Tag Archives: Donald Trump

Words No Longer Matter

But I cling, nevertheless, to my childish fantasy that words do matter, in spite of what Trumpism is unleashing in our world. Donald Trump demonstrated repeatedly that he could say anything, including with his behavior, and people would dutifully overlook it. The best example was when he declared brazenly, “I could shoot someone in the street in Manhattan and not suffer at the polls.” He was right. He once told a crowd in Iowa after falling behind in the polls, “How stupid can you get?” He carried Iowa easily in the election.

But I must admit that I play loose and easy with words. I do not believe they are the “thing in itself” so that when you passionately affirm your faith in “God”, for example, that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with God. But, we live in a less esoteric world where the meaning of words in popular usage carries weight. Therefore, if I cry “fire” in a crowded theater, I have crossed a line. If I tell a hot young woman, “You have a fine rack,” then I have crossed a line. Usage of language requires a sensitivity to decorum and sensitivity so that when I run for President of the United States in four years, I promise I will not be insulting or denigrating of my opponents on the debate stage. I will not defend the size of my “male member”, though let me assure you, “there is no problem there!” I will not refer to women’s private parts at all and if I had to do so I would not use the “c” word. Use of words has a contextual dimension and involves a sensitivity to that context. Someone with the neurological disorder Tourette’s Syndrome illustrates what kind of problems happen if someone lacks that filter. He creates awkwardness in the social body and this “awkwardness” now being legitimized by Trump if not stymied can lead to chaos.

Yes, words have a hidden meaning, they “burgeon forth into a region beyond themselves” (Gabriel Marcel) but they also have value on the superficial, contextual level. What we are witnessing now in my country is the breakdown of verbal propriety, of decorum, and people with a reptilian brain in over-drive are feeling empowered by Donald Trump. They can say, and do, whatever they wish because “words do not matter.” Words do not carry consequences. Donald Trump has demonstrated that my country lives in a meaningless universe of its own making in which words, and deeds, do not matter. This is “meaninglessness” and, per William Butler Yeats, “mere anarchy is unleashed upon the world.

Weighed in the Balances & Found Wanting

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King Belshazzar, the king of Babylon in the 6^th century B.C, saw a writing on the wall one morning and eventually called the Hebrew prophet Daniel to interpret. He must have been stung to hear Daniel announce his interpretation, “Thou art weighed in the balances and found wanting.” This scripture is often used sermon material in evangelical circles to remind us that we have “been weighed” and found wanting. And I think this is a useful thing to remember, for all of us from time to time feel the sting from reality which brings us face to face with our inconsistencies and duplicities, giving us the opportunity to humbly acknowledge that we were “posing” a little more than we thought. And, speaking from experience, those who have a spiritual focus in their lives often need to endure this sting of, “The Spirit of God” and thus find the opportunity to acknowledge a dimension of what the Apostle Paul called, “the flesh” in our spiritual practice. In modern parlance, we would call this the ego. Of course, we also have at our disposal a contrivance I’ve used often, “Oh no. I am right” and remain stuck in our self-serving view of the world; for, “How could it be wrong? I’m a Christian.” John Paul Sartre called this “bad faith.”

The Christian faith, especially those in the evangelical fold, are now staring face to face an opportunity to experience this “sting” as Donald Trump represents the phenomena of them being “weighed in the balances and found wanting.” Never has a political leader embodied more fully the very antitheses of the teachings of Jesus than does Donald J. Trump, yet evangelical Christians have pledged their troth to him and one of their leaders, Jerry Falwell Jr, even likened him unto “King David.” This support of Trump is an egregious illustration of the specious and hypocritical dimension that is often present in faith.

