Come, Ye Thankful People

I recently read someone's post extolling the supposedly Christian meaning of the "First Thanksgiving." Could we pause for just one moment of reality here? That 1st TG kicked off 500 years of hate crimes against American Indians.

Here's part of a Thanksgiving sermon delivered in Plymouth in 1623 by Puritan minister "Mather the Elder." Mather gave special thanks to God for a plague of smallpox that had wiped out most of the Wampanoag Indians (yes, the same tribe that had saved newly arrived Pilgrims from starvation.) Specifically, he praised God for destroying "chiefly young men and children, the very seeds of increase, thus clearing the forests to make way for our better growth."

In 1637,the first official “Day of Thanksgiving” was proclaimed by Governor John Winthrop. To offer thanks for a bountiful harvest? Not so much: Winthrop called his people together to celebrate the Puritans' slaughter of some six hundred women, children, prisoners, and surrendering Pequot Indians in the Connecticut Valley. On this Thanksgiving Day, Mather was also on hand, delivering a victory sermon which thanked God "that on this day we have sent six hundred heathen souls to Hell."

But indeed, spiritual grace abounds in the story of the first Thanksgiving--just not on the part of the invading Europeans. Among American Indians, unrestrained generosity and forgiveness is highly admired. Giving to those in need, without holding back, is a cherished cultural value--and along with it goes the faith that there will be enough for all to share.

The Pilgrims had arrived poor and hungry. Their English crops failed in the new land. Within a few months, fully half of them had perished from disease and hunger. Despite having suffered for a hundred years at the hands of European slave traders, the Indians took pity on the new crop of white people on their land. Through the winter the local Wampanoags fed the Pilgrims and taught them how to grow their food.

O. Henry wrote that Thanksgiving Day is the one day of the year that is purely American. As we offer gratitude this week, may we be reminded to thank the Americans who were already here when we struggled ashore onto land that had always been theirs; who blessed us with kindness, instruction, and sustenance; and who almost surely rescued this nation from early extinction.

Franklin, Tennessee's Suicide Magnet

Since the year 2000 thirteen people have died from jumping off the Natchez Trace Bridge in Franklin, Tennessee. People are asking why. Why this particular bridge? Why these particular people? More urgently, people are asking what---if anything--should be done about it.

Two measures have been proposed. One is inexpensive but not likely to work. The other is more costly to implement, but a proven life-saver.

The frugal approach, posting signs on the bridge urging suicidal people to call for help, certainly couldn't do any harm. But it's unlikely to prevent anyone from jumping off. Suicide by jumping is known to be an act of impulse, somewhat like shooting a lover in a flash of rage. At such a moment one does not stop to read messages, call mental health workers, or wait around for helpers to arrive on the scene.

The method that works (as shown by many careful studies) is simply to make the bridge harder to jump from. Higher railings, metal safety nets, even mildly electrified balustrades on "suicide magnet" bridges have drastically reduced death rates everywhere they're used.

But wait--wouldn't the suicidal person just go home from the bridge and shoot himself? Or locate a more accommodating bridge? The idea seems commonsense, but in fact these impulsive bridge-jumpers seldom come to the brink with a Plan B. They have fixed their minds on an iconic, somehow symbolic bridge (like San Francisco's Golden Gate, or Tennessee's Natchez Trace). If they're blocked, the impulse to jump wanes and they usually just retreat and go on with life.

Sound improbable? This fascinating study by Berkeley psychologist Richard Seiden may convince you: Seiden collected police records on 515 would-be-jumpers who, over a 40-year span, were one way or another thwarted from leaping off the Golden Gate bridge. He found that only 6% ever went on to kill themselves. Ninety-four percent of these people got over it, whatever the "it" was that had driven them to mortality's doorstep.

"Means restriction" is what we are talking about, an approach to suicide prevention that focuses, so to speak, on the "method" of the suicidal person, not just the "madness" that may underlie the wish to die. There are other famous examples of successful means restriction besides bridge modification.

