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Absolutely Revolting

September 2021, no. 435

From Plato to plutocrats, the September issue of ABR brings together the best and worst of the cultural moment. In our cover feature, Joel Deane casts his eye over the ‘ugly truth’ of Facebook’s contemptuous exploitation of users, while in a thought experiment inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin, Elizabeth Oliver identifies more worthy candidates for space travel than Branson and Bezos. Megan Clement reports from Paris on the pass sanitaire and Diane Stubbings reviews Peter Doherty’s plague-year dispatches. Sheila Fitzpatrick is our Critic of the Month and was a judge in this year’s Calibre Prize, for which Anita Punton’s ‘May Day’, printed in this issue, came runner-up. We also feature reviews of new fiction by Jennifer Mills, Colm Tóibín, and Laurent Binet, and new poetry by Toby Fitch, John Hawke, and Song Lin – as well as much, much more!

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James Dunk reviews Mad by the Millions: Mental disorders and the early years of the World Health Organization by Harry Yi-Jui Wu
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World War II drew the still-marginal profession of psychiatry into the war effort, with psychiatrists screening recruits for mental disorders and predisposing histories. Trauma, or the fear of trauma, hovered. But after treaties were signed and soldiers returned to their loved ones, and the memory of war faded for those not condemned to be visited by it daily, what role was psychiatry to play? In Mad by the Millions, historian of science and psychiatrist Harry Yi-Jui Wu writes about the peace time ambitions of postwar psychiatry, which were marshalled in the unlikely, bureaucratic setting of the International Social Psychiatry Project (ISPP) run by the Mental Health Unit of the World Health Organization.
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Book 1 Subtitle: Mental disorders and the early years of the World Health Organization
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Book 1 Biblio: MIT Press, US$35 pb, 235 pp
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World War II drew the still-marginal profession of psychiatry into the war effort, with psychiatrists screening recruits for mental disorders and predisposing histories. Trauma, or the fear of trauma, hovered. But after treaties were signed and soldiers returned to their loved ones, and the memory of war faded for those not condemned to be visited by it daily, what role was psychiatry to play? In Mad by the Millions, historian of science and psychiatrist Harry Yi-Jui Wu writes about the peace time ambitions of postwar psychiatry, which were marshalled in the unlikely, bureaucratic setting of the International Social Psychiatry Project (ISPP) run by the Mental Health Unit of the World Health Organization.

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Ben Brooker reviews This Is Your Mind on Plants by Michael Pollan
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At sixty-six years of age and best known for his books on the sociology of food, the American author and journalist Michael Pollan has become an unlikely figurehead for the so-called ‘psychedelic renaissance’. In How to Change Your Mind (2018), Pollan surveyed the recent revival of psychedelic drugs as adjuncts to psychotherapy, and the emerging evidence that supports their use in the treatment of depression, PTSD, and other mental health disorders. Globally prohibited since the early 1970s and still mostly illegal, these compounds – including the ‘classic’ psychedelics LSD and psilocybin (the main psychoactive alkaloid in magic mushrooms), as well as MDMA (also known as ecstasy) and ketamine – are once again the subject of clinical trials, including in Australia where the federal government has became one of the first in the world to fund research in the field.
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Book 1 Biblio: Allen Lane, $35 pb, 274 pp
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At sixty-six years of age and best known for his books on the sociology of food, the American author and journalist Michael Pollan has become an unlikely figurehead for the so-called ‘psychedelic renaissance’. In How to Change Your Mind (2018), Pollan surveyed the recent revival of psychedelic drugs as adjuncts to psychotherapy, and the emerging evidence that supports their use in the treatment of depression, PTSD, and other mental health disorders. Globally prohibited since the early 1970s and still mostly illegal, these compounds – including the ‘classic’ psychedelics LSD and psilocybin (the main psychoactive alkaloid in magic mushrooms), as well as MDMA (also known as ecstasy) and ketamine – are once again the subject of clinical trials, including in Australia where the federal government has became one of the first in the world to fund research in the field.

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Open Page with Jennifer Mills
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Jennifer Mills is the author of the novels The Airways (Picador, 2021), Dyschronia (Picador, 2018), Gone (UQP, 2011), and The Diamond Anchor (UQP, 2009) and a collection of short stories, The Rest Is Weight (UQP, 2012).
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Jennifer Mills is the author of the novels The Airways (Picador, 2021), Dyschronia (Picador, 2018), Gone (UQP, 2011), and The Diamond Anchor (UQP, 2009) and a collection of short stories, The Rest Is Weight (UQP, 2012).

 

If you could go anywhere tomorrow, where would it be, and why?

