Jerry Lembcke

The "Right Stuff" Gone Wrong: Vietnam Veterans and the Social Construction of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

This paper presents a social constructionist account of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Its account of PTSDs multi-faceted origins begins with the efforts of the Nixon Administration to discredit of the voice of anti-war veterans following the fall, 1969, Moratorium Days against the war. Subsequently, mental health professionals frame veteran political behavior within a medical discourse, transporting the concepts alienation, survivor guilt, and flashbacks into the PTSD literature from other contexts. The New York Times plays a critical role in legitimating PTSD.

Classical Theory, Postmodernism, and the Sociology Liberal Arts Curriculum.

This article presents classical theory as a modernist endeavor to apprehend the phenomenon of “unity of disunity.” It presents the three ways that classical theory comes to grips with the problem of wholes and parts: the holism of Durkheim, the dialectical materialism of Marx, and the pluralism of Weber. It argues that postmodernism liquidates, rather than solves, the unity of disunity problem by treating “wholes” as mere appearances.The article contends that postmodernism needs to be taken more seriously than it has been by sociologists but that, ultimately, the challenge presented by postmodernism validates the relevancy of classical theory. The article concludes that the postmodernist influence has diminished sociology’s relevance to real-world problems and, as a result, made the discipline less relevant for undergraduates. It calls for a revitalized sociology of sociology with the capacity to think through the trap formed by neoconservatism on the one side and the micro politics of postmodernism on the other.

Class Capacities and Labor Internationalism: The Case of the CIO-CCL Unions

This article counterposes a class analysis to the more conventional Weberian frameworks that have been used to interpret past and current attempts at working class internationalism. It uses the U.S.-Canadian case to show that working class nationalism has not universally displaced cross-border class solidarity and that, even when it has, that displacement process is better understood as a dimension of class conflict than as a geo-cultural phenomenon. The article shows that different fractions of the working class have greater propensities toward internationalism than others. The article is a caveat on the spirit of enthusiasm that reformists have shown for the recent secessions of Canadian unions from the AFL-CIO.

Recapturing Marxism : an appraisal of recent trends in sociological theory

Acknowledgments Preface Introduction: Marxism, Neo-Marxism, and American Sociology by Rhonda F. Levine and Jerry Lembcke Crisis and Vitalization: An Interpretive Essay on Marxist Theory by Albert Szymanski New Classes and Old Theories: The Impasse of Contemporary Class Analysis by Peter Meiksins Class and Class Capacities: A Problem of Organizational Efficacy by Jerry Lembcke Bringing Classes Back In: State Theory and Theories of the State by Rhonda F. Levine The Limits of the World-System Perspective by Alex Dupuy and Barry Truchil Race, Ethnicity and Class by James A. Geschwender Recent Ideological Tendencies in Urban and Regional Research: Neo-Liberalism and Social Democracy by Richard Peet Behind the Veil of Neutrality: Hegemony in the Academic Marketplace by Peter Seybold Feminism: A Marxist Critique by Albert Szymanski Thinking About Social Class: Structure, Organization, and Consciousness by Scott G. McNall List of Contributors

Reviews: What About the Not-So-Hidden Injuries of Class ?

&dquo;a class system of authority and judgment making&dquo; (p. 150) and &dquo;a scheme of values that sorts men into different classes&dquo; (p. 75 & 76). At times it seems that class is a process of labeling (p. 85 & 86) and the hidden injury of class comes from being classified (p. 76). Sennett and Cobb do not see class as rooted in any material, structural conditions. They say, &dquo;A class society, Sartre has remarked, is a society of scarce re-

“Shell Shock” in the American Imagination: World War I's Most Enduring Legacy

The war veteran suffering shell shock is one of the most enduring images of twentieth-century war. Coined during World War I, it was soon discredited as a diagnostic category and studied thereafter as a socially constructed concept akin to hysteria. Culturally, however, shell shock played out in Germanys interwar period as a metaphor for a nation traumatized by war whose defeat and hurt could only be avenged through more war. In the United States, the notion of shell shock proved useful for defining a new diagnostic category, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was said to be “like shell shock.” This paper will reprise in greater detail this biography of shell shock with attention to the way art, film, and other cultural forms played into its construction, and how PTSD and traumatic brain injury (TBI) now abet an American lost-war narrative eerily similar to that which remilitarized Germany in its interwar period.

Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory:

