say you're sorry...
...There is something finally circular and unanswerable about feeling good about yourself, something neat and sleek, like disco9 There must be more to the feeling than this...
...The effect, at any rate, was to feed information from a routine wargame tape into NORAD's computer in such a way that the computer thought a Russian submarine in the North Pacific had launched a handful of missiles toward the United States...
...The answer is no...
...That is too bad, but she felt that she should work at providing g~xl self-images...
...yes in the sense that societies do get fearful and can panic, and when they do they can catch up people and punish them...
...He has always maintained a curious detachment from the case...
...The self, seen as an object among other objects, a thing we can handle and deal with, is a bad idea...
Vol. 106 • December 1979 • No. 22
