Poor Sean Spicer, the world’s most egregious bully-victim. The White House press spokesman may well have been yelled at by the C-in-C who was unable to “enjoy” his first day in office due to press reports about the low turnout, and Spicer duly took it out on the tiresome Wahrheitpresse (truth press). Now a strange new fact has emerged from US reports about Spicer. Every day, the manic press chief chews 35 pieces of Orbit gum – and swallows them.
All the time, his jaws are working: chewing, chewing, chewing. And he doesn’t spit. He swallows. It’s not necessarily bad for him. Maybe it’s better that he does that, rather than contributing to gum-related litter. But why? Isn’t it a little bit dysfunctional? A quasi-eating disorder in someone who is both predator and prey? Could it be that Spicer can’t stand for his mouth to feel yucky and he has to spruce up the minty taste in there all the time with gum – but won’t do anything as yucky as spit it out? If so, then this is a temperament he shares with his famously “germophobe” employer.
Drinking to forget
“Blessed are the forgetful,” said Nietzsche, “for they get the better even of their own blunders.” Can forgetting be a sign of strength? Psychologists at University College London are experimenting with giving problem drinkers a one-off dose of the drug ketamine, which will erase harmful memories. This means the memories of enjoying drink, and various Pavlovian associations and triggers: the sound of glasses clinking, the expectant feeling on returning home from work, the sight of beaded bubbles winking at the brim. (Though of course, alcohol addiction often provides its own sort of unreliable and alarming memory erasure.)
Is the cure for unhappiness simply a case of memory management? It’s very like Charlie Kaufman’s film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, about a firm called Lacuna that offers laser brain surgery to remove unhappy memories, generally for people who have been rejected romantically. “Will this procedure cause brain damage?” asks one client, to which the doctor gravely replies: “Technically, this procedure is brain damage.”
In Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, the narrator is told by Swann that if he moved to a paradise island he would forget all about Paris. Maybe. But perhaps the ketamine treatment will meet resistance precisely because of people’s loyalty to their own unhappiness.
In praise of golf
All US presidents are supposed to love golf, and Donald Trump has famously opened a course in Scotland, the land of his forebears – high-handedly dismissing the concerns of local residents.
But sadly this looks as it will be yet another point of Trumpian dispute with China, which is cracking down on golf. The ruling Communist party has closed down 111 Chinese courses, on the grounds that they are a massive waste of land and water, an echo of Mao Zedong’s disparaging view that golf is a “sport for millionaires”. Perhaps the one person who kept the idea of golf acceptable to the non-golf classes is John Updike, with his ecstatic golf-related prose.
Maybe Mao and Trump would have admired Updike’s concept of a golfer’s modesty: “Few sights are more odious on the golf course than a sauntering, beered-up foursome obviously having a good time. Some golfers, we are told, enjoy the landscape; but properly the landscape shrivels and compresses into the grim, surrealistically vivid patch of grass directly under the golfer’s eyes as he morosely walks toward where he thinks his ball might be. We should be conscious of no more grass, the old Scots adage goes, than will cover our own graves.”
