Barry Spector's Blog

I laughed to myself…Here we go. I’m starting a war under false pretenses. – James Stockdale, flying over the Gulf of Tonkin, August 5th, 1964

August 10th, 2020. This month we note many anniversaries. Fifty-five years ago on August 6th, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act. In 1974 on August 8th, Richard Nixon resigned. August 28^th is the 57th anniversary of the March on Washington for Civil Rights.

But one anniversary is the most significant. On August 7th, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. The Senate gave him the power “to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed forces,” to fight the spread of communism in Southeast Asia and assist our ally in South Vietnam “in defense of its freedom.”

 The story was this simple: North Vietnamese torpedo boats – off their own coast – had attacked American ships without provocation. An admittedly minor (if unproven) altercation with no injuries was all America needed to come and defend freedom.

America was coming to help!

Understanding this phrase – indeed, understanding any aspect of American history – requires knowledge of our mythology. This is the America of Daniel Boone, John Wayne,  Rambo, Clint Eastwood, Buffalo Bill, Batman and all the other heroes who charge in at the last moment to save the innocent community from the clutches of the evil, inscrutable (and usually dark-skinned) Other. Our heroes never throw the first punch.

One of our greatest paradoxes is that, early on, a nation of radical individualists with no innate purposes became an individualist among nations with a divinely inspired mission to make the entire world a better place. In this fallen world, only America had the know-how and the altruistic ideals to make a difference. It was also, however, an open world, offering irresistible opportunities to those capitalists and colonialists who could find reasons to justify military intervention. But their problem was then and always has been how, in a democratic nation, to mobilize public opinion.

By the late 19^th century, America’s mission (known as manifest destiny, the white man’s burden, bringing the good news, making the world safe for democracy, nation-building, etc.) had taken on four fundamental assumptions.

First: unique, divinely sanctioned purpose.

Second: generous, idealistic intentions, never financial gain.

Third, unenlightened, oppressed people who longed for our help.

Fourth, a pretext for intervention: unprovoked attack.

Since by definition American violence must stem from the noblest of motivations, our actions are always re-actions to nefarious attacks from the Other, who hates us out of purely evil intent. Hence, no movie cowboy heroes ever strike the first blow. They intervene only after the Other has threatened someone’s freedom. Similarly, no American President ever strikes at the enemy without first having been attacked. In these narratives, the Other always strikes first, with a “sneak” attack. At the very least, he is preparing to attack, or merely capable of doing so. That, in our myth, is justification for American “pre-emptive” violence.

The events in the Tonkin Gulf fit a tradition extending backwards, past Pearl Harbor, the Palmer raids, the sinkings of the Lusitania and the Maine, the Mexican War and the Witch craze, and forward to the Gulf War and 9/11.

The gunboat diplomacy of the 1890s didn’t begin this pattern; it was already enshrined in American myth. Between 1798 and 1895 (the year conventional historians consider the beginning of American empirical designs), the U.S. had already intervened in other countries over 100 times. Such policies protected business while allowing Americans to innocently believe that they benefited mankind. In 1907, however, future President Wilson admitted (or bragged):

Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded… even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged… the doors of the nations which are closed must be battered down.

The story remains deeply embedded in our psyches. When economic pressure and clandestine operations or political assassinations fail, American leaders, whether Republican or Democrat, fabricate provocations and attack. This has been a regular pattern, regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats have inhabited the White House, for over 170 years.

Our self-image, however, remains staunchly innocent because the myth teaches that redemption (for both ourselves and those we would save) comes not through peace but through righteous violence. “The distance between such noble principles and such self-serving aggressiveness,” writes historian Walter Nugent, “ is the measure of hypocrisy.”

But Americans, though naïve, are no more inherently violent than other peoples. The state must regularly administer massive dosages of indoctrination to reanimate our sense of innocence and purpose. Propaganda merges with belief; every student learns that America never starts wars but always aids those in need. The mythic appeal is so fundamental that occasional disclosures of the truth do little to alter popular consciousness.

Our media gatekeepers – the New York Times, the Washington Post, all the major broadcast networks and Internet news providers and social networks – make sure of that. Still, the narrative of innocence requires regular ceremonial maintenance.

In August of 1964, Congress (with only two “nay” votes) gave Johnson complete authority to go to war – a war that would last another eleven years, killing some 60,000 Americans (and generating over a hundred thousand veteran suicides) and between three and four million Asians, the vast majority of them civilians.

The mythical god Apollo sent his arrows to kill from a distance. Similarly, American military violence is rarely an intimate affair. Whether it comes from the barrel of an artillery cannon, the rockets of a fighter jet, airborne tankers dropping defoliants on peasants, a B-52 carpet-bombing entire regions from five miles off the ground or the joystick of a computer that directs drone-fired missiles flying over another continent, it is usually perpetrated from a distance. Distant violence allows us to de-sensitize ourselves to the reality of death. In addition, a constant diet of TV crime dramas and semi-comic superhero movies allows us to believe that violence isn’t real, or that, despite our fears, it only happens elsewhere.

My book Madness at the Gates of the City: The Myth of American Innocence argues that American myth has divided the world into “red, white and black” – the external, red other; the internal, black other; and the innocent, white community. In Viet Nam, America enacted this narrative once again, with white generals sending black and brown soldiers into what everyone called “Indian country.” The U.S. dropped seven million tons of bombs; significantly, most were dropped from 30,000 feet, so pilots never heard the explosions or saw the results. They took Apollonic killing at a distance to its extreme: bombing a nation “back to the Stone Age.”

On the ground, however, obsession with the body count, rather than control of territory, became an end in itself. General Westmoreland set the tone by smugly dismissing civilian casualties: “It does deprive the enemy of the population, doesn’t it?” With this kind of permission coming from the top, massacres became commonplace, as they had been in Korea and would continue to be, wherever the U.S. would oppose dark-skinned people.

Since the end of World War Two, the U.S. has bombed nearly fifty countries.

