It takes diligence, many times, to arrive at the truth about complicated things. It is a process that sometimes involves pain and can result in punishment. Many truths are hard to accept, so we retreat to endless nuance, interpretation, seeing it from another point of view. Certain truths, if you don’t see them in time, will smash your face and leave you wondering how you wound up bloody and chained in a sadist’s basement.
Lies, on the other hand, can be constructed to fit your needs perfectly. Feel threatened but can’t put your finger on what’s going on? How about this: there is a vast conspiracy conducted by elites, who are beloved public figures, very influential, who, behind the scenes, meet to share child sexual slaves and drink their blood? Doesn’t that explain why your spidy senses are tingling? If you fear a certain type, the lie becomes much more potent by slugging those folks into the scenario. It’s Puerto Rican pedophile cannibals, Jewish ones (of course), Muslims, Illegals, etc.
Obvious as it was once I heard Timothy Snyder say it out loud: the thousands of brazen lies we have been told by Trump and his spokes-sphincters over the last nine years have smudged the line between truth and lies. Truth, what is that, really? Aren’t alternative facts really just another spin on your so-called actual facts? Different strokes for different folks. Isn’t truth what you believe in your heart? Doesn’t your heart know what is real, much better than an easily confused brain?
Once the line is sufficiently blurred it is time for the Big Lie. This is a lie so audacious that people simply can’t believe it’s a lie — it’s unthinkable that a Hitlerian scale lie could be told over and over by everyone in a political party. If 25% of Americans actually believed the endless ads Trump ran that his 2020 election victory had been stolen from him, as Ted Cruz insisted on January 5th, 2021, isn’t that a reason to call time-out until the other 75% could be convinced of the same thing?
Here is five minutes of Snyder’s brilliant discussion of this hideous, all too popular, dynamic. Truth can be elusive and involves pain sometimes, lies are direct and easy to swallow, designed to make you feel just and righteous. Which one is your favorite?
Trump’s mental state continues to deteriorate, taking with it the former president’s inhibitions. After going on a rant about the people he blamed for troubles with his microphone at a sparsely attended rally in Warren, Michigan, the Republican nominee for president of the United States of America simulated oral sex on stage.
A fascist is a certain type of leader: authoritarian, top of the hierarchy of strict obedience to orders, surrounded by those who take an oath of personal loyalty to him, ruthlessly repressing dissent, threatening and controlling all professions and the mass media, spouting divisive lies, using the force of the state to terrify and punish enemies, and its treasury to reward wealthy friends and patrons.
All of these things Donald Trump has done, or tried to do, during his first term in office. Even now, we don’t know the full extent of his crimes regarding a trove of illegally retained classified military secrets and his ongoing post-presidential negotiations with his handler/blackmailer, renowned war criminal and buddy of Elon Musk, Vladimir Putin.
In attacking his opponent Kamala Harris, in addition to the usual dog whistles to the Klan and Nazi contingent of his base, and millions of ordinary misogynists, Trump routinely calls her a radical left, Marxist, communist, fascist. In the country Trump’s family comes from Marxists and Fascists were fighting deadly battles in the streets less than twenty years before Trumpie was born.
No fascist can be a Marxist and vice versa. Only someone intent on name-calling, inspiring maximum loathing and ignorant of, or careless about, the meaning of the words he uses, would call a communist a fascist. They can both be totalitarians, authoritarians, but calling Harris a communist fascist is like saying she’s a cat dog (both delicious, by the way, people are saying, the weave, am I right? I’m right, aren’t I?).
Personally, I blame advertising for the distraction and credulity of Americans. Our attention spans are shattered at an early age by the constant bombardment of commercial messages, attention grabbing non sequiturs which we often tune out even as they interrupt whatever we were thinking about a second before. Watch any video on YouTube and, precisely as the video tees up the pay-off, the money quote, the volume jumps and some shill is excitedly shouting over loud music. They are shouting about something completely unrelated to what you were interested in, focused on a second earlier, but not a problem. In America these interruptions are simply an inescapable feature of the marketplace of ideas, just as valid as anything else in a society whose only real value is monetary profit. Everyone understands the profit motive, no?
So you get to vote for a presidential candidate/huckster who lies compulsively, is ignorant about history, incurious about the present and almost everything else, a businessman who started with a small $400,000,000 nest egg from his father and failed in every business venture he started, declaring bankruptcy six times, while touting himself as the greatest business genius of all time, as seen on TV. He knows how the game is played, so he can mock his opponent, call her any name he likes, literally throw shit at her.
Here’s the unfunny punchline: when she is asked whether she agrees with two of his former generals and his former secretary of defense that he is indeed a fascist (it’s virtually impossible to make an informed argument that he’s not) and she says she does, Trump screams bloody murder that she’s name-calling. Every fascist in history has done that, as have many communist dictators, although dogs and cats (equally tasty when prepared well, many people are saying, see that skillful weave I’m doing?) rarely do.
“How dare that nasty, low IQ, brown sonof a bitch who doesn’t know if she’s Black or Indian, or Malaysian, or Samoan, or even a human being, call me a name I already call her?”
