The Cult of Diminished Mental Capacity

It seems like it was only yesterday when your refusal to pledge allegiance to the cult of Russophobia got you branded as, if not downright unpatriotic, then at least the naive tool of Vladimir Putin.

Now that year-long investigations have turned up zero evidence that Russia "hacked" the 2016 presidential elections or that Donald Trump "colluded" with Putin rather than maybe just launder money with the help of the Russian oligarchy, the newest cult revolves around the 25th amendment and the juicy revelations contained in the hastily written and hastily released Fire and Fury.

If you express any doubt that Donald Trump is in the early-to-middle stages of Alzheimer's disease or another form of progressive dementia, then you are a naive fool who refuses to honor the long-distance diagnoses of mental health professionals who possess some sort of remote control PET scanner that sees directly into Trump's Swiss Cheese of a brain. 

Before the new cult of Oprah Winfrey came along the other day to take a little of the psychiatric heat off Trump, his melting brain and deteriorating personality were all that the pundits of CNN and MSNBC could talk about since the book came out last week. Finally, the "open secret" of the president's worsening dementia could be talked about in polite company!  And not just talked about, but weaponized. Knowing full well that Trump watches a lot of TV, they embarked on nothing less than a round-the-clock propaganda campaign to not only convince the public of his incapacity, but to convince Trump himself. He must have felt like Ingrid Bergman to dozens of cable news Charles Boyers. Don't ever dare to defend your sanity, my dear, because it only proves how insane you are. 

"Trump's 'Very Stable Genius' Tweet Proves He Isn't" is the expert opinion of CNN's Chris "Sigmund" Cilizza, with Meta-Narrative Disability as his differential diagnosis:

Trump's lack of strategy is, in an odd sort of way, the most consistent thing about him. Any look at his life tells you that he is someone who just, well, does stuff.

Why has it taken the political world so long to wake up to that fact? Because we tend to view presidents -- and presidencies -- as tied together by some sort of narrative arc. That each statement, each policy decision, each tweet is somehow in support of a broader agenda. That the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That theirs is a story being told to us by the White House -- and it's our job to sniff it out.

Trump's presidency is abnormal in all sorts of ways. But perhaps the most important to understand is that it lacks any sort of meta-narrative. There are just his reactions to things. That's it.

And that, whether you like Trump or hate him, is not the hallmark of a three-dimensional chess-playing super genius.

This is quite a different tune than the one CNN was playing last year at this time. Back before he became so incapacitated, Trump apparently was a master gaslighter in his own right. He was making reality itself become hazy for a whole nation full of Ingrid Bergmans. But of course, it was really Putin who was pulling the gaslighting strings of his Trump puppet:

Russia even tried to gaslight US voters, as intelligence agencies concluded, trying to undermine their faith in the democratic process. And when Moscow thought Trump would lose, it planned to promote the view that the election was stolen, under the #DemocracyRIP banner, a plan whose seeds Trump had already planted.

The challenge will be a steep one for journalists and for all Americans, when so much of what comes from the next president has to be checked and double-checked. The first step is to establish when there is a gaslighting operation in progress.

The media's counter-gaslighting strategy has had an effect all right, but probably not what the pundits had in mind. Instead of reduction, via media torture, to even more of a quivering mess of an old man eating cheeseburgers in his locked bedroom while tweeting increasingly maniacal threats and complaints, the president strategized and decided to go on a full-on mental health campaign of his own. Since, like probably every president before him he is a textbook narcissist, he selfishly made the mental health all about him. He started to ever so carefully over-enunciate his words in public appearances. On Tuesday, he opened to TV cameras what would normally have been a private negotiating session on immigration reform. Not only did his mouth form complete sentences, not once did it hang open or even so much as dribble. Trump performed without incident for over an hour. He even uncharacteristally offered to "take the heat" from critics of his pro-DACA concessions rather than lash out as expected.  He simply was his usual un-meta self, with the Queens accent which makes the fluent media-political complex cringe so self-righteously.

