Narcissism

August 22, 2020

Pentwater, Michigan

     It's pretty hard to ignore what a doofus our president is.  His limited vocabulary and inarticulate ramblings and repetitions, employing the comparatively few words he does know, strike the reasonable listener each time they hear the guy talk (which for me is as seldom as possible).  But because he's the president and because before that he was in the world of high finance, he is sometimes also credited with a deeper overall knowledge of things than he has.  After all, we think, how could he have made, and lost, all those millions of dollars if he didn't have at least a little sense?
   
     And there's no punch line to follow that rhetorical question.  He does indeed have some sense, some knowledge that others don't have, and the ability to make things happen.  There's a certain grim charisma to the guy.  Whether he's the lackey of the right wing, or its leader, makes almost no difference--he is certainly carrying out the Republican agenda with, for them, admirable alacrity.  For anyone who doesn't already know it, the Republican agenda is, and has been for many years, the following:  to promote the interests of big business at pretty much any cost.  That's it!   But you say, it can't be that simple.  What about racism and white supremacy? what about pandering to the ignorant and superstitious religious people? what about keeping the attention of the country focused on illegal immigrants and slant-eyed foreigners?  Well, duh, as they say.  These things all promote capitalism, which needs to exploit the permanent underclasses and the profoundly ignorant among us in order to survive.  First of all, get us all worshiping and drooling over the doings of the wealthy (like Trump, Bloomberg, Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc.), so that we not only expect them to be our saviors but also assume that their morality is superior to ours, and that therefore their ability to lead us is greater.  This isn't anything new in this country, of course.  Despite the "aw shucks" personae of several of our most prominent presidents, it was the patricians of the colonies--Washington and Jefferson, for instance--who led the revolution, and to whom was given the initial power.  Why?  Because they were wealthy, and thus inherently superior to the rest of us. 

     But there's that niggling psychological aspect to Trump's personality, which the left-of-center media keeps harping on, and which they say separates him from the garden variety rapacious and soulless Republican.  He's also a narcissist.  Democrats say so.  His bitter psychologist niece says so.  Various eminent psychiatrists say so.  And even some of his fellow Republicans are saying it, lest they be tainted by the Trump legacy after he's gone.

     So, is Trump a narcissist, in the clinical sense?  In the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-5, which is the American Psychiatric Association's attempt to create a sort of  Oxford English Dictionary of craziness, "narcissistic personality disorder" is defined to include 9 characteristics, of which a certified narcissist should possess at least 5.  Let's take a look at these criteria as they apply to Donald Trump:

          1.  A grandiose sense of self-importance;  (check)
          2.  A preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love;  (check)
          3.  A belief that he or she is special and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people or institutions;  (definitely the first part, but possibly not the second part, since he surrounds himself with idiots and ass-kissers, and his idea of a high-status person is Jeffrey Epstein and his idea of a high-status institution is a golf course)
          4.  A need for excessive admiration;  (check)
          5.  A sense of entitlement;  (check)
          6.  Interpersonally exploitive behavior;  (check)
          7.  A lack of empathy;  (check)
          8.  Envy of others or a belief that others are envious of him or her;  (check)
          9.  A demonstration of arrogant and haughty behaviors or attitudes.  (check)

So, the guy really aces this test.  He needed a 5, but he got at least an 8 1/2.  So why isn't he bragging about this score, like he bragged about passing his cognitive ability test?

     Why indeed.  Really, it's an easy and cheap shot to call Trump a narcissist and leave it at that, as if he is the only narcissist who treads the polished marble halls of our nation's capital, or who has ever occupied the White House.  So the guy's a narcissist, what of it?  First off, none of his faithful give a shit, because narcissism is a four-syllable word and they don't understand it.  And as for his handlers, the capitalists whom he serves, they couldn't care less either, because he gets things done for them--lowering taxes, deregulating every damned thing he can, and generally, to the best of his ability, making it easier for them to make a buck.

      I realize I'm pretty much preaching to choir.  But here, ladies and gentlemen, is a truth that we might not wish to hear.  Having a president who is a consummate, textbook narcissist just might be the very thing this country deserves.  Just as individuals can have narcissistic personalities, so, I believe, can nations be narcissistic.  As a nation, no matter who the president happens to be, we in the U.S. are convinced that we are the Greatest Country on Earth, and that our president is not only the Leader of the Free World, but the Most Powerful Person in the World.  Maybe that's because of all the nukes we have, but I suspect that it's at least as much from our being utterly convinced that we are, as countries go, the cat's meow.  Outside the warm context of our own feeling of self-worth, all this might sound a little like the pronouncements of the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain, but we repeat these "truths" ad nauseam, even when we're criticizing the president or ourselves as a country, e.g., the United States should know better than to ignore climate change, because we are, after all, the Greatest Country on Earth; our president should be a better person, because he is the Leader of the Free World.  Even when we are forced to face our systemic police brutality and racism, we say, This is No Way for the Greatest Nation in the World to Behave.  And by the way, no matter who the president or would-be president is, "God Bless the United States of America."  Man am I sick of  hearing that benediction.  There was a time, even in my lifetime, when presidents didn't end every speech they made with those seven vapid words--words which, for all their supposed neutrality, scream out that we are God's Chosen People, despite how far off the track we may have strayed.   

