Excused

In 2007, University of Colorado psychologist Frederick Coolidge asked five historians to take diagnostic personality tests on behalf of Adolph Hitler.

The results showed Hitler was clinically insane.

More specifically, they showed der Führer was a schizophrenic who suffered from psychotic thinking and extreme paranoia.

Not only did he have delusions of grandeur, but Hitler was chronically anxious, angry, argumentative, aloof, patronizing, narcissistic, and sadistic.

Followers, nonetheless, excused him.

"Dangerous leaders typically have apologists who discount their destructive methods in favor of viewing their behavior as consonant with 'laudable' goals," Coolidge wrote.

Cornelius Vanderbilt IV, an American filmmaker and magazine correspondent, interviewed Hitler on March 5, 1933, the day he was elected Reich Chancellor. The interview took place in a backstage corridor of the Berlin Sports Palace, at the start of a Nazi rally.

Although he spent less than a minute with Hitler, Vanderbilt sensed he was in the presence of a madman.

“Tell the Americans that Adolf Hitler is the man of the hour," Hitler told him. "Tell them he was sent by the almighty to a nation that had been threatened with disintegration and loss of honor these last fifteen years.”

In a Country Churchyard

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

― Thomas Gray

On the eve of Barack Obama's first inauguration, Rep. John Lewis recounted "Bloody Sunday" for NPR's Terry Gross.

While the event was political in nature, its roots were the church, and listening to a replay of Lewis' interview this week prompted me to stop by a tiny "colored" graveyard just a mile from my home.

Bucktoe Cemetery feels hermetic on a sultry July afternoon, more like a piece of backwoods Mississippi than eastern Pennsylvania. It's the resting place for, among a hundred other souls, nine members of the US Colored Troops, veterans of the Civil War. The graveyard once nestled the largest church in the township, but Klansmen burned it down in 1900. Today, only a partial foundation remains.

Blacks represented only 1% of the North's population in 1860; but 10% of the Northern army during the Civil War. Congress at first was reluctant to allow Blacks to serve, but in 1862 deemed their service was an "indispensable military necessity." Lincoln agreed.

Once assembled and drilled, regiments of the US Colored Troops were ferried to the Deep South, to fight Confederates on their home turf (Edward Zwick's magnificent film "Glory" recounts the first such regiment's history). US Colored Troops also served combat duty in Virginia, fighting under U.S. Grant against Robert E. Lee.

Nearly 200,000 Black troops served in the Civil War; and more than 37,000 died.

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.