Shortly after we announced what the theme of this issue would be, the New York Times reported that the hijacker of an Indian Airlines jet "had his hostages joining in for singing games and joke-athons. The grown-ups listened to him recite Urdu poetry. The children called him uncle. And a newlywed wife who had a birthday in captivity was grateful when he bought a shawl from a Nepali hostage who dealt in them and presented it to her." For a few weeks after that, the psychiatric condition identified in the 1970s as Stockholm Syndrome—the emotional dependence, even love, a prisoner can come to feel for his or her captor—was back. When the New Yorker worked the phrase into one of those cartoons set in Hell, it raised a question: is the internalization of the values of one's oppressor tragic or amusing? The New York Times Magazine split the difference: they ran a serious feature on the do's and don'ts of being taken hostage, but they laid it out so it looked just like an in-flight safety card. Ha!

But the news media was, as ever, playing catch-up. No longer just a plot device half-remembered from Quinn Martin productions, the plight of Patty "Tania" Hearst—the eternal Stockholm Syndrome poster girl—is even sexier now than it was 25 years ago. For alt.culture magazine readers, Patty has become the symbol of the woman who can have it both ways: machine-gun-totin' trustafarian turned happy suburban housewife. While Hearst failed upward into domestic complacency and movie bit-playing, today's ingenue wants to be Patty and Tania at the exact same time. In movies recently, we've seen Sophie Marceau, Melanie Griffith, Jennifer Lopez, and Alicia Silverstone all playing some variation on the Patty/Tania theme; TV shows like Survivor and Big Brother encourage us to dream of being held captive, locked up, and brainwashed for the benjamins. When Entertainment Weekly suggested that Stockholm Syndrome should be renamed Richard Hatch Syndrome, it became apparent that as a culture we're suffering from a syndrome syndrome. What does it all mean?

According to our Critical Affairs Department, Stockholm Syndrome is nothing less than a fundamental mode explaining everyday life right now—and has been for a while. In The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, Anna Freud writes that "identification with the aggressor" is "one of the ego's most potent weapons in its dealings with external objects which arouse its anxiety." Healthy psychological adjustment, she proposed, demands that we introject the values of the guardians of the status quo. "The cut worm forgives the plow," as William Blake puts it in "Proverbs of Hell"; these days, however, the worm curses the plow if it fails to cut him. The bank job in Stockholm which gave this particular syndrome its handle was, our research has led us to believe, a transitional moment between, say, the days of Charles Manson or the SLA and the way we live now. Naming this condition Stockholm Syndrome allowed it to exist, but look who was doing the naming. The implication is that anyone who says No to the way things are must be crazy.

The philosopher and social critic T.W. Adorno, this issue's Hermenaut of the Month, continues to be excoriated by liberals, conservatives, and libertarians alike, because he insisted upon saying No to America's affirmative culture. In "The Culture Industry," for example, he and Max Horkheimer write that "the liberation which amusement promises is [actually] freedom from thought and from negation"—in other words, "to be pleased means to say Yes." Nay-sayer has always been a pejorative ("No is for pussies," as one contemporary of ours puts it), but when did yes-man become a compliment? Yea-sayers are yes-men, people. How did we forget that?

When we began work on this issue a really long time ago, our managing editor showed us an essay which charged, among other things, that "we have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder 'censorship,' we call it 'concern for commercial viability.'" We took it as a good sign, then, when the essay's author, David Mamet, asked if we'd excerpt his new, post-infoapocalyptic novel Wilson: A Consideration of the Sources; yes, we said, we would. Yes! So you see we say Yes sometimes, too. And what happens? We ask you.

Last winter we launched the Hermenaut.com website. It features excerpts from this magazine and new content every week—and then there's the Wicked Pavilion, our conferencing system, where Hermenaut readers and staffers gather every single day to cross swords on all manner of topics and then sulk about it for weeks on end. You can also buy back issues, subscriptions and gift subscriptions, and T-shirts there. If you want weekly e-mail updates about what's new on our site and in the rapidly cooling Hermenaut universe, just write us at editors@hermenaut.com to say so and we'll sign you up.

One more thing: it might take a long time for the next issue to come out, OK? Remember, Marshall McLuhan said, "Readers like a journal that appears on an irregular basis. Most readers of journals are very unhappy about their regular appearance." We like to get mail, but please consider McLuhan's insight before you start bugging us.