In his rage the other night he fantasized to replacement theory promoter Tucker Carlson about disloyal war monger Liz Cheney not being so brave if she had a rifle and was looking down the barrels of nine rifles pointed at her head. The New York Times did mention this threat in today’s edition, but carefully, with plenty of respectful nuance (they don’t want to face down the barrel of nine automatic weapons). The Washington Post (spineless puto-owned) presumably also gave a balanced portrait of the candidate’s understandable bad mood as he uttered his arguably well-veiled, deniable threat to Tucker Carlson, a craven lying toady who cackles like a startled school girl. As Tuckems said the other day at the beautiful Madison Square Garden love fest that had not a hint of the 1939 Nazi rally held there (I got the proof for you right here):
“He’s liberated us in the deepest and truest sense,” Carlson said. “And the liberation he has brought to us is the liberation from the obligation to tell lies. Donald Trump has made it possible for the rest of us to tell the truth about the world around us.”
A far cry from Tucker’s January 6th tweets about Trump being a demonic force and talking about how much he hates the sore loser Orange Fraud. Tucker has always shown an almost Jeff Bezos-like level of personal integrity (see, for example, his recent infomercial for Vlad Putin in a Russian supermarket).
Ah, fuck those lying, name-calling, thin-skinned, transactionally pearl clutching, fainting couch humping, fascist fucking crybaby putos. Better to see exactly how fucked Mr. Musk will be if Trumpie loses the election and can’t get his goons to overturn the results.
Democracy dies in a greedy rich man’s tightly clenched asshole.
Or, as Dan Rather put it the other day, in describing the uber-billionaire’s cowardly, antidemocratic twitch decision not to publish the Washington Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, already written and ready to go (and Bezos’s sickening written attempt to sanitize and justify his weasel dicked self-interest):
He is scared of Donald Trump. I am not saying he shouldn’t be. Trump has threatened to go after his perceived enemies, and that includes members of the media. But as the owner of one of the most important newspapers in the country, you have to have skin like a rhinoceros.
Bezos says there was no quid pro quo involved, but that claim raises suspicion, at the very least. And to many it rings downright hollow. His companies have billions of dollars in federal government contracts and are bidding for billions more. Those contracts generated more than half of his companies’ profits in the last quarter.
Trump’s fondness for retribution is legendary, so the possibility of payback, in the form of a canceled contract, is real.
Trump and Bezos have never been chummy. Trump has been critical of the Amazon founder, but there seems to have been a thawing of late, with recent overtures by Bezos and his executives.
In July, Bezos called Trump after the assassination attempt to tell him how much he liked the fist pump photo.
According to the Post, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy called Trump in August to further the relationship. “Trump told Jassy that he was going to win the election and that Amazon should help him because it would be in the company’s best interests.”
And the head of Blue Origin, Bezos’s space exploration company, spoke with Trump last Friday — coincidently, the same day the Post announced it would not endorse anyone.
“While I do not and will not push my personal interest, I will also not allow this paper to stay on autopilot and fade into irrelevance — overtaken by unresearched podcasts and social media barbs — not without a fight. It’s too important. The stakes are too high,” Bezos wrote. Careful getting off that high horse of yours, Jeff. . .
. . . What might be the most upsetting aspect of this cowardice is that it proves Trump’s strong-arm tactics work. Timothy Snyder, a Yale historian and scholar of authoritarianism, has published a list of ways to avoid succumbing to autocracy. Three of five apply here: “Do not obey in advance,” “Defend institutions,” and “Remember professional ethics.” Jeff Bezos has so much money that if he never makes another dime, he would still remain one of the richest men in the world for the rest of his life. So the courageous thing to do would be to stand up to the bully, rather than yield to his threats in advance. That would do more to restore America’s faith in the media than the gutless act of not endorsing Kamala Harris.
“All violence,” says psychiatrist James Gilligan, after years working with violent inmates in American prisons, “is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem.” Fear of shame drives all kinds of extreme, harmful behavior.
Self-delusion is another adaptation to fear of shame. “I could not have lost, because I am a winner and winners never lose. So-called reality is conspiring against me because it is jealous and it fears me, and rightfully so. I will destroy so-called reality and all the feeble cucks who try to cite facts as though they are more real than my feelings. Nothing is more real than my feelings, they rule the universe!”
Give someone like this power over others (and they often crave it as the only way to feel safe from a feeling of worthlessness) and hold on to your seat. The driver is now a hostage and a lunatic is at the wheel with only one goal — never to feel the traumatic agony of his shame again. If it takes driving off a cliff to prove he’s fearless, not a problem to someone hellbent on outrunning the terror of shame, failure, a paralyzing fear of utter worthlessness.
We have been watching this struggle play out in public for the last nine years. It is playing 24/7 at the moment in a party that must swear loyalty to a debasing lie about a lost election that was, like the Civil War, never lost, but stolen. This power dynamic has always operated behind the scenes, in throne rooms, corporate boardrooms, courtrooms and behind closed doors, but now the agents of this divisive, controlling rage have their perfect front man. He has no filter, will say and do absolutely anything, and insist on his perfect right to whatever he feels he must say or do. No human laws can stop him, he is superhuman, magical in his powers to overcome reality itself.