What's more, the Democratic bigwigs in the room actually groveled and laughed and joked and preened and expressed great enthusiasm about working with this supposedly deranged man about his cruel plan to build a wall against immigrants. Once they got their seat at the lime-lit table, they couldn't help themselves.

 "Democrats are for security at the border,” Democratic House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer assured Trump during the meeting. “There are obviously differences, however, Mr. President, on how you affect that.” 

Richard Durbin, the Senate minority whip, likewise couldn't contain himself at the utter fascistic sanity of it all, gushing to Trump: "We’re all honored to be part of this conversation.There are elements you’re going to find Democrats support when it comes to border security. We want a safe border in America, period, both when it comes to the issues of illegal migration, but also when it comes to drugs and all these other areas.”

He later schmoozed to the TV cameras that "my head was spinning" over the 90-minute jam session with Trump. Political dementia is, like, so contagious.

As even the New York Times approvingly wrote, the collaborative aura and appearance of civility "were a remarkable break with the divisive messaging that propelled Mr. Trump to the White House and the harsh policies that have defined his first year in office, marked by efforts to demonize and deport immigrants who have entered the country illegally."

I guess you just can't gaslight a gaslighter after all.

It's preferable to the ruling class that cruel policies such as the mass expulsions of human beings be done as quietly and secretly as possible, as was the case under the Obama administration. Despite all his xenophobic rhetoric, Trump is not anywhere close to beating the discreet and intelligent Obama, who deported more people during his tenure than any other president.


***


I usually profoundly disagree with everything that conservative New York Times pundit Ross Douthat writes. But as he insightfully opined in his Sunday column (days before the Democrats engaged with Trump in that bipartisan matter so beloved of the establishment press): 

But op-ed provocations notwithstanding, the 25th Amendment option isn’t happening — not without some major presidential deterioration in the midst of a major crisis, and probably not even then. And while I blame Republicans for a thousand things that brought us to this pass, it’s too extreme to blame them for not pursuing an option that’s never been tried before, against a president who was recently and (yes) legitimately elected, especially when that option requires extraordinary coordination across the legislative and executive branches and could easily fail … with God-only-knows what kind of consequences. So unless Robert Mueller has more goods than I expect, we are going to live for the next few years in the way that America lived during the waning days of Nixon, the end of the Wilson administration, and perhaps at other moments known only to presidential inner circles — with our own equivalent of the petticoat government, which in this case includes military uniforms, dress suits and whatever outfits Ivanka and Kellyanne Conway favor (but not, any longer, the layering of collared shirts perfected by Steve Bannon).

My published response:

The more the media rails about Trump's mental status, the more the third of the electorate which supports him will feel the vicarious paranoia and outrage against the "elites" who, they feel with some justification, are trying to gaslight him out of office sooner rather than later.

There's cunning method to Trump's madness. After all, it does take a special kind of malevolent brain to be able to con and market your way into the ranks of the Forbes 400. The real scandal is not that he "colluded" with Russia to deny Hillary her coronation, it's that his corrupt way of doing business over the decades has been so rewarded by the very Establishment now seeking his ouster.

As long as the stock market keeps booming and the rich keep growing richer, the #Resistance will continue playing out as a soap opera for our aghast entertainment. Were it not for the fact that Congress has done zilch to take away Trump's capacity to blow us all to smithereens at any time, this whole show would be a work of, like, great comic genius.

The media had their chance to destroy Trump's candidacy. Instead they nourished it with $5 billion worth of free advertising. His TV rallies and debates were ratings bonanzas. Media mogul Les Moonves even gloated that Trump "may not be good for America, but he's damned good for CBS!"

Meanwhile the "demented" Trump is completing plans to destroy Medicaid and snatch health care away from millions of poor people. Where's the media shock and outrage over that?

August Is Trump Mental Health Month

If you tuned in to CNN or scanned the homepage of any major media outlet in the past few days, you'll have learned that the people running the asylum are whispering about staging an "intervention" for Donald Trump. 

Reactionaries Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani, for example, have turned into mental health concern trolls practically overnight. They echo the fear running throughout the Establishment that Trump is endangering American military might and exceptionalism by questioning wars and even by verbally jousting with the Gold Star Khan family. 

