My Job is More Important than Your Life

Be frank. The monologues, the dialogues, the tearful descriptions of victims, the calls for action, the finger pointing, and arguments (among others) have become tediously repetitive. One news outlet, in the wake of this recent Broward County shooting, replayed post-mass shooting comments from Speaker Paul Ryan over the past year that were so identical they actually felt comical due to their redundancy.

Although the bulk of the this unique American tragedy falls squarely on Republican Conservatism, one needs to also reflect on why Progressive Liberals are so inept at making changes to restore to health a society ever more handicapped by a killing disease.

Let me reflect on both, but first the problem.

It has become increasingly presented by domestic and international analysts that when it comes to non-lethal violence, virtual or real, the United States is not an outlier.  Whether it is due to anger, passion, greed, mental illness or whatever, bad shit is contemplated or happens everywhere with only minimal variation of degrees.

The US is a big nation, so raw numbers are also large, but when analysts dig deeper, Americans do not embrace violence uniquely. However, when it comes to mass-shootings (4 or more people killed by an assailant with a gun) the US is off the charts in a category of its own. If you add all shooting deaths, including suicides, then America truly becomes an island.

The reason is ridiculously and painfully obvious. Access to firearms, in particular certain types of firearms, allows violent people to carry out their violence with…you guessed it…shooting.  Aren’t you smart! Moreover, they view it as standard operating procedure.

The ramification of this gun violence is far more harmful than the publicized carnage.

The inability to address the social issue continues to lead the nation down a road of prevention as the sole means of dealing with the problem. Ironically, this direction benefits the advocates (and profiteers) of guns since it calls for even more guns to be distributed within the nation to be put in the hands of “good guys” (notice its “guys” not “gals”). Along with that add physical barriers (lock doors, walls, gates, metal detectors), and “procedures” (shooting drills in school, military style presence, e.g.). You end up with a nation of people more stressed, more angry, more afraid, and with more guns. This is a solution?

Republicans lawmakers and the Republican Party as a whole have fought even the slightest attempts to curb gun availability. To think they have done this out of some patriotic adherence to the Constitution should make anyone with half a brain laugh to the point of tears. They have taking this stand for only one pitiful reason: their “grade” from the NRA. They feel a ‘B’ grade or less from the NRA means their election in the Republican Primary is toast…period. They know because in many cases they used that same standard to defeat an opponent, along with the financial support of the NRA. Deaths of children notwithstanding, to Republicans keeping their job is what counts.

But what of Progressives with all their ‘D’s and ‘F’s from the NRA? I believe they just don’t get it.

The constant refrain we hear from gun control advocates is that we need to stop these mass shootings today. They reference the cause of these shootings as inappropriate weapons too easily acquired.  Their arguments are self-neutralizing because they are so unfeasible. They project the target of their efforts as the next mass shooting.  They cannot bring the problem down to earth. Every time I hear the phrase “…so this will never happen again” I literally want to scream.

It is reasonably estimated that there is a gun for every man, woman, and child in the United States. Nothing is going to stop gun violence in this year, this decade, or this generation. We need gun control laws of all kinds, at all different levels of government, because we need it to be a reflection of how we, as a society, feel about the use of guns to carry out our personal anxieties. That attitude which is reflected elsewhere in the world needs to be replanted here.

Banning the sale of certain weapons, restricting acquisition to certain individuals, and beginning aggressive buy-back programs will go further in the minds of young people because it would create a social imperative. That needs to be the goal, gun ownership be damned. There will always be guns…always.

Politicians need to do this so the next generation, often the young children being killed today, can expect that their peers feel the way they do, and that fear is not the driver of their lives.

A Convenient Amnesia

In early 2016 Lindsey Graham, the thoughtful but doggedly Conservative Senator from South Carolina, described Donald Trump as a “kook” and pointedly wrote that he was “not fit to be President of the United States”. He said this after his own prospects for the Republican nomination had dropped to zero. As Trump secured the nomination, Graham announced that his own Party had gone “batshit crazy”.

