by Judy Jones
TRADE ASSOCIATION)
The media coverage of this, the trade deal linking the United States, Canada, and Mexico, seemed almost willfully incomprehensible at the time (although perhaps not so willfully incomprehensible as the public debate), both before and after NAFTA actually went into effect on the first day of 1994. Part of the problem was that NAFTA wasn’t really news. The United States and Canada had had their own bilateral trade agreement since 1989, and were so heavily invested in each other even before that that NAFTA didn’t really stand to change a whole lot. Mexico is a little different—we never used to party with them much, and they did seem a little, it hurts us to say this, inclined to the making of brooms— but even here the United States had been treating Mexico like an enormous, if backward, fifty-first state just south of Texas since at least the mid-1980s, when it started endowing all those maquiladoras. Of course, this didn’t, at the time, alter the intellectual perceptions (if you can call them that) of anybody—e.g., the Clinton administration, along with most Democrats (pro), or Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, and the AFL-CIO, leadership and manpower alike (con), with the Republicans having to decide (1) whether NAFTA was the sort of big-business proposition they ought to like and (2) even if it was, whether they still shouldn’t vote against Clinton. Then there was the problem of all the different systems all of the above players had devised to count things up, especially jobs—e.g., NAFTA would have created somewhere between 30,000 and 170,000 new jobs in the United States by 1998, a range of estimates that were actually published with a straight face. Jobs were the most roiling of NAFTA issues, especially blue-collar—or, in the case of Mexico, no-collar—jobs, an ongoing trauma for all three countries. In 2004, when NAFTA celebrated its tenth birthday, neither side had moved much from its original position. These days, NAFTA supporters, mostly wearing Armani, will point to the dramatic increase in intra-American trade, which more than doubled in the associations first decade. Investment is way up, too, they beam, bringing with it more and higher-paying jobs as well as lower costs for consumers. Environmental and working conditions have benefited from NAFTA side agreements. And just look at Mexico, which finally has an almost-first-world credit rating and is now seen by corporate boards and venture capitalists as more of a North American country than a Latin American one. “Bull droppings!” shout NAFTA opponents, sporting T-shirts and serapes. “Trade and investment may be up, but the only people who’ve benefited are the rich shareholders, owners, and executives of multinational corporations.” They insist that workers in all three countries have lost jobs or rights or at the very least have seen their wages fall relative to their productivity. Mexico, they point out, is poorer than ever, with manufacturers now moving to China for cheap labor and poor peasant farmers having their livelihoods buried under thousands of tons of subsidized U.S. corn. Statistics show that the number of Mexicans crossing the border to find work has doubled since NAFTA went into effect. And forget about laws protecting workers’ health and the environment, say NAFTA-haters; they’re subordinated at every turn by the chance to make a buck. Observers trying to maintain neutrality usually conclude that both sides have a point, and that in the end NAFTA may matter most as a lesson in how to, and how not to, stitch together future trade agreements, such as the pending CAFTA (Central American Free Trade Agreement) and the even bigger-deal FTAA (Free Trade Agreement of the Americas) currently being negotiated by 34 countries.
A Trio of Geographical Clarifications for a Nation That, Frankly, Would Rather Skateboard
One way to divide up the Western Hemisphere is to snap it in two just a little below its narrowest point, the Isthmus of Panama. (Not for no reason did they decide to dig the canal there, rather than across, say, Honduras.) This gives you two big pieces: North America, which includes Canada, the United States, Mexico, Central America, the West Indies, and, up top, Greenland, still owned by Denmark; and South America, which includes the continent’s twelve independent nations (ranging in size from Brazil, the fifth-largest country in the world, to Suriname, the former Dutch Guiana), plus French Guiana and the notorious Falkland Islands.
On the other hand, there are times when a person wants to speak collectively of his southern neighbors (more and more of whom are, we grant you, trading in the metaphor of neighborhood for a substandard three-room apartment right down the block). Now the term of choice is Latin America, and it takes in everything from Mexico and Cuba all the way to Chile and Argentina. Everything, that is, that speaks a Romance language, which leaves out most current and former British colonies, likewise Dutch ones, as well as the U.S. Virgin Islands; Puerto Rico, though, is Latin American.
South-of-the-border breaks down in other ways, too. Central America is the seven nations stretching from Guatemala and Belize, which you may remember as British Honduras, to Panama. Middle America—however ridiculous the term sounds in light of all those old double-knit-polyester jokes—includes, in addition to Central America, both Mexico and the countries of the Caribbean (a.k.a., more or less, the West Indies; see box), regardless of language and colonial past. Meso-America, which archaeologists and anthropologists like to throw around, designates the area from Mexico to roughly Nicaragua, rich in pre-Columbian architecture and artifacts. South America we’ve already talked about.