But a caveat is in order. There is nothing that should be surprising to learn from time to time that our faith is “specious and hypocritical.” For, “we hold this treasure in earthen vessels” as we are all very human regardless of how sincere we are in our spiritual commitment and therefore from time to time we must feel this “sting” and see how we have been deceived. It is so easy to piously announce “The Lord has raised Trump up” or “the Lord is leading me to vote for him” but I have found personally that so many times when I’ve felt strongly that “the Lord is leading me” I would have to shortly thereafter realize—“Oh, that was only my ego leading me, not God.” But it is really hard to admit “I am wrong” in our faith for our ego often is much more present than we care to admit. This duplicity that I have been, and am given to does not make me a “bad” human being but it does reveal just how human I am, just how much “the flesh” is present in my spirituality. But it is so much easier to just brazenly continue on one’s path, refusing to admit having made a mistake, basking smugly in the delusion that “the Lord is leading.” And it is no accident that the evangelicals have opted to cast their vote for a man who is characterologically incapable of admitting he made a mistake.

But the Christian tradition that I have lived in most of my life facilitated a simple “Christian persona” and when one’s identity is hidden beneath an ego-ridden persona, there is tremendous resistance to acknowledging this. This persona is largely a fictional creation we have subscribed to about ourselves and about the world itself, a fictional creation comprised of conceptual formulations and ideas. When one is only a persona, even if a “Christian” persona, he/she is an ideologue and is easy prey for a demonic figure like Trump who is keenly in touch with the dark side of the American psyche. When one is an ideological Christian, he/she will be a slave to the “letter of the law” and not open to the nuances of life and scripture. This facilitates succumbing to the clarion call of “Let’s Make American Great Again” which is merely code for, “Let’s turn back the clock to a time when ‘everything is done decently and in order.’” In other words, to turn the clock back to a time when everything is static and nuance is verboten. And if you want to see where this phenomenon will lead to in the extreme, just Google the term, “Isis.”

This ideological faith brings to my mind a sonnet by John Masefield describing how the “tiger mind” so desperately contrives to create a world that is consistent with its world-view, an endeavor which in the area of faith leads ultimately to the discovery that the God one is worshipping is only a projection of his/her own ego. Now let me confess. When this dawns on you, it will rattle your cage; and even worse, it will make you aware that you will be subject to “cage rattling” for the rest of your life!

How many ways, how many different times
The tiger mind has clutched at what it sought,
Only to prove supposed virtues crimes,
The imagined godhead but a form of thought.
How many restless brains have wrought and schemed,
Padding their cage, or built, or brought to law,
Made in outlasting brass the something dreamed,
Only to prove themselves the things held in awe.

Thoughts about the Election 2016

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This election yesterday which will bring Donald Trump to the Presidency of my country in January has taught me so much, not just about my country but about myself. This is because I now pay attention much better, not only to what happens “out there” in my world but what happens “in here” in my subjective experience. No longer do I have the luxury of merely coasting by on my convenient set of preconceptions.

The American people have clearly voted for a more conservative direction in our country, politically and culturally. Their insistence on a return to conservative values was so emphatic that they were even willing to vote for a candidate that most of them did not like, many of whom even found it embarrassing to vote for him. And I feel passionately that a conservative presence in any culture is needed; but it is sad that the Republican Party could not come up with a candidate who represented their values and didn’t bring Trump’s unsavory qualities to the table.

Furthermore, this election was an affirmation about a certain way of looking at the world, a worldview with very certain and rigid boundaries best illustrated with Trump’s brazen declaration to “build a wall” to keep out the Mexicans and even to make Mexico pay for it. This “building of walls” is a metaphor for the whole emphasis of the Trumpian message to “Make American Great Again,” meaning to turn back the clock to the time when boundaries were very definite and “everybody” knew their place. Yes, “Negroes”, women, homosexuals, foreigners of all stripes, and all expressions of diversity were frowned upon or persecuted.

When the basic assumptions that formulate the template through which we view the world are threatened, it is a very human response to want to revert to what has worked in the past to diminish or eliminate this threat. This is true on an individual and a collective level. But sometimes this need for the security of the “tried and true” of yesteryear can become too great and we will succumb to the temptation of making, “for ourselves a life safer than we can bear.” (W. H. Auden) Life is inherently dynamic and with the dynamic flow of this spiritual process there is always some risk involved. Without willingness to take risks, to change, we have retreated to a sterile and moribund world which leaves us bereft of spirit, existing only as the walking dead.

