PETER LOEWEN13ERG
525
passive experience of humiliation and identity loss of boot camp into the
active one of beating local Latino youngsters, shaving their heads and
taking away their clothes. The available brown-skinned "enemy" assuaged
their anxiety over the more remote and dangerous enemy waiting for
them in the Pacific.
The politics of anxiety frequently produces an unreasoning impulse
to find a quick solution that soothes the immediate anxiety, but often
fails to solve the long-term problem. The historical understanding of
anxiety is that it is a response
to
a sense of powerlessness, a loss of
mooring or centering. The experiences of an epidemic, a lost war, an
old order destroyed, family savings and security wiped out, and strife in
previously safe streets, are the social equivalents of the death of a parent
or loved one, divorce, loss of a job, or a catastrophic diagnosis. Such
crises are the "danger point" creating anxiety, and the overpowering
urge is
to
do someth ing, to impulsively attack an available and vulnerable
target,
to
act aggressively and violently in ways that seem at the moment
to meliorate the painful anxiety. The danger is the regressive need to find
and follow the leader who gives reassurance with simplistic, often pro–
jective and xenophobic, formulae that promise stability, order, and reck–
onability, power, mastery, and false security.
THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS
History and Literature in
the Augustan Age
By JOSEPH M. LEVINE.
"A masterly account of a major episode in
European cultural history."
- Anthony Grafton, Princeton University.
Joseph Levine here recounts the acrimoni–
ous quarrel between the "ancients"and the
"moderns" that excited the English world of
letters from 1690 until the 1730s. $29.95
DR.
WOODWARD~S
SHIELD
History, Science, and Satire in Augustan England
At
bookstores,or direct
from the publisher-
CORNELL
By JOSEPH M. LEVINE.
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"One of the most imaginative contributions
to the history of ideas written in the last fifty
years."-London Review of Books.$14.95
University Press
124 Roberts Place Ithaca, NY 14850