Sociologist Phillip Slater observed this pattern of goodwill justifying mass slaughter and argued,

This transfer of killing from a means to an end in itself constitutes a practical definition of genocide…Do Americans hate life? Has there ever been a people who have destroyed so many living things?

Read Part Two Here.

1 – Our popular narratives of extreme violence, both real and fictional, are always justified by the need for a hero, an exceptional man who is willing to sacrifice himself (but rarely does) to protect the innocent community from the irrational, evil desires of the “Other.”

2 – Like the mythical god Apollo whose arrows killed from a distance, American violence is not an intimate affair. Whether it comes from the barrel of a gun, the rockets of a fighter jet, airborne tankers dropping defoliants on peasants, a B-52 carpet-bombing entire regions from five miles off the ground or the joystick of a computer that directs drone-fired missiles flying over another continent, it is perpetrated from a distance.

3 – The denial of death. This characteristic distance is one of the factors that allow Americans to de-sensitize themselves to the reality of death. In addition, a constant diet of TV crime shows and superhero movies allows us to believe that violence isn’t real, or that, despite our fears, it only happens elsewhere. Hence our disillusionment and punctured innocence when the Sandy Hooks of the world happen to us.

4 – A perpetual war economy, at least since the end of World War Two. Why does America go to war so often? Do Imperial politics fully explain the fact that the U.S. has attacked over forty countries since 1945? Ultimately, our American stories convey an even deeper level of mythic reality. At the core of all western culture – yet expressed in its purest form in America – is the myth of the Killing of the Children. Our greatest secret – the most sacred knowledge, so sacred that it is taboo to ever discuss it – is that the American Empire must periodically sacrifice large numbers of its own children in foreign wars in order to shear up the cracks that appear in our national sense of innocence and white privilege. They die, we are told, to protect freedom. In fact, they die because we want them to die.

5 – Unprovoked attack. Since by definition American violence must stem from the noblest of motivations, our actions are always re-actions to nefarious attacks from the Other, who hates us out of purely evil intent. Hence, no movie cowboy ever strikes the first blow. Similarly, no American President ever strikes at the enemy without first having been attacked. In these narratives, the Other always strikes first, with a “sneak” attack. At the very least, he is preparing to attack, or merely capable of doing so. That, in our myth, is justification for American “pre-emptive” violence.

6 – With four hundred years of these stories deeply woven into the American psyche, we are well-primed to ingest each new one. Among the countless examples, think of “Remember the Maine,” the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, 9-11, “weapons of mass destruction”, Iranian nukes, Syrian barrel bombs. But think also of the thousands of movie, TV and comic book villains who without exception strike the first blow, often from behind. They don’t play fair. They use “chemical weapons,” which – despite our own use of them – we deem as so terrible that they must be punished. Indeed, every action of the American empire requires such provocations, because otherwise, cracks would quickly appear in the myth and Americans would begin to question the essence of our identity.

This essay is about one of those stories. In 2005, Admiral James Stockdale died, almost universally revered as a genuine American hero. Most Americans knew him as Ross Perot’s 1992 vice-presidential running mate. An older generation remembered him as America’s highest-ranking prisoner-of-war in the Viet Nam war, a man who suffered extreme beatings and torture for seven years but never revealed classified information or spoke ill of his country. After his release, he received the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Few of us, however, know about this other story:

A very public person, Stockdale gave many interviews about his military service, and he was quite candid about his participation in the Gulf of Tonkin incident of 1964 that gave President Lyndon Johnson the excuse to begin the invasion of Vietnam. Stockdale had led the fighter squadron searching for the North Vietnamese boats that had allegedly fired upon an American ship.  Stockdale admitted, “I got so low I had salt water on my windshield and there’s no boats out there!” (All quotes are from from this interview.)

So Stockdale knew very well that the President was lying when, the next day, Johnson announced that the U.S. was responding in force to this unprovoked North Vietnamese “aggression.” Either Stockdale said nothing to his superiors or he was commanded not to speak about the event.

Stockdale had been raised to be a hero but had been too young to see action in Korea, and he didn’t want to miss his chance for glory.  The next day, when other pilots were about to take off to bomb Haiphong Harbor, Stockdale (as he revealed many years later) pulled rank, demanding that he be allowed to lead the raid. When asked if he wanted defensive weapons loaded on his planes in addition to the bombs, he answered:

No, there’ll be no action out there against us today except the flack…I could have said, Hell, no. This is Pearl Harbor; we’re going to attack a country that’s not waiting for it… I didn’t say any of that and it’s just as well.

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution?

They had already signed it and Johnson had withheld it. Now I don’t know what happened to it… I laughed to myself. I didn’t put it on the air but I said, Here we go. I’m starting a war under false pretenses… August 5th, 1964, and I was the guy that did it. I wouldn’t have missed it but – so anyway I don’t argue about the Vietnam War legitimacy or anything like that.

Here is a most remarkable admission. Of course the war would have started anyway, even if Stockdale had spoken up or refused to go on the mission. Months later, Johnson proclaimed, “We must love each other or die” as he secretly prepared to escalate the conflict into a major war.

But just imagine: a single person, a single point in time, a single decision to drop the bombs.  Just following orders. And eleven years later, three million Vietnamese — and perhaps another two million Laotians and Cambodians — were dead. Do such actions fit the definition of “war criminal?”

A year later Stockdale was shot down over North Viet Nam and his prisoner-of-war saga began. Several best-selling books, the Medal of Honor and millions of votes came his way.

His behavior in the prison was exemplary; he probably saved the lives of many of his co-prisoners. Americans came to see these men, most of whom who had been shot down while bombing North Vietnamese cities, as victims of cruel communists, the “Others” who would later be the stock villains of Sylvester Stallone movies. To this day, most Americans think of those pilots as victims, and of the 58,000 American dead as the only casualties of the war.