“People of the Lie”

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In the mid 1980’s a psychiatrist, Scott M. Peck published a couple of books that made a big splash in self-help and personal growth circles. The first was, “The Road Less Traveled” and the second was “People of the Lie.” The latter was about the subject of evil and I personally think that he probably got carried away to label some of the people in his book as “evil.” I think he was guilty of the error of many clinicians, the tendency to wield the diagnostic label too readily. Yes, I do think there are evil people in the world but then there are the rest of us who are constitutionally wired to be “people of the lie” in that we present a face to the community that is not reflective of what lies beneath the surface. As Goethe noted, “The heart has its beastly little treasures” but most of us are so scared of the “beastly” that we hide behind a sanitized persona. C’est moi!

But Donald Trump is an unabashed liar. I hesitate to call him “evil” but I do think he has that capacity if my nation, apparently a “nation of sheep” will empower him. He cannot tell the truth even on the simplest level; for, if the “truth” impugns his tenuous sense of self-worth, he merely resorts to brazen lies. There are so many examples such as declaring that the National Football League had conspired with Hillary Clinton re the schedule of the debates. The next day the NFL denied any communication with him on this manner and Trump merely refused to address the issue. In the last debate, Clinton reminded him of an egregious offense when he mimicked and mocked a disabled reporter, to which Trump leaned in an intoned, “Wrong!” He simply cannot admit fault. I see him as a terribly wounded two-year old whose “malignant narcissism” makes him constitutionally incapable of admitting any wrong. In fact, in so many instances when he could have easily offered an euphemistic response like, “I misspoke” or “I regret putting it that way” he will merely double down because of a characterological in ability to simply say, “I was wrong.” Now, it is no coincidence that early in his campaign he stated that he had never asked God for forgiveness, an observation which evangelical Christian leaders like Jerry Falwell Jr. and Robert Jeffress conveniently overlook. I have a hunch they have this same “characterological” problem.

I must admit that the evangelical faith of my youth would not have allowed me to admit, “I too am a ‘people of the lie.’” Yes, I, too, have a shame-base and have spent most of my life adamantly refusing to acknowledge what Carl Jung called the shadow. I was a mere “actor” which is the word in the New Testament, for “hypocrite.” No, that does not mean I was a horrible person or a Donald Trump, it merely means that I had not found the courage, the “Grace”, to acknowledge that I was a flawed individual who was not as noble as I had presented myself to be or as I had thought myself to be. I had been presented with a “packaged” religion and I had not reached the point of maturity and courage to “open the package” and allow what in my spiritual tradition is called, “The Spirit of God” to begin to flow. Once I had begun to right myself after the horrible pain of disillusionment, a “still small voice” whispered to me, “Welcome to the human race!” For, it is human nature to be some version of Peck’s “People of the Lie” but, I admit, that is putting it a bit harshly. Perhaps I should just put it in the words of T.S. Eliot, “Human kind cannot bear very much reality.”

Epistemology and Trumpism

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A friend recently quipped, “Get the behind me thoughts,” a play on the famous words of Jesus when under temptation from his nemesis said, “Get the behind me Satan.” But the quip contains great wisdom for our thoughts are more powerful than we can ever imagine and, yes, are usually the way in which dark forces penetrate our reality. A New Age guru Mike Dooley quips, “Thoughts are things. Choose the good ones.” Dooley recognizes that we have the built-in capacity to take pause with the thoughts that flow through our mind and provide a “reality check” to them. But it is easier to never question them and be merely carried along by the current of our ideological pre-conceptions without ever bothering to subject any of them to scrutiny. Most of us do this in the subtleties of our heart, in our “pre-conscious” so that some things that pass through our mind to say are filtered out in the interest of social appropriateness and wisdom. Persons who have Tourette’s Syndrome demonstrate what happens when that filter is gravely impaired.