You might have noticed that these bereaved parents are oddly being described by major media outlets as "Muslim-Americans" rather than as American citizens who emigrated from Pakistan. So many politicians and journalists seem to think that Islam is a country rather than a religion. Did you ever hear anyone described as a Catholic-American, or a Baptist-American, or an Atheist-American? I thought not. Members of the media-political complex themselves need an intervention for their own Orientalism. 

And they also need to be confronted and called out for their own unhealthy greed. After recklessly giving Trump a year and a billion dollars' worth of free campaign advertising, letting him spout his misogyny, racism and xenophobia with reckless abandon, the moral arbiters of America are finally getting serious about Stopping Trump. The corporate media aren't even trying to pretend at anything close to objectivity. First, they red-bait Trump, accusing him without a shred of evidence of being a Russian tool. Now he's a mental case with a hankering to blow up the world, his short fingers just itching to press the red button the minute he enters the White House.

One congress critter has even started a Change. Org online petition, demanding that Trump be professionally screened for a psychiatric disorder. With its graphic depiction of him looking like a character straight out of Dante's Inferno, #Diagnose Trump also serves the dual purpose of demonizing the mentally ill.

In Your Guts You Know He's Nuts

Rep. Karen Ross (D-CA) writes:

Donald Trump is dangerous for our country. His impulsiveness and lack of control over his own emotions are of concern. It is our patriotic duty to raise the question of his mental stability to be the commander in chief and leader of the free world. Mr. Trump appears to exhibit all the symptoms of the mental disorder Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). Mental health professionals need to come forward and urge the Republican party to insist that their nominee has an evaluation to determine his mental fitness for the job. It is entirely possible that some individuals with NPD can successfully function in many careers, but not the Presidency of the United States. We deserve to have the greatest understanding of Mr. Trump's mental health status before we head to the polls on November 8th, 2016. #DiagnoseTrump

You don't need to be a mental health professional to sign Ross's petition. You merely have to be afraid of Trump. As of this writing, more than 10,000 concerned citizens had signed on. Or at least, there are 10,000 signatures. Some could be duplicates signed by sufferers of obsessive-compulsive disorder, or even paid Democratic Party operatives. Maybe Putin or Wikileaks can hack into the Change.Org data base and give us some names.

Here's my take on this latest bout of electoral hysteria. If you force one candidate or politician to undergo a mental health evaluation, then you should require all of them to. Just think about how differently things might have turned out if Ronald Reagan had been screened for early stage Alzheimer's or George W. Bush's brain had been PET-scanned for evidence of alcohol-induced damage.  And then there's Bill Clinton's known sex addiction and Hillary's documented bouts of clinical depression.

As far as Narcissistic Personality Disorder is concerned, I doubt that anybody aspiring to become leader of the "free" world can be entirely immune from it. I'm sure you've seen the checklist:

1. Grandiosity with expectations of superior treatment from others
2. Fixated on fantasies of power, success, intelligence, attractiveness, etc.
3. Self-perception of being unique, superior and associated with high-status people and institutions
4. Needing constant admiration from others
5. Sense of entitlement to special treatment and to obedience from others
6. Exploitative of others to achieve personal gain
7. Unwilling to empathize with others' feelings, wishes, or needs
8. Intensely jealous of others and the belief that others are equally jealous of them
9. Pompous or arrogant demeanor.

Out of curiosity, I Googled "mental health screening," and was gifted with a whole slew of online tests. I decided to take the one sponsored by Psychology Today magazine. Based upon some recent weight gain, an occasional sleepless night, and once in awhile pondering my own mortality, I got a preliminary diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder. I was advised to seek an appointment with a mental health professional in my area (who'd paid to have his or her name included at the end of the magazine test.)

I immediately became anxious and worried (another scary symptom!) until I realized that Psychology Today couldn't stay in business without selling ads to drug companies with a vested interest in selling megatons of anti-depressive and other psychotropic medications to American citizens, many of whom are probably worried sick about the prospect of President Trump. (Trumpophobia, or Trump Derangement Disorder.)

