Ammon Shea recently spent a year of his life reading the OED from start to finish. Over the next few months he will be posting weekly blogs about the insights, gems, and thoughts on language that came from this experience. His book, Reading the OED, has been published by Perigee, so go check it out in your local bookstore. In the post below Ammon reflects on his precocious childhood.

I’ve always known that I was a precocious child, and not in a good sense. One thing that I picked up at a remarkably early age was a firm grasp of vulgarity. Unlike many children, I did not simply parrot the taboo words I heard, but instead used them with intent and in context. At least, this is what I’ve been told – I was too young to remember.

I’ve heard my father many times describe the first time he heard me curse. I’d asked him for a hot dog, or some similar food in the supermarket, and he had said that we were going home to eat dinner, and so refused to get it. According to him, I then clenched my fists, stuck out my lower jaw, and bellowed “scumbag!” at the top of my lungs. I was not quite two years old.

I knew, and used, many other forms of foul language at an unusually young age, but it always seemed to me that my use of scumbag was the most unusual of them. This was not simply because I was saying it before I was two, but also because I was saying it in 1972, and the dictionaries I checked all date the use of this word in a pejorative sense from 1971. I was, I thought, truly on the cutting edge of offensive vocabulary, and I’ve always taken a perverse sort of pride in this.

I understand that words, especially slang and colloquialisms, are frequently in use verbally before they are found in writing, but even so I was always somewhat alarmed at how quickly I had adopted into my own vocabulary this prophylactic synonym after its entry into out language. Recently, however, I have discovered that it is somewhat older than I had always thought.

The OED lists scumbag (as a condom) from 1967, and as a term of opprobrium from 1971. But in an article in Slate magazine from 2006, Jesse Sheidlower notes that the dates for each of the two uses of the word have been pushed back to 1935 and 1950, respectively.

The business of antedating a word is a tricky one, and it seems that one can almost always find an earlier example of a word than was initially thought, as has been demonstrated by Jürgen Schäfer and many others. But the case of scumbag strikes me as odd. After all, its first appearance in the OED was in the supplement O – Scz, published in 1982. Was there really no one who worked on defining this word at the time who remembered it from their own childhood, or at least from a time prior to 1971? I suppose it is possible that they simply could not find any written citations prior to then, or that the word was not enough it common usage to have been part of the written record. But it also seems possible to me that the lexicographers, no matter how unflinchingly they dealt with this and all aspects of our language, did not come from an environment in which scumbag was bandied about as an acceptable colloquialism.

In any event, I’m very much looking forward to the new entry for this word when it appears in the current revision of the OED, even as it will conclusively dismantle one of my cherished childhood memories: I was not a linguistic wunderkind – I was merely a foul-mouthed and ill-mannered child.

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If you remember that slapstick comedy duo Laurel and Hardy, you may remember Ollie’s standard line

“another nice mess you’ve gotten me into.”

Stan Laurel was the thin one and Oliver Hardy was the fat one.

This might bespeak a larger appetite on the part of Oliver Hardy and if so there might be an etymological explanation for Ollie’s quote.

Around the year 1300 the word mess made its first appearance in writing in English.  This date points to a possible source of the word from French since it’s within a few hundred years of the Norman Conquest and it would have taken a few centuries for a French word to have been first picked up and adopted into English, and then eventually to find its way onto paper.

Sure enough the Oxford English Dictionary traces mess back to Anglo-Norman and Old French before that.

But what a hungry Oliver Hardy might have found interesting about a mess of 700 years ago is that it didn’t mean “a spot of trouble” as he might have meant in reprimanding Stanley, at first a mess was a serving of food, a meal.

This connection between the word mess and food is preserved for us in the military where soldiers, sailors and pilots eat in the mess.

As with most French words mess actually goes back to Latin and the OED even takes it back further to Indo-European.

Back those five thousand years or more the Indo-European root mittere meant “to send” and the idea here is that the food was sent to the table.  So from Indo-European to Latin the meaning was “to send” but while in Latin a meaning of “food” evolved that was carried into languages including French and Italian.

English adopted the “food” meaning but English was the only language to mutate the meaning again into our current meaning of “disorderly,” “untidy,” “cluttered” or “dirty.”

