Pardon us fragile snowflakes (or is it overly aggressive Antifas?) if we don’t get the joke: The Kurdish anarchist left has been establishing a highly successful pro-women, religiously tolerant, pro-humanity, deeply democratic society (m.dailykos.com/...), at the same time they are defeating ISIS. So naturally Trump sells them out to his reactionary Turkish thug buddy only to subsequently threaten the potential for economic sanctions, even as the thug is invited over for a state dinner. Perhaps beneath the floorboards cruelty is the whole joke or perhaps there is more to the joke, a vast hidden punchline of the emolument category in the country with the largest number of Trump Organization projects, another ground for impeachment to be “hilariously” obstructed from public view like the tax returns and countless other Trump Organization projects worldwide. (To accurately describe its idiocy requires repeating some habits of phrase emanating from Trump perceived to have mysterious hypnotic value by his friends, my friends.)
Wherein we understand such “ironic humor” to be a sign of a much broader narcissistic “lack of empathy toward other people” than one limited to our brave and wise commander in chief, a sign of a system of red-hatted would-be über con men and neo-Confederates as well as fear and lots, lots, lots of greed, rising all the way to the very top. The very top my friends, the very top, where the lying clown Trump is more of a John Wayne Gacy, Jr. than a “mere” serial sex abuser of women and con man, and the Kurds are his “boys,” but lots, lots, lots of others also have bodies buried under the floorboards.
Let’s change the subject slightly and lighten things up my friends, lighten things up. At least it’s getting a little tougher these days for an emperor with nothing on but silken underclothes to take cover beneath a wounding psyche. Projection projectile-launching is becoming easier to spot. We’ve had a lot of practice. Even some conservatives, such as George Conway (www.theatlantic.com/...), are objecting to the sleaziness of a president laying nearly bare in all his grotesque incompetence for the job.
They have a point too. “Tak[ing] Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” presumes an ability to care about and keep good faith with the interests of others. When, for instance, the Congress does its job to “lay and collect Taxes ... to provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States” the President must have the ability to resist temptation for personal aggrandizement and spend the money as intended.
However, Conway and ilk rarely think to question the narcissistic system that routinely not only tolerates but celebrates pathological political-economic “sickos” (a Trumpian term that for once fits), large and small, not to mention periodic killing of people from the wrong tribes by us patriotic, freedom-loving Americans or our autocratic pals.
Narcissism is not a defect of a particularly odious representative of the ruling class but the archetypal psychological undergarment of capitalist rule. When many of its white petit bourgeois adherents in the US see the emperor’s undergarments they are titillated not disappointed, for they want to gawk and then be free like him, free to shamelessly run around like a Cato Institute con man or Caligula with pistol envy, naked but for the tighties.
This, in fact, is the emollient-softened scrotum of Trump’s base (“Hell yeh we’re deplorables if not proud incel would-be p*-grabbers!”), not completely overlapping, on Sundays at least, with more generic fear-motivated white evangelicals and retirees, and not to be confused with the gilded emolument-softening set he hosts at Trump properties around the globe. Thankfully not all white people who fit the following definition are in Trump’s base, but sadly many are. And on their “ironically humorous” whims in a few swing states we are told another four years could turn, so I guess we shouldn’t be insulting any of them. Nor should our friends at marxists.org dare to put them in a Marxist box with a pompous French term if there ever was one:
Petit-Bourgeoisie, lit., “little city-folk” – the small business people, sometimes extended to include the professional middle-class and better-off farmers.
(www.marxists.org/...)
Trump, with the particularly devout help of his many violence-prone head-shaved bearded neo-Confederate friends, my friends, is once again proud, as in the last Republican presidential primaries, to be called out by a few ruling class mercenaries. The latter have vestigial consciences intact, or, cynically, strong desire to hold on to the Senate, or perhaps it’s just that he’s being too crassly good at narcissism for the ruling class lords with highfalutin manners to tolerate.
When Trump’s red-capped followers yell praise to his coarse and now literal bullshit it is because he is giving full voice to their totally hilarious talking [petit] penis will to power (en.m.wikipedia.org/...) in all its nearly naked self-glorification, the more inane the better. It is not because he is better than them in any “coastal elitist” sense, fully flowered middle American man of the people that he is, but because he is the cathartic biggest selfish asshole in the room, and they are thoroughly entertained and not worthy in a AR-15-toting mockumentary of reality TV sort of way.
From cheering (and jeering fake news reporters) in a coliseum-outpost of lily white Trump World is little or no distance to not giving a shit that Normandy-missing, bone spur-less Kurds—or African Americans or Native Americans or LGBTQS or humans with female body parts or Central Americans or Yemenis or Iraqis or Jews or Palestinians or Vietnamese or so many other “others”—have died and will die because of merely our latest brazenly hypocritical and imbecilic leader or his geopolitical goony 100% hetero boy friends. Such leaders as Trump, Erdogan, Putin, Assad, Khashoggi, Kim, Xi, et al. are not pariahs [piranhas, tomatoes, tomahtoes], but, after all, demigods God-ordained to climb to the hilarious pinochle of political-economic success. If only we would loosen up, discard our politically correct, Democratic, socialist (the shoe sometimes fits) ways, and get in on the highly inequitable capitalist (market or, in the case of Kim, state) joke.
