The mother of all jellyfish days . . . er, weeks . . .
The U.S. presidential election has
unleashed a firestorm of conflicting emotions, and not just between voters with
polarized viewpoints. In my current experience, many individual psyches are
also engaged in a war of swirling perspectives. I do not discount that this may
be due to white privilege, of an inexperience with being hit in the gut with the reality of loss of civil rights and overt racism.
Though I’m appalled at the
prospect of the Trump presidency due to begin in January 2017, and disgusted by
the many terrible xenophobic expressions of hatred, both psychological and
physical, that his most ignorant supporters are committing around the country
both before and after the election, I have had the weird but plausible thought that
Trump is the crack in the vessel that allows the sunshine in, or the pore in
the infected underbelly of this country that may drain and allow the deep,
centuries-old wound of racism and misogyny to heal . . .
But, as with dealing with a
surgical incision that succumbs to an antibiotic-resistant infection or
gangrene, or performing emergency treatment to save a critically ill patient
from toxic shock, it appears the healing will not be easy or pleasant. There
will be a healing crisis – healing of deep wounds is painful – and sadly, there
will be casualties as citizens strive to reconcile national divisions and move
forward. And if there’s no reconciliation at all, we may experience something
far more terrible – armed skirmishes in the streets (we have those now due to
the proliferation of guns and police brutality but I’m speaking of an even more
fractious situation than the current one) – or even of outright civil war
breaking out either regionally or nationally.
In other words, I have never
thought this oily billionaire turned politician could ever fix the economy or
save America from anything – he is far too wounded himself and his ideologies
too divisive – but could he be the negative catalyst that moves the country
forward nonetheless? I often question myself when my thoughts stray this way
because this President Trump thing could do endless harm to the most vulnerable
among us, and who knows what terrible things could happen on the international
stage.
Donald Trump is definitely no savior
nor is he a true leader; he is a symptom, a manifestation of the obscured xenophobic, racist, sexist thought he promotes. Trump may be just the man to
unwittingly inspire perhaps one of the greatest revolutionary movements since
the American Revolution in the eighteenth century as people rally to oppose his
demagoguery. But he is definitely not revolutionary in the way that some Trump
supporters thought to take their country back.
Plus, even if he is an unwitting catalyst
for social change (not by his actions or policies but because of our collective
reactions or proactive resistance), this doesn’t mean that we should tolerate
bullshit or endure four years of a Trump administration. Trump denounced support
by the KKK only after public outcry, but he never challenged the unbridled
racists, sexists, and others with deplorable and ignorant attitudes at his
campaign rallies, and he has not my knowledge stepped up to the plate to
discourage the tremendous evil in the many small acts that his most toxic
supporters are now committing against our most vulnerable citizens. He has
knowingly enabled these actions, just as they have either deliberately or
unwittingly enabled his worst attitudes. [After this writing he has chosen disgraced politicians and even a white supremacist for his transition team and cabinet. If you're not alarmed yet, you should be.]
It is obvious he is an unbalanced
person himself. I am no psychologist, but I do have degrees in anthropology and
the humanities, as well as some direct experience in the matter by having had
some unpleasant relationships with narcissists. To the best of my knowledge,
Trump’s behavior is that of a classic narcissist. Narcissists display
grandiosity, require excessive admiration, have a sense of entitlement and a
lack of empathy for others, believe that they are unique or uniquely qualified
and yet are extremely insecure and fragile. They have fantasies of unlimited
success and exaggerate their own successes, but at their very core, are exploitative,
taking advantage of people in many different ways. If you examine them closely,
they have a chameleon-like nature, often seem to be role-playing (because they
are), and some psychologists say they have no authentic personality because
there was a lack of mirroring and nurturing in their childhoods.
Sound familiar? Trump has faced numerous
lawsuits in the past for fraud – not paying people who have provided goods or
services to his business projects – and he still faces a lawsuit for creating a
fraudulent university that promised the sun, moon, and stars to aspiring
student entrepeneurs but extorted millions of dollars from them instead. This
is business as usual for Mr. Trump! We know for a fact that the Trump family
regularly funnels money from the Trump charity into their own pockets, and that
many of his so-called campaign expenses were payments made to family members.