Here’s how that worked:

After that first appearance in 1300 the word mess changed its meanings in English a little bit.  In one case it went from meaning “a meal” to meaning “a single portion.”

In another case it went from meaning “a meal” to meaning a specific kind of meal, something soft, liquid or goopy; porridge or soup would have been called mess by some people as early as 1330.

This is the meaning that matters to us because it is this mixed-up-stew kind of meal that gave rise to a meaning of mess by 1738 as feed for an animal and by 1828 as an unappetizing mixture of foods.  Somewhere about this time the undesirable state of “things mixed together” lent the word mess to applications outside of the world of food.

The OED’s first citation for mess meaning “a predicament” or “troubling state of affairs” is from 1812.  So by the time Stan and Ollie were getting into messes in the 1930s the principal meaning of “food” had been somewhat obsolete for a century or so.

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Today I am delighted to be able to bring you another VSI column. This month Véronique Mottier has kindly answered a few questions for OUPblog about her latest book Sexuality: A Very Short Introduction. Véronique Mottier is Fellow and Director of Studies in Social and Political Sciences at Jesus College since 1999, and part-time Professor in Sociology at the University of Lausanne since 2006.

OUP: Have sexuality and politics always been as closely aligned as they seem to be today?

VÉRONIQUE MOTTIER: In antiquity already, sex was important to political life, but in different ways from the present. For example, in ancient Athens, it was perfectly acceptable for free men to have sex with women, slaves, or young men. However, men who prostituted themselves were seen to lower themselves to the level of women and slaves by accepting the role of sexual object, and could be stripped of their political citizenship rights. Accusations of sexual impropriety were frequently used weapons against political opponents in public debate in the ancient world and could have devastating consequences. It is difficult to think of any society where the sexual was not political, though how the political and sexual spheres were understood has varied enormously throughout history. What is different today is the pervasive role of the modern state, which intervenes in the sex lives of its citizens through education, legislation, and healthcare. Another important change is that modern citizens demand political rights based on their sexual orientation. In the classical world, the idea of classifying people according to the gender of the person they have sex with would have seemed downright bizarre!

OUP: You talk about the impact of HIV/AIDS in your book. With the rate of new infections still rising in the Western world, what do you think governments need to do to help slow the epidemic?

MOTTIER: There is certainly no room for complacency. While anti-viral drugs have been highly successful in extending the lives of people living with AIDS, the battle has by no means won. Campaigns promoting sexual abstinence have been largely unsuccessful in reducing unsafe sex, while prevention strategies which focused primarily on providing information and condoms have implicitly assumed that citizens are rational beings who will abandon their risky practices once they’ve been informed of the risks. Continuing new infections demonstrate that the provision of information and condoms continues to be crucial; however, it is not enough. Sex does not constitute the most rational area of most individuals’ lives. Today, Western governments are increasingly aware that prevention campaigns need to try to take into account the emotional and irrational aspects of people’s sex lives.

OUP: You say in the book that sexuality has been an issue that has deeply divided feminists over the years. Could you briefly explain to the OUPblog readers in what ways this has happened?

MOTTIER: Many feminists initially embraced the sexual revolution of the 1960s with great enthusiasm, seeing sexual liberation as crucial for women’s liberation generally. Pretty rapidly however, feminist critiques emerged which rejected sexual liberation rhetoric for mainly serving the sexual interests of men while continuing to exploit women. Separatist lesbian groups argued that women who slept with men were ‘collaborating with the enemy’, a stance which hardly endeared them to heterosexual feminists at the time and created great controversy within the women’s movement. Further deep splits over the links between sexuality and women’s oppression occurred in the 1980s and 1990s, when prominent voices such as Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin argued that pornography and prostitution were forms of violence against women, and that sexual violence was the foundation of male domination over women generally. In contrast, feminists such as Lynne Segal or Carol Queen began to define themselves as ‘sex-positive’, rejecting the ‘depressing’ views of sexuality that reduce female sexual pleasure from intercourse to the effects of male brainwashing.

OUP: With so much controversy over sex education, when do you think is the optimum age to start sex education in schools, and why?

