His patriotism was real, but it was complicated by the fact that he was lying to Congress. Oliver North cried at the Iran-Contra hearings whenever he talked about how much he loved his country. After analyzing hundreds of psychological experiments and sociological studies of weeping, hundreds of accounts of crying in different cultures and different historical periods, thousands of tearful moments in film and fiction and art, I have come to see that, like the mother of the bride, many of us weep because we are overwhelmed by contradictions. We cry, in fact, because we don’t.īoehner’s tears aren’t hard to read. We weep and we wail, and we do so not because we know, without a doubt, exactly what we are feeling. Loss is complicated by rage, by denial, by guilt. The stages of grief do not follow each other in a neat therapeutic procession instead, they are often a jumble. At the same time, she feels a sense of loss: A part of her life is over she is losing not only a daughter but a purpose, a role.Įven our moments of extreme grief are complicated. Take the mother who cries at her daughter’s wedding: She may be happy about the marriage and flooded with positive emotions - feelings of role fulfillment, of accomplishment, of pride, of happiness for her daughter. All the research suggests something else entirely.Ĭrying is often the sign of excruciatingly mixed emotion. No matter what we may know of crocodile tears, we continue to read weeping as a sign of true, pure emotion. One of our fondest cultural myths - one of baffling durability, like the idea that Republicans are fiscally conservative - is that crying is a sign of sincerity or authentic feeling.
So what can the tears tell us about our new House speaker? Then on Sunday, during a “60 Minutes” interview with Lesley Stahl, Boehner’s tears began to flow as he worried aloud about today’s schoolchildren. On election night, addressing supporters, he was overcome with emotion while describing his up-by-the-bootstraps pursuit of the American dream. Boehner (R- Ohio) cry twice recently in public.
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