The New Depression Is Not So New

I really do not like the word depression. I believe it is a catchword designed by the medical industry to rationalize and efficiently market drugs and services. The notion that depression or hyperactivity or attention deficit or manic depression is due to chemical imbalance of one kind or other is not sound.

In the 1600’s it would have been very difficult to find someone who didn’t believe in the existence of witchcraft, or in the pernicious evils of the practitioners. Those people who did not believe it pretty much kept their opinions to themselves, and for good reason. It was very easy to become a suspect, and very difficult, if not impossible, to prove you were not a devil worshiper. If, after sixteen hour days of strenuous farming and other survival related activities, someone was tempted to sleep in on the day of rest rather than attend church, that was often enough to cast initial suspicion.

And if you had an antagonist, frequently they could effortlessly trump up a case against you. It happened a lot.

But enough of that. Now let us flash forward to the mid twentieth century; my childhood. It was in that aftermath of two great world wars and the devastating hardships of inflation and economic collapse, not all that different than today. Both optimism and hysteria were in the air, a volatile mix, I was a confused and conflicted child, but no more so than my siblings or parents.

My father had just been honorably released from the Pastorship of his last Presbyterian congregation, Most of the members of his flock never learned of hs various “addictions” to sex, alcohol, amphetamines, barbiturates, and the control of those around him. One of my siblings came to believe that my father was the devil incarnate. I am inclined to believe otherwise. He was simply a tragic product of a great many complex circumstances, with which he was ultimately unable to totally come to grips. Sad to say, even in his final years, true resolution evaded his grasp.

It is typical of me that when in the course of writing, the subject turns to my father, I can only get a handful of paragraphs out before looking for reasons to stop and turn to something else. I used to think that it might be because there were still living people whose illusions about my father might be shattered because of my remarks. Not that I would be inconveniencing him, but them. Honor thy father and thy mother. I can honor him in no better way than trying as best I can to understand why he was as he was, and to approach a better idea of what might have made him that way.

From my earliest memory, my father dwelled on death, and toyed with suicide. He also liked life insurance. As far as I know, he always had some. And he spoke of it often. About how well protected we would all be when he was gone, and the hardships often endured to pay the premiums. It is perhaps why it never, ever occurred to me to buy any, and why I have never been able to discuss such things with my children.

A couple years ago I visited my youngest son in Texas, He had a theater room and encouraged me to watch a couple of movies. One was a truly violent, murderous thing called Sin City. I found it exciting and vivid and, today can remember only flashes of it.

The other was about a fellow who was into tracking down the history behind snapshots that he had been collecting. Second World War photographs. Some sort of quest to better come to grips with the holocaust in a deeper and more personal sense than what happened in the famous death camps. He had acquired an opportunistic youmg guide, and was driven by an old gent who was seemingly sight impaired, yet somehow managed not to kill them with his driving.

The blind driver was also, to all appearances, virulently anti-semitic. I particularly remember the oddity of that since my son feels there are not two sides to the intractable Palestinian/Israeli situation. He is whole-heartedy and unremittingly pro-Isreali.

But as it turns out, the blind driver was actually a Jew who had passed as a gentile after the war, in part because race hatred was still just as alive and well after the fall of the Nazi’s.

In any case, this movie affected me rather profoundly. At one particular moment, I saw a photo which just opened the gates, and tears more profuse than I ever remember without intense physical pain, flowed as spasms of anguish overcame me. I had remembered the pictures my father had shown me -- no, not showed, but compelled me to see when I was about five. News pictures of the death camps. For sixty years, I had been driving like the blind man in the movie, and had no idea.

Had I had this horrible epiphany when my father was alive, I am sure I would have tried to fathom why he had done that. But frankly, my father was never particularly forthcoming about anything related to my youth. I don’t think he was actually trying to withhold, but rather that he had just selectively forgotten, and that he had no intention of revisiting things long gone, particularly from a perspective other than his own.

I guess this all came up because my parents had gone through the Great Depression, and it certainly played a big role in making them who they were. There was not a lot of good cheer in the houshold of my childhood. And I was a prodigal son starting at the age of twelve. No matter how many times I escaped and was recaptured, my resolve remained strong.

Surely, one of the greatest playwrites America has produced was Eugene O’Neil. His work is extremely unpleasant and disturbing, at least to me. I find it difficult to sustain my resolve to see a full production intact. In pieces, I can deal with it.

I saw Long Days Journey Into Night, which, if memory serves me was set in the year 1912. It was actually written in the fifties, and I saw it in about 1961.

Although the story had taken place a half century earlier, it had a contemporary flavor. The pivotal character was a morphine addicted mother, but O’Neil never saw the need to spell that out in so many words, so I was thinking heroin.

But heroin had only been in commercial production for perhaps a decade or so, and Bayer had a monopoly on it at the time. It had not yet been around long enough to have been the likely cause of her addiction, which had apparently dated back to a difficult childbirth recovery a few decades earlier.

There were her sons, two brothers of considerable complexity. The considerably elder of the two was a lush and ne’er-do-well. The younger probably had tuberculosis, but everyone pretty much skipped around that as well. I don’t recall the word consumption ever being used.

As for the husband and father, he had been an actor of only middling success who dreamed of what might have been. He was frugal to a fault, from everyone’s perspective but his own.

What stands out for me most now, in retrospect, is considerably different than my first reactions, those of a twenty year old. I was then still in a much more fluid and fugitive state of being. Not being married, as prodigal a son as I could be, having hacked my roots off with a considerable vengeance, the only character with whom I could empathize was the younger son, And perhaps, like me, he was the least fully fleshed out character of them all. In spite of my years as a feral teen, and filled with bravado because of my luck at survival, I was still very much at loose ends.

Now I see things more from the vantage point of the father, for whom life had held some rude surprises, some of them brought upon himself. His sons had little use for him, but their disdain was more disguised than his for them. The eldest was determined to fail at anything his father would have held to be of value, and the younger was moving in a similar direction, although his illness portended that his failure would take less active effort than his older brother had employed. Suddenly the play holds new and deeper meaning, becoming more universally tragic. No winners or heroes here. No happy ending on the horizon. Just a Long Days Journey Into Night.