But who really were the victims: the 1,300 POWs, the hundred thousand veterans who committed suicide after returning, five million dead Asian peasants or an American society that still refuses to grieve for that war or for the wars we have prosecuted since then, each of them idealistic crusades to rid the world of evil, yet each of them begun “under false pretenses?”

In a dark time, the eye begins to see. – Theodore Roethke.

 Boy Psychology

I mentioned the Jungian psychologist Robert Moore in an earlier section. His books King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine and The Archetype of Initiation are essential reading for the understanding of masculine psychology in the late stages of our demythologized world.

The devastating fact is that most men are fixated at an immature level of development. These early developmental levels are governed by the inner blueprints appropriate to boyhood. When they are allowed to rule what should be adulthood, when the archetypes of boyhood are not built upon and transcended by the Ego’s appropriate accessing of the archetypes of mature masculinity, they cause us to act out of our hidden (to us, but seldom to others) boyishness…Boy psychology is everywhere around us, and its marks are easy to see. Among them are abusive and violent acting-out behaviors against others, both men and women; passivity and weakness, the inability to act effectively and creatively in one’s own life and to engender life and creativity in others (both men and women); and, often, an oscillation between the two– abuse/weakness, abuse/weakness.

He was writing and teaching about the base line of normality shared by almost all men in our culture. And he conceived these ideas in the 1980s, decades before the economic meltdowns of 2008 or 2020 that put much greater pressure on the fragile sense of American masculinity. I spent much time in Moore’s presence, and I can tell you that he certainly would have agreed with one of the basic premises of my book: that as the myth of American innocence collapses, the conditions of social reaction are making it even more likely that uninitiated and profoundly immature men will rise to the top of cultural, economic and political influence.

To summarize and to mythologize. Our American Innocence has conjured up these two men: one who embodies the very worst of our possibilities but who is, literally, us; and the other who models for us all the futile attempt to hide the truth from ourselves. We are also dealing with two old men who are so invested in their personae and so unwilling to consider introspection that they can barely censor themselves.

My image for Trumpus is the smirking, entitled but uninitiated boy-king who is so desperate to know himself, for others to know his pain (and perhaps finally be loved for who he is) that he will unconsciously invite his own — and our — destruction by provoking the wrath of Dionysus. What is he really saying? Stop me before I drive this red sports car into my wall!

The image for Biden (when he comes out of hidin’) is of driving that same sports car, but with his foot on the emergency brake, wondering why he isn’t going anywhere. I hope he isn’t senile, and he may not be a psychopath, but he certainly exhibits classic passive aggression by sabotaging his goals. What is he really saying? I really don’t think that I deserve to be President! I don’t even want to be President! Don’t vote for me!

Granted, one is crazier than the other. And we really need to remove him before he ups the ante any further. But we no longer have the luxury of hiding behind our own ignorance and pretending that the other is not a servant of the same oligarchs whose boundless greed will take us all down. Yes, for the Supreme Court. Yes, for abortion rights. Yes, for union rights. Yes (maybe) for mitigating Climate change. Yes, for a more rational Covid policy. Yes, for mild increases on taxes on the mega-wealthy. Yes, for the possibility of making the streets a little safer for immigrants and people of color.

But know that to a Venezuelan farmer, or a Palestinian child, or a Sudanese peasant, or almost anyone in dozens of Third-World countries under the thumb of the American empire, or to a black single mother in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward who used to work cleaning houses, or to her autistic son – or to the military/industrial/financial/petrochemical/health insurance/carceral/high technology complex – it will make absolutely no difference who wins this election.

As for that last group, it’s getting harder to miss the many subtle hints in the media that the Pentagon and the “intelligence community” are throwing their support behind Biden:

Retired Marine General Latest to Admonish Trump 

Former Army secretary backs Biden, citing ‘moral leadership’

Head of Aerospace Industries Association endorses Biden

Pentagon disarms the Guard in D.C.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper says he had no idea he would be in Trump’s infamous photo-op and no idea troops would beat back protesters

George Will reveals he is voting for Joe Biden

As Trump Implodes, Democrats Roll Out the Red Carpet for Bush Era Republicans

George W. Freaking Bush? He of the famous smirk? Are these people decent, honest conservatives who have woken up and just cannot support Trumpus because they love their country and don’t want it to deteriorate further? Please…let me remind you that almost every one of them has supported 95% of his agenda for their entire political careers (including the past four years), and further, that “principled conservatives” no longer exist within the Republican Party, that decades ago they were ousted by the current group of racist reactionaries. So their support for Biden is exactly what it looks like: going with the odds and betting on the guy who is currently favored to win.

Still, you have reasons, and I support many of them. Beyond the wish to end the horrors of Trumpus, a “woke” nation should support Hiden’ Biden in the hopes that a Democratic administration may allow the opening of some democratic space for progressives to influence policy. But watch what he does, not what he says. As Franklin D. Roosevelt said of Nicaragua’s murderous dictator Anastasio Somoza, “He’s an SOB, but he’s our SOB.”

In 2009 I concluded Chapter Eight of my book by assessing the state of America’s leaders in mythological terms. And here we are again, except that the ante has been upped considerably:

…only a mythic perspective can make any sense of this. America’s rulers are not ignorant; they are fully aware of our human and environmental tragedies. The fathers no longer send only the young to be sacrificed; now they offer everything to the sky-gods. Whether or not we take their religious rhetoric literally, they are deliberately (if unconsciously) provoking both personal and global apocalypse.

Recall Pentheus, emerging from his collapsed palace, even more determined to confront (or to merge with) Dionysus. Thebes/America is a city of uninitiated men, fanatically devoted to the systematic destruction of their own children. A boy-king, who secretly longed for the symbolic death that might effect his transition to manhood, was leading this city. The entire world could almost feel it as a desperate, visceral prayer when, in June 2003, Bush, the self-appointed embodiment of American heroism, challenged the Iraqi resistance to “bring it on!”

Apocalypse, however, actually means “to lift the veil.” It is, more than anything, a challenge to wake up. Will enough of us accept it?

