As I understand it, and have experienced it with my father and others, narcissism is a reflexive lifelong response to unbearable childhood trauma. The pain and terror of this humiliating experience mark the child for a life devoted to never again feeling those terrible emotions. In order to avoid this pain, it is necessary to silence any voices that can evoke these emotions. Critics and questioners need to be put to silence by any means necessary.
The demon that torments the narcissist is so terrifying that the narcissist will do virtually anything to avoid that nightmarish feeling of powerlessness and humiliation.
In the case of a malignant narcissist, driven to attain power so that he can use it to punish his countless enemies, the narcissist is capable of literally anything you can imagine, and things worse than you can imagine.
Since we are living in the age of narcissism, and if you need convincing look at Ye, Elon, Don Jr., Caitlyn, Pompeo, Sloppy Steveand countless other public examples, we have a lot to learn about how to survive these motherfuckers. We’d be well-advised to start studying this prevalent disease of our time.
When I was a boy my father’s colleague at the NYC Board of Education’s Human Relations Unit, Evelyn, became a regular visitor to our family. My mother, also named Evelyn, was fond of her. My sister and I loved her. She was funny, irreverent, a good athlete, a folk guitar player with a beautiful voice, had a “retarded” dog, a black cocker spaniel named Twosie, and she seemed to love hanging out with us. My sister had prominent, slightly bucked teeth (as they called it in those days) and so did Evelyn (picture a young Joni Mitchell). Evelyn taught my sister to stick out her teeth and hold her hands up like paws whenever she called “Beaver Patrol Report!” The two of them would do the Beaver Patrol salute and we’d all laugh.
It turns out Evelyn had survived a horrific childhood. In hanging out with her smart, irreverent, darkly funny colleague and his family she got to experience what seemed to her (before her eternal falling out with her friend and colleague) a healthier version of family life and childhood. She was as much an older sister to my sister and me as an adult.
After my own troubling childhood I often found myself in the position Evelyn was in, hanging out with the children of my friends. I was paid a great compliment by one of my friend’s children when he was about five: Eliot’s not agrownup, he’s more like us. I was. I am. I am never far from the most life-affirming feelings of my early life, when it comes to imagination, creativity, having fun, drawing, playing music. I love to play, and why should I not?
Because, the adult will say, work is far more important than play. Work is what gives meaning and value to life, a sense of self-worth, productivity, respectability. Play is for vacation, maybe. I honestly pity the average workaday motherfucker, too tired out bygrim responsibility to be playful.
There is a certain point to the adult view, of course. If I had ever tried to sell any of my writing, had any literary success, had sold several books, I’d be a published author and that would be my career, turning my daily practice into a monetizable, recognizable job. When people asked me what I do I’d just say “I’m a writer” and it would be true, since I made a living by my words. Instead, I play at writing, which is more fun, but far less lucrative and practical. In the eyes of the world I’m just one of a hundred million would-be writers, “publishing” my work, gratuitously, in cyberspace.
I think of my father, hours before he died, telling me his life had been basically over by the time he was two. A very sad thing to hear your father say the last night of his life. It explained why he acted like an inconsolable two year-old so often, but, damn, it was hard to hear.
I have the two haunted photo portraits of his maternal grandparents. I can hardly look at them, in their beautiful convex oval frames. One or both of these long dead ancestors created of their youngest daughter a savagely angry religious fanatic who whipped her first born across the face from the time he could stand. No doubt, it had happened to one or both of them, with their parents. And before that, the parents of their parents and so on down the endless tragedy of history.
I think of this whenever I think of parents and children. It is easy enough to blame the parent, or the child, but that’s a game for suckers. To me, the real action is getting some goddamned insight and making some positive changes in your life, before you sorrowfully confess to your oldest son, right before you die, that your life was basically over before your great-grandfather was two.
The very stable genius who would be dictator, in any other country, would already be locked up somewhere awaiting his trial, for several crimes. Here, where we are scrupulous about fairness to extremely wealthy and powerful citizens, and seeing that it is only two years from the date of his multipronged crimes against the US government, the Department of Justice is still deliberating over exactly how to proceed. Democracy and the rights of extremely powerful, angry, violent, anti-democratic players need to be carefully balanced, apparently.You could fairly say it was the intent of the framers.
Here’s a nice piece of evidence against the very stable genius himself, a smoking gun, if you will, nicely presented by Ari Melber.
