People know the rich don’t care whether they live or die.
That’s progress.
I gave a quick talk about Occupy Wall Street to the Malta NY Rotary Club once. A man came up to me afterward. He looked like the aged Buster Keaton of The Railrodder and had made his living before he retired fixing CRT televisions. In the abstract I should have loved this guy.
He came up to me after my talk, clearly seeing I was Jewish and knowing my politics because I’d just given a talk about them and said “What we need to fix this problem is…a Holocaust but for the Muslims this time.”
I was horrified. I saw in his eyes that he didn’t want Muslims put in concentration camps, tortured and killed because he hated Muslims, but that he wanted to hate Muslims because deep down he wanted to see people put into concentration camps, tortured and killed. And he looked like Buster Keaton.
I went around to practically everyone I knew and described the incident. I said that without some unforeseen major event, this country would either go hard left or hard right within 5 years.
Some of them responded with sensitivity to my evident distress. Some of them shrugged it off and said something to the effect “That could never happen in the US.” (Poor Sinclair Lewis.) Almost no one seemed to take me seriously. Even if they did, I’m not sure I knew anyone who had the power to right this. I just hoped and prayed that I did and didn’t know it.
Now the president* is openly endorsing a woman who is saying, basically “We need a Holocaust, but with the Muslims this time.”
Anyone who thinks that they’re safe because they’re not latino/a so they’ll never be put in a camp, please read your history. That’s not how it works.
The racist mob wants to feel better about themselves by killing men women and children. But they never actually will feel better, so they will not stop torturing and killing men, women, and children until they are obliterated and marginalized. We need to stand together against this. We can’t be afraid to be arrested, assaulted, or worse. Never again means no more concentration camps.
The mob wants blood. They don’t care whose blood it is. In Nazi Germany, children sent their own parents to concentration camps, and officials within the Nazi party would even kill each other and lie about it in order to feel like big shots.
Leaders of the Jewish community, early on, would say “We need to work with them and then they’ll be appeased”, much like the establishment Democrats are saying now. These former leaders were, in all likelihood, gassed or shot and dumped in anonymous mass graves along with the communities that mistook their cowardice for leadership.
If you’re Jewish and think that Trump’s base won’t come after you and doesn’t hate Jews, you are delusional. Your being delusional is probably endangering the lives and safety of your friends and loved ones, and definitely endangering the lives and safety of the groups the Nazi GOP have decided to use as trial balloons to see if the US, “land of the brave, home of the free” will be fine with them throwing whoever they want into concentration camps.
Please share this with anyone you think should read it.
*I had a link in this article sourcing the president* endorsing someone who’s openly advocating for genocide against Muslims, but it was messing up the article formatting, so I’ve provided it in the comments section below.
1) Donald Trump obviously colluded with Russia. I’m not really sure how any reasonable person could conclude otherwise after he’s fired three separate people investigating into it and multiple aspects of the Steele dossier we all thought sounded ridiculous a couple months ago have been confirmed. He also mentioned in his letter about Comey’s firing “You told me I wasn’t under investigation 3 times.”
2) Trump learned politics from Roy Cohn, one of the most toxic figures in US history. Cohn’s entire strategy was “Never back down on anything and attack anyone who questions you, personally.” Richard Nixon could eventually be cornered into stepping down. Trump will, when cornered, retaliate with any means at his disposal. He’s already done this throughout his life and in his short political career.
3) Trump doesn’t have any real incentive to back down in any capacity at this point because the only way this ends is with his total consolidation of power or with his going to prison/frying.
4) Don’t be surprised if it turns out McConnell and Ryan and others got in on it. Rumors are already spreading on twitter to that effect, and they’re not standing behind Trump at this point because it makes them look good.
5) Trump established a “committee” to investigate the completely bogus “crisis” of “voter fraud” this morning. Translated: there’s a committee figuring out how to fix the 2018 and 2020 elections through suppression of the vote. Anyone who thinks he isn’t going to try to convince his base to go to the polls next year armed to the teeth to scare off potential voters hasn’t been paying attention. Remember the “my second amendment people” comments?
6) You all know I’m about as far to the left as anybody. I don’t like the DNC, I don’t like how they handled the Sanders thing, I don’t like their connections to Wall Street, etc etc. However, the US falling into banana republic status doesn’t help anybody. The DNC doesn’t seem interested in taking all the chips off the table, and for now that’s the best we’re gonna do. You can save the “I told you so” whatever bullshit for later. This isn’t about you or me being right, this is about stopping a racist mad man from consolidating unilateral control of a massive domestic police force and the most comprehensive surveillance apparatus in human history.
7) Trump is only cornered this much so far and he’s already doing this stuff. He has no knowledge of policy or how government actually works. When his economic policies inevitably fail, he will attempt to consolidate power through appeals to violence. This is a common strategy of dictators-let the disgruntled population take out their anger on each other instead of going after the guy at the top. Mao did it, Duterte is doing it. Trump’s campaign manager, Manafort, was involved in the violent consolidation of power in Russia. Putin had his own Reichstag fire. Trump will inevitably try to declare a war/stage his own Reichstag fire/both in order to avoid having to back down. Trump has repeatedly voiced his admiration for authoritarian lunatics ranging from Duterte to even Kim-Jong Un.
I’m not really sure what we do from here.
