PicoBlog

Today I want to raise up two really involving articles that are very different from one another but that really commanded my attention.

The first, by Margaret Talbot, ran in the October 2, 2023 issue of the New Yorker. “Behind a Closed Door”. It’s a very long, deep and complicated investigation of the childhood experiences of a woman who grew up in Austria named Evy Mages who has spent much of her adult life as a photojournalist in New York City and Washington D.C.

Talbot and Mages partnered up to look into Mages’ memory of being taken from the home of her foster family to a house in Innsbruck when she was eight years old, in 1973, and then being confined there under horrific circumstances for several months, after which she eventually ended up in a German orphanage before leaving as a young adult for New York. Over the course of the essay, the reader discovers that the house was a facility run by a then-respected Austrian academic specializing in child psychology named Maria Nowak-Vogl.

Over the course of the article, what emerges is first that postwar Austria established a network of abusive facilities designed for “difficult children”, but that Nowak-Vogl’s facility, which operated from 1954 to 1987, was particularly harrowing. Nowak-Vogl was obsessed with stamping out masturbation and bed-wetting, particularly in girls, on the belief that these led to deviance, disobedience and disorder. She did so by compelling children to sleep straight with their arms at their sides, to sleep with heavy underpants, and by forcing them to take cold showers and stand in the corner for the whole night if they wet the bed. Their use of toilets was constantly monitored during the day as well. She also enforced silence during meal-times, compelled children to eat everything put on their plates (if they failed to do so, they were served the leftovers the next day), and compelled children to recount their dreams and punished them if they failed to do so. Children were told not to form or express friendships on the belief that this was “sexualized behavior”.

Children in the facility were administered a variety of psychotropic drugs, but also an untested drug called epiphysan that Nowak-Vogl believed would suppress female sexuality.

Unsurprisingly, when Mages and Talbot eventually make contact with a woman who worked briefly at the facility, she bitterly recounts how staff members also physically abused some children, and that Nowak-Vogl “hated the children…she wanted to destroy childhood in the children”.

It’s also unsurprising to see the spectre of Nazism and eugenics lurking around the edges of the story, and how Nowak-Vogl’s personal cruelty and repressiveness was constantly reshaped in slight ways to promise a solution to the concerns of the Austrian mainstream after the war, including an antidote to student protest movements in the 1970s.

I frequently found myself overwhelmed by the article. First by a sense of disbelief: this was happening during my lifetime. In fact, almost in tandem with my life: Mages is almost the same age as I am. In my life, someone claiming the authority of science was being this profoundly evil to children, and being accounted an expert by universities and licensed by a government. This isn’t some distant history, some long ago thing. And yet, as my daughter pointed out as I talked over dinner about how distressing the article was, there are camps and facilities in the United States operating right now for “difficult youth”—or to convert LGBQT children and teenagers back to heterosexuality—that are just as abusive and just as full of phony, evil nonsense about some kind of therapeutic regime or corrective practice. The past is not even past.

The second overwhelming thing, however, was that the investigation reveals both that the survivors of the house have found ways to healing—while also being haunted by memory—and that further restoration is not only possible, but is achieved within the course of the work that went into the article. Not only has the Austrian government recognized the enormous harm done and tried to compensate for it, and not only have Austrian historians done a fantastic job of detailing how this happened, but also Evy Mages makes new connections with her children, finds her sister, and even reconciles with her foster mother, who acknowledges that she was cruel and hurtful to her foster daughter for no reason. She confronts a file that not only documents the general abusiveness of the government’s approach to children at the time, but also the name of her birth father, which she had not known.

I found myself weeping several times while reading, but never more so on reading the last comment in the government file on Evy Mages as a teenager: “The minor is courageous enough to assert herself in life.” One true thing on top of an archive of cruelty and lies.

But somehow, despite how angry and sad and darkly depressed I felt as I read through the piece, it does also give me a sense that somehow, progress has happened, or that progress is possible. This whole week, I’ve been somehow picking up on little moments in other things I read and see that help sustain that thought, traces of things that really are better in my lifetime. That sense that Austrians who hear this story now are as distressed and disturbed as I feel on reading it is something to hold on to. There has to be hope that once you strip away something like “a home for difficult children” from its protective shell and expose the evil inside of it, there’s almost nobody who will make excuses. The deeper hope might be that we all learn to pre-emptively exercise that diligence so that nothing like that ever gets a pass again.

Amanda Hess’ essay in the New York Times on viral videos of in-flight fights and meltdowns is massively different in feel, but for some reason it really grabbed hold of me this morning.

I also will view a lot of those videos pretty compulsively. (The other genre that often commands my attention are dashcam videos of bad, awful or selfish driving.) Hess did a lot to explain why that attention is not just an embarrassing case of rubber-necking at someone else’s distress. There’s something very important happening in those videos.

What I think is happening, riffing off of Hess, is that plane flights in the last twenty years are essentially an (accidental?) experimental study of what’s been happening to us in the rest of our lives. And thus, also, a falsification of some of the worst ideological attempts to dismiss the truth about that change.

Airline executives, the federal government, and a kind of general haze of neoliberal opinion try to argue that viral videos of bad behavior from passengers show us “human nature”, something deep and universal about how people behave in stressful situations. That a plane is just a Hobbsean nightmare waiting to happen, that there’s a thin blue line of flight attendants and air marshals standing between a flying nation and anarchy in the air.

Occasionally, tinpot moralists get in on the action. People these days are so selfish or mean. The world is getting worse. Why back in my day folks sat quietly and never did any such thing. Crying babies? Bah! When I was young, we loved to hear the sounds of a crying baby on a plane, because we believed in family and God. And so on.

But the reality of the experiment, the laboratory microcosm on a plane, is that people are angry, panicked, stressed, on a plane and even by the thought of getting on a plane because the airline industry have forced people to viscerally confront the reality of increased inequality and to experience physical and psychological pain because of that reality. To sit in smaller seats, to have seatbacks jammed into bodies, to have other people touching you and to touch them when normally social politeness involves immense care about coming into contact with other bodies. To see people who don’t have to endure those conditions right there, just up the aisle. The inequality is there from the moment you arrive—a longer line to check-in, a slower process through security, a waiting area where none of the outlets for charging devices work. But most of that at least, there’s a physical segregation between the elect and the plebs.

There’s no chance on the crowded, miserable flights that have been deliberately engineered by the airlines to work out sociality even in a kind of temporary way. The production of scarcity and the spectacle of inequality are triggering pressures on almost everybody—what is often invisible or effaced, what is subtextual, text. As Hess says, “distinctions of class and status are made explicit”, now in almost every seat and situation. That seat? $30 extra, because it’s the aisle. This seat? $60 extra, it’s the exit row. That seat, the cheapest (but not cheap)? It’s the last row, next to the toilet, last to board, last to exit, and likely not to get any food.

Hess puts it perfectly: the plane now poses the question, “Do we live in a society or a marketplace?” We are all on the plane when we’re there—there won’t be anybody who gets to buy their way out if it crashes, or who can continue on to their destination if it’s diverted. But otherwise the airline is telling us: we don’t care about society except when it comes to using police power to remove someone from that space. We don’t even care about our own workers, who understand that they’re being made the exposed and visible representatives of our quest for record profits.

Which seems (here I am back to a loss of faith in progress) an experiment that reveals much of why we are all increasingly screaming at one another while feeling completely unable to touch the people who are engineering our suffering.

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