An old friend suddenly shows you an implacable face, as hurt turns into disagreement, which turns into a conflict, a standoff and finally an all out war.
No compromise, no more of your fucking feelings, I won’t even hear what you’re upset about, how dare you challenge me, I’m the one who’s been wronged here!
You protest, call to mind past compromises, a long mutual friendship, a history of two way empathy, honest conversation.
“No!” you will hear, the jaw set, eyes boring into you to chill your blood, to cow you.
“When did my old friend become a terrible two year-old?” you wonder to yourself, as you reel yourself back from telling the enraged person to go fuck off. What is clear is that someone you cared deeply about is now treating you with cold contempt.
This has happened to me a few times over the years, and I am somehow never prepared for it. It was always a mystery that I knew wassomehow related to my troubled father, but I had little grasp of what the connection was exactly. I had no concept to understand where this sudden implacable anger comes from, this need to blame you for making them feel bad, no matter what actually took place between you.
The riddle of this confounding rigidity, this angry refusal to bend, has been mindfucking to me for many years. It was only very recently that I grasped a concept that explained this bad behavior and made the unfortunate pattern sensible to me.
The context of the era we are living in offered me a giant clue I was slow to put to good use in my personal life. The recent hostile attitude of dear friends was sickeningly familiar, and horrifically Trumpian. The incoherent story constantly changed, all in a mighty effort to avoid talking about any feelings but their’s and whythey were so brutally hurt by me! My longtime closest friend, someone whose friendship and integrity I never had reason to doubt, seconded every aspect of the shifting story, no matter how implausible the blame narrative became. The runaround, the noise and fury in response to an expressed need, was familiar as any headline I’d doom scrolled recently.
We Americans have endured years, seemingly a century, of a malignant, compulsively lying narcissist whipping up hatred and division. Right or wrong, he’s always right. Facts are bullshit! What does he do when confronted with his wrongdoing? Double down, in that now despicably common phrase. Blame his enemies, attack investigators, judges, diplomats, his intelligence agencies, his military leadership, the sick and dangerous child blood drinking cannibal fucks who traffic and molest children — while running the deep state — the celebrity who insulted him twenty years earlier. He does this, of course, because he’s a narcissist.
We are living in the age of narcissism. I just didn’t understand it until very recently, though the number of celebrated current day public narcissists, admired by millions, is huge. You see them literally everywhere, our greatest, most important citizen influencers.
What is the narcissist’s drivingdilemma? How to preserve the all-important feeling of being in the right when confronted by someone important to them they’ve hurt, or by any mistake they’ve made. It can’t be their fault, it’s obviously the fault of the thin-skinned, needy prick who’s making them feel bad — on purpose!
I was reading a book by Jon Krakauer a couple of months back and came across this, which was like a light going on, in terms of explaining something I was at a loss to comprehend.
That is exactly what happens with anyone who has survived deep childhood injuries by becoming a narcissist. They live in a world of agitated semi-recovery where they‘re either perfect, beautiful, and admired, better than almost anybody else, or they’re plunged into the unbearable pain of feeling utterly worthless, humiliated, contemptible.
There is no middle ground for a narcissist, no grasp of the human condition — we all fuck up sometimes, it’s perfectly human to be imperfect. One of the things the non-narcissistic learn to do is accept responsibility, make amends, do their best to set things right when misunderstanding or conflict arises.
The world, to narcissists, is an instrument to protect them from feeling the agony that bears down whenever they feel vulnerable. The world is full of souls of infinite worth, each unique, exotic, with a mischievous expiration date. The narcissist doesn’t buy this pie in the sky bullshit, the world is about never being hurt. If you don’t make yourself vulnerable, it’s harder to be hurt, though a narcissist’s invulnerability comes at a high price. If you‘re hurt, hurt back twice as hard to make them back the fuck down.
This zero-sum worldview is the essence of narcissism. The narcissist’s world is a demented see-saw. There is only victory and defeat, nothing else. I win, you lose. If you win, somehow, I must lose, and that is intolerable to me. So no matter what, you must lose. If I have to assassinate your good name, and throw aside ourlong, close friendship, it’s a very small price to pay to defeat somebody who will not capitulate to my need to be perfect and beyond criticism of any kind.
Though they seem strong, nobody is weaker than the narcissist. The tension they live under is tremendous, the pressure they put on everyone around them is relentless.
All you need to do is admit that I’m right and you’re wrong, no matter what. How hard is that to do?