The latter move is likely not illegal, but is certainly ethically challenged. Pundits
predict his legal woes may allow for an impeachment. Then we’re looking at
President Pence, but that’s another story . . .
Trump is an entrepeneur and not a
career politicians, but even so he is the worst-case caricature of a salesman or a
polit-trick-cian, a lying, two-timing, forked-tongue rapscallion who says
anything for a vote or a sale. Typically narcissists say or do almost anything
that comes to mind at any given moment, no matter how hurtful or false, if they
see any personal benefit. Lying is a basic part of their nature, and they often
employ what psychologists call “gaslighting.” If you’ve ever known someone who
basically tells you that black is white and white is black and subverts what
you know to be reality into an ongoing construct of lies and deception until
you begin to doubt your own perceptions, then you’ve been duped by a narc.
Witness Trump’s racist supporters,
many who have been claiming for eight years that Obama is a racist who has
divided America. They are not only employing psychological projection, they are
gaslighting. The end result of gaslighting is that the victim is further
victimized by the abusive narcissist’s claim that they are the true victim. Narcissists
take their victims into their rabbit hole of contradictions. This creates an
unsettling sense of anxiety and confusion for those who have contact with the
narcissist.
And we all have contact with
Trump! What is both fascinating and extraordinarily appalling is that US
citizens are all being gaslighted by a master narcissist, with the numbers of
victims potentially soaring to millions on the national level and even billions
on the international level.
New
Yorker writer
Mark Singer interviewed Donald Trump in the 1990s, wondering what Trump thought
about when he was alone. (See Don P. McAdams’ story in The Atlantic here.) Singer reported that Trump
seemed baffled by his question. Singer rephrased the question to ask Trump if
he was his ideal company, meaning his best companion or best friend –
typically, a healthy person feels secure in their solitude and is, in essence, are
their own best friend. Trump’s answer was telling, shades of the recently
revealed “grab ‘em by the pussy” remark made about ten years ago: “You really want to know what I consider ideal
company? A total piece of ass. . .”
One could make the excuse that Trump
was just a wealthy celebrity in the era of both remarks, but his attitudes have
clearly endured to this day. Trump’s misunderstanding of Singer’s question
doesn’t mean that he’s unintelligent. His answer reflects his psychological
makeup and how far removed he is from having a fully integrated and healthy
personality. He is socially awkward, clueless about healthy human nature,
something that many much healthier people also struggle with, and yet they still
progress. The difference is that Trump is locked into his perceptions. People
with NPD rarely seek help – they never think they need it. Any relationship or
social chaos created by a narcissist is always the other party’s fault. Unlike
the average person, they never apologize for any fault or for any situation in
which they said or did something hurtful. Their sense of self-worth is so
fragile that they cannot accept even the tiniest bit of responsibility for
their words or actions. They cling to their shaky illusion of perfection.
Trump’s NPD is why he has
encouraged unhealthy behaviors at his political rallies, why his policies are
geared toward xenophobic fear of “the other,” why he only denounced support by
the KKK after public outcry, and why he’ll likely either not denounce the abuse
that his supporters are heaping upon minorities and women before and after the
election, or will do so under pressure. If he does denounce this situation, it
is likely to be an insincere and calculated move designed to improve his image,
not a heartfelt condemnation. And it certainly won’t come as an apology. His
words and actions will blow with the wind of self-aggrandizement and his
unruly, misguided supporters will not necessarily be quelled.
Witness Trump’s rapid shift on
Twitter about post-election protesters. He insinuated they are paid to protest and called
them unfair, which he knows is a bald-faced lie, and nine hours later, praised
them for their passion. I call bullshit. This is not a change of heart – this
is narcissistic manipulation, making nice to set himself up to take
authoritarian action later.