Home to Kaurna Yerta (Adelaide). I should be there already, but when the federal government halved the international arrivals cap my flights were cancelled at the last minute. I’m now one of many thousands of Australians stranded overseas – in Italy, in my case.

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Gary Werskey reviews JFK: Coming of age in the American century, 1917–1956 by Fredrik Logevall
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Writing this review of John F. Kennedy’s formative years soon after the end of the Trump regime has evoked some surprising parallels between these two one-term American presidents (and perennial womanisers). They were both second sons born into wealthy families dominated by powerful patriarchs. Against the odds, they emerged as their fathers’ favourites and were groomed for success. Thanks not just to their wealth but to their televisual celebrity and telegenic families, they managed to eke out close election victories at a time when just enough disenchanted voters were looking for a change of direction in the White House. Despite their administrations’ profound disparities in competence and their differences in political outlook, they shared a deep distrust of senior bureaucrats and military officials, as well as an inability to work effectively with Congress. Bullets and ballots, respectively, ended Kennedy’s and Donald Trump’s presidencies, but not the cults of personality they had inspired. In the space of just over half a century, they have tilted the trajectory of American democracy and diplomacy from the tragic to the tragicomic.
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Book 1 Subtitle: Coming of age in the American century, 1917–1956
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Book 1 Biblio: Viking, $59.99 hb, 816 pp
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Writing this review of John F. Kennedy’s formative years soon after the end of the Trump regime has evoked some surprising parallels between these two one-term American presidents (and perennial womanisers). They were both second sons born into wealthy families dominated by powerful patriarchs. Against the odds, they emerged as their fathers’ favourites and were groomed for success. Thanks not just to their wealth but to their televisual celebrity and telegenic families, they managed to eke out close election victories at a time when just enough disenchanted voters were looking for a change of direction in the White House. Despite their administrations’ profound disparities in competence and their differences in political outlook, they shared a deep distrust of senior bureaucrats and military officials, as well as an inability to work effectively with Congress. Bullets and ballots, respectively, ended Kennedy’s and Donald Trump’s presidencies, but not the cults of personality they had inspired. In the space of just over half a century, they have tilted the trajectory of American democracy and diplomacy from the tragic to the tragicomic.

Read more: Gary Werskey reviews 'JFK: Coming of age in the American century, 1917–1956' by Fredrik Logevall

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Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, the rain blew you / into the backseat, steaming and boisterous, my quiet son / and you his not-friend-Dad-we-only-share-some-classes, / or late evenings, sunset dampening down the final lap ...
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Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, the rain blew you
into the backseat, steaming and boisterous, my quiet son
and you his not-friend-Dad-we-only-share-some-classes,
or late evenings, sunset dampening down the final lap
around the oval, falling into the backseat, grass-stained and
sweaty, for a grunt or two about school and other tyrannies
and then we’d have the radio on for the trip to your house,
or my one-sided conversation about the world’s events, things
I had heard. My son would roll his eyes and open a book and
you would thank me politely at the door of your dark house.
Today I heard about the caverns under the Nullarbor, plinking
cisterns and subway stations, gobleted with water, kilometres
of tunnels small as a wriggle or large as a castle. All the light
the dark keeps to itself is caught in those limestone funnels.
Cavers fly through water lucid as a dream, cold as truth, their
torchlight repeats, redoubles, pure and clear, through copepod
and brachiopod, through the blind flutter of slippery fish. None
have ever met a man. Glowing lace of slime. Fragile spiders.
All waiting for you, kilometres of undiscovered worlds
beneath the desert. All waiting for you. The fingers of a hand
and in a lifetime only a thumb might get explored. Each caver
going further than the last. You could be whatever you needed
to be. You could swim forever in these bowls buried deep
beneath the sounding holes and roaring seeps, beneath the
huddled saltbush, the wheeling, tell-tale birds, you could swim
forever and never need a breath. One tank could last forever.
Whatever troubled you, would be years away from the man
you would become, whatever you never spoke to me about
on that fifteen-minute trip to your house, would be forgotten pain.
Down each pointing finger in the rock, held out for you,
if you could wait that long. But I won’t drop you off anymore.
Your father met me where the parents wait, his eyes as old
as caves and spoke of your depression, but all I can think about
is waste, of fingers down beneath the heavy dust closing into
stony fists. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I’ll talk to you and
look back but you’ll be gone and those whistling bats and
all that lightless light must wait for someone else to find them.
I look back through my rear-view mirror at a queue of parents
in their idling cars, at a recursive hall of mirrors, at my son and
at the missing boy next to him and all those fathers look back
in their rear-view mirrors, at the shape of what the future might
become, and what the future can no longer become.

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