(1) News bulletin: A UFO has landed in Nebraska and vaporized Omaha. This news is for you
(a) Unrelievedly bad: After all, there is nothing good about the loss of several hundred thousand people.
(b) Putatively bad but secretly not so bad: I don’t know anybody in Omaha and there is something extremely interesting about an authenticated UFO visitation — which I had never really credited until now.
(CHECK ONE)
(2) While you stand at the paper-tube reading the morning headlines, a highly localized yet extremely violent tornado descends upon your house, carrying it aloft and away like Judy Garland’s house in The Wizard of Oz. Your wife is in the house. Nothing is ever heard again of the house or your wife.
This event is
(a) Unrelievedly bad news: You love your wife. She is a good woman, your companion and helpmate for these twenty years. Your house, moreover, is underinsured.
(b) Putatively bad news: All the above is true enough, yet if the entire truth be known, your wife is also a shrew; you are sick to death of her, the house, your job, and your life. Since your wife has vanished through no fault of yours, cannot indeed have suffered much, whatever her fate, could indeed have been set down in a new place and a new life of her own like Judy, you are free to begin a new life without guilt.
(CHECK ONE)
(3) You are a woman whose husband has taken early retirement. He is a decent fellow, a combat veteran of Korea, and has been a good provider for thirty years. Money is no problem. Now, even though he is seriously overweight, all he does is sit around your pleasant Lake Wales house polishing off six-packs and watching golf, the NBA and NFL on TV. For months he goes without touching you and hardly speaking. Or he’ll have spells of satyriasis when he’ll want to have beery sex twice a night. What do you want? (What do women want?) You want to take a cathedral tour of Europe, or a leisurely barge voyage through the canals of France, stopping off at quaint French villages, or a cuisine tour through the vineyards and kitchens of the Loire Valley. Or visit the Galapagos Islands with your local Audubon Society. He won’t go. Why do I want to look at a bunch of turtles? What does he want? He wants to go to Vegas to catch Wayne Newton and Liberace, or to Augusta to follow Nicklaus. You won’t go. Yet you don’t feel free to go off without him — you have duties as a housewife.
So one day you pick up a brochure from a travel agency in Orlando about a thatched-roof-cottage tour of England and a hot-air balloon ride down the Loire Valley and get in your car and start home. From the radio comes news of yet another sinkhole in the fragile limestone crust of central Florida. When you arrive in your block, you discover that your entire lot, house, husband Ralph, and the Zenith Chromacolor have dropped out of sight and disappeared forever into the Eocene muck.
This is
(a) Unrelievedly bad news: Ralph, a good man, a good husband, is gone. You, a good Christian woman, have lost your better half. You are alone in the world.
(b) Putatively bad: This is all true, but on the other hand Ralph is gone through no fault of your own and you are free. Frankly, thirty years of Ralph is enough. Moreover, Ralph was well insured.
(CHECK ONE)
(4) You are picking up the morning paper before going to work. It is a big day in your career. You are making a sales presentation to representatives of the biggest prospective corporate customer in the history of your firm. You’ve been suffering some anxiety and sleepless nights, and with good reason. In recent months you’ve been somewhat depressed and you’re drinking more than you should.
A young insane person, totally unknown to you, drives slowly past your house in an ancient VW, takes aim with his Colt Woodsman.22-caliber pistol, and shoots you in the armpit just as you reach to take the newspaper from the paper-tube.
The wound is probably not fatal. The bullet hits a rib, flattens, ricochets into the substance of your lung, but without injuring heart or major vessel. Your neighbor comes to your aid, calls an ambulance. Feeling faint, you sit on the grass of your front yard. You notice a dogwood tree which you planted ten years ago. It is doing well.
In the emergency room of the hospital, you feel a strange euphoria. You joke with the doctors. Even though you’re spitting blood and growing fainter, your mind works wonderfully well. To the amazement of the doctors and nurses, you remember a remark of Churchill’s, which you quote: “Nothing makes a man feel better than to be shot without effect.”
Is this occurrence
(a) Unrelievedly bad news? It is not good to get shot. One could die of it.
(b) Putatively bad news but secretly good? The incident somehow dispenses you. The single irrational act of a madman changes the entire state of your life in an instant — from that of an anxious worried businessman in danger of losing a big account, to that of an innocent victim, not only not guilty but also unfailed, a patient who finds himself not only in the peculiar role of hospital patient with its peculiar prerogatives, that of being the passive and blameless recipient of the expert services of highly trained people, but of a certain honorific status as well, better than a business bonus: that of being a kind of surrogate victim for all of us. After all, it could happen to any of us in this crazy world, and here it has happened to you, a highly respected and successful member of the community. You took a round which any of us could have taken.
What is more, you’ll probably get the account for your firm — which in your anxiety you might have lost — without lifting a finger. What corporation would turn you down?
Why did President Reagan feel better after he was shot than he has felt since?
(CHECK ONE)
(5) You are standing by your paper-tube in Englewood reading the headlines. Your neighbor comes out to get his paper. You look at him sympathetically. You know he has been having severe chest pains and is facing coronary bypass surgery. But he is not acting like a cardiac patient this morning. Over he jogs in his sweat pants, all smiles. He has triple good news. His chest ailment turned out to be a hiatal hernia, not serious. He’s got a promotion and is moving to Greenwich, where he can keep his boat in the water rather than on a trailer.
“Great, Charlie! I’m really happy for you.”
Are you happy for him?
(a) Yes. Unrelievedly good news. Surely it is good news all around that Charlie is alive and well and not dead or invalided. Surely, too, it is good for him and not bad for you if he also moves up in the world, buys a house in Greenwich where he can keep a 25-foot sloop moored in the Sound rather than a 12-foot Mayflower on a trailer in the garage in Englewood.
(b) Putatively good news but — but what? But the trouble is, it is good news for Charlie, but you don’t feel so good.
(CHECK ONE)
If your answer is (b), could you specify your dissatisfaction, i.e., do the following thought experiment: which of the following news vis-à-vis Charlie and you at the paper-tube would make you feel better:
(1) Charlie is dead.
(2) Charlie has undergone a quadruple coronary bypass and may not make it.
(3) Charlie does not have heart trouble but he did not get his promotion or his house in Greenwich.
(4) Charlie does not have heart trouble and did get his promotion but can’t afford to move to Greenwich.