7/18/2020
I felt it in the water in the 90s
The great unrest roiling
Beneath a pretty plastic surface
A counterfeit world, eggshell fragile
We have continued on
doing our best to ignore the noise & cracks
blithely jumping over yawning chasms
- of hunger, anguish, desperation
Because they weren’t *our chasms*
But now the cracks are everyone’s
Wallpaper & earplugs aren’t enough
We can’t close our eyes & pretend
No one is safe if anyone is unsafe
Election day is nearly upon us and where are we? The nation is as taut as a bowstring. It seems like a good time to look at what is happening with the Dear Leader.
If there is one thing Trump understands, it’s destruction. He is undoubtedly one of the most toxic humans currently walking the face of the earth. He is a toxic stew of mental illness, namely malignant narcissism, and dementia. He also is a bully with a base cunning aka. animal instinct, but he isn’t smart, per se. He also possesses an uncanny ability to con people into believing his lies, especially people definable as authoritarian personality types, characterized by easy submission to established, legitimate authority; high levels of aggression in the name of their authorities; and a high level of conventionalism. These are personality traits that are much more prevalent in right wingers than Left-wingers. Beliefs can also strongly affect whether authoritarians agree with whether the government (ala “daddy & mommy”) is doing the right thing. (theauthoritarians.org)
Since Trump was elected, the United States has become a shell of its former self. Everything looks normal … but institutions are only functional enough to maintain the illusion: Social Security will fail. The payroll taxes which funds the program has been temporarily suspended by Trump. Should this continue, social security is estimated to end in 3 years. (https://www.kiplinger.com/taxes/601197/what-trumps-payroll-tax-cut-will-mean-for-you) Other programs & laws already facing the Trumpist/GOP chopping block include Medicare, Medicaid, & Food Stamps. Luckily the changes to food stamps have been blocked by the courts, for now. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/trump-food-stamp-cuts/2020/10/18/7c124612-117a-11eb-ad6f-36c93e6e94fb_story.html) (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/22/us/politics/medicare-trump.html) Other egregious destruction includes the rollback of environmental protections, the Clean Water Act, wildlife protections, all under the guise of freeing business from annoying regulations. This doesn’t even begin to address the damage done the USPS, the CDC, the DOJ and many other federal agencies.
So much is happening and yet all the roads meet in the crossroads that is the Orange Menace. He knows nothing but continues to fill his insatiable greed and need while spinning a magical tale that his cultists willingly believe.
We have become, to a large extent, a country of warring ideals: colloquially seen as the “snowflakes” vs. the “patriots”, at least from the Right-Wing perspective. However, that script needs a flip. Kindness and compassion exhibit real strength and resilience, knowing history and our founding documents, admitting our failures & not just touting our triumphs is real patriotism. Men like trump are bullies who are all bluster, but cannot take criticism, & have no ability for self-reflection, they are the real snowflakes.
In her book, “For Your Own Good,” Alice Miller discusses what she called poisonous pedagogy (child rearing practices that repress the spirit of children) and through these practices kids are conditioned to not remember or admit to themselves the cruelties visited upon them. When these children become adults, they act out their childhood frustrations on their own kids or in the case of Hitler, the entire world. She also argues that authoritarian child-rearing practices create adults looking to have the denied childhood needs met. Thus “softening up” entire groups of people who easily submit to political leadership who mirror their authoritarian parents who demanded similar unquestioning obedience and submission. (tinyurl.com/...)
In the United States, childrearing practices have slowly moved away from “tough love”, but the unacknowledged & unhealthy patterns we learned as children remain and get unwittingly repeated. Leaving children emotionally damaged and unable to fight back, they lash out or engage in self-destructive behaviors and don’t know why.
Alice Miller uses Hitler as a prime example of how poisonous pedagogy can go horrendously wrong on a global scale. Hitler was raised by abusive parents and not allowed to express his emotions, deeper self, and needs. When he became an adult, he essentially took on the role of his father, and treated the Jews much the same way he was treated by that father. Donald Trump is not so very different. In his niece Mary Trump’s book, Too Much and Never Enough, he was mostly ignored by his parents for various reasons; his father didn’t really care about anything except his business and his mother was sick for most of Trump’s earliest and most formative years. Trump also saw the abuse his older brother Fred Jr. suffered at the hands of his father, and apparently decided that he would be the man his father wanted him to be: never showing emotions and learning to “be a killer”… as well as a misogynist & racist. He also reportedly kept a copy of Mein Kampf at the beside.
When you take the comparison to the next step, Trump is still trying to please his father and gain that approval and attention, but the hole in his soul is bottomless. He wants that which he can never have. He also has suppressed anger at his parents, while also continuing to seek a sense of control. His admiration of strong man dictators is telling.
Trump’s father also steeped him in a warped belief in relationships as purely transactional, teaching him that the only value that people had was based in their value **to him**. He himself had no inherent value as a whole person. His value was only in how he reflected on his father. When watching Donald interact with others, you can see how well he learned his lessons. Those around him are only valued as far as they are useful to him. It is all about him. When those around Trump are no longer useful or no longer reflect well on him, they are cast aside because they take too much effort. It’s almost a parallel to his being sent to military school when he was a teenager, because his parents couldn’t handle him. And that is getting off easy… if he’s really mad, he visits the suppressed rage at his parents’ neglect via his made Tweetstorms and wild accusations, or perhaps getting his minions, like Bill Bar, to try and lock up his opponents.
Trump is a broken human being. He does not care about anyone but himself. He has never acknowledged the nearly 230k COVID deaths, thinking that makes him look worse than his deliberate & malicious decisions to downplay the virus and unleash herd immunity on the American people. And please be clear, the COVID response has not been “bungled”, it is deliberate cruelty. He even treats his followers with contempt, he has called the “disgusting people”… and at at least 3 rallies in the last week, in Omaha, Tampa, & Pennsylvania… his campaign left people stranded after the rallies ended, not paying to bus people back to their cars… and this is after people have packed into venues, maskless, in the middle of the pandemic.
And the Trump cultists are broken. They are willing to do what their Dear Leader says because they are believers and to them, the ends justify any means. They care as much about you as they do about themselves, which is apparently not much. They believe in an amorphous myth of a past that we will never return to, let alone ever experienced, and they are willing to believe so strongly they cannot see the present danger right in front of their eyes, because he is their savior.
Things are ugly right now. And they are likely to get uglier in the days ahead.
Stock up with the supplies you might need as though it’s a natural disaster, if you possibly can.
And by all means VOTE.
If Biden wins, we can get the country on the path to recovery. If Trump wins, American democracy is dead.