To my great personal sorrow, I had a painfully close front row seat to the highly personalized version of this dynamic a few years ago. My closest, most trusted friends, people I’d known and counted on for fifty years, all sneered angrily at me from the windows of a bus driven by one of these unleashed fucking maniacs. There was no appealing to their humanity, to our long friendships, to our actual experiences of each other over decades. They were united in their sudden certainty that I deserved only their united contempt and eternal anger for my stubborn refusal to take responsibility for willfully and singlehandedly destroying the happiness of a group of lifelong friends. The best formulation I got for my permanent expulsion from this close social circle was a demented “we can never forgive you for not being able to forgive.”
The lesson I was forced to learn was an extremely harsh one. In certain circumstances, a popular person can quickly and easily convince all the other kindergarteners in the schoolyard that you have cooties. Cooties are highly contagious. If you go near Cootie-boy you will have cooties and that will be the end of you, too. Life, my little five year-old friends, is a binary choice, always. You choose black or you choose white. In a shame-based world there are no other options, no nuance, no gradation, no possibility of EVER working out any problem with a loved one that might make their shame rear its monstrous head for them.
Therapy doesn’t work with these creatures, although often everyone around them, not as strong and self-sufficient as the shame-based charismatic, will seek therapy. To begin to change anything about yourself that causes you pain you must be able to look at faults in yourself, your reflexive reactions that often lead to misery. The idea of honestly looking at their own faults is terrifying to someone whose entire personality and worldview is based on never again being traumatized by shame. They will not do it. Nothing bad can ever be their fault in any way, that’s the inhuman rule these poor bastards live by.
Poor bastards or not, they can’t be negotiated with, persuaded or made more empathetic. They cannot change in any significant way, because of the particular nature of their damage. They are doomed to their fate, but we are not. We can be polite to them, speak calmly with them, but they can’t be counted on for anything besides their own self-preservation. Horrible but not uncommon, the worst feature of their affliction is their ability to convince others of their magical worldview.
Most humans have a deeply wired impulse to avoid conflict. Many people, particularly if they are raised by angry or unstable parents, grow up fearing the worst whenever they find themselves in any kind of conflict. To those raised in an embattled home, perceived conflict, and the fear, anger and other startling emotions it inspires, becomes an emotional emergency, to be immediately talked out with the other party. Addressing conflict when you are upset, before you have digested everything involved in the conflict, is a crappy recipe for conflict resolution.
It’s natural, if you were accosted by unreasoning anger over and over in childhood, to assume that if someone seems mad at you it could be the end of a relationship you value. In the home you grew up in, everything was always phrased that way. You were conditioned to respond defensively, meekly, self-denyingly, by long years of this demand that anger is always your fault. “You crossed me again, you little shit, and maybe this time will be the last time I take that shit from you. I brought you into the world, I have the perfect legal right to take you out of it, applicable murder statutes notwithstanding.” At four years-old, about all you can do is blink and try not to cry.
It is hard, very important, work to separate the cause of the conflict from the most dire emotional outcome you can imagine. It’s important to be able to sit with the uncomfortable feelings, fear of catastrophe, until you have a handle on them, are able to consider, and talk about, the situation calmly. The only thing that makes it an emergency to deal with now, now, now! is in your catastrophizing soul.
A conflict may turn out to be very simple to solve. Someone told me they feel under pressure because I respond to emails within a day of when I get them while it takes him/her/them at least ten days to reply. I described a feature on gmail that allows you to schedule when an email is sent. I write back tomorrow, schedule send for ten days later. Your feelings understood, technology to the rescue, problem solved. Easy.
Underlying conflicts that should be very simple to resolve, assuming good will and ability on both sides, is the vast, bottomless swamp of our emotional needs, many of which are unknown and/or disorienting to us. There are some people whose dread of feeling responsible for ever hurting anyone makes them go to ridiculous, sometimes highly antagonistic, lengths to explain why, since they had absolutely no intention of hurting you, you are clearly wrong for feeling hurt by what they did, which was the exact opposite, intentionally, of what you said hurt you. So you are actually hurting them, really unfairly and aggressively, for expressing your hurt feelings when they can explain all the reasons, in exhaustive detail, that you’re completly wrong to feel hurt by what they clearly didn’t mean to do.
It can literally make your head explode, dealing with these relentless characters. In another life, not long ago, I’d have referred to them as relentless motherfuckers, which is as accurate, maybe more so. Characters can be entertaining, endearing even in their limitations and faults. Motherfuckers can only do one thing, which makes their relentlessness something to avoid. You can’t reason with them, they can’t necessarily dance (in fact, they almost never can) but will insist on dancing to the end of endurance if it suits their larger purpose: never to be wrong no matter what.
It takes a long time, in my case more than sixty-five years, but the understanding that it’s literally impossible to resolve conflict (no matter how insignificant) with a relentless motherfucker is probably the single most important thing I’ve ever learned. I pass it on to you to consider, free of charge.
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