Pure Moods 1994 Full Album

[Klaudia Aricas]

Theequivalent of this phenomenon in American electoral history took place on the night of November 7, 2000. As the election returns for Congress showed the House and Senate moving towards parity between the two parties, the presidential race edged, eerily, towards an astonishing outcome: two candidates separated in the national popular tally by a few hundred thousand votes, an electoral college result that without the state of Florida produced no majority, and a popular-vote margin in Florida of under 2,000 ballots. It was the Perfect Tie.

This does not mean that the floating vote is entirely without structure or direction. Although a portion of the vote in every election is predicated on responses to evanescent moods and an evaluation of personality and leadership traits, it is still possible to discern the outlines of what the floating voters appear to want, or more precisely, what they do not want. The floating vote, understood here to include most of the nonpartisans as well as a portion of weaker partisans, has made known its dislikes at least twice in the last decade: after 1992-93, when it reacted against a strong Big Government agenda and a cultural politics of permissiveness from the Left; and after 1994 and 1995, when it reacted against a strong anti-government agenda and a strident cultural-war rhetoric from the Right. Floating voters have therefore previously rejected the intellectual packages and world views that are embraced by the strong partisans of both parties. Successful presidential candidates have been those who have found a way to maintain the enthusiasm and support of their core supporters, while managing to appeal to a larger portion of this floating vote.

It is also important, of course, to consider how people vote for the three major political offices at the state level: governor, the state Senate, and the state House. The results here are striking. For the state legislative chambers, Democrats in 2001 control 25 state lower houses to 24 for the Republicans, while Republicans control 24 state Senates to 21 for the Democrats. Four Senates are tied between the two parties. There is, however, one office today where one of the parties holds a clear advantage. Among the governors, 29 are Republican and 19 are Democrats. And therein lies a tale. It is surely no accident that the President, George W. Bush, not only came from the ranks of the Republican Governors, but also was nominated with their support and campaigned for the presidency, conspicuously, with their help.

At the beginning of the decade, the Republican Party was predominantly a presidential party. Republicans held the presidency (as they had since 1980), but both houses of Congress were in the hands of the Democrats. In the states, the Democrats had the edge in Governors (28D-20R) and the decided advantage among state Senates (34-11) and state Houses (40-9). By 1994, the contours of partisan control had begun to change. Democrats now held the presidency, while Republican captured the House and Senate. Republicans in 1994 gained their large advantage among governors (30R-19D) and pulled almost even among state Senates (25D-24R) and close among state Houses (26D-22R).

The elections of the 1990s therefore did indeed realign American politics. But the did so not by placing a single party in control, but by bringing one of the parties (the Republican) from an overall minority status into a position of parity. A large part of this has been the transformation of Southern politics, in which the change from Democratic to Republican voting that showed earlier in presidential races worked its way down to the lower levels of office holding.

A statistician might object that these numbers tell us which party won an office or institution, but not by how much. But if one were to construct an index, weighted by population, in order to show how well each party has done in each state for all six of the major elective offices (President, Senate, House, Governor, state Senate, state House) the results would show a nation that at the outset of the decade was more Democratic than Republican, but that in 1994 moved into and has since remained in a Perfect Tie.

Political leaders today are adjusting to this unusual situation of politics without a mandate. Neither party has been able to win an outright majority of the votes cast in a presidential election since 1998. Far from constituting a crisis, however, this situation may offer some new possibilities for governance. With politicians operating without the overhang of a mandate, they are free to consider patterns of conduct unrelated to an extra-constitutional source of authority. Depending on what techniques and tone President Bush adopts, he could reintroduce institutional models, both for the presidency and for dealing with Congress, that have a closer affinity to the spirit of constitutional government.

A second scenario envisages a substantial degree of bipartisan cooperation and legislative action. President Bush would work largely with and through the established congressional leadership of the parties, negotiating in particular with the official leaders of the opposition, who would be authorized to speak for their party. Democrats would cooperate based on a calculation that voters are not in a mood to condone partisanship and would penalize either part if it were perceived as too obstructionist. Faced with this kind of uncertainty, Democrats might think that they have as much to gain as Republicans from a mutual record of legislative accomplishment.