MOTTIER: Perhaps we should less worry about the age at which sex education should start (since different cultures have such different ideas about sexual adulthood this that a general reply would make little sense), and more about its contents. It strikes me that much sex education today aims to inform children of the mechanics of sex, as well as of its risks and dangers such as unwanted pregnancies or sexually transmissible diseases. These are extremely important matters; what gets a bit lost in the process is the issue of sexual pleasure. If we want to produce citizens who are able to express and negotiate their sexual needs, and to respect partners’ personal boundaries, sex education needs to address issues of communication and consent perhaps more explicitly than it has done in the past.

OUP: Once people have read your VSI, which five books would you recommend them for further reading?

MOTTIER: Jeffrey Weeks’ Sexuality is an excellent and well-written general introduction (Routledge, 2003). David Halperin’s One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (Routledge, 1990) is a scholarly analysis revealing the enormous gap that separates modern understandings of sexuality from those of the ancient world. The series of reports by Shere Hite, in particular her Hite Report on Female Sexuality, first published in 1976 (Dell Books), remain fascinating, both in terms of offering insights into people’s everyday experiences of sexuality in 1970s America, and as prominent contributions to the feminist critiques of sexuality which followed the sexual revolution. Angus McLaren’s Impotence: A Cultural History (2007) on the cultural consequences of male sexual ‘failure’ is riveting. The influential History of Sexuality (especially Volume 1: an introduction) by the French philosopher Michel Foucault (Penguin 1990) transformed current thinking about sex when it first came out in 1976.

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Everybody must have heard the phrase to go berserk, but not everybody is aware of the fact how little is known about berserks and how obscure the word berserk is. Berserks were mentioned for the first time in a poem commemorating King Harald Fairhair’s victory in a battle that occurred around the year 872. The language of the poem is, consequently, Old Norwegian. For that period, Old Norwegian means the same as Old Icelandic. All we learn from the relevant lines is that “the berserks roared, the battle was in full swing, the wolfskins howled and shook the irons.” It is hard to decide whether wolfskins is a synonym of berserks or whether there were two groups of warriors (one roared, the other howled?) and on whose side the berserks made noises. Be that as it may, the information on the original berserks is admittedly scanty. Perhaps the poet (Old Scandinavian court poets were called skalds) coined the word berserk himself, but it may have existed in the language before him. Contrary to expectation, it occurs most rarely in later poetry, and, when it does, it means “warrior,” without any specification, and only with reference to the heroes of old. Once we hear that the great god Thor fought berserks’ brides. Since Thor’s main opponents were giants, berserks’ brides probably meant “giantesses.” Female monsters were feared more than superhuman males (thus Beowulf overpowered Grendel, a mighty “troll,” but nearly perished by the hand of Grendel’s vengeful mother), so that Thor cannot be accused of attacking defenseless girls.

The greatest Old Icelandic historian was Snorri Sturluson. He lived in the 13^th century, and we owe several priceless books to him. One of them treats the history of the kings of Norway. As was common in those days, Snorri began his work with a mythological introduction, for royalty needs divine origins, and in a short chapter he said that Odin (the Old Norse form is Othin, rather than Odin), the main god of the Scandinavian pantheon, had a retinue of fearful warriors who “fought without armor and acted like mad dogs or wolves. They bit their shields and were strong as bears or bulls. They killed people, and neither fire nor iron did them any harm.” This he adds, “is called berserk rage.” In English we say going berserk (like going amuck), but we too know what rage is, though more often on the road than in battle.

Snorri’s description comes as a great surprise. In addition to his magnificent history of the kings of Norway, he wrote a book called the Edda, a collection of ancient Scandinavian myths. Odin figures prominently in it, but his wild retinue is not mentioned a single time. He is usually depicted as traveling alone or accompanied by two other gods at most. Nor was the word berserk of any importance to Snorri. The source of this passage is a mystery, and no one can tell why berserks failed to appear in the Edda. In the absence of facts theories purporting to explain the role of Odin’s berserks are many. I also have a theory, but it runs counter to those proposed by many eminent scholars, for which reason it found little support. Yet, like a true berserk, I roar and howl and stick to my guns (or should it be spears, slings, and arrows for the sake of preserving the local coloring?).