Just give yourself some time. Not everyone is equipped to go directly from the front lines of playing tight end one’s freshman and sophomore years at the New York Military Academy to giving a Turkish dictator the thumbs up to mass slaughter and ethnic cleansing of one’s supposed “allies.” The cognitive dissonance normally created by “growing up” is a cost of doing business in a materially inequitable world that often takes a lifetime of numbing. Environmentally-calamitous, fossil fuel-dependent, generationally-grand larcenous economic “growth” requires a populace generally committed by fear or greed to morally regressive personal “growth” into the mature cowardice of mass narcissism instead of mass action.
Many but not all of our betters in the ruling class seem to come naturally by such insights, for they never really have to grow up in order to regain their infantile narcissism. Emotionally painful regressing from sharing in the sandbox to fighting in the bread wars and ignoring others’ pain is not particularly relevant when you’re endowed, so to speak, with “at least $413 million in today’s dollars” (www.nytimes.com/...).
While not every white male legacy baby gets NPD (en.m.wikipedia.org/...), a logical expectation is that the percentages are roughly equivalent to those with ED:
Mild and moderate erectile dysfunction affects approximately 10 percent of men per decade of life (i.e., 50 percent of men in their 50s, 60 percent of men in their 60s).
Some of us need to re-learn and some of us never un-learned “exaggerated feelings of self-importance, an excessive need for admiration, and a lack of empathy toward other people.” In their “defense,” many millionaires and billionaires, whether born or “self-made,” also re-learn some sand box-like “acts” of charity, however insincere their commitment, at least when tax deductions make it a wash, although our dear leader could not even get this right.
But let’s not pick on Trump. He’s had a bad week. Not as bad as the Kurds, but we can be sure if they die, our leader thinks they probably had it coming, not being white or rich and all.
Noblesse oblige did not prevent George W. from killing a huge but still disputed number of Iraqi civilians. This did not prevent Ellen from granting forgiveness for their deaths and for the shattered lives of those merely displaced, not to mention the disaster that is the Middle East and the forced emigration crisis many Europeans have rebranded, as our dear leader would have them do so, as an immigration crisis:
As of November 4, 2006, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimated that 1.8 million Iraqis had been displaced to neighboring countries, and 1.6 million were displaced internally, with nearly 100,000 Iraqis fleeing to Syria and Jordan each month.
(en.m.wikipedia.org/...)
Coming soon to a venue near you:
And so I told him, “Hell yeh, by all means come in and kill, my good friend Recep,” such a good, good friend. “But beware,” like a Pumpkin Spice Latte drank frequently by enemies of the people, standing right over there, we see them [loud boos] “beware,” I said, “beware my potent potential sanctions.” Ha! Let me tell you, death of brown people commodified is something to be said. They don’t vote for me anyway, and they did not join us at D-Day, [looks at teleprompter] one of the great battles we [ba dum tss] fought.
With funny as hell presidents like this, who can blame much of the next generation of white males for having a grossly confused, and dangerous, definition of “irony” and their God-given rights as white males. They are in particular need of help preventing their own Internet-driven narcissistic tendency toward the Alt-right, “lovingly” fostered by the barrel of laughs NPD-sufferer in the White House.
The meme showed a man in contemporary clothing tipping off the Nazi leader to the invasion of Normandy. My son said he hadn’t even read it, he’d just assumed the time traveler was trying to kill Hitler, not help him. He was shocked and embarrassed when I pointed out the actual message: that it would have been better if the Holocaust had continued.
“I’m not stupid enough to like a Hitler meme on purpose, Mom,” he said. “And anyway, I’m sure my friend shared it to be ironic.”
I didn’t see the irony and my son couldn’t explain it. I talked to him about the Holocaust, the trauma and violence that Jewish people all over the world still experience and my late friend Edith, whose delicate arm displayed a number tattoo that stopped my heart every time I saw it. He knew all this already, but I worried that he was forgetting. I worried that he was being pulled toward a worldview that would see this painful history as fodder for jokes, or worse, as something to celebrate.
(www.nytimes.com/...)
We do not laugh or celebrate. We seek to educate; we mourn what Trump has done to the Kurds, his giving of sanction, aid, and comfort to their mass murderer; and we vow to do our best to exact constitutional, political, and legal revenge. Trump, records with the whole truth MIA, must go—out of office and into a prison, one that will no doubt be much better than that loser John McCain’s, RIP, where Trump should be passing soap-on-a-rope to Bush, Cheney, and Ollie North (oh the bodies beneath their floorboards).