And Donald Trump gives us another example of someone with an impaired filter. For example, having been taunted about the size of his penis by Senator Mark Rubio, Trump disregarded all decorum and propriety and reassured the American population that “there is no problem there.” And Tony Schwartz, the ghost writer of his book, “The Art of the Deal” has described Trump as not having a filter, having only a stream of consciousness reality and a penchant for saying things without any understanding of how they will appear to the public. And with this impaired cognitive filter and his shoot-from-the hips style, Trump has routinely tossed ideas out which needed to be presented more thoughtfully or not at all. But with this impaired judgment, he has appeared to his base as somebody who “tells it like it is” or “tells the truth” and is not like the more polished politician, “Crooked Hillary.” Therefore, his speeches have been a font of red meat which has impassioned his base even to the point of hinting at violence should he not be elected.

Trump is the classic ideologue and is now the standard bearer for a political party which has at its base millions of people that fall into the same category. They are ensconced in a morass of unquestioned assumptions, assumptions which are now under assault by the relentless grind of modernity. But their response, when threatened, is like that of Trump, merely to double down and shout their dogma even more loudly. Ideologues are trapped inside a self-referential world consisting only of carefully selected ideas which buttress their preconceptions. When they are subjected to a critical interview, they cannot handle it and often appear ridiculous in their response. I have Congressman Louie Gohmert of Texas in mind here. But there are others. .

But, I must issue a caveat in closing. Most of my country and my world are concrete thinkers and if they suddenly were “enlightened” into a post-modern world, our entire world would immediately collapse! The entire spectrum of human cognition has a place though at some point each vein of thought on either extreme, if unchecked, can easily cross into sheer lunacy. And most concrete thinkers, and what Trump called “my uneducated voters”, are very good people and in a sense the backbone of any tribe. I know. I was raised in a culture of concrete thinking people and those people were very good people and I’m very grateful to them. But what has happened in my country is that the economic and political elites have ruthlessly exploited this base of their party and have manipulated them into giving them their political support even while wielding the reins of the government for the primary purpose of amassing and concentrating power and wealth

A Caveat Re Trump

Donald Trump and his Shame-Based Psyche

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If we don’t know already enough about the character of Donald Trump, we now have another glimpse into the dark recesses of his heart with a new book, “The Truth about Trump” by Michael D’Antonio. The author uses Trump’s own words from an interview two years ago to show us just how extensive is the shame-base that governs this man who could soon be the next President of the United States. This shame-base is so deep-seated and pervasive that he cannot acknowledge any wrong or having lost in anything. It boils down to an inability to admit, “I am wrong” about even the simplest matter. Often when it would have been politically prudent to have acknowledged that “I misspoke” or “I now regret having said that” or some other euphemistic say of acknowledging he had made a mistake, he will merely double-down on the matter. At times it has been comical.

All of us have a shame base and it serves a purpose, forcing us to “join the human race” and play by its rules…more or less…even when at times these rules seem to be more than we can bear. But if we cannot play by the rules we will be an “out-lier” and possibly become the bully on the playground who fails to regard common civilities and perfunctory kindnesses necessary to “join in the reindeer games,” those from which Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer was excluded. The playground bully is comfortable with the disruptive influence he has on the play-ground, and even thrives on it in some perverted manner. Those that carry this impudence to an extreme and cross a certain boundary at some point will end up in the principal’s office and face frequent suspension from school. For the “play-ground” must have rules as otherwise the “civilization” that it represents will disintegrate into complete chaos.

In any ordinary “play-ground” Trump would have already been suspended or institutionalized in one of the facilities at which I used to practice counseling for incorrigible teen-age offenders. But Trump stumbled onto a “playground” that was amenable to his excesses, allowing him to reach a point at which he could not be stopped. Oh, sure now his Republican Party is greatly troubled by his presence and by his power but most of them still will not acknowledge that they created an atmosphere in their Party the past few decades that would permit him to climb to power by fostering a culture of dishonesty and hypocrisy which would make someone like Trump viable. If they’d have maintained some basic sense of moral and spiritual integrity, the resulting structure, i.e “boundaries”, would have made it impossible for demagoguery to gain traction. To illustrate, for the past eight years of the Obama presidency they have been passive in response to members of its constituency that insinuated and declared that Obama was not an actual citizen of the United States, was actually a Muslim,. Often I watched the GOP leadership sidestep opportunities to quash this type of non-sense but they would always equivocate on the matter, not wanting to alienate their base who thrives on hysterical non-sense.

