Newsweek frees a meme

I love seeing my thoughts echoed in print because it makes me believe in nifty shit like synchronicity, or maybe that Hundredth Monkey phenomenon where I spontaneously get brains when somebody somewhere frees a meme.

Jerry Adler writes Newsweek's March 27th headline story Freud is not Dead.

Well some of Freud is dead. Like pop psychology and jive talk therapy - the most annoying additions to the 20th century, aside from war, famine, pestilence, big hair, and valley girls - those are dead. But then there was that usefully cool shit about Oedipus, the death drive, fantasy, and ideology.

I read Freud in the early 90s, just when the world was looking and feeling too intolerably good for upper, middle, and upper-middle class white people. Social and economic progress was too much to bear. There were no more bogey men to animate their fears - so they looked inward to their own dissipated existence and found that they could torture themselves with the content of their own fundamental fantasies and then torture the rest of us by filling the airwaves with false recovered repressed memories of ritual psuedosexual nonabuse.

Newsweek ended the article by referencing the same disgusting stank:

It is no accident...that Freud's reputation reached a low point in the early 1990s, which was not only the height of the recovered-memory hysteria, but also of the post-cold-war optimism that made a best seller of Francis Fukuyama's book "The End of History." Fukuyama predicted that the dissolution of the Soviet Union would pave the way for the triumph of liberal democracy around the world - an idea that came crashing to the ground one sunny morning in 2001...What Freud has to say, which is worth hearing even if analysis never cures another patient, is that history will never end. Because it is made by human beings.

OK Newsweek, but even that sobering conclusion is too sanguine. Because in fact history can end whenever some Christian or Muslim Fundamentalist fucktard wants it that way.