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I must not Think Bad Thoughts: Latent Content in the American Dream Response to Commentary by Dick Blackwell

I am grateful to Dick Blackwell for reflecting with me – us, I should say – on the ideas and experiences that I took up in my essay. His thoughts are enriching and provocative, and provide considerable food for further thought. The hairs rose on the back of my neck when I read the title of Dick Blackwell’s commentary: ‘Who Played Ball with Bin Laden?’ My original working title was: ‘Playing Basketball with Bin Laden.’ After some heated discussion with the intervention team members, and a fair degree of ‘editorial feedback’ from colleagues, I had reluctantly changed the title. Yes, I thought, it’s true, the title is a bit flippant, and yes, it does carry within it the potential to offend. So Dick Blackwell’s title was an uncanny convergence indeed, and my initial response was the strange and disorienting sense that I was dreaming. Oddly, the refrain of an old song by the punk band ‘X’ (1983) entitled I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts was playing repetitively in my head, and I wondered what this dream was trying to communicate from my own, or my culture’s, unconscious. If this is a dream, I thought, then what part of my own repressed, dissociated unconscious process is speaking to me through it, that is, through the voice of my overseas colleague? Perhaps Dick Blackwell’s exploration of the latent content submerged beneath the manifest presentation of my article makes visible a specifically American style of collective unconscious defense, a national character structure that wards off our own ‘bad thoughts’ about the degree to which we are part of the problem. If this is so, I asked