But my main concern today is, “Why do intelligent citizens continue to support him when reports such as the D’Antonio book clearly reveal that Trump is mentally unstable?” And furthermore just yesterday a Conservative firebrand, Glenn Beck, described Trump as a “psychopath” about whom he was frightened. Trump’s instability is so egregious that it is commonly accepted but many conservatives sheeplishly declare they are standing firm in support of him, lest Hillary Clinton be elected.. So, where is reason in my country today? Have we lost our mind? Are we crazy?

Well, no. The problem is that “reason” is not the guiding force in our lives and never has been. Our reason is but the surface dimension of life and is always subservient to subterranean dimensions of the heart that we do not wish to acknowledge. As Woody Allen once said about marrying his step-daughter, “The heart wants what it wants.” Or as someone else once put it, “Our thinking is the belated rationalization of conclusions to which we have already been led by our desires.” To put it still another way, our reasoning which purportedly governs our life is always governed by the unconscious. But for many people the notion of being influenced by unconscious motivations jeopardizes their ego-driven belief that they are totally in control of their lives, that they “know” what they are doing, and are “right” about what they are doing and believing. To recognize this hidden dimension of their heart would jeopardize their illusion of being in control. And control is the core issue in this political campaign. It is a battle between people who are firmly entrenched in a now-threatened view of the world that we are in control of our lives and those of us that have imbibed of what I think can best be described as post-modern thought. This modern view of the world recognizes that we only have a perspective on the world and do not see things objectively, making it necessary to lighten-up a bit with our view of the world and allow more diversity that we used to think was necessary or even possible.

And this, my friend, is scary! What makes it so frightening is that the ego can no longer reign in our hearts and lives, forcing us to humble ourselves a bit and see, understand, and experience that our view of the world is very finite and given to being very self-serving. By nature we see and believe only what we want to see and believe. Or, in the famous words of Jesus, we “have eyes to see but see not, ears to hear but hear not.”

NYT book review of D’Antonio book: (See NYT review of the D’Antonio book–http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/26/us/politics/donald-trump-interviews.html?_r=0)

Macbeth’s “Distempered Cause” and Donald Trump

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Shakespeare must have been an impulse ridden young man for his characters often wrestle with the issue of self-control, best illustrated with his description of Macbeth being unable to “buckle his distempered cause within the belt of rule.” This image is that of a corpulent man trying unsuccessfully to fasten a buckle around his protruding belly. It brings to my mind, the corpulent Oliver Hardy, of “Laurel and Hardy” comedy team from the early 20^th century, comically attempting to fasten his belt. Shakespeare presented Macbeth as deeply flawed, not merely in attitude and behavior, but deep down in the heart in the depths of his “cause,” or heart/will. Macbeth’s inability to control his impulses, leading to murderous intent, stemmed from something that had gone awry deeply in his soul. He was, to borrow a description from Ranier Rilke, “The toy of some great pain.”

This Shakespearean observation of Macbeth has been on my mind often recently as I’ve watched Donald Trump unravel before our eyes and watch his Republican Party stand by haplessly, not having had the courage in their own collective heart to intervene when they could have. Trump presents such a vivid picture of psychopathology and it has been amusing, and sad, to watch his cohorts attempt at various times in the past year to rein him in. But when one’s “cause” is so deeply “distempered” or diseased, there is no reining it in.

Trump is still living out of what we clinicians call “the terrible two’s” when the world is one’s oyster. Usually one’s familial and social context will provide limits so that the child will come to see that the world is not his to exploit for his own ends, but is a domain that requires cooperation. And surrendering to this external demand is excruciating to a nascent ego but most of us manage to endure the pain, learning to appreciate the value of trading immediate gratification for the deferred variety. Trump’s family indulged him, and so did his political “family” early in this campaign. One of his 16 competitors in the primary season, Senator Lindsey Graham, noted onetime in retrospect, “We all cowered in the corner of the stage” before Trump’s onslaught of bullying behavior. The “willfulness” that Trump demonstrates has made him wealthy but at the expense of a lot of people. A strong-willed person, with just a modicum of self-restraint, can be very successful in about any area of life. Will, or the exercise thereof, is very important but it can lead to one’s downfall.