Make absolutely no mistake about one undeniable reality: Trump the Presidential candidate is exactly the same as Trump the President. The only difference I can perceive is a marginally increased ability to read a teleprompter. Yet for the past year Lindsey Graham (along with 99.3% of Congressional Republicans) has taken no meaningful overt, public stand to reign in the “batshit crazy” we have witnessed for the past 13 months. Why?

It’s too easy to simply discount the negligent ambivalence on the part of Republican lawmakers as self-interest. The desire to retain power by securing seats in Congress has always been a significant modus operandi regardless of Party. Yet the reality that the Public interest is often their best interest as well, could, like olive oil over vinegar, still occasionally float to the surface.

Now, something has changed, yet Donald Trump, with all his mental incapacities, is not the cause. He is merely the tumor caused by this Nation’s long time exposure to a social carcinogen.

The great schism of the 21^st century began with Barack Obama. As a society we are closer to 1860 than we ever have been over the last 100 years.

Obama would likely have never become President had George W. Bush not been the second worst President in modern history. Obama rose to office on a populous wave that was made possible by his own talents and intelligence.  He was not a flaming Liberal and he proved that as President, a fact which would undermine the Democrats in the 2010 election. As a center-left President you would think he could govern as Bill Clinton had, with reasonable support from the loyal opposition. Of course, that did not happen.

 Before the music had faded from the inauguration balls, the famed Tea Party was gearing up to oppose his Presidency. Not oppose what he did, mind you. Rather simply to oppose him. Under the guise of being an army of fiscally responsible patriots, they organized a certain large sub-set of Americans with the classic use of fear…fear of people who were not them.

The laughable hypocrisy of their “fiscal responsibility” has been made obvious by their conspicuous absence during the Republican’s 2017-2018 continuing assault on our National Debt.

No, forget the excuses. The biggest problem with Obama for the Tea Party and their minions was that he was black…and the Republicans knew it. When McConnell stated that the primary job of the Republicans in Congress was to remove Obama from office, he was feeding fish to the seals.

The fears that have pervaded and handicapped America since the mid 1800s, have divided the Nation between White America and Black America, or as Chris Hayes has put it; a Nation and a Colony within that Nation.  We have over the decades chipped away at that division successfully, until the moral imperative to eliminate discrimination became more or less accepted…in theory.

In practice however, those latent fears of losing security (physical, financial, and egotistical) surfaced with a vengeance in 2009, even in the midst of a historic economic crisis. The dark side of American White Supremacy erupted like the angry creature that shot from the space traveler’s chest in the movie ‘Aliens’. An apt analogy indeed, considering that all types of non-European, alien minorities have been combined with African-Americans as outliers in the “Patriotic” White America.

 The Republican’s spent 7 years stoking the fears of their constituencies. They did it by systematically undercutting every move Obama made to affect legislation.  Obama, with his painfully professorial approach to governing, would not or could not rise sufficiently to confront his opposition. In plain language, the lesser educated, Conservative, white males could not stomach the idea that a black man was President, and Republican Conservatism did everything it could to make them feel justified.

This is Trump’s core support and the Republican’s Frankenstein’s monster.

Too many times I would hear reasonably intelligent men state that Obama was the worst President in the history of this Nation. What?!? Pulling us from fiscal collapse, eight years of increasing economic prosperity, ending a disastrous war, leading the world in ecological efforts, leading the world in curbing Iranian nuclear proliferation, and on and on makes their conclusion about Obama as illogical and non-sensical as their support for Donald Trump.

The Republican Party and American Conservatism now operate on pure emotion, as does Trump TV (aka Fox News). You can check your brain at the door when entering the RNC; conspiracies in every branch of Government, roaming gangs of bloodthirsty aliens in little towns everywhere, unending lies from every information source except Conservative talk radio and Fox News, herds of feminists looking to destroy good people and murder unborn babies, Gestapo Liberals ready to enter your home, empty your gun closet, and force you into third world health care, and the underprivileged not knowing their place.

I believe most of Trump’s supporters don’t love the guy, they’re just scared shitless by the alternative…made all too real by the election of a black man as President.

When Republican lawmakers and leadership are asked the question ‘why’- why Donald Trump, why the passive support, why the acceptance – they get a convenient amnesia. They didn’t know, they hadn’t heard, they are unaware, they don’t recall.  They may never remember how they used the darkest part of American society to split that society in two.   

