I stumbled across the Gestalt technique after a few years in therapy. I decided to write a letter telling someone, probably my mother, how I really felt about her. I told my therapist about this. He nodded approvingly and said, "How Gestalt of you." I took this as high praise and continued the practice.
A few years ago in an attempt to get over a string of bad "relationships", I created the Gestalt Madlibs Project. Rather than leave the letters unsent, this time I emailed them to everyone. Each participant received an email that began like this...
You have been selected to participate in the Gestalt Madlibs Project.
This project is one aspect of the three-part No More initiative, where I stop being bored, stop taking shit, and move on with my life.
This was followed by a paragraph telling them exactly what I'd been wanting to tell them. Some people, like my friend Patrick, got really nice mails. Most people didn't.
I decided tonight that the time has come for Part Deux. So I set up an email account. For all of us! You can email it from another account, or through the miracle of modern technology, you can just email "yourself" from inside the account. Be anonymous. Or not. For the love of god, use this when you are tempted to drunk dial/email. Write in English or another language. You can probably even chat if you want to.
Feel free to send pictures or images to illustrate your mails. Part Three might be some sort of compilation. We'll see.
Login: gestaltmadlibspart2@gmail.com
Password: lonelyheart
Security Question/Answer: What's the secret to all great relationships?/Communication
For those of you seeking advice more than catharsis, why not use this email account to email Patrick at Chivalry.
P.S. I don't want anyone to feel censored. However, if you need to send a mail contains really, really adult content, or graphic descriptions/depictions of violence, or whathaveyou, please note this is the subject line so our gentler readers are not caught unawares.
There's this great scene in Sex and the City: Charlotte and Harry are having an argument. He can't marry Charlotte, a gentile, because he promised his mother, who lost family in the Holocaust, that he would marry a Jew. Charlotte gets all quiet and says, "Well, now I can't say anything because you've brought up the Holocaust."
The Holocaust is obviously one of the most horrific events in human history. It silenced millions and created a black hole in European cultural history. As such, whenever anyone brings it up, it just stops the argument.
As metaphors "Holocaust", "Nazi", and "Hitler" are so fraught with meaning, that they are rarely used with actual seriousness. When a teenager says, "my mom is such a Nazi today" he's more likely to mean, "my mom has a lot of rules and won't let me take the car" than "my mother is rounding up my Jewish friends, gassing them, and turning their skin into lampshades."
Because Nazi, Hitler, and Holocaust are such loaded terms, it irritates me to no end when people use them seriously to describe something, like the Bush Administration, that simply doesn't compare in sheer horror, scope, or magnitude. It's just not the same thing. Hitler ≠ George Bush. For five principle reasons:
1. George Bush is not as intelligent, calculating, or just plain organized as Hitler. Were he, Afghanistan and Iraq would already be sorted. A more efficient and Hitler-esque thing to do would be to, with the help of other residents, completely obliterate the most "troublesome" ethnic groups in these areas, and then move on. I feel that the same people that would happily call George Bush an idiot are saying he's the new Hitler. The two are mutually exclusive. George Bush isn't as clever as Hitler.
2. Part of the reason people Hitler rose to power was because Germans in the 1930s were absolutely desperate. The economy was a disaster. Their sense of nationalism was crushed. The whole Nationalsocialist movement started out as something to rejuvenate the homeland. Our economic conditions, while crappy, are not comparable to 1930s Germany. Were George Bush truly Hitler reincarnate, he probably would've tried to do something about our economy, all the while blaming a minority group. Hispanic migrant workers might be a good target. Blacks might also be good because of their success in sports and entertainment. 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina did jump start our sense of national pride, but that had less to do with George Bush and more to do with that damn Jewel song.
3. Bush is an ideological imperialist. I don't really see Hitler that way. In my mind, the Bush Administration probably has more in common with other imperialist governments, perhaps England in India, Belgium in the Congo. (Aside: why are people so convinced that democracy is the perfect fit for everyone? Good Lord! Sans centuries of Western philosophy we might not even conceptualize the individual and her place in society in a way that supports democracy. So why do we expect people in the Middle East to?)
4. A failed artist himself, Hitler really used arts and culture to further his agenda. Yeah, there's a little bit of conservative propaganda out there, but it simply can't compare to Hitler's propaganda machine. The Third Reich had things like the Entartete Kunst exhibition and Leni Reifenstein's films. The Bush Administration coined the term "freedom fries". There's really no comparison.
5. Hitler never had a "we're going to help the Jews" slant to things. We purported to at least have a positive purpose in Iraq. Maybe this is ignorant, but I really believe that George Bush had the Iraqi people's better interests in mind. Not necessarily as a primary interest, but I think he truly believed that there would be at least some indirect benefits to the people of Iraq. He does have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, after all. (Smirk)
I guess the bottom line here is that I don't think George Bush is inherently evil or mentally disturbed. An egomaniacal, willfully ineffectual leader? Yes. Spawn of Satan? Eh... I wouldn't invite him to my party, and I'm sorry he was President for eight frigging years, but I just don't think of his administration as the Fourth Reich.
I find that a lot of people claim they're Really Into Politics, then are surprisingly superficial in their discussion of candidates and issues. I don't claim to be a particularly political person. This allows me to be both superficial and illogical about politics without fear of reproof.
Barack Obama is now the democratic nominee. Personally, I preferred Hilary. I think she probably knows more about what it's actually like to be the President, and if she sucks, well, I'm sure Bill could give her some pointers. It's like two for the price of one! And the woman has clearly has stamina.
That said, Obama is daaaaaaaamn inspiring. Seriously. Every time he opens his mouth out come rainbows of hope and inspiration.
We need to start having some Real Talk about why we support certain candidates. Issues are secondary--we support the candidate that best embodies our idealized version of ourselves. It's why Bob Dole lost to Clinton, and why Nixon lost to Kennedy.
A quick glance at McCain's website makes it clear that he's not the candidate for the cool. He's rockin' a seriffed font, he has a tacky starry background, and that photo is not flattering.
Obama, on the other hand, IS ON TWITTER.
No one wants to think of him/herself as an aging, military leader who resembles an albino beaver. No! We want to think of ourselves as hopeful, multicultural, photogenic, and possessing superior taste in graphic design. Obama embodies the America that Gen X/Yers want to be.
McCain suffers in comparison. The strong, protective father figure shtick is 60 years too late. That shit is played, yo! At best it seems tired. At worst, paternalistic. We just don't want to think of ourselves like that. I think though if McCain could somehow reinvent himself before November as an iBook-toting, fixed-gear bike riding, Big Liebowski dude looking person, everyone in their 20s and 30s would vote for him.