The problems that began on November 7 seemed to most Americans to be at first the stuff of history books, drawn from a more primitive political era. Journalists found themselves searching for accounts of the last disputed presidential election, when a close national election result in 1976 led to charges of widespread electoral fraud and a revisiting of the votes in a few of the reconstruction governments in the Southern states, including Florida. Charges of a similar kind were raised in 2000, but most people realized that fraud in the literal sense was not really the source of problems in this election. Instead, it was the exceptional way the vote was distributed around the country, couple with an unexpected technical challenge that by chance occurred in the state of Florida, where the difference in vote totals between the two main candidates was smaller than the margin of error that the electoral mechanisms could handle. It was more than Florida had planned for, more perhaps than it might reasonably have been expected to plan for.

Even as the Hollywood movie The Perfect Storm devoted a good deal of attention to the rescue efforts that attended the calamity, so in this case citizens should ponder how different political institutions and actors responded to the extraordinary challenges they confronted after the election. These questions go well beyond what is usually covered in electoral studies and extend into realms that assess prudence and statesmanship. Here, alas, political science has developed no index to assist us.

It is not unusual for people worldwide to be exposed to trauma. According to the World Mental Health surveys conducted by Kessler et al. (2017), 70% of the 68,894 respondents in 24 countries had experienced some form of lifetime trauma. Therapists trained in Guided Imagery and Music (GIM) are therefore advised to equip themselves with additional skills to assist clients with traumatic experiences.

With his background in medical and psychiatric training, Dr. Krlin combines breathing practice with music listening as a safe approach for his clients who have difficulty receiving GIM or Music Imagery (MI). This Music Breathing (MB) approach builds on clinical experiences and insights, and a holistic knowledge base (Krlin, 2019b). His contribution is recognized as showing how GIM can be applied in psychiatric settings (Abbott, 2019; Ahonen, 2019; Beck, 2019; Maack, 2012). Dr. Krlin (2019a) has also written a chapter on neuropsychological theory of traumatic imagery, and is an expert in this field.

Discovery Breathing (DB): Spontaneous discovery, exploration and imagination of the breathing, is followed by a painting of what is actually experienced. Minimal directions from the therapist. No mandala circle is used.

In this semi-structured interview, Dr. Krlin describes briefly how he developed the practice of MB and how his approach evolved. He identifies some key features of his work, and how they are different from GIM, MI, and other types of breathing exercises such as Holotropic Breathwork (Taylor, 2003). Generally, GIM refers to the Bonny Method of GIM. The current Association for Music and Imagery (AMI) definition of the Bonny Method of GIM is:

GIM is a powerful intervention and may sometimes overwhelm the limbic alarm system of clients recovering from trauma (Grocke, 2019). In GIM, the images provoked by music listening present not only as symbols that carry multiple meanings, but also as unprocessed sensory, bodily, and affective experiences. As these overwhelming physical and psychological experiences may not manifest in symbolic imagery, they may sometimes appear in a distorted manner or get disconnected from the re-experience in music. GIM has the potential to help clients access and reintegrate these traumatic experiences. It is key when working with these clients to avoid hyperarousal and stimulating symbolization, as proposed by Dr. Krlin (2019a). MB is considered a way to counteract autonomic dysregulation.

When Dr. Krlin practiced GIM in psychiatry, he foresaw the need for a more accessible, approachable method among people who have experienced trauma due to their stress sensitivity and tendencies to dysregulation of arousal. The benefits and specific features of MB will be highlighted in the following interview. Dr. Krlin has given his consent for this interview to be disseminated in written format. This article will include the majority of the transcript of the interview, conducted in Sweden, and serves as a contribution to expanding the understanding of, as well as a complementary resource to, his MB practice.

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