     But just to be certain about our national narcissism, let's look at those nine DSM-5 criteria again, and apply them to the good old U. S. of A. as a country:

          1.  A grandiose sense of self-importance.  Well, if you have to think twice about that one, you haven't been paying any attention at all.

          2.  A preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.    If there's anything we fantasize about, in fact and fiction, it's our success and beauty as a country.                      3.  A belief that he or she (or in this case, it) is special and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people or institutions.  This defines us perfectly as a nation, and we make it a point to ally ourselves most closely with the other countries we deem to be powerful enough and most like ourselves in racial, economic, and imperialistic outlook.  To hell with wasting our time with little weak Third World countries--what would be the percentage in that?
          4.  A need for excessive admiration.  Let's face it, if we don't get our asses kissed by other countries, we're just not happy with them, and are liable to send in a few troops to teach them a lesson. 
          5.  A sense of entitlement.  Ahem, yes, to every damn thing there is, from food, fuel, fortunes, and fun to media, music, medicine, and munitions.
          6.  Interpersonally exploitive behavior.  Hmmm.  Have we ever tried to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, or tried to rape them of their natural resources? 
          7.  A lack of empathy.  Well, it's pretty hard to be empathetic with other countries when you're The Greatest Country on the Face of the Earth, and in the History of the Universe.  What's to empathize with?
          8.  Envy of others or a belief that others are envious of him or her (or it).  We absolutely know that the rest of the world just wishes it could be us.

          9.  A demonstration of arrogant and haughty behaviors or attitudes.  See all of the above.

     So wow!! For absolute narcissism the United States as a nation scores even higher than our current president does as a person!  And aren't we proud of ourselves and our precious every-man-for-himself, gun-toting-libertarian, pay-as-little-tax-as-we-can "perfect" democracy?  You bet we are.  Just look at all the people who want to get in!  If we were so bad, why would they want to?  Well maybe it's because we are simply less bad than some of our global neighbors.  But that doesn't make us better than all of them.  Unlike many other countries, we don't offer universal health care, free or cheap higher education, decent worker benefits or vacations or leave time.  Nor do we provide safety from guns and brutal police.  We're like that one house on the block where the parents are affluent and don't give a shit what their kids do as long as they do it in the house.  Of course the other kids want to come over, especially if their own parents have lots of rules, even ones that are good for them.  And in the case of the kids whose parents abuse them and don't give them enough to eat, or are constantly fighting, yes, our house might well be the better choice.  But it's not because we're a more responsible house, just a less restricted one.  In the long run, we don't really take care of our guests, we just let them in.  And when it's time for us to kick ass in our house, watch out!  
   
     Let's not ever forget that we weren't founded by real revolutionaries--not ones who wanted to completely transform society or create a utopia to replace a dictatorship.  We were founded by men who were tired of paying taxes--men who didn't mind owning other people, or at least condoning the practice in others, and who certainly didn't mind annihilating the people who were here before we came.  "A more perfect union" my ass.

     But, you might be saying, aren't all countries narcissistic?  Don't they all believe they are the greatest group of people ever assembled by God in one place?  Some are, but not all of them.  The Danish, for example, may love their little peninsula and their way of life, but they know they're not the absolute shit, on a worldwide level.  Togo, I'm pretty sure, has a healthy sense of its own comparative lack of importance on the world stage.  Vietnam wants to run itself and its people and secure its own borders from foreign invasion, but it doesn't want to rule the world.  Even the French, for all their arrogance and general lack of interest in anything non-French, aren't, strictly speaking, narcissistic.  They're very much in love with themselves, to be sure, but they don't give a shit whether the rest of the world loves them, because, after all, the opinions of anyone non-French don't count for much.