What psychology knows about
narcissists has mostly been gleaned from their victims, who often do seek help to
understand their predicament after being steamrolled by a narcissist. Even a
relationship with a mild-mannered borderline or covert narcissist can be
devastating, and those who have had the great misfortune of relating to an
overt malignant narcissist often need years of hard work to recover.
If this is true for individuals, think
again of the collective strain on a country that is already engaged in a long
struggle to redeem its bad behavior. While the United States has long upheld
ideals of freedom and equality, it also has long history of institutional abuse
of its original indigenous inhabitants, of its non-white immigrants, including
those kidnapped for chattel slavery, of LBGTQ communities, and of fully
half of our citizens at any given moment – women – and Trump has
maligned and insulted these people at various times in his campaign rather than pledging his support.
A resistance to the hatred
perpetuated by Trump and to his presidency started immediately after the
election in myriad forms – through protest action, community organizing,
through dissent in the arts, music, literature, journalism, and even in individual,
everyday acts of kindness. We are witnessing the early days of an unparalleled tsunami
of creative dissent, practical action, and spiritual illumination. This arises
also from the many mighty streams of dissent that have arisen throughout
American history as people have struggled with the institutionalized genocide
of Native Americans and African Americans, and many other social ills that
Americans have collectively banded together to fight and to change.
So if you feel crazy since the
November 8 election and are trying to make sense of what just happened and what
will happen in the near future, know that you are not alone. You’ve just
witnessed on a grand scale the havoc that NPD can produce . . . You’ve.Been.Trumped! Or as Yoko Ono so aptly puts it here . . .
*~*~*~*
I’m at the Arteles Creative Center in Finland for a one-month residency (beautiful country, lovely people, fantastic experience!) While I'd love to ignore the U.S. presidential election and its immediate aftermath until I go home, I cannot. I’ve been examining the paradoxes
and confusion inherent in this situation. One aspect that interests me and simultaneously
pushes my emotional buttons is the balance between fear and hope. There is hope, of course, but telling
frightened people that everything will be okay while we are freshly absorbing
the sobering prospect of a Trump administration is well-intentioned and perhaps
even true (after all, in a very basic cosmic sense, we’re always okay no matter
what happens, even unto death) but it also smacks of white privilege or of a
sort of maternal or paternal condescension.
On the other hand, this type of disappointment and suffering has been going on for a very long time in 'Merica and it seems mostly white people are reeling because of Trump's election . . . many minority people are either afraid but not surprised or simply more circumspect about reality: business as usual.
Many spiritual expressions of comfort sound like empty religious platitudes at this point, even though many are
tried and true. If you’re on the receiving end of a narcissistic-fueled racist
or sexist incident, it doesn’t feel okay even if you’re a resilient, forgiving
person. And for a child or young person, these incidents can be emotionally
crippling and take years to recover from.
After three days of reading
various reports of racist and sexist assaults on property and people, I
gradually started to become numb. Add this danger of growing numb to hatred to the already festering problems
with institutional racism in law enforcement and the judicial system, and it may
set the United States of America back dozens of years, if not decades. Nor does
it take a giant leap of imagination to consider that if this bad vibe continues, the country
could devolve into an unrecognizable hellhole that it may never, ever recover from.
love is love is love is love is
love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love is
Trump’s
‘Merica, Days 1-3
9-12
November 2016
(with thanks to journalists Tom
Boggioni, Shaun King, Madison Feller, Prachi Gupta, Bil Browning, Sydney
Robinson, Caitlyn Dickerson, Stephanie Stall)
Please do not feed the fears!
A twenty-four-year-old language
arts teacher at Dacula High School discovered a note in her classroom on
Friday. The message: “Your headscarf isn’t allowed anymore. Why don’t you tie
it around your neck and hang yourself with it . . .” Signed, America.
~ Mairah
Teli (Dacula Georgia)
We are in the end times – no
fear!
“More texts from my sister: ‘I
was on this bus to St. Francis and a bunch of girls get on. They looked around
and looked at me and said, Aren’t you
people supposed to be sitting at the back of the bus? I looked around and
saw that there were mainly black and Hispanic people sitting in the middle of
the bus. I asked this girl to repeat herself and she said, Aren’t you supposed to be sitting at the back of the bus now? Like,
Trump is president!”