After heaven and earth have passed away, my word will remain. What was your word, Jesus? Love? Forgiveness? Affection? All your words were one word: Wakeup.  – Antonio Machado

We cannot let this, we’ve never allowed any crisis from the Civil War straight through to the pandemic of 17, all the way around, 16, we have never, never let our democracy sakes second fiddle, way they, we can both have a democracy and…correct the public health. – Joe Biden, April 2020

In 1966 Joe Biden told his first wife that he aimed to become a senator by the age of 30 and then president. He did become a senator at age 30, 6^th youngest in history. Perhaps he felt charmed – and entitled – by his early successes. He’s been running for president for nearly half his adult life. Yet from early on, he has continually subverted his goals with foolish and entirely preventable errors. He was forced to withdraw from the 1988 (yes, that was 32 years ago) presidential race when reporters accused him of plagiarizing speeches and lying about his background.

Later, he was the definition of clueless (“…two kinds of lies: the ones he tells others to scam them, and those he tells himself.”) In 2006 he bragged about his support among Indian Americans: “I’ve had a great relationship. In Delaware, the largest growth in population is Indian Americans moving from India. You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking.”

In 2007 he undermined his next presidential campaign on the very first day by describing Barack Obama: “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy—I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

He was developing a reputation, and the media took the cues and ran with them. In 2008 the NYT wrote that Biden’s “weak filters make him capable of blurting out pretty much anything.” Later, it was reported that as vice president his remarks caused Obama to complain, “How many times is Biden gonna say something stupid?”, and that campaign staffers referred to his blunders as “Joe bombs.” In 2012 he told a mixed-race audience that Republican proposals to relax Wall Street regulations would “put y’all back in chains.” That same year, Time Magazine wrote, “…Biden’s brain is wired for more than the usual amount of goofiness.”

And, I would add, unnecessary risk. Trumpus’ attempt to link Biden’s son Hunter to corruption in the Ukraine seems to have gone nowhere. But Hunter did serve on the board of Burisma from 2014 to April 2019, receiving compensation of up to $50,000 per month. Hunter is a banker who may or may not know anything about oil drilling, but his father was the American vice president for most of that period. All this, of course, was conventional nepotism and influence peddling. Everyone does it. But from the perspective of someone who was certainly planning to run for president again and couldn’t afford to be perceived as corrupt, this was, at best, asking for trouble.

I only mention Hunter because I’m building a case that Joe regularly sabotages his intentions, and that it seems to be a family pattern (the Trumps aren’t the only ones to pass their pathologies on to their children).

In May 2013, Hunter was sworn in as a direct commission officer in the Navy (we can only wonder why a 42-year-old banker with a prior drug arrest, son and brother to well-known politicians, would want to join up). A month later, he tested positive for cocaine and was subsequently but quietly discharged. Two months later, he joined Burisma.

In recent years Joe Biden can’t seem to keep himself from making egregious bloopers or spontaneous racial insults, or from inappropriately touching females on camera. No wonder his advisers have counseled him to stay out of sight while Trumpus makes his own case daily for not being re-elected. But this strategy has also earned him the nickname “Hiden’ Biden.

As I wrote above, old guys are likely to make verbal gaffes on camera. No big deal. What interests me, however, is the unconscious psychological strategies that their gaffes reveal. What does Joe Biden really want?

To know that, we need to know that some of his gaffes really seem to be Freudian slippage on a monumental scale:

Biden accidentally tells crowd he’s a candidate for United States Senate

Vote for Biden Or Don’t

Biden tells voters ‘don’t vote for me’ if they’re concerned about his age

Biden: If You Don’t Vote for Me, ‘You Ain’t Black’

I saved the worst (and my sarcasm) for last:

Biden Vows He’s ‘Going to Beat Joe Biden’ 

Oh yeah, here’s a guy who’s clear about his intentions. Yes, if he is our only option to get the Trump organized crime family out of the White House, then we support Biden, and may it be so.

However, as I wrote about Trumpus, the same American myth is manifested in our idealizations of Biden. If in your mind he is either a handsome white knight (what a set of teeth on him!) in shining armor riding forth to slay that dragon, or a humble, “average joe” you could see yourself having a beer with, please remember that your Joe Biden is an image created by media specialists to elicit exactly those responses in you. Support the guy, vote for the guy, but check your innocence at the door.

Read Part Six here.

I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters. – Trumpus

This essay is not really about politics, except to the extent that politics reflects mythology. Our first responsibility as mythological thinkers is to cultivate discrimination, to take a step back and attempt to perceive the narratives that are being played out in our culture, how they circulate within our psyches, before we can begin to offer new ones. We must understand how we participate in those stories through our own unconscious acceptance of their primary themes. We must acknowledge how they have constrained our view of the world within narrow parameters of the possible.

And before we can engage effectively in the cutthroat world of politics, we must actively grieve how they have diminished our lives, because our constrained view of the world also means a restricted view of ourselves. It means that at some level we believe that we deserve no more than what these old men have to offer. It means that we have traded a moral, visceral, natural response to the world for a fragile sense of innocence. It means that we give our consent to perpetuating a world in which the father gods offer their children for sacrifice.

Within this world, Biden would be smart to refuse to debate Trumpus. If debates happen, consider that

Idealization says more about our own psychological projections than it does about the candidates. When, after one of these debates, you hear yourself say (about either candidate), “He seems like a nice enough guy; I just don’t agree with his positions,” know that the ritual has been successful. The “nice guy” has proven that he can play the role if called upon; he has passed the audition.

Who are these guys? What really drives them? Please, please don’t tell me that either of them is motivated at any level of consciousness by a sense of duty to the nation, by a desire to serve the people. To do so is to reveal your own insistence on American innocence. It is to reveal your addiction to the culture of celebrity, your willingness to project your own inner nobility onto an image of a person, not the person himself.

