A Citizen Is Being Victimized, or, No Seriously, What Is It about This Guy?

It took me years to convince my best friend (forgive me, best friend) that my dad was a psychopath who had done me and my brothers a lot of harm. 

He came across, at first and in pieces and at a distance, as wonderful, radiant, charismatic, funny, different...the same way a product looks all shiny on the shelf. As a kind of ad about himself. 

It was impossible for my friend to discern the fact that this was ALL he had, that this was a common technique of psychopaths to lure people in, not even deliberate, but because it's ALL they've got...and once you see under the surface, it's American Psycho time (this happens several times in the novel if you've read it; Trump makes some cameo appearances).

The desperation I've felt over the years since 2015 at people looking on at Trump as this incredible being...thing is, his disinhibition looks incredible, like witty party guy life and soul stuff, in small doses. And if you're white and male and still watching the whole thing like it's on TV, it's all small doses, and you get off on his cruelty, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes fully consciously. 

And on that note, there is a whole masochistic thrill, of the "A Child Is Being Beaten" kind (Freud). The glee a child feels when another one is being punished, around the corner. The whole "enjoy your life and we will punish the other for you" is appealing to this basic basic psychic layer. 

So to recap: it's fascinating snippets, and glimpses of stimulating punishment.  

The truly demonic aspect is that these feelings have been marshaled forever in the service of enslavement and white supremacy, along with misogyny. This is some tired, deep old shit he's playing with here. The bargain basement bottom of the life toilet bowl of white western humanity. 

I'm going to watch The Apprentice now. I'll let you know what I see. 

Come to My Hell Book Launch in Chicago (October 25 6pm)!

 

PTSD Every Day (Complex PTSD in Fact) or, Now I Know Why Succeeding Makes Me Feel Terrible (Really Terrible; Really Really Terrible)

 ...hello. If you've been reading this for a while (started in 2007) you'll know this has never occurred to me before. 

I used to think I was an introvert. Then I think introvert is a suspect category, and what this actually is, is exhibitionism plus a phobia of it. 

But I have a much simpler explanation for my feelings after I do a  lecture or, in this case, right now today, finish doing an interview. 

Whenever I succeed at a task, I feel bad. I mean I feel like a bad person. The sense of being contaminated or evil is in direct proportion to the magnitude of the task, how successful it was, what it churned up .

I just did an interview with a Czech magazine that was without doubt one of the best interviews I've ever done. 

And now I get to feel like I'm a terrible bad person, possibly for hours, possibly for the rest of the day. Like really bad. Like I keep saying to Treena, "I'm a bad person." And she keeps saying no. At least I've learned to verbalize it. And she knows how to hold it and respond. 

Sometimes the PTSD is so intense and all pervasive, you don't realize it is what it is. Actually, Complex PTSD, to get technical. Links are to National Health Service definitions. 

It's not that I feel physically exhausted. I feel morally terrible. Like evil. Really evil. Like I should be deprived of property and money and a life and killed. 

Fascism as Brain Candy

 Let me get this straight. He has to destroy all of America and the world so he can not-shake his booty like the one time he ever let himself go, in a crowd, aka on coke in Studio 54 to Village People?

It's like Brain Candy, the film. Gleemonex reaches into your brain (chemically!), locates your happiest memory (chemically!), and freezes it (chemically!). The fascism locks on to his happiest memory and keeps him there.

We have to endure all this so as to act as a dubious antidepressant to Trump.

He does that dance at the very end of his rallies, with the volume turned all the way up to ear-splitting levels, presumably how a naive person would've heard the speakers in Studio 54 way back when. Regressive, too, the intensity of the sound. 

Footage from the time shows him dancing just that way, that jerk-your-arms-don't-whatever-you-do-shake-your-booty white man dance of racist homophobia. 

The one measly little bit of real enjoyment in his brain, the one little bit of being part of a crowd rather than the mirror-mirror-on-the-wall-ness of his entire existence, just look at his penthouse. 

Interview with Me in Texas Monthly

 I really enjoyed talking with Michael Hardy about the book and about a number of related topics. 

Read This. That's an Order

 

Fascist Hypnosis by Daniel Pinchbeck

Time to break it

Read on Substack

Autocracy and Poverty Go Together

 

Autocracy and Poverty by Timothy Snyder

Trump and Vance bring them together

Read on Substack

Deconstructionists Interview about Hell (really good--REALLY good)

 This was the one, if you ask me. 

Interview in LiveScience

 I really enjoyed it... 

"The person dubbed "the prophet of the Anthropocene" talks to Live Science about how they got this title, what the Anthropocene means, and why we need to stop trying to define when it started and accept that we've been in it for millennia."

Yet More New Classes Uploaded

 Head over to my Patreon for some lessons on how to read anything at all. Includes how to understand propaganda. 

Bookplate Offer Still Stands!

 If you haven't heard, I'll send you  signed bookplate if you can email me with proof of purchase of Hell. I've sent out 300 so far! 

tbm2@rice.edu is the address. 

More Classes are Up on My Patreon

 Just go here and take a look! 

More Music from me and Andrew Melchior

 It's the B side to "Come Fast from the Dark." 

"I Can't Believe We're Having This Conversation Again"

 

I Was on This BBC Radio 4 Show and Loved It

 ...a show about crisis...we recorded it in London  yesterday. Everyone got good stuff out I think. 

A Major, MAJOR Aspect of Trump's Horror

 "while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever. I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman. But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty."

Nate White

Why I Boycotted the New York Times or, How It Turned into a Giant Wordle Whose Solution is "Acquiesce"

 I don't buy your product any more New York Times, and a long quotation from a “think” piece called “How a Naked Man on a Tropical Island Created Our Current Political Insanity” vindicated my decision.

It's PART of the insanity you see, insanity itself being a euphemism for obscene violence.

You see, oh Grey Lady, the way it suckered me by hinting it was going to talk about colonialism and race--but never does...

When actual clothed people FROM an island are being assaulted OUTSIDE the precious tv (tellingly and menacingly absent from the title)...

While a white (because never colored in) man acting like Crusoe “clearly understands how to operate” the never mentioned stochastic terrorism...

MAKES ME WANT TO PUKE.

And that’s not all! This “clearly understands how to operate” thing is a great instance of sanewashing, the utter menace of a deranged clown presented as competence.

All this does, ALL it does, is glamorize how a fascist nihilist dominates us by saturating the news cycle. It does it for him. Without calling it out.

Then another Times piece will sanewash the violent nonsense.

And so this is why I don't buy your product any more.

You are an acquiescence machine, reams of cleverly manicured, deliciously diverting prose designed to drown the screams like the Beethoven on the loudspeakers at the camp I'm sure I can't even mention here. Congrats!