We are, sadly, living in a renaissance of openly proud public psychopathy. This appears to be a worldwide phenomenon, with influential American culture presently at the epicenter of this plague on humanity. Bullying is an expression of deep inferiority that is easily seen, on a superficial level, as a kind of strength. It is the kind of strength that only destroys. Bullying inhibits and stunts the best intentions, and higher natures, of everyone around the bully.
My personal take on people like Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, Elon Musk’s elected second in command, and their stinking ilk is that they are driven by self-loathing that makes them cruel and punitive. They are primally wounded, to be what others see as childish, egotistical freaks; their grandiose mission in life is gaining power to punish the world for their humiliation. If they have the power to control and destroy others, they imagine they are important and safe from the self-hatred that animates their need for attention. If I humiliate you, who’s the humiliated one now, asshole?
I have come to this understanding through painful personal experience, being ostracized by a group of my oldest friends, based on lies told by two of them. My two closest friends, during a tense holiday the four of us spent in a rented house, were quietly at each others’ throats. The pressure mounted as the wife tried, and largely failed, to please her dour, quietly angry husband by micromanaging every moment of our vacation. Trying to help ease the escalating tension between my two old friends was a fool’s errand, and I paid a dear price for trying.
A laser beam of silent rage was fixed on me by the dear friend I considered the sister I’d never had, over a senseless, minor, easily fixable conflict. I wound up blamed for the entire disastrous vacation, I’d ruined a beautiful time on the second to last day by venting frustration in an inexcusable way. I’d uttered the forbidden f-word in front of these two silently vying prigs. It was that expression of visceral vulgarity that became the focus in the days, weeks and months afterwards. My uncontrollable temper, abusiveness and purported inability to forgive became the grounds for my righteous assassination by an extended group of friends of fifty years, the proof was in my own violent words.
My friend called a few days after our tense goodbye at the vacation house, saying “wasn’t that a great vacation?” When I reminded him of the rising tension, the anger, the coldness at our parting, he denied there was any tension at all until my explosion of anger made things suddenly uncomfortable for everybody. He told me he and his wife were very concerned about my abusive behavior, discussed it the whole ride home, were not sure they could ever forgive me. A few weeks of silence later my friend told me “I’ve walked away from friendships for less than what you did to me”. He did not elaborate. More outbursts of indignation followed, and months of silence from my other friend, his wife.
This should have told me everything I needed to know about my former friends. I should have recognized they were now determined, adamant adversaries. Today there’s no way I’d keep trying to save a dead friendship once confronted by this united show of implacable anger and contempt. Now that I can see it clearly, a curt exit is the only sensible thing to do. In my defense, at the time it was unthinkable to me, as it was for Seedj, that our two closest, oldest friends were beyond the reach of friendship. They were, but it was impossible to conceptualize.
It took a full year, plus a month or so, before I finally saw their desperation never to be wrong as the monstrous, relationship destroying force it actually is. Rage does not yield to peacemaking if the inflexibly angry party will not hear anything that might make them feel imperfect, or in any way bad about themselves. The party’s over.
We were going to celebrate the retirement of another dear friend. The whole group would be there, paying a few hundred dollars a seat into his favorite charities as he was honored. The four of us had not seen each other since an ugly ending to an evening we’d spent together, five months earlier, when the woman who sternly told me that she and her husband had a contract never to call each other names, called her husband a name that stung him like an electric current. Then she smiled at me mischievously. When I made an oblique reference to it, they immediately got up from the dinner table and walked away. We hadn’t seen our close friends for five months, though I continued to try to get through to my friend, the husband, who I saw from time to time.
It would be impossible for me to pretend that all was well, and joyously celebrate our friend’s retirement, without being able to talk through our ugly impasse first. I challenged my friend and he dragged his wife down to hear what I had to say, a few days before the joyous retirement party. She had a prolonged temper tantrum. I’d put my phone on the table and recorded the session, to be sure I’d said what I needed to say. One part of me understood I might need the verbatim notes for later use. One problem I’d had in trying to make peace was that the story my friends told continually changed. There had been absolutely no tension in that house until I’d violated everyone with the fucking f-word. My friend had never flown into a prolonged silent rage at me, my aggressive hostility made her “get her back up”, understandably. I was the one with the anger problem, not them.