Berserks reemerged in Icelandic sagas (prose narratives), recorded mainly in the 13^th century, when Snorri was active. But there they are gangs of vagrant marauders, intimidating farmers, raping women, and killing everybody who dares oppose them. It is in the sagas that they bite shields, fall to the ground, with their mouths foaming and frenzy making them allegedly invulnerable to fire and iron (they cannot be killed with a sword, but a cudgel does fine), and practice other stage effects. I suspect that, while writing an introduction to The History of the Kings of Norway, Snorri borrowed the portraits of berserks from the literary clichés flourishing in his lifetime. Real, not epic, berserks certainly existed, though they were exterminated in both Norway and Iceland before Snorri’s birth. Nobler berserks, the choicest warriors of kings, are mentioned in the so-called legendary sagas, and it seems that a vague memory of such bodyguards went back to at least the 8^th century. Later bandits may have called themselves berserks, to aggrandize themselves, or perhaps the population called them this. It matters little who gave them such a name, for they did not resemble their predecessors of King Harald’s epoch. If Snorri had heard or read myths about Odin’s berserks, he would have retold them in the Edda. Apparently, he did not. So I assume that he knew none and, in his history, modernized the god’s image under the influence of literary tradition.

The problem is complicated by our ignorance of the etymology of the word berserk. We remember that Snorri mentioned berserks’ custom of fighting without armor and roaring like bears. The second part of the noun berserk (-serk) means “shirt,” but the first is ambiguous: it may mean “bear” (which accords well with roaring) or “bare” (in reference to throwing off armor in battle; however, being without armor is not the same as being naked), for in Old Norse the words for bare and for some forms of bear are as close as they are in Modern English. (Has anyone seen a pin I saw in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the mid-seventies: “Bare with me”? It was worn by a grinning female. No one seemed to be paying attention.)

Bears play an outstanding role in the history of Germanic cults. On the other hand, medieval sources, both Scandinavian and Irish, describe scenes of heroes fleeing in a panic when women expose themselves to them. No superstitions are connected with male nudity. Thus, either interpretation (“bareshirt” and “bearshirt”) makes some sense. Until the middle of the 19^th century Icelanders had no doubt that “bareshirt” is correct. Then an influential Icelandic scholar opted for “bearshirt,” but seventy years later the original theory again found an excellent supporter. I think he was right. Recapitulating his arguments here would take me too far afield. The main of them is that berr “bear” did not exist in this form in Old Norse, and other compounds with ber- “bear” as the first element have not been recorded either (a single exception is dubious). It is also unclear whether serk- was current as a technical term for “skin” or “shirt” as early as the 8^th century.

Those who will delve into the berserk problem will find numerous things, intriguing but largely irrelevant. Did berserks form unions? If so, did those unions have a religious character? Did berserks consume poisonous mushrooms and, intoxicated like hashish eaters, attack their enemies? Were berserks akin to wervolves? Both agony and ecstasy fill the pages of the works devoted to those semimythological creatures. Little is known, a lot has been surmised. Some medieval Scandinavian warriors were certainly called berserks. They started as kings’ bodyguards. Theirs was a dignified name. With the dissolution of early feudal retinues like King Harald’s, those groups degenerated into plundering riffraff, their members turned into brigands, and the word acquired negative connotations. (The same happened to the word Viking.) Odin was hardly surrounded by berserks, Snorri’s evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. It is more likely that berserk first meant “bareshirt” (that is, someone who fights with nothing but a shirt on) even if berserks roared like bears in battle. Anyone who would try to go to battle with a bearskin on will find himself easily overheated and incapacitated. A few of my pivotal statements can be and have been contested, and herein lies the beauty of scholarship. Some people, as Snorri put it, make mistakes and others correct them, so that everybody has something to do.

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David Domke is Professor of Communication and Head of Journalism at the University of Washington.  Together with Kevin Coe he wrote The God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America. To learn more about the book check out their handy website here, to read more posts by Domke and Coe click here. In the post below Domke examines the role of race in the Presidential election.

