Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 2005 | Page 118

114 Popular Culture Review Indeed, what role does suffering, the eternal teacher, play in then- never-never lands of the psyche? MacKay and Fanning don’t say. They and their best-selling colleagues would do well to consider Nietzsche’s splendid dictum that the man who despises himself nevertheless esteems himself as a self- despiser. Nietzsche meant that self-loathing and the sort of self-esteem mental health specialists like MacKay and Fanning espouse are opposite sides of the same coin, the coin being, of course, narcissism: a.k.a. taking the self too seriously for any reason. California State University, Bakersfield Steven Carter Notes 1 Todd Gitlin, “Postmodernism defined at last!” Utne Reaper, July/August, 1989,58. 2 Christopher Lasch, The Culture o f Narcissism: American Life in an Age o f Diminishing Expectations (New York: W.W. Norton Company, 1978), 10. 3 “TV Appearance o f Teen Victims Suggests Rape Stigma is Fading,” Los Angeles Times, August 8, 2002, A 18. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 “Battle Over Victims a Sign of Pressure in TV Industry,” Los Angeles Times, August 8, 2002, A19. 7 “TV Appearance o f Teen Victims Suggests Rape Stigma is Fading,” A18. 8 Ibid. 9 One extreme, but telling, example o f this. In May 2003, a most disturbing story appeared in The Bakersfield Californian. Thursday, a severely emotionally disturbed eighth-grader attacked a Walter Stiem Middle School teacher, breaking her vertebrae. While that teacher lay in the hospital, another began to speak out against the violent past of the boy, even as Bakersfield City School staff denied it. The 200-pound pupil was chasing a special education aide through the school courtyard Thursday when he ran up to [art teacher Vicki] Smart, who was on yard duty, she said. As she tried to run away, he grabbed her with bruising force, and then, grimacing, forced her to the ground, her legs splayed out straight in front o f her. Then he pushed down on her