a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

After she had dinner and a bath last Saturday, Daphne, our two and a half year old granddaughter, made her usual bedtime request—happily, to me, one of her babysitters that night.  “Read me! Read me!” At her age, “me” is the central ingredient of most communications, it requires no prepositions, just lots of imperatives. “Me want Rainbow Rob,” she specified. Currently, “Rainbow Rob” is her favorite book, having edged out “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” which was at the top of her best-loved list for many weeks.  You have to sing along with the multicultural cast of cherubic little kids who fill “Itsy Bitsy Spider’s” pages. They join together on the last page for an uplifting chorus of “Up The Water Spout Again!” Daphne throws her hands up in the air along with the kids in the book, and laughs delightedly as they all do.

“Rainbow Rob” is a book you can sing, too, but Daphne prefers it delivered in a slow, quiet speaking tone so she can be almost asleep at the end. If she is not about to nod off, she quietly says “More” and you read it all over again, slower, quieter. This is not an action book that pumps you up at the finale, it’s an identity quest narrative. We rock in the rocker while reading it; she puts her arms around my neck.

Rob, a young black-and-white penguin, is restless: he thinks he is drab and uncolorful. (He even utters the scientific untruth that black and white are not colors, but never mind.) His desire –his dream–is to be bright. So he sets off to visit other animals and explore the possibilities. As he does the stations of his way, he reflects to himself that he cannot be like them. The lion is YELLOW, but Rob cannot live in the grassland. The crocodile is GREEN, but Rob cannot swim in the river under the hot sun, any more than he can fly like the butterfly he meets who is PURPLE. He lacks a bushy tail so how can he be RED like the fox? Eventually, he comes to a page where he sees other animals who are black-and-white like him: a panda, a zebra. Daphne, making an associative leap, chimed in: “Cici!”  (Cici is my black-and-white New Yorker housecat, who immigrated to Canada along with me and is now, like me, a Permanent Resident—but without a health card.)

The panda and the zebra seem to Rob just fine as they are, and this prompts him to the revelation that he, too, is just fine the way he is, without any bright color. He smiles broadly. And we come to the moral of the tale: BE WHO YOU ARE!

I do wonder what effect all the socially aware books Daphne and her older sister Ava read will have on them. And how they will remember their school and their community center, which are exquisite shrines to acceptance and letting everybody be who they are.  When I was their age, the Brown vs. the Board of Education decision of 1954 was in the future. The doors of my elementary school finally did open to the African-American kids – still called Negroes then–who lived, literally, on the other side of the railroad tracks, but there was no real equality for them, certainly no Southern hospitality. Dick and Jane and their dog Spot continued to romp through our reading primers without ever meeting a Negro. Those kids never came to my house, nor did I ever go to theirs. Our whole town was still effectively segregated when  I left it for college. To this day, it shames me that this is how it was.

I was thinking about the kind of prejudice that was normative when I was a child while I read the long profile of Carl Paladino in Monday’s New York Times (9/27) and then Bob Herbert’s Tuesday column on Paladino’s emailing habit. The Republican candidate for Governor of the State of New York, who is two years younger than I am, obviously grew up in his Northern town, Buffalo, with the idea that blacks are inferior, as our whole white generation did, but the shame he felt (the newspaper stories show) was not about that idea. His shame was about himself. And he projected that shame on “them.” He never got the BE WHO YOU ARE message.

Paladino has admitted to using “bad judgment” –nothing more–when he emailed around racist images “to a wide variety of people.” One image, captioned “Run, niggers, run,” featured a group of black men running away from an on-coming airplane taxiing on a field. In another President Obama, dressed as a pimp, holds the hand of his wife, who is dressed as a prostitute “in a grotesquely revealing outfit.” “An image of a woman performing a sexual act on a horse” was distributed as well. Bob Herbert commented, carefully, in an even-handed tone: “The images and videos are so blatantly hostile to blacks and women that it is fair to wonder whether Mr. Paladino is prejudiced against them.”  What could possibly be unfair about wondering? Or even concluding?  By sending such emails, Paladino himself was going out of his way to call attention to his prejudice, he was advertising it, as people prejudiced in his way do. So his prejudice should get some attention!  Some analysis, some criticism.

In my business, psychoanalysis, we do not analyze a person without that person’s free associations, without knowing their thoughts in the confidentiality of an analytic session,  But that does not mean that psychoanalytic theory cannot be applied to public statements, public acts –as long as that is done with a clear educational purpose. In this case, if I tell you what I think about Paladino, I am saying: Here, for what you judge its worth to be for you, is how my judgment is influenced by what my psychoanalytic way of thinking finds in  those public facts.