If It Were Only Just Lies

“…can you call it Treason?  Sure… why not.” So Donald Trump described the Democrats and others during his State of the Union speech when they did not applaud during what he thought were universally good pronouncements. 

Forget that Treason is a serious crime that can be punishable by death in this Country. Forget that he doesn’t have even minimally useful mental firepower to understand that the Opposition Party does not credit him with many economic positives (especially those that involve minorities).  Forget that the use of labeling your opponent as “un-American” or “Treasonous” is classic authoritarian rhetoric.

It was inflammatory, ignorant, insulting…and absurd. But it was also telling.  

All these things that involve viewing Trump through a microscope of intellectual analysis continue to miss the point. I find it so frustrating day after day to listen to both opposing and supporting pundits review the behavior of this man. 

I now start almost every weekday watching 30 minutes of recorded Morning Joe and 30 minutes of recorded Fox and Friends (not a healthy activity). I read articles to a fault from every perspective I can find.  I feel at a gut level the chaos that is beyond articulation.

Attempting to stand back and view the dialogue as a whole tells me one important thing: the foundation of the pundit’s, “expert’s”, and politician’s observations and opinions is wrong. They want to apply logic, often in the absence of truth, to try and explain what is happening.

As I have stated at length on several posts to this Blog (starting well before Trump was elected President), the explanation is simple, and you might even say organic (if that term pleases you more). Donald J. Trump suffers from a relatively rare mental condition known as a Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). That fact explains EV-ER-Y-THING!! It is the only logic remaining after the dust settles at the end of each day.

Narcissism is a spectrum we all fall on to different degrees. Someone with NPD falls so high on the spectrum that certain behaviors become almost hard-wired and predictable.  It doesn’t necessarily negate other abilities or talents, and, in fact, can enhance some personal traits we often find attractive, such as confidence, enthusiasm, or congeniality.

To dismiss the fact that Trump has a NPD because such a pronouncement requires professional counseling with the President is sadly misinformed. Not only will a sufferer of NPD not submit to counseling because they cannot accept the possibility of the condition, but also because Trump’s public persona provides more observational data than any psychologist could hope to extract from a one on one meeting with an ordinary patient.

Trump’s detractors label him as a liar. Make that a colossal liar. The Washington Post recently tallied Trump’s “lies” during his first year in the thousands. Politifact has quantified him as the most untruthful individual (of those with a significant volume of entries) in the history of their publication. We have all seen it with our own eyes and ears and now routinely accept it as a new normal. The dogmatic Trump supporters don’t even consider his untruths as anything more than grunts and cheers.

I don’t believe Trump is a liar, not to say he hasn’t used deception from time to time, as many do. The reason I don’t is important. In order to lie, you must believe there is a exterior truth. Truth is not something that exists for someone with a NPD. If you can understand that reality, then Donald Trump begins to become understandable and possibly even predictable.

For an individual with a Narcissistic Personality Disorder truth or facts are not concepts that are exterior to themselves.  As they view both their actions and their thoughts they are forced to refashion external reality to coincide with the conclusions they already arrived at. When actual facts are presented to them contradicting their conclusions they naturally view those facts as incorrect, and even view those presenting the truth as conspiratorially opposing them.

When you think about Trump's use of “fake news”, or his inability to admit a mistake, or refusing to apologize it all begins to make sense.

It should be of no surprise to anyone that the most vulnerable people to Trump’s mental handicap are those, who by necessity, must surround and advise an American President. They must perform a daily kabuki dance of explaining to him he’s wrong by simultaneously telling him he’s right. Ergo the exodus that has left the White House, and continues unabated.

There is one irrefutable reality. A person with a Narcissistic Personality Disorder should not be President of the United States. 

I had a relationship through most of my life with a person suffering from a NPD and I saw how it evolved.  I experienced, first hand, the irrationality and paranoia that overtook that individual.  The need to remove Trump from office is far greater than you may have considered in November of 2016. At the very least…the very least…his power needs to be neutered by a significant change in Congress. Just watching cannot be an option.