Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 2005 | Page 118
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Popular Culture Review
Indeed, what role does suffering, the eternal teacher, play in then-
never-never lands of the psyche? MacKay and Fanning don’t say. They and their
best-selling colleagues would do well to consider Nietzsche’s splendid dictum
that the man who despises himself nevertheless esteems himself as a self-
despiser. Nietzsche meant that self-loathing and the sort of self-esteem mental
health specialists like MacKay and Fanning espouse are opposite sides of the
same coin, the coin being, of course, narcissism: a.k.a. taking the self too
seriously for any reason.
California State University, Bakersfield
Steven Carter
Notes
1 Todd Gitlin, “Postmodernism defined at last!” Utne Reaper, July/August, 1989,58.
2
Christopher Lasch, The Culture o f Narcissism: American Life in an Age o f Diminishing
Expectations (New York: W.W. Norton Company, 1978), 10.
3
“TV Appearance o f Teen Victims Suggests Rape Stigma is Fading,” Los Angeles
Times, August 8, 2002, A 18.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 “Battle Over Victims a Sign of Pressure in TV Industry,” Los Angeles Times, August 8,
2002, A19.
7
“TV Appearance o f Teen Victims Suggests Rape Stigma is Fading,” A18.
8 Ibid.
9
One extreme, but telling, example o f this. In May 2003, a most disturbing story
appeared in The Bakersfield Californian.
Thursday, a severely emotionally disturbed eighth-grader
attacked a Walter Stiem Middle School teacher, breaking her
vertebrae.
While that teacher lay in the hospital, another began to
speak out against the violent past of the boy, even as Bakersfield City
School staff denied it.
The 200-pound pupil was chasing a special education aide
through the school courtyard Thursday when he ran up to [art teacher
Vicki] Smart, who was on yard duty, she said.
As she tried to run away, he grabbed her with bruising
force, and then, grimacing, forced her to the ground, her legs splayed
out straight in front o f her.
Then he pushed down on her