We absolutely will never know what either of these men actually thinks, except (see below) when they speak spontaneously. Otherwise, as I wrote above, anything spoken for the public by anyone at that level of power has been composed for them by professional speechwriters, carefully vetted in front of multiple focus groups, and edited precisely to fit the perceived needs of a very specific audience so as to manipulate its views.

That’s our baseline here. But we are also talking about two old men. Not too long ago, we would have called them very old, and today we have legitimate concerns about senility (the word is related to senator), just as we had, or should have had, with Ronald Reagan. Reagan, at least, even in his decline, could still read a script.

For four years liberals have been laughing (perhaps to keep from crying) at Trumpus’ gaffes and verbal mistakes. But for the past year, they’ve been cringing as Biden’s gaffes pile up, Fox News insists on his “cognitive decline,” and even Trumpus challenges Biden to take the cognition test that he himself had “aced.” Only in America. If you really need to be reminded, you can see Biden’s gaffes here, here or here.

Actually, it is the state of public discourse that has entered cognitive decline when the two major parties are each selling their candidate as the one who is less demented than the other guy. But I’m not that concerned; if I or you were on camera as often as they are, someone could easily compile similar (highly edited) comic videos about us. And Biden (sigh) is our guy. What interests me is the unconscious psychological strategies that their gaffes reveal.

Trumpus              

Of course Trumpus is mad as a hatter, as countless psychiatrists argue. He is a malignant narcissist (see here and here and here); a sociopath; a psychopath who is a son of a sociopath and/or a sexual sadist who is utterly incapable of human concern and empathy.

So what?

After four, or six, or thirty years of watching this guy on TV, do these diagnoses still surprise you? Do you still react to his latest threat, lie, brag, insult or cruel decision by posting it to Facebook and sharing it – your surprise – with your friends. Well, of course we all do this; but consider that the subject of the sentence, “I can’t believe he said this new thing!” is myself and my own wounded innocence. The shock below the shock is really that Trumpus = Trump / us.

Of course, writes Alex Morris, merely having a mental illness wouldn’t necessarily disqualify Trumpus for the presidency. It doesn’t even make him that unusual:

A 2006 study published in the Journal of Nervous & Mental Disease found that 18 of the first 37 presidents met criteria for having a psychiatric disorder, from depression (24 percent) and anxiety (eight percent) to alcoholism (eight percent) and bipolar disorder (eight percent). Ten of them exhibited symptoms while in office, and one of those 10 was arguably our best president, Abraham Lincoln, who suffered from deep depression…

But despite our wounded innocence, we know that we are dealing with a special case. We know that he schemes constantly to feed his narcissism. We know that he gets deep pleasure by deliberately manipulating, insulting, cheating and stealing from and even hurting anyone and everyone he can get into his clutches. And we know that he’s been doing these things his entire life. And the lies: The WAPO claims that he made 19,127 false or misleading claims in 1,226 days. Clearly, he gets pleasure not from money but from what the money represents – cheating, conning, frightening and manipulating people. Psychologist John Gartner writes:

He enjoys ripping people off and humiliating people. He does this manically and gleefully… Trump is also a sexual sadist, who on some basic level enjoys and is aroused by watching people be afraid of him. In his mind, Trump is creating chaos and instability so that he can feel powerful…Professor of psychiatry and psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg called that phenomenon “omnipotent destructiveness.”…Trump is a master at getting negative attention, and the more people he can shock and upset, the better.

Psychoanalyzing public figures usually tells us more about ourselves than it does about them, but this time we need to go there. We may lie for perverse pleasure – or for some deeper reason. Psychoanalyst Lance Dodes suggests that Trumpus tells “two kinds of lies: the ones he tells others to scam them, and those he tells himself.”

That’s an interesting statement that may carry us to Trumpus’ core, and possibly to the core of American myth. I think this is critical: many insiders have leaked accounts of how he gets bored and constantly seeks to increase the level of risk. With each new tweet, press conference, dismissing of a regulatory bureaucrat, betrayal of a supporter or revelation of the latest scandal, he seems to be constantly upping the ante to see how much he can get away with, before – what? I won’t begin a list because it would take too long, and we’ve all been watching this, daily, for years now. We turn to our spouse and say: I can’t believe it! Just when we think we’ve seen it all, when he couldn’t possibly do or say anything worse – there he goes again.

I propose two bookmarks that define his MOA. The first is the infamous boast at the beginning of his campaign on January 23^rd, 2016:

They say I have the most loyal people — did you ever see that? Where I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.

He got away with that because, as Selena Zito wrote, “The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”

The second occurred 3½ years later. On July 24^th, 2019 Robert Mueller told Congress that the Justice Department has long argued that a sitting president can’t be indicted, and therefore he was declining to indict Trumpus for either obstruction of justice or campaign finance violations. James Risen writes:

…Most people who survive that kind of legal threat would lie low, at least for a while, and try to get back to some level of normalcy. But Trump is a habitual criminal, and his reaction to escaping Mueller’s investigation was to go on yet another crime spree…

From that frying pan, Trumpus leaped into the fire, calling the president of Ukraine, asking him to work with Rudy Giuliani and William Barr to help them manufacture lies about Joe Biden and his son Hunter (more on Hunter later), and clearly offering financial incentives. When the news came out, Adam Schiff, a broken clock who is right twice a day, tweeted, “The transcript of the call reads like a classic mob shakedown.”

No surprises here. The only reason I mention this particular outrage is that it occurred the very next day after Mueller’s testimony.

Trumpus knew perfectly well that intelligence spooks listen in to all his calls. I suggest that – at some level – he knew that this conversation would soon be made public, he was quite deliberately pushing the envelope of provocation and self-incrimination. I imagine his internal logic like this: Well, they refused to catch me last time; maybe this will get their attention. He was – and is – asking to get caught, and he still has the re-election campaign (Goddess protect us) to up the ante further.

What is he really doing? Yes, he’s America’s premier con man.  But look inside every huckster or shyster and you’ll find a low-level trickster, a rebellious adolescent provoking his parents, older brother or teachers by repeatedly transgressing some rule or agreement of social decorum, just, so he thinks, to get a rise out of them.