Mary Trump said that her uncle Donald is the weakest man she’s ever met. His genius, she notes, is finding people even weaker than him, to do his bidding, to take the fall whenever needed.
Narcissism is a zero-sum game. My father was a narcissist, it’s painfully obvious to me now. He saw the world as black and white and, I realize now, from his point of view, he actually couldnotchange, which was the tragedy of his life as he lamented at the end. My little sister followed in dad’s footsteps. He was her role model for strength in the face of terrible pain. I’m sad to say, but like with her father, cross her and you’re fucking dead, though she might not tell you that for a few decades.
The willingness to kill does not make you tough, or strong, it just showsa desperation never to feel like an utterly worthless piece of shit. No amount of belated love can save you from that terrible fate, if you can’t somehow see your own way out of there.
Humans are pulled by a need to do the right thing. It is not always easy to know what the right thing to do is. We will often be influenced by those around us, it feels good to agree with people we like. We have seen over and over lately how strong the pull of loyalty to your perceived tribe is to most people. That force can make otherwise sluggish citizens throw themselves into battle against police, grunting in unison as they crush a cop in a doorway in their attempt to break into a locked building. It makes you turn your back forever on somebody you were once close to.
I had a friend whose marriage was daily trial by combat. It was that way from before the wedding and there was no let up in the decades of the marriage. My friend told me that he was tortured by the damage he was doing to his young sons by raising them in a brutal war zone.
I was raised in a brutal war zone, though the war was not mainly between my parents but against me, and my sister, so he didn’t need to explain about the damage. The damage of witnessing violent anger in loved ones goes straight to the soul of an impressionable young person. How are they to make sense of the world, have faith in the healing power of love, when their earliest memories areof explosions of rage from their caregivers and protecters?
As a young person you are sometimes fortunate to meet people in life who may offer you a helpful perspective. Sometimes they make you laugh, affirm something important in yourself. You can learn useful things from them, like when to remain silent, when to add your part. You feel great affection for this kind of person, a relative or friend of the family who understands something about your life that your immediate family may often not seem to. There’s no tension, as there often is within a nuclear family. We are lucky to run into these sympathetic souls.
Then one day you learn that the funny person you recently laughed with has struck a deadly blow to the heart of your family. Your parents’ love is too tied up with rage to accept, says this judgmental longtime family friend/relative. “FUCK HIM!” snarl the parents in unison. There is no greater feeling of unity than righteous anger at an external enemy.
The strong feeling of unity lasts until the regular war resumes, a moment later. A war that neither side has the slightest ability to resolve. Whatever you want to say about the two combatants, they are not skilled in any kind of conflict resolution. They only know how to fightto the death, no matter what.
If on Monday we had a relaxed friendly conversation at a party, on Friday you will get the memo: our old “friend” is a vicious, demanding, angry, judgmental, unforgiving, unapologetic, unloving, wrong, sick, irredeemable asshole. He’s a Nazi, a fucking self-righteous Nazi, who needs to be right even if itinvolves mass murder.
You may take this assessment as tinged with hyperbole, but the point will be clear enough. This person, not good. This person, bad, dangerous. Hurt your parents very deeply.
In the case of parents who lie to their children, the most pressing danger is the story on the other side of the lie coming to light. That is the most dangerous story in the world, the shamefulone they are determined to keep secret. Look how the adorable, skillful fucking sadist feints and bobs as he works the conversation closer and closer to the “lie”, to his own self-righteous, pernicious version of “truth” because he is the only one who knows the “truth,” this sick, damaged, judgmental fuck with his fucked up lying loser life.
You now have two irreconcilable images of this person you always liked, pulling hard in opposite directions. Cognitive dissonance is hard to sit with. How can this funny, intelligent, sensitive person who always treated you well suddenly be such a colossal, irredeemable monster, the metaphorical killer of your mom and dad? He’s got to be one or the other, or some grotesque combination of both, or a great psychopath and actor, both.
The natural fall back is loyalty to your clan, because, really, when the other choice is to be irked by the thought that no matter how bad, and wrong this person is, no matter how much your parents tell you how he tortured them, you have experienced a completely different, well-loved person for years.
Oh, well. At least you didn’t really have an independent friendship with the person, you saw them only at family gatherings. That won’t happen any more. Whew, that’s kind of a relief, no?
Heather Cox Richardson, writing about yesterday’s Brazilian version of January 6, 2021 (accomplished after a consultation visit to Bolsonaro from Sloppy Steve Bannon) flagged this ‘social media’ post by the big orange polyp.