I will travel to New York on November 2nd to vote against this candidate for Governor because, on the basis of the way I think about prejudices and politics, I judge him to be a person who will continue in his own unique but also characterologically typical way our country’s shameful behavior toward blacks and women. To my way of thinking, he is hysterical –an attention-grabber and an exhibitionist. Afraid that he is shamefully weak or going to be shamefully weakened, he resorts to domination and bullying and shooting off his mouth. The emailed images are standard fare for people who assign others a submissive role –usually a sexual role—and then say that is all there is to those people, or all there should be. They bully them into the role. The emailing is a kind of bullying.

They say the blacks are nothing but dirty sexual beings –that’s their role. They spend their lives pimping or prostituting, grinning like minstrel show characters. They have primitive sexual power, but no intelligence. They can be run around and rounded up like herd animals.  Women, too, are nothing but sexual beings—they masturbate or let themselves be masturbated like animals, by animals; it starts when they are girls riding on a man’s knee, or dancing up and down on his lap. Poor people get assigned the same role. Paladino believes “that spaces in prisons should be turned into work camps in which poor people would get, among other types of training, classes in personal hygiene.”  This is not a private email message, it is one of his public policy statements; it is how his prejudice plays in policy.

The Times profile offered a veritable case report. Paladino’s father suffered anti-Italian prejudice and on his deathbed, worn down, regretted that he had only been able to do the American Dream to the point of buying his son a private Catholic education, not to leaving him a money inheritance. His wife’s father got, so Paladino says, ripped off by an overzealous IRS agent and was so devastated that he died of a stroke What’s the lesson in this? Make so much money you will never be shamed or pushed around as the fathers were; you can be the one who pushes other people around, avenging the fathers. If, driving yourself to make money, you have panic attacks and repeatedly end up in the ER (as Paladino admits he did), keep going, try to push through to the point of being invincible, without anxiety.

If a black city councilor in Buffalo seems to think he has some power, take him down a notch or two or three, show him and the city who is boss. Attack government, reduce it, or better still become the government –take it over, control it. But while this strategy was playing out for Paladino, a third man in the family died after a period of being devastated, broken down:  Paladino’s son Patrick, recently out of rehab for alcohol and drug addictions, lost control of his SUV one night in 2009 and slammed into a tree. Such a loss could break a father. But, no: Paladino joined the Tea Party, started making unrestrained speeches that channeled huge amounts of his own and other peoples’ anger toward the government. He could be the Come Back Kid, take down Mario Cuomo’s son, Andrew, one of those elite Manhattanite snobs Paladino detests; take him down off his arrogant, entitled government perch, show him who’s boss.

It’s a very sad story. Full of histrionics and what is known in my  trade as “intergenerational transmission of trauma,” from fathers to sons.  But do we need this in our public life? Being crazed is no crime; real life soap operas do sometimes jump into politics or get played out in the newspapers. But shouldn’t we have by this time, as a nation, enough sophistication –enough knowledge of prejudices and how they work—to realize that a person like this is going to operate by bullying and pushing down anyone he thinks could cut into him or humiliate him sexually?  He is and he will continue to be a loose canon hysterical dominator; and he glories in disguising WHO HE IS –a boy like that young penguin who thinks the others must be more colorful.

In the portraits of Paladino, we are not treated to the language of obsessional prejudice:
he is not railing against infiltrating socialists, he does not see conspiracies everywhere. There is no evidence that he is a hoarder using money to protect himself from spies and thieves and double agents and the terrorists next door, although he makes millions upon millions building a towering real estate empire. Nor is his grandiosity of the narcissistic sort, with prejudices focused on trophy women or trophy children or trophy houses or possessions –he lives rather modestly. He shares with narcissistically prejudiced men an anti-abortion policy that asserts control over women’s reproduction.  But his policy makes an exception that is not typical of sexists who want a woman’s reproductivity 100% under their control, even if it means that the woman is erased. He would permit abortion when a woman’s life is in danger. Unlike purer narcissists, male hysterics always want women nearby for future service –they do not want to erase them completely or eliminate them. Hysterical men usually behave toward women in the way Sigmund Freud over-generally thought was typical of all men: they want to have a wife who is loyally maternal, and a sexy mistress nearby who will produce a “love child” (a sexual prowess child). The John Edwards syndrome. Paladino talks publicly about his “love child,” supports her, and has what the Times calls a “nighttime ritual” in which he travels to her home nearby and puts her to bed. For the child’s sake, I hope she gets to read some of the books that my granddaughters bring home from their fully governmentally subsidized, beautifully maintained, multiculturally staffed, in no way “separate but equal,” free library.

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