Or consider a slightly older male “leaving rubber” in his flashy, red sports car, daring the cops. You know the color – I call it “bust me red.” Isn’t he hoping to get caught and have clear limits set on his behavior? Here are some more troubling examples, two from life, one from art and one from mythology:

In 1946 at the scene of one of his crimes, the serial killer William Heirens scrawled these words on a mirror: For heaven’s sake catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself. 

In 1993 a young girl named Polly Klaas was kidnapped and murdered in a case that would lead to California’s “Three Strikes” law. The culprit was a multiple offender named Richard Allen Davis. I mention him because a study of his life reveals a pattern. Each time he was released from prison he quickly went on to commit worse behavior, until he enacted the ultimate crime of child murder. It was almost as if each of his actions had been a cry for attention: For heaven’s sake catch me. Until you pay attention, I will continue to up the ante.

 Francisco Goya’s great painting Saturn Devouring his Son depicts the primordial murder of the children which I have argued is the mythic narrative at the core of western civilization (for background, I write about it here). Jay Scott Morgan describes it:

The image is ineffaceable: the cannibal god on bended knees, engulfed in darkness; the mad haunted eyes and black-blooded mouth; the rending fingers, threaded with blood, and the ravaged figure in their grasp…Cover the right side of the face, and we see a Titan caught in the act, defying anyone to stop him, the bulging left eye staring wildly at some unseen witness to his savagery, his piratical coarseness heightened by the sharp vertical lines of the eyebrow, crossed like the stitches of a scar. Cover his left eye, and we are confronted by a being in pain, the dark pupil gazing down in horror at his own uncontrolled murderousness, the eyebrow curved upwards like an inverted question mark, as if he were asking, “Why am I compelled to do this?”

Who is this Saturn (Chronos, in Greek myth) addressing? Why us, of course. Why won’t we intervene? Why do we collude and normalize the crime? / Morgan continues:

…the painting still evokes in me an interior terror, a sense of isolation, loneliness, grief–this god on his knees, tearing apart his own child, enshrouded in a blackness that is like a psychic tar, clinging to me, clinging me to him, to a drama of primal murderousness, so that now I seem to be participant as well as viewer. I look upon him, and I am implicated in the crime.

A final example comes from Euripides’ play The Bacchae. The boy-king Pentheus reveals (to us, not to himself) his unconscious motivation when he orders his henchmen to find Dionysus and arrest him:

Go, someone, this instant,
to the place where this prophet prophesies.

Pry it up with crowbars, heave it over, upside down;

demolish everything you see…

That will provoke him more than anything.

As I write in Chapter Five of my book,

“Provoke” (from vocare, to call) is marvelously appropriate. At some level Pentheus can choose. He can invoke or evoke his own Dionysian nature, or he can innocently project it outwards, provoking its expression somewhere else.

Yes, on one level Trumpus certainly gets temporary satisfaction from cheating, stealing, hurting and antagonizing his social and intellectual betters. It’s temporary because, like all addictive strategies, it gives no nourishment for the soul and must be repeated continuously. I have no doubt that consciously he says and does these things for these amoral reasons.

But on another level (a moral level), with all the upping of the ante, isn’t he actually proclaiming, I can’t stand myself! Someone please catch me, stop me, punish me before I do something really awful! I don’t want to do this any longer! Get me out of here!

Perhaps, as Alex Henderson remarks of Trumpus’ deluge of ‘incredibly self-damaging actions’ “People are starting to question if he’s ‘actively trying to win anymore.”

Is it possible that – for his entire life – he’s just been asking for help? Conventional psychology might see his behavior patterns as indicating self-hatred. But, as depth psychologist Robert Moore argued, if we look closely at grandiosity, we often discover that just below it lies depression, and that the path toward healing involves puncturing the grandiosity so as to allow the deeper wounds to emerge into the light and be cleansed. From this perspective, everything he does is actually part of an unconscious teleological drive toward self-knowledge. Like Pentheus, he is asking, with increasing desperation (in ritual terms) for initiation. In that sense, he really does speak for all of us.

Read Part Five here.

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes. Everybody knows.  – Leonard Cohen

We can disagree in the margins, but the truth of the matter is it’s all within our wheelhouse and nobody has to be punished. No one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change. – Joe Biden

The Democratic Primaries

This is not going to be pretty. The election is more than a case of politics making strange bedfellows; it’s two branches of the ruling class in a food-fight. It’s Republican shills for the mega-rich driving white rage down the same old roads of fear and white supremacism they’ve been riding since the 1670s. And it’s octogenarian Democrat dinosaurs using the Russiagate narrative – and now the “Bountygate” narrative – to distract you from the fact that their corporate, neoliberal policies serve the same financial interests as do those of the Republicans.

And the same militarism. Even as I write this, both the full Senate (including 16 Democrats)  and the House Armed Services Committee (with a Democratic majority) have just voted to make it much more difficult to withdraw U.S. troops from the “forever war” in Afghanistan.

Yes, yes, support Biden, for all the appropriate reasons. This time the lesser of two evils is less evil enough for it to matter. But don’t be naïve, and don’t kid yourself about the inappropriate reasons. Biden’s campaign has stressed a fantasy of a “return to normalcy” after an “abnormal” president. However, as Caitlin Johnstone writes, this is a silly idea for two reasons:

Firstly, wanting America to go back to how it was before Trump is wanting the conditions which gave rise to Trump…the same status quo austerity, exploitation, oppression and warmongering …Secondly, this fabled “return to normality” that Biden is supposedly offering is literally impossible, since normality never actually left. Normality never left, because Donald Trump is a very normal US president.

…the media just yell about this president a lot more than usual because he puts an ugly face on the horrific normal that was already there. Sure he makes rude tweets and says dumb things and has made a mess of the pandemic response, but by and large when you strip away the narrative overlay Trump has been a reliable establishment lapdog advancing more or less all the same status quo imperialist and oligarchic agendas as the presidents who came before him. There are just a lot of establishment loyalists with a vested interest in spinning the ugliness his oafishness is exposing as caused by and unique to him.

