Butchblog

I told myself to take a break from thinking about the insane clown. But it doesn’t work. I can do it for an hour or two. Yesterday I went surfing with a couple friends. The water was choppy and cold, but we had fun and, I’m certain, did not think about trump once. We still weren’t talking about anything other than the surf and the weather as we made our way home, but then somehow the awful events of this dark time period in all our lives came slipping back in, and there we were talking about the insane war and the tariffs driving small farms out of business (one of our neighbors reported the loss of their cherry farm as there was no one left to pick the crop, and no more farmers able to afford to grow the fruit any longer.) From there it was a short hop to the war in Iran and the war crimes threatened by our own government. I think we caught ourselves then, and tried to remember the adrenalin surge of the waves and appreciate this lovely place we live in, away from the horrors created by Mr. Dementia.  But that sort of isolationist thinking only gets you so far.

            Has trump gone completely insane? I believe so. Some of the statements recently are completely bonkers. Not only are they vastly inappropriate for a head of state, but they are coarse, and obscene. Case in point: After the death of Robert Mueller was announced—a man who was a dedicated public servant and a war hero, two things that trump cannot even imagine—our enlightened president wrote: “Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people”. What kind of person says something so cruel and vicious? His level of vitriol is not only unfit for the president of the U.S., but a marker of a clearly deranged mind.

            Now that we are on the precipice of a world-wide conflagration, trump continues to throw gasoline on the fire, heedless of the impact his ravings have on our allies (our former friends), and his own electorate. As I sit here typing, I’m aware of his current threat to bomb Iran into oblivion. Or as he so gracelessly and obscenely has put it: “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Tehran does not meet his latest deadline for the Islamic Republic to agree to a deal.

He seems to be under the impression, as he has always demonstrated, that whatever he thinks is fine to say. These statements and actions are clearly the result of a psychotic mind. Many psychologists have made the diagnosis that trump suffers from “malignant narcissism.” Erich Fromm, one of the founding thinkers of modern psychology explains it thusly: The essence – and biggest danger – of malignant narcissism is that it keeps growing, like malignant cancer. Fromm wrote: “It is a madness that tends to grow in the lifetime of the afflicted person. The more he tries to be a god, the more he isolates himself from the human race; this isolation makes him more frightened, everybody becomes his enemy, and in order to stand the resulting fright he has to increase his power, his ruthlessness, and his narcissism.”

            And so we have the specter of a world war on the horizon brought about almost entirely by one pathetic, small man. What can we do about it? Today feels hopeless. But I’ll hold on to hope that tomorrow wiser heads can somehow prevail and forestall the cataclysm. I don’t expect any good sense or honesty from those in the administration or the current republican congress. They’ve all amply displayed their cowardice, and subservience to the mad king. But the resistance here and abroad grows stronger and more alarmed every day. We need an even stronger resistance, though, an action beyond waving signs. I don’t know what that looks like, only that if this reign of terror continues we are all, despite our protests, in some way responsible. Maybe we have not yet fought hard or smart enough to stop the madness.