Culture

Donald Trump, Mental Illness, and Us

Culture / By

I can’t imagine there’s not a serious observer who doesn’t assume that Donald Trump suffers from some form of serious mental illness.  Possibly multiple illnesses.  As far as we know, they’ve never been officially diagnosed by a medical professional, and it seems highly unlikely that he’s ever been seriously treated.  And this is at the core of what America has always gotten, and continues to get wrong about him and his presidency. I’m not a professional; it would be irresponsible of me to publicly guess which illness(es) Trump suffers from.  And besides, that’s not my point.  Rather, it’s that people who don’t have training in or substantial experience with serious mental illness can often be quite naive about it.  And we, as a society, have been extremely naive about Donald Trump. Without a clear understanding of mental illness, or often even recognition of it, people typically make an enormous mistake: they think that someone suffering from serious mental illness can, like the rest of us, simply learn to “behave better.”  That you can explain to them what they’ve done wrong, and they’ll learn and adjust.  Or that if problems continue, you can successfully use a system of rewards and punishments to reinforce better behavior, like you would with a dog or a child.  And if they don’t adjust, they’re just being stubborn, or they’re “bad apple.” But that’s not how it works.  And not because mental illness is so different from other illness, but because it’s so similar in certain ways.  As with any serious illness, band aids and pep talks accomplish next to nothing.  Serious mental illness requires serious mental health care treatment, which may include medication. Seriously ill people can’t simply be encouraged or shamed into being better.  Why?

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The Mythological President

Culture, History, Politics / By

Lies and mythology are related, but they’re not the same thing.  One person can lie to another, whereas mythology exists and functions across society.   I can tell you a lie, but a myth is something we tell ourselves.  A myth is made up of many lies that magically add up to a higher “truth.” Donald Trump lies.  A lot.  Clearly more than most people, and probably more than any other president.  Arguably professional journalism’s greatest failing of the last several years has been its reluctance to label him a liar or to even identify his lies as such.  Instead, they almost always play it safe, on the grounds that they cannot read his mind, and so they settle for euphemisms. He is “incorrect.”  He “exaggerates” and “misstates.”  His statements are “inaccurate.”  Respected, professional news outlets almost never call him a liar.  They never say he lies.  Of course it isn’t always a lie.  Some if it is just gross stupidity.  But he also intentionally lies.  Many thousands of them. This is very important.  When we fail to challenge Donald Trump’s countless lies, they are allowed to form a larger mythological whole that is greater than the sum of its individual lies.  The result is The Mythology of Donald Trump. A myth is full of statements that are “inaccurate” or “incorrect.”  A society bundles up these individual lies and transforms them into a mythological truth.  Take for example story of Pocahontas.

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Death Becomes Us

Culture, Politics / By

It seems likely that over the next year or so, perhaps a million Americans, mostly the elderly, will die from Covid-19 (Corona Virus).  A variety of models are predicting that perhaps one-half to two-thirds of Americans will become infected; somewhere between 200,000 and 1.7 million Americans will die from these infections; upwards of 21 million patients (about 6% of the population) will require hospitalization, overwhelming the healthcare system, and thereby increasing fatalities. Much of this is no one’s fault.  Viruses mutate constantly, becoming exceptionally lethal when a mutation allows one to jump species.  Say, from pigs (eg. swine flu) or from chickens (eg. bird flu)  That’s because the new host species (eg. us) has had no prior contact with the new virus and must develop antibodies more or less from scratch.  That takes a while, and the first pass can be exceptionally lethal. This process of viral mutation and virgin pandemics has been happening in the eastern hemisphere for millennia.  By contrast, it happened relatively infrequently in the Americas prior to Columbus because by and large Native Americans did not domesticate many animals, and thus did not create many opportunities for viruses to jump species.  This is why the long history of epidemiology is largely a history of Eurasia and Africa, where people have long domesticated a large variety of food and work animals. So to a large degree, the sudden emergence of Covid-19 is humanity’s fault at large for continuing to domesticate animals, particularly in close quarters and in unsanitary conditions. This was going to happen. But how it plays out, exactly, is another matter.  And we can identify one man in particular, whose own ignorance, stubbornness, irrationality, pettiness, incompetence, selfishness, and gross irresponsibility will greatly worsen Covid-19’s impact in the United States: Donald Trump.

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Stuck, Ch. 15 Coda: What Jefferson Airplane Became

Culture / By

The following is a coda to the Stuck chapter on Jefferson Airplane, published at 3 Quarks Daily on February 16, 2020.  A full Table of Contents with links is available at the Stuck page on this website. CODA (noun): 1. a concluding musical passage typically forming an addition to the basic structure; 2. a concluding event, remark, or section. Fleetwood Mac looks like the Brady Bunch compared to Jefferson Airplane’s decades of fighting and fucking.  They loved and hated each other into becoming and re-becoming seemingly endless incarnations of themselves, only some of which I have the patience to figure out and the space to recount.  One family tree I found online lists a dozen incarnations of just Jefferson Airplane just from the years 1965-1972, with no less than 16 different musicians filtering in and out. And several more separate bands were destined to spin off from the original.  What follows is a highly abridged Annotated Jefferson Airplane, sans the footnotes. In 1969, Grace Slick began having an affair with band mate Paul Kantner.  She finally divorced husband Jerry Slick in 1971; by then she was pregnant with Kantner’s child.  Now an established artist, she kept the surname Slick, but named her daughter China Wing-Kantner. The group took a hiatus in 1970, but many members continued to work with each other on various side projects.  That year, Kantner teamed with several studio musicians and select members of Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Crosby, Stills and Nash.  The collective was later dubbed the Planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra. 

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Is “Little” Steven Van Zandt (a) Racist?

Culture, Politics / By

You might not know the name “Little” Stevie Van Zandt, but yet may be familiar with his “art.” Van Zandt first gained prominence back in the 1970s as the lead guitarist in Bruce Springsteen’s East Street Band. He also hosts a long running radio program called Little Steven’s Underground Garage. And during the turn of the 21st century, he reached a whole new audience as an actor. He played the role of Silvio Dante, Tony Soprano’s consigliere on The Sopranos. Van Zandt has a long history of working to fight racism. For example, in 1985 he authored and co-produced the protest song “Sun City,” one of the era’s anti-apartheid anthems. In conjunction with that, he supported the entertainment industry’s boycott of Sun City, a performance venue created by the racist South African government. So, can Stevie Van Zant be racist? Of course he can, as recently witnessed by a series of tweets in which he claimed that black musicians, while being instrumental in the founding of rock n roll, “did not elevate the rock idiom into an artform”  

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Why You’re Wrong

Culture / By

Your numbers are off I said your numbers are off You forgot your watch You forgot your glasses You misread You misunderstood You’re missing the point You’re naïve You’re irrational You’re close minded You’re vain You’re shallow You’re overly emotional It’s wishful thinking You’re too optimistic You’re too pessemistic

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The Public Professor

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