Now, what if you want to point only to those people in Latin America who speak Spanish—i.e., the Mexicans, the Central Americans, the residents of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic (not Haiti, next door, which speaks a free-form version of French), plus almost everybody in South America except the various Guianans and the Brazilians (the last of whom speak Portuguese)? Then you’ll say Spanish America, or better, given that the United States kicked Spain out of Cuba and Puerto Rico, its last New World holdings, in 1898, Hispanic America.
ISLANDS IN THE STREAM
A few nice distinctions for revolutionaries and winter vacation-goers. First, don’t think that Caribbean and West Indian are exact synonyms. The West Indies (which disappointed Columbus by not turning out to be the East Indies, that is, present-day Indonesia) includes all the Caribbean Islands (from the Carib Indians whom Columbus found living there, the source, also, of our word cannibal) plus the Bahamas, which aren’t any more in the Caribbean than Fort Lauderdale is. The Caribbean Islands themselves break down into two big groups: the Greater Antilles (Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, which is shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico; called “Greater” simply because they’re big), and the Lesser Antilles (everything else, none of it with much heft). The Lesser Antilles break down, in turn, into the Leeward Islands (e.g., the Virgins, Antigua, Guadeloupe) and the Windward Islands (e.g., Grenada, Martinique), plus Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, and Curaçao and the rest of the Dutch Antilles. Bermuda, by the way, is not a West Indian island at all, but a flyspeck of a British colony a few hundred miles off the coast of North Carolina, all pink stucco houses and Shetland sweaters. If you’re heading there for a February vacation (or a revolution), you’ve made a terrible mistake.
It isn’t a sceptered isle or a precious stone set in the silver sea because it’s only a part of that isle and that stone. The other parts are called Wales (to the West) and Scotland (to the north), and together the three have made up a single country since the 1707 Act of Union between England (which had already swallowed up Wales) and Scotland. It was called “Great” less out of copywriter’s overkill than to distinguish it from “Little Britain,” better known as Brittany, across the channel in France, which had been named and settled by Celts driven out of “historic” Britain by the Germanic Angles and Saxons in the fifth and sixth centuries. Not to be outdone, evidently, the Angles came up with “England.”
No, we’re not finished. The British Isles is the name for the islands of Britain and Ireland taken together, along with such outlying island groups as the Shetlands and the Orkneys and the British possessions of the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. The United Kingdom is the formal name for the nation you now won’t be referri
ng to as England; its full name is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. (It was known as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 1801 until southern Ireland—a.k.a. the Irish Free State, a.k.a. Eire—pulled out in 1922.) Today, both “Britain” and “the UK” are accepted shorthand forms for “United Kingdom.”
No, we’re not finished. The British Empire, which at its height, just after World War I, took in 450 million people spread over 14 million square miles (a quarter of the earth’s population and land surface), from Canada to Ceylon, Ireland to Iraq, Australia to Antigua, and which the sun was supposed never to set on, hasn’t existed since 1947, when India and Pakistan became independent, and when “British Commonwealth” seemed like a more diplomatic heading under which to be bearing what remained of “the white man’s burden.” Now, unless you’re a reactionary yourself, you’d do well to call it “the Commonwealth,” more formally “the Commonwealth of Nations,” no “British” about it.
No, we’re not quite finished. British—the adjective—can be used of the island of Britain and the people who live on it, assuming you don’t want to be more specific and say English, Welsh, or Scottish (which, for what it’s worth, is preferred by most Scots to “Scotch,” unless it’s broth or whiskey you’re talking about); the Northern Irish are Irish, not British, but begorrah, and we’d best not be opening that one up. A person who lives in Britain is a Briton, as opposed to a Breton, which is a person who lives in Brittany (or Bretagne, as the French like to say). “Britishers” is what Americans sometimes call Britons, who find the word mildly funny. Be all that as it may, you’ll still probably choose, with most Britons, to refer to Prince Philip’s wife not as “Her Britannic Majesty” but as “the Queen of England.”
Nobody uses “Near East” much anymore as a way of indicating Turkey, Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, and usually Iraq and the countries of the Arabian Peninsula. (Earlier, in the nineteenth century, it had been used exclusively of the Balkans, Greece, and Turkey, “near” with regard to “civilized” Europe.) “Middle East”—or, more folksily, “Mideast”—is still going strong, however, and takes in all of the above, from Turkey on down, as well as Libya and the Maghreb (see below); the Sudan; Ethiopia and Somalia (the so called Horn of Africa: think rhinoceros), plus Iran and Afghanistan. And if you’re nostalgic for Days of Empire, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan), Burma (now Myanmar), and even Nepal, today usually lumped together as the Indian Subcontinent, although Burma has lately been sliding into the lap of Southeast Asia, over to its right.