Again: as mythologists, our first responsibility is to strip away the narratives that keep us from acknowledging reality. The only meaningful way to oppose Trumpus is from the position of a new story that reveals how the myth of innocence – even, perhaps especially in its liberal varieties – has led us all up Shit Creek.

It means giving the one hundred million adult Americans who don’t vote something to get excited about, as Bernie Sanders would have done, rather than fighting over the scraps of the tiny numbers of undecided “swing” voters. We can’t ignore the fact that instead of articulating a progressive (and extremely popular) critique of the military machine, almost all the leading Democrats continue to attack Trumpus’ foreign policies, but from the right.

To get past our denial and really understand what the DNC does, we have to take an unblinkered view of the cesspool known as the Democratic primaries. It will be enlightening if not encouraging. Mysteries abound. In the best conventional analysis I’ve seen so far, Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic (I’m quoting him because he’s a legitimate leftist) lists some of them:

Sanders’s leftward stances on issues like immigration supposedly lost him rural counties, but he had the best standing with rural voters, out of all Democrats. He supposedly alienated rank-and-file Democrats with his rhetoric, yet held sky-high favorability ratings among them throughout 2020…(he) won nearly every demographic in Nevada, even moderates and conservatives, and led nationally among black voters on the eve of South Carolina…He annihilated his rivals in donor numbers from Obama-to-Trump counties, had historic electoral strength in such areas, and had the largest lead among independents in head-to-head polling with Trump among all his rivals.

In searching for answers for Biden’s triumph, Marcetic does acknowledge the role of the media:

…these themes were relentlessly advanced by the network(s): beating Trump was all that mattered, Biden was the safest bet to do so, and running Sanders — when the network deigned to mention him at all — would be a risk…these developments prompted a barrage of attacks and apocalyptic warnings from Democratic officials and pundits about Sanders’s threat to Democrats’ chances in November. A group of party centrists spent millions blanketing South Carolina with ads making these charges. Party leaders and rival candidates openly vowed to deprive him of the nomination if he won the most votes…CNN covered Sanders three times as negatively after his blowout Nevada win as they did Biden after his romp through South Carolina, assailing Sanders’s electability above all…

We should also note Elizabeth Warren’s egregious, opportunistic, unforgivable betrayal of Sanders.

But ultimately, Marcetic falls back on the conventional – that is naively innocent – perspective: “…voters saw Biden as the candidate by far most likely to win against Trump.” He simply refuses to consider the observable facts on the ground, and in doing so he reveals his trust in the system. Worse, the implication is that he (like all the mainstream media he would criticize) wants you to trust it.

Here is the fundamental reality of politics in America: both Republicans and Democrats tamper with election results whenever they can get away with it, but they do so at differing points in the election cycle. That this happens this way is no mystery. Why it happens is the mystery.

Greg Palast, Harvey Wasserman  and others have demonstrated that in the 2016 primaries the DNC was able to manipulate the vote, in every case to the detriment of the Sanders campaign. In State after state, claims Jonathan Simon, author of Code Red: Computerized Election Theft and the New American Century, “The vote counts were more in favor of Clinton than the exit polls, which were more in favor of Bernie Sanders. We saw a very consistent pattern of that.”

In liberal Massachusetts, Sanders beat Clinton in all the precincts with hand-counted paper ballots but lost every single precinct that used electronic voting machines.

Palast tells us that exit polls are the State Department’s own “gold standard” used to measure the honesty of – and in several cases – decertify elections in other countries such as Nicaragua and Uganda. Our own Agency for International Development (a well-known front for the CIA) has stated:

Detecting fraud: Exit polls provide data that is generally indicative of how people voted. A discrepancy between the aggregated choices reported by voters and the official results may suggest, but not prove, that results have been tampered with.

The discrepancies between the exit polls’ projections of each candidate’s vote share and the vote shares derived from unobservable computer counts have a considerable impact on the apportionment of delegates to each candidate, which is, after all, the main reason for these state primaries. Palast continues:

Exit polling is, historically, deadly accurate. The bane of pre-election polling is that pollsters must adjust for the likelihood of a person voting. Exit polls solve the problem…In 2000, exit polls gave Al Gore the win in Florida; in 2004, exit polls gave Kerry the win in Ohio…So how could these multi-million-dollar Ph.d-directed statisticians with decades of experience get exit polls so wrong? Answer: they didn’t. The polls in Florida in 2000 were accurate. That’s because exit pollsters can only ask, “How did you vote?” What they don’t ask, and can’t, is, “Was your vote counted?”

So why don’t we hear more about this? Mainstream media outlets contract with a company called Edison Research to conduct exit polling. Joe Lenski, its executive vice president, has candidly admitted that Edison massages its exit poll data once official vote counts have been released to align the exit poll numbers with the electronic vote totals. Indeed, the whole argument about vote flipping is possible only because researchers have been able to post those exit polls before Edison can change them.

This may be old news from February 2017, but it bears mentioning: Tom Perez, soon to be named Chair of the DNC, bragged that they had rigged the primaries in favor of Clinton. His remark appeared online before he could retract it.

What does this mendacity accomplish? As I predicted in my analysis of the 2016 election, the Clinton forces ensured her nomination by sweeping the primaries in the Southern states. This effectively eliminated Sanders, but these were all states that were certain to go to Trumpus in the general election, and the DNC was perfectly aware of this.

So, that was 2016. What about the 2020 Democratic primaries (compiled by TDMS Research) Surely, the power brokers have learned that they can’t afford to alienate the young, the black, the brown and the progressive – in other words, the base of the party. Right? Hold your nose.