~
Adriana Medina (Queens, NY)
Maybe Trump won’t be so bad after
all.
“A woman
in South Philly (Pennsylvania) awakened to find her SUVspraypainted with ‘Trump
Rules’ and ‘Black Bitch.’
~ Photo courtesy activist Shaun King on
Twitter
Stay strong! No
fear!
“Street
vendor here just yelled, ‘hey guys, at least it will now be legal to grab
pussy!’ And high-fived a group of men who laughed.”
~Prachi Gupta (New York, New York)
A reporter who interviewed Ivanka Trump and was
publicly called non-intelligent by Donald Trump
Love will Trump
hate!
Police
were alerted after people seemingly dressed in Ku Klux Klan robes were photographed
marching on a bridge in Mebane, North Carolina on the morning of 9 November following
Donald Trump’s presidential win. Reporters at the scene claim this photo was
shot the night before, on election night, and is of people waving Trump,
American, and “Christian flags.” Law enforcement claims this group has no known
affiliation with the KKK, though some people in the photo appear to be hooded
and wearing robes.
~ Shorty
Guizman – @kelbi1lewis
(Kebane, North Carolina)
Try
to stay calm!
“I
can’t believe this happened to me, but then again, I’m a [gardener]. Not a full
24 hours have gone by and a lady driving around looking for recycling stops and
starts yelling at me and my workers: ‘Trump is getting’ ya’ll outta here’ and
‘No visa, no America.’ Bitch ran away when I told her, ‘I’m a citizen, fuck
off!’
~ Eddie
Moreno (La Palma, California)
We
lived through eight years of Bush; we can live through Trump.
“I
was walking on Washington Ave. Bridge when I was stopped in my tracks by a
white male Trump supporter who yelled at me to ‘go back to Asia’. . . I pretended not to hear anything because I
didn’t want to create conflict . . . he
followed me . . . grabbed my wrist . . . told me I was rude . . . said I only
got into the University of Minnesota due to affirmative action . . . he punched
me . . . I used my self-defense skills to break free and punch him in the
throat . . . the police who came did not listen to my side of the story and put
me in cuffs . . .”
~
Kathy Mira Tu (Minneapolis, Minnesota)
Don’t
mourn, organize.
“A
house three blocks away from where I used to live in Noe Valley – Cordova
Heights is now [flying] a Nazi flag in the front yard.”
~
Cristina Cordova (San Francisco, California)
All
those who do harm are like a precious treasure.
“Two students from Babson College
sped around the Wellesley campus [a women’s college], laughing and screaming from
a pick-up truck with a Trump flag. They parked in front of the house for
students of African descent and jeered at them, screaming Make America Great
Again. When one student asked them to leave, they spit in her direction.”
~ Sydney Robinson, Student reporter
(Wellesley, Massachusetts)
Things
are not getting worse, they are getting uncovered.
“Wow. I’m waiting with my son in
his kindergarten line and a little girl and boy (in his class) are saying they
voted for Trump and teasing a Hispanic kid by saying he’s Mexican and [will be going
back to Mexico and to a different school].”
~Julio Puentes (West Valley City, Utah)
Despair
in no answer . . .
“I’m 35 & had never been called a racist
slur. Recently my 5yr old experienced just that by a group of teens. Feeling
scared in OH.”
Pray for peace and love!
“This morning, as I pumped gas in Safeway at Centralia, a
block from the school I work at, a man said to me, ‘Go back to Africa, nigger .
. .’ . . . I am biracial . . .”
~
Sarah Stone (Centralia, Washington)
The
true nature of mind is a union of love and compassion.
Sign placed on a car:
“Can't wait
until your ‘marriage’ is overturned by a real president. Gay families = burn in
hell. #Trump2016 #Repent #GodBless”
~
(North Carolina)
love is love is love is love is love is love
is love is love is love is love is
 |
| Wrathful Dakini |