theory, demonstrating the superiority of the former as a guiding framework for the sociology of emotions. A second is a chapter on love and sex in which he shows how statuspower theory can help us to make sense of the dynamics of intimate relationships and the primacy of sexual desire. The final chapter provides a thoughtful analysis of status-power theory as both a predictive and a postdictive theory, or Theory 1 and Theory 2. Over his long career, Kemper has achieved recognition for his contributions to Theory 1, having produced theoretical propositions that he has tested with empirical research. In this chapter, however, Kemper argues that post-diction is good enough when it comes to developing a theory of emotions. That is, rather than using statuspower theory as a basis for predicting emotional responses (as he has done in many empirical studies), he recommends employing status-power theory following an emotional experience as a way of understanding what had transpired in any given social interaction. This is a particularly important point. Although status-power theory has been and can continue to be empirically tested and refined with experimental studies, I carried a nagging doubt through my reading of this book about its overall predictive power in real-life situations. On the one hand, I was pleased to discover the breadth of Kemper’s conceptions of status and power. But on the other hand, if people differ from each other with respect to the array of reference groups with whom they engage status-power relations, then it would seem to be impossible to reliably predict behavior or emotional response without knowing a person’s guiding reference groups. I was pleasantly surprised, then, to find Kemper argue for postdictive theory as a good enough theory of emotions. I have had a very long engagement with Kemper’s book. Note that the book was published in 2011, while it is now 2014. My intention was to produce the review in a timely manner, and when life circumstances interfered I maintained my intention day after day for three long years. My copy of Kemper’s book is well worn. It has traveled with me every day in my backpack for nearly three years, since I intended to finish that review each day of my extremely lengthy period of tardiness. I have carried it to doctor’s appointments, to family reunions, and anywhere where I thought I might have found some minutes to read it. Most days it got out of my backpack to be read, and always for these three very long years was the book on my mind. Each night as I have wound down before sleep, I have found myself analyzing the experiences of the day and my own internal dialogues in terms of Kemper’s status-power theory. I found it particularly useful for analyzing my internal dialogues, since it led me to name the operative reference groups with which I was engaged in internal dialogue and to consider my status-power objectives with respect to each of them. I would suggest that the application of Kemper’s framework provided the means for the most lucid and deepest selfreflection. Whether or not one agrees with Kemper’s contention of the uselessness of a concept of self, I think Kemper is certainly right that there is no better way to understand a person’s sense of self than by analysis of a person’s status-power relations with their guiding reference groups. I deeply regret being so extremely late in producing this review, but I have no regrets for the long period of time I have spent thinking about Kemper’s theory. Kemper’s book is a top-rate contribution to the discipline of sociology as a whole.

Review symposium II: Reply to Mintz, Philips and Philion

I did not see Valley of Death when it aired on CNN in June, 1998 but, as I read news reports about it in the ensuring days, the words “myth” and “legend” kept coming to mind. My initial skepticism derived from the story being sourced-based solely on the memories of veterans. I was also struck by the thirty-eight years of silence between the event and its exposé. Was it possible, I wondered, for a whole group of defecting GIs to have holed-up in Laos and then been killed by their own government without even a rumor of the event having circulated within groups like Vietnam Veterans Against the War? And it seemed a too-convenient coincidence that Sarin nerve gas was appearing for the first time in a Vietnam-war story on the heels of news reports that an obscure Japanese religious cult had used it in 1995. Perhaps, I thought, defectors in the story were an incarnation of the “The Legend of the Lost Command,” the Sarin, a story-telling prop evocative of familiar post-war narratives of governmental evil doing, secrecy, cover-up, and betrayal? I wasn’t sure. As time passed, and supporters of the story were unable to muster convincing evidence for the claims made in Valley of Death, most critics concluded that CNN’s retraction had been appropriate. My interest in the story went beyond those matters to questions about where it had come from. If the real Operation Tailwind involved no nerve gas and no defectors, how did those elements get loaded into the memories of the men who told the story? And why did it seem right to the CNN producers, April Oliver and Jack Smith? I approached Valley of Death, then, not as a study in historical accuracy but a study of public memory about the war, American culture at the turn-of-themillennium, and the state of journalism in what I call “a fearful America.” It seems to me that Beth Mintz and Stephen Philion understand and appreciate this approach. Mintz remarks on the powerful influence that popular culture has on undergraduate students, a point that I can concur with from my teaching position at Holy Cross. On the subject of the war in Vietnam, most of what students “know” is infused with betrayal themes about how the war was fought and lost: liberals in congress and radicals in the streets undermined the morale of the soldiers and gave aid and comfort to the enemy. Film and folklore have displaced the historical record of GI and veteran involvements in the anti-war movement with mythical images of protesters spitting on returning soldiers. The idea that the war in Vietnam could have been won, had it not been for treason on the home

Growing Class Inequalities and Declining Class Politics: Where's the Paradox? Comment on Franklin

able. Americans do need to enhance their commitment to the public good, check their invidious habits, and think more globally. Americans also need an analysis that helps them understand why they don’t do all those good things. Unfortunately, Franklin’s paper, while long on sentiment, is short on analysis. Implicit in his paper is a periodization of U.S. history from the 1930s through the early 1960s. At first glance it is a periodization that is easy to agree with. During the early years of that period there was

The Political, Economic, and Cultural Complexities of Counterrevolution

Department of Sociology, Holy Cross College, Worcester, MA 01610. The idea for this roundtable was brainstormed about two months prior to the February 25th Nicaragua election. At the time, polls indicated a victory by the Sandinistas. It appeared that the election would be a watershed event after which Nicaraguan history would be on a qualitatively different plane: no more contra war, hopefully no more U.S. economic boycott, an elevated status of the FSLN inside and outside the country, and, in general, the political and economic space for Nicaragua’s economic engine to run on a good set of level tracks for a change. It wasn’t to be and our task today is quite different than the celebratory one we had anticipated. I went to Nicaragua as an election observer for the Worcester, Massachusett’s sister city project. Worcester’s sister city is Comalapa, a small cattle town in Chontales Department, about 100 miles east of