The consensus among political journalists and pundits is that if race becomes a salient matter in the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama is in trouble. The thinking goes something like this: if white voters are reminded that Obama is black, or start to think through a racial prism, the nation’s first African American major-party presidential candidate will lose.

In the words of NBC News political director Chuck Todd: “Anytime race is THE topic du jour in the campaign, it’s a bad day for Obama. Period.”

I disagree.

Let’s review the three most racialized moments in the campaign.

First there was the tit-for-tat in late January, as the Democratic Party approached the South Carolina primary. Obama had won the Iowa caucuses, Clinton had won in New Hampshire and Nevada, and in the days before the Palmetto State’s voting, the Obama and Hillary Clinton campaigns traded accusations that each was bringing up race for political advantage. When Obama won a landslide victory, Bill Clinton dismissed it as Jesse Jackson redux, drawing significant criticism for the comparison. Was Obama damaged by all of this? Not hardly. Bill Clinton, however, has yet to recover.

Next there was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright remix of God bless America, in which Wright presented an image of an angry-at-America, angry-at-whites black man. The political and media punditry quickly sounded the death knell for Obama’s candidacy, and indeed Obama sank in the polls. The Gallup Daily Tracking Poll in mid-March showed him leading Hillary Clinton 50% to 44% before the Wright videos emerged, and five days later it was Clinton up 49% to 42%. But within days Obama was back in the lead, following his profoundly adult speech on race in Philadelphia.

Most recently we had the he said-he said showdown between John McCain’s and Obama’s campaigns, beginning with McCain’s “Celebrity” advertisement linking Obama with Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Some say that tying Obama to young, sexualized white women was an attempt to prime racial stereotypes about black men. For his part, Obama said that the McCain campaign was trying to tell everyone that Obama “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills.” The Obama side later acknowledged it was a ham-handed attempt to highlight race without saying so explicitly.

The McCain camp immediately jumped on it, saying that it was the Obama camp who was playing the “race card.” Sensing an advantage, the McCain campaign has subsequently gone all-in with its advertising strategy, and has now released a web advertisement that declares “Hot chicks love Obama.” ABC News’ Jake Tapper put the count of white women at a minimum of 4. Subtle it ain’t.

Since the McCain-Obama back-and-forth began, the Gallup Daily Tracking poll has shown an interesting pattern. On July 30, when the Celebrity ad was released by the McCain campaign, Obama led McCain 45% to 44%. On each of the following two days the candidates tied at 44%, but nearly every day since Obama has gained ground—and as of Wednesday he led, 48% to 42%. If Obama was hurt by the racial dynamics, these numbers don’t show it.

So how to explain all of this?

I’ll offer two lines of argument.

1. Obama is hurt by race when it is a below-the-radar subtext, but he benefits when it is brought explicitly into the light of day. This is exactly what research in political psychology suggests: that only subtle, implicit racial messages work in today’s U.S. politics. The evidence suggests that most Americans don’t want to act upon their embedded racial prejudices, so when these biases become apparent to them, voters take intentional steps to act differently.

In South Carolina, Bill Clinton’s claims that Obama’s race helps him among black voters and Clinton’s reference to Jesse Jackson made race explicit, and subsequently Obama benefited. With Jeremiah Wright, Obama was hurt in polls when people simply saw Wright’s rants, but then Obama bounced back after his “More Perfect Union” speech directly addressed racial divisions. And in the aftermath of the salvos with the McCain camp two weeks ago, the news media are now giving closer scrutiny to the racial dynamics of the campaign. Such scrutiny, this pattern suggests, will help Obama.

2. There are two political groups that are determined that Obama will not suffer the same fate as Democratic Party nominee Michael Dukakis in 1988, when the George H. W. Bush campaign rode the infamous “Willie Horton” ad to victory.

The first are African American voters, whose support for Obama is at unprecedented levels for a Democrat. In response to the Wright flap, for example, media reports suggested that blacks often rallied to Obama’s side.