I grew up in a household defined by parental narcissism. I only figured this out roughly a year ago while on the road. Browsing random things on my phone, I stumbled on various pages describing theories and self-help literature revolving around what are called “adult children of narcissists”, or ACoNs. Going through various message boards and articles, I managed to untangle much of the complicated series of nonsensical events and outbursts which gave my upbringing much of its dada trainwreck aftertaste.
Eventually the time came when it was clear the situation was not going to get better and I had to cut my father off entirely for the good of the both of us. Searching online for guidance on how to confront this situation, I googled “adult children abandoning parents.” Bizarrely, I found that all of my results turned up websites and message boards relating to organized support and legal action groups put together by groups of parents claiming they were abused and neglected by their narcissistic children. Going through these threads, I noticed, insofar as you can diagnose such a thing based on a pattern of logic presented in message board posts, that most of the posters were in fact pathological narcissists. Their stories about their children had the consistency of Swiss cheese. They had projected the accusations of narcissism onto their estranged children. They’d come to a mutually reinforced unconscious conspiracy of enabling-as-solidarity.
It was utterly fascinating. A community based on shared support of a pathology.
A short while later I ended up at the home of a friend whose mother was an ardent watcher of Fox News. We ended up in his living room watching her watch TV. I noticed that the appeal of the network’s shows was similar to that of traditional hero narratives in the sense that Otto Rank and later Ernest Becker had framed them-they maintained the position of the viewer as the hero in their own personal narrative against the overwhelming evidence to the contrary inherent in their living situation. His mother was very much like Bill O’Reilly in her behavior. She couldn’t have conversations without constantly interrupting the person she was speaking with and making vague aggressive accusations against groups of people she had no direct knowledge of. She chose these people specifically because she had no knowledge of them and could more comfortably create a self within a closed feedback loop of a gerrymandered space of not-knowing. Attempts at introducing unknown variables into conversation were met with temper tantrums.
Marshall McLuhan once said “Charisma is looking like a lot of other people.” On TV and the internet, charisma becomes to the heroic presentation of common psychological profiles defined by decisive forward motion. Trump’s lack of concern about releasing policy papers is telling, as is his unorthodox choice not to apologize for social gaffs. He represents “self”, pure for its emptiness, decisively pushing forward. He is Nietzschean will to power without the complications. America wants to be sure of and proud of themselves, not right about things. Much as Americans will drift into the fantasy self of the heroic character in a TV program, or one of the actors in a pornographic film while handling themselves, so they see their projected fantasy self in Trump. Trump is the popular collective wish of one morning waking up on a giant pile of money. Like the male pornographic film performer (think Ron Jeremy), his clumsy ugliness is part of what makes the fantasy seem accessible.
A different friend once told me a short brilliant anecdote of dysfunction in his own childhood. “My dad was really drunk and started screaming at my mother. He shouted ‘You’re a fucking retarded Pollack!!!’ at my mother and stormed out. The thing is, he’s Polish, she isn’t.”
Most literature in the 20th century psychological tradition analyzing the roots and causes of fascism emphasizes the comforts fascism provides to the wounded narcissistic identity. Because the greatest fear of the pathological narcissist is the possibility of confronting the void of the self, a void which they’re constantly attracted to contemplating but can only contemplate in the projection of this wounded self into paranoia regarding their surroundings and always under the guise of talking about something else, the vague “national identity” becomes a perfect means for both their own projection and the construction of remarkably simple and cleanly efficient propaganda.
Fox News uses very simple psychological techniques to funnel the empty self-affirmation of a mentally ill populace toward the desired targets. Fox News is simply another manifestation of the desire in the TV viewer to see a recognizable version of their self in a position of exciting heroic swashbuckling. Endless websites, articles, and organizations attempting to point out blatant lies that Fox has told miss the point-the viewer goes to Fox to outsource the difficult work of bridging cognitive dissonance. They watch Fox because Fox is willing to confidently lie to them and never back down.
Donald Trump is the child of this dynamic; as a brand he represents little beyond the presentation of white wealth. That he represents little else is his public relations strength. His unapologetic nativism symbolically represents, for the victim-identity obsessed white population of this country, the most appealing redemption narrative-the one where they have to admit no wrong doing and can shift blame entirely onto the powerless.
I’m not sure a better object representing collective narcissism could be conceived than a giant wall built around a country that has no actual invaders.
Insofar as Trump would, in an earlier culture paradigm that the majority of commentators are still using to analyze the present, a parody of a traditional candidate, a cultural actor even more ludicrous than Reagan the cowboy actor was, he makes perfect sense in the context of the present. The political process has been dangled in front of the public as a lighthearted extension of the popular culture for so long, a toy that wasn’t supposed to played with, that Trump’s treatment of it as a toy that he can play with strikes a chord with those who admire him ironically. The importance of the sale and presentation of the item sold, be it a toilet cleaner or a presidential candidate, has come to far outweigh the traditional “use value” of the object itself.
As Slavoj Zizek has repeatedly pointed out, the experience of the consumer and the resolution of the neurotic condition created by the obvious irrationality of capitalism that cannot be acknowledged mixed with the desire to live an ethical life is now a dialectic tension that expands the surplus value of certain products. While Zizek mostly focuses on it in the context of “ethical consumerism” associated with the middle to upper class US left, the same cultural logic is pushing the response on both sides. Neurosis is defined by the urgency of its need to be resolved or sated. Trump and the modified fascism he represents offers the hope that this neurotic condition of the wounded narcissistic identity of his numerous followers can be repaired in projecting their empty selves into the exuberant narcissism of a man who does in fact understand their deepest problems from the inside.
God help us all.
Writers Without Money 