"[Wilhelm Reich] treated mostly working-class patients and believed that they were 'carrying their past experiences around in their bodies, storing their emotional pain as a kind of tension'..."

"... which he called 'character armor.' Therapy could help, as could Marxism, but what was really needed, Reich thought, was a revolution in sex, the liberatory potential of which had been warped by an extractive economic system..."

From "Olivia Laing’s Strange, Sublime Book on the Body 'Everybody' is, per the title, an interrogation of bodies, but not in the sense that bodies are usually interrogated" by Katie Waldman in The New Yorker.

This is a review of a book that is about a whole lot of people, not just Reich, but we're told he's the "central character" and "fragments of Reich’s story are woven throughout." Somehow the book is "an interrogation of bodies, but not in the sense that bodies are usually interrogated."

The book skips over traditional sites of interest, such as health or appearance, to explore questions of force and constraint, and how, more abstractly, our physical forms can shove us into conceptual categories—Black, male—that then shape us further.... The book proceeds, via an almost dreamlike, permutative logic, from the body as prison to the body in prison to masses of bodies in prison to masses of bodies in protest. At the end, we are released on a note that is either utopian or dryly ironic. “The free body,” Laing writes. “What a beautiful idea.”

Here's the book, in case you're tempted to read it. I sort of am. Well, it's the sort of thing I definitely would have read 30 years ago.

"Believing America’s generals were planning an imminent coup d’état, Mr. Bean abandoned his thriving career and moved his family to Australia in 1970."

"He became a disciple of the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich and wrote a book about his psychosexual theories, 'Me and the Orgone.' (The orgone was a pseudoscientific theory about a universal life force.) When the book appeared in 1971, Mr. Bean returned to America with his wife and four children and for years led a nomadic life as an aging hippie and 'househusband,' casting off material possessions in a quest for self-realization. 'We were so sure we didn’t want to be possessed by things and so intent on not having them that we gave away almost everything we owned,' he wrote in a 1977 Op-Ed in The Times. 'We entered what I now call our late hippie stage. We tossed the kids into the van, bummed around the country, sponging on our friends and putting the kids in school wherever we happened to light.' In his dropout years, as he recalled in a memoir, he experimented with psychedelic drugs, communal sex and other excursions into self-discovery. His peripatetic family collected driftwood and books, and at night read aloud to one another."

From "Orson Bean, Free-Spirited Actor of Stage and Screen, Dies at 91/The television, stage and film comedian starred on Broadway, was blacklisted as a suspected Communist, founded a progressive school and moved to Australia before returning to the U.S." (NYT).

If you remember Orson Bean, it is probably not for his hippie phase. As the NYT puts it, he is "remembered for early panel shows, which, in contrast to the culture of greed, noise and kitsch of modern game shows, were low key, relatively witty and sophisticated." You know, stuff like this:



He also acted in plenty of of movies and TV shows, notably the "Mr. Bevis" episode in the first season of "Twilight Zone." Clip:



Another distinction: Orson Bean was the father-in-law of Andrew Breitbart.

ADDED: Bean did not die of old age. He was struck by a car as he crossed the street in Los Angeles.

And this is interesting, from 2014, 3 years after the death of Andrew Breitbart, "Orson Bean on God, America, and Yesterday's Hollywood that Embraced Both" (Breitbard):

Bean said Breitbart resonated with so many people because he was fighting to right that culture, which he said is decaying, with optimism and joy. And he did it in an unconventionally fresh and unique way that warranted Breitbart’s name to be a trademarked, one-of-a-kind brand. Bean said it was Breitbart’s larger-than-life spirit that makes people come up to him to this day with tears in their eyes, saying, “you’re Andrew Breitbart’s father-in-law!”

Breitbart, who once was a fierce liberal, may never have been a conservative or built the foundation for his media empire had he not seen a Rush Limbaugh book in Bean’s library.

“Take it home and read it, Andrew,” Bean recalled telling his son-in-law.

And the rest is history.

"Ebola now functions in popular discourse as a not-so-subtle, almost completely rhetorical stand-in for any combination of 'African-ness,' 'blackness,' 'foreign-ness' and 'infestation'..."

"... a nebulous but powerful threat, poised to ruin the perceived purity of western borders and bodies. Dead African bodies are the nameless placeholders for (unwarranted, racist) 'panic,' a conversation topic too heavy for the dinner table yet light enough for supermarket aisles."

ADDED: Whether you agree with the quoted analysis or not, you need to be aware that this is how some people are processing the news. The issue is swirling within our politics, and this is a separate phenomenon from the disease itself.

Time to read/reread the 1978 Susan Sontag essay "Disease as Political Metaphor."

In the sense of an infection that corrupts morally and debilitates physically, syphilis was to become a standard trope in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anti-Semitic polemics. In 1933 Wilhelm Reich argued that “the irrational fear of syphilis was one of the major sources of National Socialism’s political views and its anti-Semitism.” But although he perceived sexual and political phobias being projected onto a disease in the grisly harping on syphilis in Mein Kampf, it never occurred to Reich how much was being projected in his own persistent use of cancer as a metaphor for the ills of the modern era.

You need to pay to get farther at that link. Here's a link for buying the book with that and more. (I've just bought it myself.)