New Hampshire (2/17):

The New Hampshire Democratic Party Primary computerized vote count results differ significantly from the results projected by the exit poll conducted by Edison Research and published by CNN at poll’s closing. The disparities exceed the exit poll’s margin of error.Buttigieg’s vote count exhibited the largest disparity from his exit poll projection. His unverified computer-generated vote totals represented a 12% increase of his projected exit poll share.

South Carolina (2/29): This was the state where Biden began his (alleged) big comeback, where the media unanimously trumpeted the narrative of his “electability.”

Election results from the computerized vote counts differed significantly from the results projected by the exit poll. The disparities exceed the exit poll’s margin of error. Biden’s vote count exhibited the largest disparity from his exit poll projection. His unverified computer-generated vote totals represented an 8.3% increase of his projected exit poll share. Given the 528,776 voters in this election, he gained approximately 19,700 more votes than projected by the exit poll.

Massachusetts (3/3):

As in the 2016 Massachusetts primary between candidates Sanders and Clinton, disparities greatly exceed the exit poll’s margin of error. Sanders won Massachusetts in the exit poll and lost it in the computer count. The discrepancies between the exit poll and the vote count for Sanders and Biden totaled 8.4%— double the 4.0% margin of error…Warren’s and Biden’s discrepancies also totaled 8.4%, again double the margin of error. Noteworthy is the fact that the 2016 Massachusetts Republican Party exit poll taken at the same time and at the same precincts as the Democratic Party primary, and also with a crowded field of five candidates, was matched almost perfectly by the computer count—varying by less than one percent for each candidate.

Vermont (3/3):

In Sanders’ home state, the combined disparities between the exit poll and the vote count for candidates Sanders and Biden at 10.8% exhibited the largest disparity of the 14 primary states that voted to date…Biden with an exit poll share of 17% and in danger of receiving 0 delegates (if his vote count fell below 15%) outperformed his exit poll share by 4.5% in the vote counts—a 26.1% increase of his exit poll share.

Texas (3/7):

Sanders was tied with Biden in the exit polls but lost in the unobservable computer counts by 4.5%. 

California (3/9):

According to the exit poll Sanders won by 15%. Computer counts cut his lead by half (once again more than double the margin of error). To date, California computers totaled 250,600 fewer votes for Sanders and Warren than projected by the exit polls and 236,700 more votes for Biden and Bloomberg. The current (3/9/2020) apportionment of California delegates  stands at 185 for Sanders and 143 for Biden. The estimate derived from the exit polls calculates to 207 delegates for Sanders and 122 for Biden.

In Texas, computer counts resulted in 90 delegates for Sanders and 102 for Biden. Substituting California and Texas exit polls’ estimated delegate count for the computer derived counts results in Sanders leading the current delegate count by 543 to 501 for Biden.

Michigan (3/14):

The large discrepancies greatly exceeded the margin of error …Sanders underperformed his exit poll projected proportions by 15.4% (and) received 105,000 less votes than projected while others (mainly Biden and Bloomberg) received 111,000 more than projected by the exit poll. Of concern is Michigan’s destruction of the ballot images, that could have been used to greatly facilitate a recount, that were created by their scanners for their counts. This destruction appears to violate both federal and state laws.

Missouri (3/25):

As in 11 of the 17 state primaries elections prior to March 17, the discrepancies between exit polls projections and the results of the unobservable computer vote counts in Missouri is large and beyond the margin of error associated with the exit poll…all but one of these large discrepancies favors Biden and disfavors Sanders.

Here are some other commentaries on the primaries:

We Believe This “Dark Money” Group Illegally Spent Nearly $5 Million to Destroy Sanders 2020 Campaign 

Is The Election Being Rigged Against Bernie Sanders? Why Are The Exit Polls So Far Off?

Bernie Is Being Cheated Again. Will He Fight? 

Is the DNC cheating? Again? 

Elite Media Dismiss Voter Suppression on Grounds That It’s “Complicated”

So let’s not kid ourselves. Part of waking up from the myth of American innocence is realizing that politics is not and never has been about morality; it’s about power, how to wield it, but primarily about how to get some of it. It’s the real world. Once we understand that, we can theoretically accept the premises of the centrist-liberal willingness to achieve small bits of incremental progress through compromise and limited demands. That describes the eight years of the Obama administration, which gave the bankers, the generals and the Israelis absolutely everything they wanted in exchange for some limited progress in health care.

This helps us understand another premise of the centrist-liberals: the marginalizing of dissident voices such as Bernie Sanders. From the perspective of the center (and coincidentally those already in power), it’s necessary to create false equivalencies between “populists” of both left and right.

The real threat of course is from the left. So in this world of real politics, Democratic centrists can and must do everything possible to eliminate any threat from the left so as to avoid scaring off “middle of the road” voters. If you prefer to imagine the DNC’s and Joe Biden’s motives as essentially moral and idealistic, here is a logical road to back up that kind of thinking. You have to play hardball to get anything worthwhile done, they would shrug and say. And it might even help you justify their manipulation of the primary votes.

The demonstrable fact, by the way, that this strategy has almost never worked seems to be irrelevant to those who consume this version of the myth. But you may ask, “What about Bill Clinton? Didn’t he do exactly that in 1992?” Well, quite apart from what he actually did in office (bombing Serbia and Iraq; eviscerating welfare), if Ross Perot had not siphoned off 19% of the vote, it’s possible that George H.W. Bush would have been re-elected.

The only context in which the DNC’s obsession with middle-of-the-road voters makes any practical sense is the above-mentioned Republican control of the voting process in half the states. If we assume – and we should – that they will continue the swindle in those states, then Democratic focus on the swing states matters.

But it makes no sense at all when we return to these facts: the U.S. has the lowest voter turnout in the industrialized world; half of eligible voters simply don’t bother; the vast majority of them are poor and have no health insurance (or jobs); and they won’t vote this time, even to get rid of Trumpus, unless the Democrats give them reasons to. Ultimately, we have to acknowledge that not giving a hundred million people reason to think that their votes might matter represents a profound contempt for democracy.

There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos. – Jim Hightower

Read Part Four here.