Take the British coal-gas story. Until the 1960's the people of Britain heated and cooked with coal gas, which contains high levels of carbon monoxide. For a suicidal person, this meant that every home provided its own execution chamber--some 2500 people killed themselves every year in Britain by sticking their heads into ovens with the gas turned on. Then the British government--motivated by economy, not public health--phased out coal gas in favor of natural gas, which contains essentially no carbon monoxide. By the early 1970's, the overall rate of suicide in Britain (not just suicide by carbon monoxide) had dropped by a third, and has remained at that low level. Similarly, we see sharp reductions in poisoning deaths from acetaminophen (Tylenol and other drugs) when drug companies are required to dispense only a non-lethal quantity of pills in each bottle sold.

It's too easy to take a what's-the-use attitude about suicide. An official connected with the project says, "I'm not sure a fence or a net would solve the tragedies or stop them." If he is unaware of the literature on means restriction, he needs to do his homework. If he is using this as an easy excuse to save money, he should consider the millions of dollars of lost productivity represented by those thirteen lost lives and those to follow.

There are many hurtful misconceptions about suicide. It's disheartening to see a public official espousing the worst of them: that if someone wants to die, there's little anyone can to do prevent the tragedy.

For J.D., With Love and Squalor

Last Friday, when I saw J.D. Salinger's NYT obit, my multi-decade hoping for more Salinger entered its own death spiral . I thought I had read everything he ever wrote, but I’d somehow missed “Hapworth 16, 1924,” a short story which is ostensibly a letter from camp written by Seymour Glass at age 7. Maybe I’ll hunt it down now. Or maybe let it lie.

Ah, the Glass family. Ex-vaudevillians Les and Bessie and their precociously existential offspring Seymour, Franny, Zooey, Buddy, Walt, Waker and Boo Boo. Salinger flashed us the first peek at them in Nine Stories and thundered adoringly on from there; I don’t need to name those books for you. Some critics (e.g.John Updike) complained that Salinger loved the Glasses “more than God loved them.” But not more than I loved them. You too?

Mark David Chapman, who murdered John Lennon in 1980, had become obsessed with The Catcher in the Rye and saw Lennon as one of the “phonies” Holden Caulfield so despised. It came out in his trial that he believed killing Lennon would transform him into a Caulfield-like guardian angel for all children.

Salinger’s writings helped shape a generation of writers (Roth, Updike, Bellow) and remodeled the skeleton of the modern short story. As John Updike says of these open-ended pieces, “they don’t snap shut.”

In place of beginning, middle and end, Salinger’s stories hang on an architecture of emotion and irony and pitch-perfect dialogue. (Seven-year old Sybil in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”: “Seymour Glass? Do you see more glass?”)

Found out a bunch of interesting stuff about J.D. He was a spectacularly poor student, flunking out here, putting in a couple of weeks there, sitting through a term or so at the next place, taking one evening class at Columbia before abandoning formal education. He got drafted into WWII and fought in the D-Day invasion and the Battle of the Bulge. Apparently this gave him a honking case of PTSD (“battle fatigue” in those days) for which he was hospitalized in 1945.

His first marriage was to a German doctor named Sylvia (Salinger called her Saliva.)
They rather quickly divorced. In 1955 (he was 36) he married 21-year-old Radcliffe senior Claire Douglas, said in many ways to resemble Franny Glass. She divorced him in 1966, stating that to continue the marriage would “endanger her reason.” In 1972 (he was 53) he had a year-long affair with Yale freshman Joyce Maynard, who wrote in 1998 that Salinger was controlling and sexually manipulative and ate frozen peas for breakfast. In 2000, Salinger’s daughter Margaret added that he was abusive to her mother, embraced Scientology, and drank his own urine.

A sliver of hope for my Salinger devotees: J.D.'s former mistress, Joyce Maynard, says that over the years Salinger had continued writing nonstop about the fictional Glass family, filling shelf after shelf and possibly one safe with more tales of their lives.

May it be true!