     Narcissism in individual human beings, like sociopathy, is incurable and irremediable, except by death.  A leopard can't change its spots, or a zebra its stripes.  Donald Trump will be exactly the way he is until he is no more.  But it's worth bearing in mind that countries can transform themselves, or be transformed by external circumstances, without necessarily dying.  With sufficient changes in leadership, and sometimes after receiving a pretty stiff dose of humiliation, countries can abruptly or gradually change.  Germany is a good example from recent history.  Even our mother country, Great Britain, is coming to understand that it's not the be-all and end-all it once thought it was.  This could happen to us, and in some measure it is beginning to, in a curiously ironic way, even while we're being piloted by the worst narcissist in the history of our national leadership.  After all, under Trump we've pretty much reverted to a kind of pre-20th century isolationism, internal capitalistic rapacity, and brutal social Darwinism.  But what might help us to get over ourselves even faster would be some genuine humility at the top, engendered by the humiliation we have experienced worldwide during the past four years.  We're going to have to bow our heads in order to re-enter the family of nations.  That would be a good thing.

     May it happen soon.

    

   

The Black Death

                                                      

August 11, 2020

Pentwater, Michigan

[I am in the middle of my annual viewing of the five Final Destination movies, and it occurred to me that I already wrote a post about them, back in 2012.  I re-read it this afternoon and decided to republish it, since it seems to resonate even more today than it did then.  If you haven't watched the movies in question, you should.  But in any case, here, with a few minor revisions, is The Black Death.]

     Some time back I mentioned the Final Destination movies.  I’ve just finished watching the most recent of them, Final Destination 5.  Twice, in fact, so I could see some of the most absurdly gruesome splatter scenes again.  This series follows a predictable formula that goes like this: at the beginning of each movie one of the principal characters has a premonition of a disaster in which a number of people die in spectacular ways.  In the first one it was a plane crashing on takeoff; the second featured a ridiculously complicated multi-vehicle freeway accident; in the third a roller coaster malfunctioned; and in the fourth the disaster took place at a stock car race where several cars went flying off the track and into the stands, which fell apart, but not before tires and miscellaneous car parts decapitated, crushed, and impaled people.  In Final Destination 5 we have the collapse of a suspension bridge due to high winds (similar to the real event that happened at the Tacoma Narrows in Washington back in 1940) while a busload of young business types are on their way to a management retreat.

     After having the premonition in each movie, the prescient person “wakes up” just in time to warn others of what lies in their very near future if they don’t leave the airplane, or highway, or roller coaster, or auto race, or bridge.  Of course no one believes that person, who nevertheless bolts from the danger spot.  A few of his or her friends leave, too, just to see what’s wrong with their seemingly crazy companion.  Then in short order the real disaster happens and dozens of people die, leaving only this handful of lucky survivors--the one who had the vision and the ones who went along out of curiosity or concern.  They watch in awe and horror as people get burned, sliced in half, have their heads crushed like cantaloupes, and so on.  Then they retreat, usually to the police station, to regroup and ponder their good fortune while grieving for those who didn’t make it.  The cops in these movies are serious but fairly nice and nonviolent, in an imaginary pre-modern way.  They don't pull their guns, and they don't even automatically suspect the token Black person in each group of survivors.  After some skeptical questioning, they scratch their collective heads, try to figure out if they can arrest anybody, and ultimately let the survivors go. 

     But here’s the thing.  Death has been cheated, and Death is not happy.  Why, I don’t know, since eventually Death gets everybody, right?  Death in these movies seems rather peevish and lacking in the patience that ought to come quite naturally after so many eons of grimly and steadily reaping its harvest.  What’s a few decades of life, more or less, where existential certainty is concerned?  Anyway, Death is angry, we’re told, and it continues to stalk the survivors throughout the movie, taking them out one by one in a series of bizarre and imaginative misfortunes that more often than not require simultaneous failures of multiple mechanical and electrical systems and ask the viewer to forget that the circuit breaker and ground fault interrupter were ever invented.  In several of the movies, Death’s relentless plan, and its insistence on gathering the succession of superficially lucky youngsters to its fold, is explained by a mysterious Black man.  Usually he’s the local coroner, a person who apparently is quite well acquainted with Death in a professional capacity.

     I mention the fact that the coroner is Black because in this movie and in the rest of the series there are few other Black people, but they tend to have a closer connection with Death, or at least a better understanding of the reason things are happening, than the white upper middle class teenagers or twenty-somethings who form the backbone of the cast, and who tend to take solace from the horror of their situation in trips to each other's houses, where they philosophically drink and talk and ultimately decide to live for today.  Cinematically speaking, in general, it seems, when it comes to helping clueless people to understand the deepest of realities, it’s necessary for a person of color to do the explaining.  

     The use of an African American character as the link between the world of insouciant white good fortune and the dark void of the unknown is part of a long tradition in the movies, which have consistently employed those of duskier hue to unite us with the most primitive and basic elements of human existence—fear, lust, privation, and death.  One Black person, skillfully utilized, can do the duty of all of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, including the pale rider.  Call it the economy of tokenism.