I found myself listening to part of the recording yesterday, while trying to master some editing software. My friend denied my challenge had forced him to bring his implacable wife to the table (though clearly it had). I was not the one restraining my temper, it was him, and his patient wife, he told me testily. I heard myself make every good argument, and listened to reactions that made no sense, except to deflect any responsibility from themselves. Yes, they conceded, for the first time, eight months after the fact, it had been tense in that vacation home, because the wife had been compelled to scramble, and micromanage, after a planned dream European vacation was preempted by Covid restrictions. I was mistaken about the anger between them, I apparently hadn’t seen anything. My friend told me they often go a week at a time, living in the same house, angry, silent, avoiding eye contact.
It would be a few more months until things came to their, inevitable in hindsight, ugly climax. In the days following painful knee replacement surgery my other close friends in the group made it clear they could never forgive someone like me, a person who can’t forgive. What I had done to their dear friends could never be forgiven.
It is said that the victors write history. They write it in the blood of their victims. My understanding of this dynamic, terminally wounded people who can never be wrong uniting others in their cause, using their power over others to feel better about the immense pain of their condition, runs deep. It could not have been illustrated more clearly than in the accusation, from someone who wasn’t there, that I’d “deliberately tortured my closest friend for over a year to bend him to my will.” My patient peacemaking efforts were doomed from the start, and I was then defamed, because I didn’t recognize the severe emotional disabilities of the people I was trying to make peace with.
So it is with the leaders and mythology of MAGA. They had every right to riot at the Capitol because they truly believed the lie that the 2020 election had been stolen from their persecuted candidate. It was a Day of Love. Legitimate Political Discourse. Those who assaulted and grievously injured police that day — persecuted martyrs, victims of a weaponized DOJ. Virtually everything MAGA stands for is a lie. Putin wants peace, the dictator Zelensky is the aggressor. Medicaid is bankrupting a country of over 800 billionaires. This is always the pattern with these terminally insecure motherfuckers. Zelensky, in countering one or two of the aggressive lies snarled at him during a photo op/pressure session, was trying to “litigate” in public, according to mascara wearing man’s man JD Vance.
We are all living in an age where these severely damaged, destructive motherfuckers are ascendant, even admired by millions. In a better world, we’d treat them as damaged people who deserve our compassion. Here in reality TV-land, it’s hard to do. They reject compassion, having never experienced its healing power. They seek only power and obedience to their will. They continually demonstrate their contempt for the weak, the powerless, the gullible and appeal to violence. Hard to have compassion for people, no matter what their tragic personal history, who want to rule like Hilter did, but with more loyal generals who don’t sometimes get out of line and try to kill them.
It is important to recognize that lying is essential to the whole Nazi enterprise. A bully has no right to treat others with contempt, except in the bully’s subjective view that he is the righteous victim and everyone else the cause of his torment. Every word these creatures utter, almost without exception, is a lie calculated to stoke violent loyalty. Lying is necessary to advance a narrative that makes no sense in light of the truth, of actual cause and effect. USAID saves thousands of lives a year, and feeds and clothes millions of starving children, protects children from polio, in poor countries that gain goodwill toward the USA. There is less waste, fraud and corruption in USAID than in the illegal “agency” of young hotshot hackers pulled directly out of Project 2025’s ass, adorably dubbed DOGE (branding is everything).
The truth is getting roughed up in this current one-sided fight, but it is crucial to see what we are up against and counter the lies at every turn. Democrats, a cautious corporate party, have been very disappointing in this regard. It is up to we the citizens of this besieged democracy. Here’s MAGA enemy Anthony Fauci, from before his security team was publicly removed from him by agents of Elon Musk and his pet orange man/boy.
(Pardon the glitch, couldn’t embed the video, which appeared with a command, from a Google bot, to prove you weren’t a bot, then didn’t let you. Click the link, the pitch is important, brief and well-said.)
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