I am Karen

I am what I am. I don't want praise, I don't want pity. 
I bang my own drum―some think it's noise, I think it's pretty.

― Jerry Herman

Women friends of mine, their names notwithstanding, are upset "Karen" has become a pejorative.

By one definition, a Karen is a "quintessential white woman who rocks an edgy, highlighted bob and demands to speak to the manager."

She’s entitled, assertive, and prone to public tantrums, fueled by an ingrained fear she could readily be victimized. And she has a “Live, Laugh, Love” placard, probably in her kitchen.

Well, I don't have a placard, but I'm here to tell you I am Karen.

I won't yell at the store manager or call the cops because you're Black. 

But―no matter your color―I will erupt when you:

• Abandon your cart in the checkout line
• Park your goddamned SUV in a handicapped space
• Go without a mask in the hardware store
• Let your doberman run without a leash 
• Smack your kids across the face
• Litter 
• Pitch me your cheesy software on LinkedIn 
• Bill my credit card without asking 
• Charge me $800 for a $100 dental procedure
• Fly the Confederate flag
• Imply Blacks, Latinos or Asians are inferior to Whites
• Disparage Gays
• Praise Ayn Rand, or 
• Insist Donald Trump is a good businessman, president, or human being

I make no excuses: I am what I am.

I am Karen.

Be Very Afraid

Readers told me my latest post struck a nerve.

Today, The Wall Street Journal issued poll findings confirming I am right:

"Less than four months before the November election, 51% of voters said they would vote for Mr. Biden if the election were held today, with 40% backing Mr. Trump."

Be very afraid.

The Slow March to American Fascism

The "very fine people" massed in Charlottesville, 2017

I'm a sucker for a Hitchcock picture and, watching "Marnie" a few days ago, I caught a mention by the lead male of The Undiscovered Self, Carl Jung's slim volume about Western civilization's fate.

Rereading the book after four decades, I'm flabbergasted at its immediacy―and no longer optimistic about our nation's ability to escape fascism.

Just as German business- and clergymen tolerated Hitler in the 1930's, greedy Republicans in the past four years have enabled Trump to rally the mentally diseased 60 percent―Jung's estimate―of our electorate.

Trump has brainwashed their already-unhinged minds―you merely have to listen to what the 60 percent are telling us, to know―and there's no "curing" them now. They're like the silent super-spreaders of Covid-19, only the disease they're carrying is Trumpism.

We're on the slow march to American fascism.

"Everywhere in the West," Jung writes, "there are subversive minorities who, sheltered by our humanitarianism and our sense of justice, hold the incendiary torches ready, with nothing to stop the spread of their ideas except the critical reason of a single, fairly intelligent, mentally stable stratum of the population.

"One should not, however, overestimate the thickness of this stratum. 

"It varies from country to country in accordance with national temperament. Also, it is regionally dependent on public education and is subject to the influence of acutely disturbing factors of a political and economic nature. Taking plebiscites as a criterion, one could on an optimistic estimate put its upper limit at about 40 percent of the electorate. 

"A rather more pessimistic view would not be unjustified either, since the gift of reason and critical reflection is not one of man’s outstanding peculiarities, and even where it exists it proves to be wavering and inconstant, the more so, as a rule, the bigger the political groups are. The mass crushes out the insight and reflection that are still possible with the individual, and this necessarily leads to doctrinaire and authoritarian tyranny if ever the constitutional state should succumb to a fit of weakness. 

"Rational argument can be conducted with some prospect of success only so long as the emotionality of a given situation does not exceed a certain critical degree. If the affective temperature rises above this level, the possibility of reason’s having any effect ceases and its place is taken by slogans and chimerical wish-fantasies. That is to say, a sort of collective possession results which rapidly develops into a psychic epidemic. 

"In this state all those elements whose existence is merely tolerated as asocial under the rule of reason come to the top. Such individuals are by no means rare curiosities to be met with only in prisons and lunatic asylums. For every manifest case of insanity there are, in my estimation, at least ten latent cases who seldom get to the point of breaking out openly but whose views and behavior, for all their appearance of normality, are influenced by unconsciously morbid and perverse factors. There are, of course, no medical statistics on the frequency of latent psychoses―for understandable reasons. But even if their number should amount to less than ten times that of the manifest psychoses and of manifest criminality, the relatively small percentage of the population figures they represent is more than compensated for by the peculiar dangerousness of these people. 