Ironically, there was a recent  article in Psychology Today warning of the mental health dangers of watching too many drug ads on television:

 The average American TV viewer can expect to watch up to 30 hours of prescription drug advertising each year, the editors of Scientific American noted recently, with drug makers spending $5.2 billion on such ads in 2015. That’s a 60 percent increase on the total spent four years earlier, with no signs of slowing down.

Ironically, the article was accompanied by an ad for mental health screening and (drug) treatment.

Even more ironically, another article in Psychology Today describes how hard, if not impossible, it is to define exactly what mental health even is. 

I'm so confused (one more troubling symptom probably requiring an emergency prescription.)

Does worrying about Trump give you a dry mouth, insomnia or palpitations?

A mental health professional is standing by, prescription pad at the ready. Ka-ching!

If that doesn't appeal to you, listen to any recent speech by President Obama for some nice New-Age therapy. According to him, American life has never been better. All you need are some bootstraps and a dream and a ladder of opportunity to reach the promised land of NotTrump.

Some Victims Are More Equal Than Others

A Tale of Two Presidential Condolences.

In the coming days, we’ll learn about the victims -- young men and women who were studying and learning and working hard, their eyes set on the future, their dreams on what they could make of their lives.  And America will wrap everyone who’s grieving with our prayers and our love. But as I said just a few months ago, and I said a few months before that, and I said each time we see one of these mass shootings, our thoughts and prayers are not enough.  It’s not enough.  It does not capture the heartache and grief and anger that we should feel.  And it does nothing to prevent this carnage from being inflicted someplace else in America -- next week, or a couple of months from now.  -- Barack Obama, on the mass shooting that killed nine people in Oregon.

The Department of Defense has launched a full investigation, and we will await the results of that inquiry before making a definitive judgment as to the circumstances of this tragedy. ...Michelle and I offer our thoughts and prayers to all of the civilians affected by this incident, their families, and loved ones. We will continue to work closely with President Ghani, the Afghan government, and our international partners to support the Afghan National Defense and Security forces as they work to secure their country." -- Barack Obama, on the American bombing of a hospital that has killed at least 23 people in Afghanistan.

One condolence is eloquently maudlin and extended, the other is every bit as brief and clinical and detached as the series of "surgical strikes" that literally ripped apart an operating room, and incinerated critically ill people trapped in their beds.

If Obama is even dimly aware of his own cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy, he is doing his utmost to hide it. But as ever, when a mass shooting occurs on his turf, the sycophantic press makes him the center of the story. This time, as the New York Times mawkishly commiserated, he was "as visibly angry and frustrated as he has ever appeared in public during a brief televised statement from the White House."

And as George Orwell similarly commiserated in Animal Farm:

 “I trust that every animal here appreciates the sacrifice that Comrade Napoleon has made in taking this extra labour upon himself. Do not imagine, comrades, that leadership is a pleasure! On the contrary, it is a deep and heavy responsibility. No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?”

 I suppose that the people killed and injured in the Doctors Without Borders hospital made the wrong decision to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. As the deservedly despised Jeb Bush said about the Oregon shootings: "Stuff happens."

It must be hard out there for a Commander in Chief being expected to ask that Congress enact gun control laws, when he is simultaneously demanding that they allocate billions of dollars for guns, bombs and Predator Drones for his global adventures!  How hard it must be for him to castigate others for offering bland thoughts and prayers when he himself offers nothing but bland thoughts and prayers.

It seems that the only lives that count are American lives. Only American murder victims are looked upon as human beings who have been denied the chance to hope, dream, grow up, or grow old. When foreign people are killed, they are coldly downgraded to "the civilians affected by this incident." 

It could have been worse. Obama has at least bestowed upon them a bare minimum of humanity. His generals are still sticking to their own sanguine Collateral Damage depersonalization: Stuff happened.

Obama has long had a built-in auto-response to both types of murders. Domestic shooters are troubled young men who get hold of guns despite their mental health issues. Military shooters are patriots who often get accepted into the armed forces despite their mental health issues. And if they didn't have any mental health issues before they joined up, their chances of developing them skyrocket once the government issues them lethal weaponry and orders them to use it.