Second, the “swiftboat” experiences of John Kerry in 2004 has put the Obama campaign and supporters on high-alert against what it considers unfair criticisms, subtle or otherwise. The Obama campaign launched its site in June, “Fight the Smears,” and on Wednesday Kerry himself launched a site, “Truth Fights Back.” Both of these sites, ironically, draw upon Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign’s war-room approach of instant responses. These kinds of tactics ensure that the Obama campaign will weigh in quickly with its viewpoints, and can go on the offense whenever race comes up. That makes certain that they’re significant players in defining the debate.

These factors have made race a complex factor in this presidential campaign—which is as we might expect, given its deep, embedded, and often-contradictory positioning in American culture at large. The evidence simply doesn’t suggest that Obama is always hurt when race is part of the campaign. In fact, it appears to be exactly the opposite, so far.

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Nouakchott, Mauritania

Coordinates: 18 9 N 15 58 W

Population: 743,500 (2005 est.)

Since the tensions between Russia and Georgia reached a boiling point earlier this month, an increasing amount of international attention has focused on the Caucasus. That said, it’s worth pointing out that the rest of the global periphery—to borrow a term from Harm de Blij’s new book The Power of Place—is no stranger to political upheaval either. In northwestern Africa for instance, the Islamic Republic of Mauritania has experienced its second coup in three years, leaving the immediate future of this poor country in question. Here on the dry, dusty edge of the Sahara, roughly half of the population survives by farming the tiny fraction of land that is in fact arable. The coastal capital Nouakchott, is one of only two noteworthy cities, and couldn’t claim much historical importance until it was designated the seat of independent government in 1957. Mining, fish processing, and a fledgling oil industry have caused Nouakchott’s size to grow rapidly in recent decades.

Ben Keene is the editor of Oxford Atlas of the World. Check out some of his previous places of the week.

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Harm de Blij is the John A. Hannah Professor of Geography at Michigan State University. The author of more than 30 books he is an honorary life member of the National Geographic Society and was for seven years the Geography Editor on ABC’s Good Morning America. His most recent book, The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization’s Rough Landscape, he reveals the rugged contours of our world that keep all but 3% of “mobals” stationary in the country where they were born. He argues that where we start our journey has much to do with our destiny, and thus with our chances of overcoming obstacles in our way.  In the post below he examines the effect of the collapse of the former Soviet Union.

The collapse of the former Soviet Union generated much satisfaction among many Americans, Europeans, and others who, with justification, saw the evils of that empire as proof of the failures of the Communist system on which it was based. No political system hitherto invented provides protection against the worst instincts of rapacious rulers and their acolytes, and many of those who thought that Karl Marx had done so found themselves contemplating their fate in the gulag, where tens of millions perished while Soviet bigwigs partied in their dachas. The theoretical merits of Communism turned out no better in practice than Nazism or Fascism, whether tested in Russia, China, or Cambodia.

But the world may yet come to appreciate the seven decades of Communist control over the Soviet empire for what it did to constrain the Russian reach for global power. Communism’s end-justifies-the-means produced conditions under which fear, and hence corruption, suppressed initiative and innovation. Communism’s inherent inefficiencies spawned an economic system destined to disintegrate in a globalizing world. The Communist imperialists extended their power over a vast colonial empire reaching from central Asia to central Europe, requiring massive investments in policing as well as armed intervention. Entire populations (for example the Chechens and the Tatars) were exiled to remote desert areas at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, then “pardoned” by more moderate rulers to return to their abandoned abodes where Russians had taken their place. To the wider world, Russia’s Cold-War leaders might threaten “we will bury you,” but the cost of their ruthless rule inhibited their capacity to do so, and the Cold War stayed cold except in proxy settings.

Now Russia is the “free and open” society that might have emerged from the Revolution a century ago, its lost empire a national preoccupation, its former colonies resentful, its Communist-era settlers abandoned to newly sovereign governments, its allies near and far looking to Moscow for succor. In their unconstrained social-spatial engineering, the dominant Russians of the former U.S.S.R. redrew boundaries and awarded territories and peoples to “republics” of which they were not historically a part on the arrogant assumption that all Soviet member states would be Moscow’s vassals in perpetuity. Thus a Soviet dictator in 1954 capriciously transferred the Crimea Peninsula to Ukraine as a reward for Ukraine’s contribution to the Soviet Union’s well-being, not imagining that, before the end of the century, Ukraine would be a sovereign state in fact rather than in Communist mythology. As a result, millions of Russians today find themselves under the government in Kyyiv (Kiev) rather than Moscow.