     In the 1930s, when cinema made no attempt at subtlety or fairness in racial matters (as if it does now), the Black seer was often the comical minstrel-show Negro whose big eyes glowed white and whose nappy hair stood on end as he saw a ghost, while the more suave Caucasians laughed at him and saw nothing.  Black folks, it was understood, had a greater tendency to believe in the supernatural, in part perhaps because of their more "primitive" roots, and in part because there weren't a whole hell of a lot of earthly delights available to them, comparatively speaking.  Sometimes the person with the enhanced vision of the inherent ignorance of the wealthy and carefree was somebody’s maid or wet nurse, with a bandanna tied over her hair, shaking her heavy head at the foolishness of the white folks and saying, “mmm, mmm, mmm” in a resigned singsong voice.  Half comic relief and half Greek chorus, the darkies would generally tend to be right about the fact that something was wrong.  Later, as we began to strive for cinematic and social "realism," we played on another image, that of the sexual threat inherent in the Black presence--sweaty muscular men and women grinding the night away on the sawdust floors of juke joints, drinking to excess, smoking dope, and gyrating in primitive ways that no decent, respectable W.A.S.P. would countenance.  In any event, the Black folk were always a degree or two closer to the basic truth of things, even if they appeared to be merely shucking and jiving and clowning.  They knew, down in their jungle souls, what was important, and it wasn’t martinis and starched collars and briefcases, believe you me. 

     Lest we think that the age of Buckwheat and Mammy and Mandingo is gone, however, we should take a look at the more recent past, and for that matter, the present.  There is, and has been for some time, a stock character in American drama known as the Magic Negro.  He or she is often a servant (what else?) or sometimes a sidekick or petty criminal, who seems to appear out of nowhere to help the white protagonist out of a jam with a combination of common sense and street smarts, and if all else fails, by laying down his life for the hero. If nothing else, this created jobs for black actors, sad as they might be.  At the TV level, think of Jack Benny’s manservant Rochester, of Starsky and Hutch’s underworld pal Huggy Bear, or of Maude's maid Florida.  In the movies there are too many to list, but you’ll easily recall them.  I’ll let serious students and critics of the genre, like Spike Lee, expound on this phenomenon and will only mention it here.  Then again, often the Black person in a movie is the first to die, or be killed by the alien, or get sucked out of the airplane.  Why?  First, because he’s expendable and frequently has no mate, due to the still-heavily-enforced cinematic anti-miscegenation rule which dictates, in contravention of reality, that a Black man shall not have a white woman, only a Black or Hispanic woman, unless of course that Black man is already a criminal.  (Here I should mention that this rule is not necessarily imposed without the complicity of both races; I once saw a woman on a documentary dedicated to Denzel Washington—an actor who fairly scrupulously adheres to the black-to-black, or at least black-to-brown, rule in his movies—rather pettishly claim him, as an African American, as “ours,” which was particularly odd because the woman who was making the claim was only about one-sixteenth less white than my own mother.)  Another reason Black people die first is that generally the protagonists are all white, and the nonwhites are just there for variety.  I will say, in defense of the Final Destination series, that one of the young upwardly-mobile survivors characters is always Black, and although he doesn’t have a love interest like some of the whites do, he does manage to outlive several of the other hapless characters.  That's progress.  You might say “big deal,” but in a sense it is just that.

   

     And let’s not forget the miscellaneous voodoo priestesses, or the spirit mediums (Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost); or the other persons with the supernatural powers (Scatman Crothers in The Shining and the Black guy who could see ghosts just like the little kid could in Stir of Echoes).  Where there is something going on beyond the pale, so to speak, you can count on a Black person being there to personify it or at least explain it.  It’s scary Mother Africa calling us all back to our pre-civilized roots.

     But in Final Destination the Black man, the scary coroner, is the messenger of Death itself, and he is still there at the end after the kids have all perished horribly, reminding us of our scant mortality.  Also--and this can’t be overstated--the Black character is there to remind us of our Great National Sin, the institution of slavery, for which we all must pay and pay, both now and in the afterlife.  The very subject I’m discussing here would have little meaning outside of that sub-context.  Put a Black man in a Dutch or Swedish movie and people would just say, "Hmm, an African.  Izhn't dat veerd?"  But our national Black guy, our messenger of Death, was there when this country made its original bargain with the Devil, to exist half slave and half free, and he’s here now to help us pay the Faustian price.  He'll be there shaking his head grimly and loading bodies into the back of his van when we’ve all been sliced in half by flying lawnmower blades, beheaded by shards of glass, immolated by carelessly stored chemicals, impaled by malfunctioning airbags and broken pieces of PVC pipe, and fried to a crisp in tanning booths gone haywire.

     Call him the Black Death.