Shakespeare is probably one of the most wonderful discoveries of my life. He knew the human heart and vividly illustrated its beauty and its foibles in his plays and sonnets. And it is very revealing that until my mid-thirties, I could not understand him and actually loathed him! His wisdom fell on deaf ears. At that point in my life I was only beginning to emerge from the darkness of “having ears to hear, but hearing not; having eyes to see but seeing not.”

“The World is My Oyster” (Not)

The Delusional World of Trump Continues

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I just finished my morning foray into the mad world of Donald Trump and was not even taken aback to see that he is now focusing on the mental instability of Hillary Clinton. This is just further illustration of how completely out of touch with reality he is; for, if he paid any attention to the feedback that he is getting from friend and foe he would realize that he should not touch the subject of anyone’s else’s “mental instability.”

But this is the problem with narcissism, especially when that mental illness has reached the stage of malignancy it has with him. For in that state of madness, one is impervious to feedback from the outside. One then finds himself comfortably ensconced in a delusional system and inevitably will have constructed himself a social world consisting of people who will help him maintain his lunacy as they too live in a version of the same delusional system. Theologian Paul Tillich described this as “an empty world of self-relatedness”, a pristine world comprised of people who march lock-stepped to the beat of the same demonic drummer.

I speak from experience. As noted before in this venue, I grew up in a context of delusional narcissism in which I learned that I was one of God’s “special” and “chosen people who had the truth; and, yes, others perhaps had the truth also but no one had it like we did! And I’m not free of this poison yet and will never be completely as it always tempts me to bask in the safety of my present day mind-set and dismiss any and all those see the world differently. But when the Grace of God has intervened and one has “named the demon” the demon can no longer work its tyranny in your heart with the same degree of abandonment. Yes, I still catch myself taking myself too seriously…in this venue and in the whole of my life…but then “reality” chides me and I am reminded again that I’m only a finite perspective in a world of other perspectives. I don’t have “the” Truth though I now feel that I am in the loving hands of the Truth and therefore don’t have to be so damn “right” any more.

And this is often quite uncomfortable. For in my heart’s core I still have that childhood desperation for “certainty” but am learning to live without it, learning that this is what faith is about. And, yes, this is faith in God…though that is a long story…but it also is a newly found faith in myself as I’m discovering that the certainty which used to offer comfort was specious at best and was predicated upon a denial of my human vulnerability.

Trump has a god-like power over many people in my country. His message preys on reptilian-brain fears which are readily assuaged by his promise that he is gonna “Make America Great Again.” He knows that he can say and do anything he wants to and his followers will stay with him for they are hapless before his demonic falderal. Last fall he even declared publicly that he could shoot someone dead in the streets of New York City “and my poll numbers will still go up.” The very next day his poll numbers spiked. He offers a delusional hope and when desperate people have imbibed of this nectar it is usually impossible to take it from them.

And many evangelical Christians are drinking the kool-aid with relish, disregarding the advice of one of their own spokesmen, Chuck Swindoll, who posed the question of Trump, “Where is the basic thread of human decency?” It is not there but many evangelicals, terrified by the reality of the modern world, are willing to sell their soul for the specious hope of a “strong-man” who will turn back the clock and restore our country to the “good old days.” They fail to realize that these “good old days,” that I remember well, were the days when blacks knew their place, women knew their place, gender diversity did not even exist, and those Communists occupied the place that “Muslims” occupy in our present day mindset. The “good old days” required rigid demarcation between “us” and “them” which is best illustrated by Trump’s promise today to “build that wall.” “Walls” and boundaries are necessary for life. But when they are emphasized to the neglect of openness and inclusiveness they are destructive, destructive of the world outside but also of those that are inside the “safe” confines of those boundaries. As W. H. Auden noted, “We have made for ourselves a life safer than we can bear.”

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