The Slavic diaspora in what Russians still call their “near-abroad” continue to arouse nationalist emotions in the new Russia. Millions of Russians have returned to their ancestral home, but many more remain beyond the border, from Kazakhstan to Estonia. And others – Slavs as well as non-Slavs – who allied themselves with the Communist cause during the Soviet period also have Moscow’s attention. Indeed, while the current crisis in Georgia has been simmering for years, its escalation relates directly to the last convulsions of another Communist collapse, that of Yugoslavia, and its largest fragment, Serbia.

The devolution of the former Yugoslavia initially yielded five states, of which Serbia was the largest and in many ways the most complex, with Hungarian, Montenegrin, and Kosovar (Albanian) minorities under Belgrade’s government. The Hungarian minority in the north did not agitate for secession, but coastal Montenegro left the Serbian fold in 2006 without serious problems and became another of Europe’s ministates, with a population below 700,000. The Muslim majority of Kosovo, landlocked leftover of the Ottoman period and numbering about 1.8 million, victims of Serbian subjugation during the devolutionary period and inalterably opposed to further Serbian domination, attained independence in 2008 with the support of the United States and a majority of (but not all) European states. Russia vociferously objected to Kosovo’s independence, supporting the Serbian position that Kosovo is a historic part of the former kingdom and vowing to veto any application it might make to join the United Nations.

While the international community’s attention was focused on the Kosovo issue, the simmering trouble between Russia and Georgia worsened, and it was no coincidence. Even as Moscow continued to object to Kosovo’s recognition, Russian military equipment and troops began to converge on two stretches of Russia’s international border: those of Abkhazia, a corner of Georgia on the Black Sea coast, and of South Ossetia, in the Caucasus Mountains. While Georgia was one of the 15 Socialist Soviet “republics,” these two pockets of Georgia – as well as a third, Ajaria, also on the Black Sea coast – were simply administrative acknowledgments of ethnic-minority realities. Indeed, the Ossetians straddled the border between Russia and Georgia: North Ossetia lies one small entity removed from Chechnya, and South Ossetians make up just 3 percent of Georgia’s population. Russians and Russian military “peacekeepers” strengthen Moscow’s presence in this enclave of Russian loyalty, and in Abkhazia, too, the Russian presence outnumbers the 2 percent Abkhazians. Even before the intervention of August 8, 2008, the government of Georgia had little control over either piece of the “near abroad.”

It has been the stated objective of the Tbilisi government to assert its jurisdiction over the three minority territories on its margins, but Moscow has obstructed this initiative in various ways, ranging from the closure of transport routes (and thus commercial traffic) between Georgia and Russia to the award of Russian passports to residents of Abkhazia and North Ossetia. Newspapers and other media commentary in Russia ask why, if Kosovo can be wrested from Serbia because locals there want independence, the same rights cannot be accorded to North Ossetia and Abkhazia. Russian commentators are arguing that Georgia’s suppression of Ossetians and Abkhazians is no less ruthless than that of Kosovars by Serbia.

But by militarily intervening as the Russians have, including the bombing of targets in Georgia itself, Moscow appears intent on creating a crisis that will demonstrate its capacity and willingness to wage war for its interests in the “near abroad” despite serious risk of potentially uncontrollable escalation. Kosovo may have been part of the kindling, but Russia resented NATO encroachment toward its borders, American-planned construction of missile-defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, EU involvement in Ukraine’s long-range plans (Georgia has also proclaimed its hope to join the EU, and you will see the EU flag, beside the flag of Georgia, stand behind President Saakashvili’s desk during interviews) and other slights. One question is whether Russian bombers will target the Georgian section of the oil pipeline linking the Caspian Sea reserves to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. Another is whether, should Russia impose a naval blockade on Georgia, Ukraine will deny it the use of its Crimean naval bases, potentially drawing Kyyiv into the conflict and creating a motive for Russian action there as well.