“Arab world,” an expression that varies in popularity according to whether the Arabs are speaking to one another at the time, leaves out Israel, obviously; it also leaves out Iran (which is Muslim but not Arab), Ethiopia (which is full of Christian blacks), Turkey (which is full of Turks, who, incidentally, in the days of the Ottoman Empire, played landlord to the entire neighborhood), and all points beyond. On the other hand, “Arab world” very definitely includes Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, which together with Libya form a strictly regional grouping called the Maghreb, from the Arabic word for “west,” which is where they lie with regard to Egypt and Arabia, secular and spiritual Arab headquarters, respectively. “Arab League” is the loose twenty-two-nation political association of Arab states throughout the region, Morocco to Iraq, Lebanon to Somalia, with Arab nationalism its raison d’être; “United Arab Republic,” you may remember, was the short-lived union of Egypt and Syria.
So much for now. There’s also a sizable backlist of geographical names, any of which can pop up without much warning. “Palestine” got a new lease on life with the PLO; historically, it describes the territory defined roughly by present-day Israel, from biblical times to its British mandate following World War I, with bits of Jordan (formerly Transjordan, “across the Jordan [River]”) and Egypt thrown in. “Asia Minor” (“Little Asia”) is essentially Turkey, at least the 95 percent of it that’s not in Europe and that’s also today known as Anatolia. “The Fertile Crescent” arches from the Mediterranean coast of Syria in the west to Iraq and the Persian Gulf in the east; like the Nile Valley, it’s a famous Cradle of Civilization, especially the Mesopotamian portion of it, centered on the plain bounded by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. “The Levant” (from the French word for “rise,” which the French enjoyed thinking the sun did there) is the eastern tier of the Mediterranean, Greece to Egypt, but especially the Syria-Lebanon portion of it, which the French got as their mandate following World War I.
Which brings us to the term “Orient” itself, from the Latin word for “rise,” a term that, until this century, was used invariably to designate Turkey, Arabia, Egypt, Persia (our Iran), Palestine, etc., not China, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines, which were known then, as they still are today, as the Far East. This shouldn’t come as a surprise: The fellows in whose honor “We Three Kings of Orient Are” was written weren’t, after all, shoguns.
Herr Doktor, What’s Wrong with Me?
Somebody—was it Freud or one’s freshman-year roommate?—defined a “neurotic” as a person who could neither love nor work, but who was still, nine days out of ten, able to get around. In other words, whatever trouble he or she may be having with unresolved anxiety, guilt, or revulsion, a neurotic remains capable of coherent speech, good manners, tasteful outfits, and what psychologists—or was it one’s freshman-year roommate?—call reality-testing.
The neurotic (unlike the psychotic, about whom more in a minute) is not out of his mind. If anything, he’s too much in it, condemned to try to use his neurotic symptom (the obsessive-compulsive’s ritual hand-washing, for instance) as an outlet for the least objectionable part of an objectionable impulse and, usually, as a barrier against the enactment of the rest of that impulse as well. Where do these objectionable impulses come from? Childhood sexual wishes, mostly, some as early as in-crib masturbation and feces smearing, some later and directed against one’s parents, nearly all of which proved painful or unwieldy and were repressed, that is, chased out of consciousness and “forgotten.” As if all that weren’t enough, the fledgling neurotic’s libido—his sex drive and primary energy source, lying inside him, as Freud pointed out, like so much crude oil—regresses, finding safer, more manageable satisfactions in an earlier, less intimidating stage of sexual development.
Don’t take it personally. This one-two punch is the fate of almost everybody, and it generally connects with us in mid-Oedipus complex, just when we’re trying to catch the bus for kindergarten. But not everybody has to deal with it all over again later. That chore falls to the adult for whom adult-style goings-on— or the lack of them—have become so painful, so unwieldy that he reinstitutes the long-dormant repression-and-regression process. Tied to a period and a pattern in the past, with things going badly now, he repeats, or acts out, over and over and over again, the trauma he can’t “remember.” As Freud once sighed, “Today, neurosis takes the place of the monasteries, which used to be the refuge of all whom life had disappointed or who felt too weak to face it.”
Like cancer and AIDS, the other mythic diseases of the century, neurosis is a grab bag of ailments, syndromes, and prognoses, with a complex causation closely linked to individual susceptibility. Reach in and you’re likely to pull out one of the following, quaintly divided here, as they were in Freud’s day, between the “transference” and the “narcissistic” varieties.
The transference neuroses, also known as the classical neuroses, were the ones Freud thought psychoanalysis could actually cure. They include:
HYSTERIA: from the Greek word for “womb,” used, pre-Freud, to designate only certain female disorders; subsequently applied to any disorder in which anxiety is converted into bodily paralysis or a sensory disturbance like blindness.