 A year before the Sandy Hook massacre that had Obama weeping on TV, an American soldier named Bobby Bales went on a shooting rampage in Afghanistan, young children among his 16 victims. Obama's response was boilerplate-similar to his reaction to the hospital bombing: “This incident is tragic and shocking, and does not represent the exceptional character of our military and the respect that the United States has for the people of Afghanistan."

 Many of the young male perpetrators of mass mayhem, both military and domestic, can't even remember a day when this country has not been at war. Obama himself has grotesquely dubbed them the "9/11 Generation."

He said last year,

America endures in the courage of the men and women who serve under our flag. Over more than a decade of war, this 9/11 Generation has answered our country’s call, and three months from now, our combat mission in Afghanistan will come to an end. Today, we honor all who have made the ultimate sacrifice these 13 years, more than 6,800 American patriots.  And we give thanks to those who serve in harm’s way to keep our country safe and meet the threats of our time.

I guess an American bomber killing children in a hospital yesterday was not part of any combat mission, seeing as how Obama announced that the war would be over by the end of 2014.

Safely Enduring

 
When a mass shooting occurs in America, Obama calls it carnage. When a mass shooting or bombing at the hands of Americans occurs elsewhere in the world, Obama calls it "an incident." Or, if the circumstances are especially egregious, as the attack on Doctors Without Borders surely was, he magnanimously upgrades it to a Tragedy. 

If Barack Obama worked as strenuously to arm-twist and bribe and threaten members of Congress over gun control as he arm-twisted, bribed and threatened them into giving him fast-track authority to negotiate the corporate coups known as free trade deals, then the domestic weapons reform he purports to crave might have a smidgen of a chance.

The truth is that Obama didn't make a peep about gun control until after the Sandy Hook shootings. And even those noises were tepid and belated. Instead of immediately sending a bill to Congress, he named a blue ribbon panel to leisurely discuss and debate gun violence. By the time lawmakers got around to voting on an actual bill, the NRA had attacked with its own threats and bribes, and the national grief and shock and outrage had been safely diluted.

The time to act is in the immediate aftermath of an atrocity.

But on the December 2012 day of the Sandy Hook shootings that killed 27 people, mostly children,  Press Secretary Jay Carney stopped the impetus right in its tracks. "This is not the day," he sanctimoniously told the nation, "to discuss gun laws."

And it's never a good day for them to discuss stopping their wars. International carnage is the only thing still inflating their puffed-up economy. Domestic carnage by way of more than 200 mass shootings this year alone is only a symptom of the larger American disease.

The real epidemic is suicide. One hundred Americans kill themselves every single day. But universal mental health care is not in our future, because the wealthy don't want to pay the taxes necessary to fund such preventive programs.

Economist John Komlos writes:

 This must be the moment to come to our senses and set entirely new priorities for our society in vigorously confronting the mass murder epidemic head on. We will never be able to lead decent lives unless we are capable of reigning in the terror at home, because we will continue to live with constant anxiety.

Instead of vacuous slogans of growing the economy and ineffective lamentations about the vicious murders, which will do absolutely nothing to lower the murder rate, we should set ourselves the explicit goal of reducing mass murders in the same way President John F. Kennedy declared the goal of reaching the moon within a decade. Ask the parents of the Sandy Hook Elementary School disaster if they’d agree with such a national mobilization at any price. We cannot do that on borrowed money. The only way to accomplish such a goal is by paying for it through additional taxes and a reduction in the conspicuous consumption of the super-rich. There is no getting around that.

Wealth inequality and the replacement of democracy with an oligarchy is hazardous to our health. The super-rich are a clear and present danger to all of us. 

 The lives of American citizens, Afghan citizens, all citizens, depend upon stopping the pathological rich. Eighty multi-billionaires now own half the wealth of the entire planet.

We can't afford them. It's time for a global wealth tax. It's the only way to cure them and their political operatives of their violent addiction to money and power and death.