A belligerent Russia has already choked off the flow of natural gas to Europe during a dispute over payments, has allowed a murder case (allegedly by a Russian agent in London) to damage relations with the United Kingdom, has turned a blind eye to criminal activity in Moldova, has obstructed efforts to persuade Iran to alter its nuclear practices, has imprisoned business leaders deemed politically inconvenient in ways chillingly reminiscent of gulag times, and has sent bombers flying into airspace in the Cold-War mode. The brutality of its post-Soviet campaigns against Muslim Chechens was seen in context of the wider “war against terror”, but the destruction now being visited on Georgia suggests that a new page has been turned.

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Anxiety and panic often first appears in adolescence, making effective treatment while still young imperative. The Treatments That Work series explains the most effective interventions for a particular problem in user-friendly language.  In Mastery of Anxiety and Panic for Adolescents, Riding The Wave: Therapist Guide, by Donna B. Pincus, Jill T. Ehrenreich and Sara G. Mattis, the aim is to help adolescents with panic disorder and agoraphobia.  In the excerpt below the authors focus on the importance of parental involvement in effective treatment.

Research on the importance of including parents in child and adolescent anxiety treatment has grown substantially during the past decade.  Numerous studies indicate that children and adolescents have the most significant and lasting gains in anxiety treatment when parents are involved.  Recent systemic research has suggested that incorporating parents more centrally into the treatment of children and adolescents with anxiety disorders may enhance treatment effectiveness and maintenance (Ginsburg, Silverman, & Kurtines, 19915; adds, Heard, & Rapee, 1992).  Ollendick and King (1998) highlight the need for intensive parental involvement when treating children with fears and anxiety.  They suggest that parents might be regarded as co-therapists, responsible for the implementation of procedures developed by the therapist and for giving children or adolescents ample praise and positive reinforcement for brave behavior.  Although this may seem common-sense, a review of the literature reveals that involving parents directly in the treatment process has been the exception rather than the rule (Braswell, 1991)…Since the parent is one of the most significant persons in an adolescent’s life, and an adolescent’s avoidance of activities often causes considerable disruption in most families, the inclusion of parents in the active treatment process should yield greater clinical benefit…

General Tips for Parental Involvement

As an adolescent is learning new concepts and tools for dealing with his panic attacks, it is very helpful to have parents on the “same page” as their child.  This can be accomplished by teaching both the adolescent and his parents a “common language” regarding the most appropriate tools to use during a panic attack.  For example, during a panic attack, a parent might suggest that the adolescent “restructure his maladaptive panic thoughts” or “notice the triggers of panic attacks” and “not avoid the feelings.”  While it is important for an adolescent to know how to cope most effectively with a panic attack, it is also crucial that parents also understand how to help most effectively.  Thus, including parents in a portion of treatment sessions ensures that they will be able to help reinforce concepts that the adolescent learned in therapy.

Many parents of adolescents with panic disorder (PD) are worried that their child might be in significant distress during a panic attack, and may inadvertently reinforce the child’s avoidance of places or situations that might trigger panic.  It is important that parents are educated about the nature of anxiety and panic, the fact that anxiety won’t hurt or harm their child, and the importance of nonavoidance of physical sensations and of situations that might trigger panic attacks.  Although parents are typically given handouts and reading materials regarding the nature of anxiety and panic, it is also helpful to have parents join part of the session, to teach these importance concepts in person.

A common fear of parents of adolescents with panic is whether getting rid of their adolescent’s PD will make them feel “less close” to their child.  Parents state that, unlike many adolescents who are trying to separate from their parents, their teenager tries to “stay close” to them out of fear of getting a panic attack and having to deal with it alone.  This often makes parents feel a sense of importance and emotional closeness to their teenager.  When attempting to treat PD, it is important to discuss with the adolescent and his parents other way that they might maintain a close relationship if panic attacks were no longer occurring.

Although parents can be involved in treatment in many ways, it is important to first discuss the plan with the adolescent and parent(s), so that both parties are comfortable and aware of the plan.  In addition, the inclusion of parents at the end of sessions does not mean that they must be informed about everything the adolescent talked about in therapy; only the important treatment concepts need to be conveyed.

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