Trump campaign ad

"Their mental state is that of a collectively excited group ruled by affective judgments and wish-fantasies. In a state of 'collective possession' they are the adapted ones and consequently they feel quite at home in it. They know from their own experience the language of these conditions and they know how to handle them. Their chimerical ideas, upborne by fanatical resentment, appeal to the collective irrationality and find fruitful soil there, for they express all those motives and resentments which lurk in more normal people under the cloak of reason and insight. 

"They are, therefore, despite their small number in comparison with the population as a whole, dangerous as sources of infection precisely because the so-called normal person possesses only a limited degree of self-knowledge."

Unless the 40 percent of us who harbor no grievances, no "fanatical" resentments, come to grips with our unconscious―"the undiscovered self"―there is no resisting Trump or his mass movement. 

Trump's madness will sink its teeth into our unconscious―like Covid-19 sinks its hooks into our lungs―and his authoritarian and tyrannical ideology will overpower us.

Flow

In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be a gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy.

― Robert Louis Stevenson

Not a few friends of late have suggested pot, now that it's legal, but I have still-life painting to turn me on.

Even when the outcome is fish-wrap―as it routinely is―painting guarantees all the flow pots does, without the attendant risk I'll gobble an entire Entemann's.

Flow―what Confucius called wu-wei—is total absorption in a task. 

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced “Me-high Cheeks-send-me-high”) was the first scientist to isolate flow, calling it a privileged "zone" where we leave tedium behind and become rapt with "the time of our lives."

A lecture on secularism by Carl Jung inspired Csikszentmihaly to study the origins of happiness, the end that eludes so many.

Csikszentmihalyi soon discovered that happiness was less an end than a state, spontaneous and temporary; a state people entered when they pushed themselves to work at a difficult task.

He interviewed hundreds of artists to learn how they felt when they worked. 

They told him they felt the art simply, effortlessly flowed from them; and that they felt ecstatic while working.

In Csikszentmihalyi’s words, flow is a "state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter."

"Krazy Kube" by Robert Francis James. Oil on canvas. 16 x 12 inches.

Forerunner

While the reading public awaits the tell-all book by Donald Trump's niece, another new book provides a portrait of a historical figure whose character resembles the president's in a most uncanny way.

Erik Larson's The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family and Defiance during the Blitz includes a sketch of Reich Marshal Herman Göring, every bit of which feels like a description of Trump.

Göring, Larson writes, was "large, buoyant, ruthless, cruel," with an "ebullient and joyously corrupt personality."

With a "passion for extravagant sartorial display," Göring designed his own clothes, often changing his costume several times a day. Besides elaborate uniforms, he often wore gold-embroidered silk shirts, tunics and togas, painting his toenails red, dying his hair yellow, penciling his eyebrows and applying rouge to his cheeks. He also wore oversized diamond and emerald rings on the fingers of both hands.

British intelligence reports said Göring spent much of his time as Reich Marshal riding and hunting on his forested estate outside Berlin, when he should have been directing the Luftwaffe. He also devoted countless hours to running a private network of thugs, whose job was to raid art galleries and wealthy homes, stealing paintings for Göring's vast collection.

Although considered crazy by some, American intelligence reports said Göring was a "great actor and professional liar."

"The public loved him," Larson writes, "forgiving his legendary excesses and coarse personality." The American journalist William Shirer wrote at the time, "Göring is a salty, earthy, lusty man of flesh and blood. The Germans like him because they understand him. He has the faults and virtues of the average man, and the people admire him for both." Rather than resent Göring's "fantastic, medieval—and very expensive—personal life," the Germans admired it. "It is the sort of life they would lead themselves, perhaps, if they had the chance."

In the rare moments he did apply himself to his office, Göring often bungled, disregarding valid intelligence, dismissing unpleasant news, and quickly losing patience with subordinates. 

"He was easily influenced by a small clique of sycophants," one Luftwaffe pilot said at the time. "His court favorites changed frequently, since his favor could only be won and held by means of constant flattery, intrigue and expensive gifts. Göring was a man with almost no technical knowledge and no appreciation of the conditions under which modern fighter aircraft fought."