“‘Tropical Trump’ as he is affectionately called, has done a GREAT job for the wonderful people of Brazil,” Trump said on his social media outlet. “When I was President of the U.S., there was no other country leader who called me more than Jair.”
Jair, you recall, famously said he’d kill his son if he turned out to be a homosexual. More ominously, he lamented the mistake of the military coup he took part in as a junior officer — their failure to murder another forty to fifty thousand members of the intelligentsia, labor and church leaders and so on. If those dissident fucks were all dead, you’d have a wonderful dictatorship in Brazil.
Heather concludes, after a sampling of condemnations of the violence by US, UN and EU officials:
As of 11:00 tonight, neither House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) nor Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) had any comment on the events in Brazil.
By Sunday night, Brazilian police had retaken control of the vandalized buildings and arrested 170 rioters.
Look, McConnell and McCarthy can’t condemn this kind of murderous fascist riot withoutcrossing a party line. They can’t acknowledge that theofficial Republican party position on the recent American assault on the Capitol — “legitimate political discourse” — is a steaming pile of dung. They must act like it’s totally fine, if you lose an election and claim for months (with a $50,000,000 dark money ad campaign) that it was stolen, to express yourself with massive violence and organized lawlessness. That’s all, according to the Republican National Committee, protected by theFirst Amendment, and the Second — and the Fifth!
Anyone who sees daylight between the aims and methods of the MAGA party, the fanatical fans of Bolsonaro, and the good old brawling Nazi party is hallucinating.
Dana Milbank, with a thorough description of man of principle “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are”McCarthyandhis sacrifice of everything imaginable to end up as the Speaker of an ungovernable MAGA majority House.Ironic and grotesque, that the goal of the elected GOP House hardliners is disabling the United Statesgovernment crippling the “administrative state” and the destruction of liberal democracy. Here’s Milbank:
The holdouts had been given essentially everything they had asked for — and still, the extremists demanded more. “A deal is NOT done,” Perry, head of the House Freedom Caucus, tweeted Thursday afternoon
“Somebody should check and make sure Kevin McCarthy still has two kidneys,” Adam Smith (Wash.), top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, quipped Friday.
By Friday evening, the rebels could hardly believe the breadth of McCarthy’s capitulation. “We’re running out of things to ask for,” Gaetz marveled.
Yet still they tortured McCarthy. One vote shy at the end of Friday night’s 14th ballot, McCarthy publicly humiliated himself by walking over to Gaetz and pressuring him to switch his vote. In view of the whole House and the TV cameras, Gaetz rebuffed him. McCarthy retreated. “We’ll do it again,” he said angrily.
Finally, after four full days of chaos capped by intra-GOP fisticuffs and Republicans voting down their own motion to adjourn, McCarthy claimed the gavel. But by then his fate had become unimportant, because whoever occupies the speaker’s chair will now be irrelevant. McCarthy’s surrender has condemned the House to two years — or more — of anarchy.
“We’re running out of things to ask for,” said one of several insurrection-minded MAGA Representatives who had previously asked for an unconditional presidential pardon, from the man with absolute pardon power.
A small group of irrational fanatics publicly demanding absolute power, by any means necessary, what could possibly gowrong?
Let’s leave aside the question of how a brand new member of Congress gets away with tweeting the real time location of the Speaker the House as the Speaker is being secured from a mob calling for her death. If that’s not giving aid and comfort to an insurrection, I don’t know what the fuck is. Then she wins re-election by 500 or so votes. Then, along with a handful of other extremists, blocks all action in Congress for several days commemorating the original insurrection on its second anniversary. Only in America, baby.
But leave that aside, here are two pictures from the more than three hours the defeated President let his bonfire burn in the Capitol building.
If all of those hopped up idiots shown in the second picture had swarmed into the building, there would have been a massacre.
This 2:24 pm tweet, deleted by Elon Musk when he reinstated the Big Orange Turd to Twitter recently, certainly didn’thelp.
As maddening as it is that none of the wealthy architects and funders of the violent riot to overthrow democracy, in the name of an enraged, racist asshole who lost the election, has been touched by the law so far, it is equally maddening to see insurrectionists in Congress, serving as obstructers of the People’s business without consequence for their treachery.
Get the indictments rolling, Jack Smith! Come on, Fani Willis. Keep going, Letitia James.
gratuitousblahg 