I wanted to address the idea of Trump's alternate reality, and one commenter's objections to naming it a reality at all, but this got long-winded, so I am putting out out here in the main thread where perhaps it will see more light for a moment or two than it would as a response to a single comment.
I wanted to address the idea of Trump's alternate reality, and one commenter's objections to naming it a reality at all, but this got long-winded, so I am putting out out here in the main thread where perhaps it will see more light for a moment or two than it would as a response to a single comment.
I can only offer my own view on what merits the name, obviously, but I do not think it is a complete stretch to call Trump's constructed cognitive universe an alternate reality. If the narratives he were pushing had all originated with him, were completely aberrant and inexplicible in their appeal, I would be more inclined simply to call them fictions and let it go at that, but much of what he says only amplifies what an extremely vocal minority of US citizens actually do believe is true. And dismissing their realities as fictions would be a dangerous understatement.
I grew up in the Deep South and deep within Christian Fundamentalism, where much the world of today's evangelical movement was itself constructed, and the standards of testing of reality are entirely different for those who are enthralled by their leaders to have faith in a version of the Gospels that extols individual righteousness as a matter of conviction, of what feels right, or, as my mother would put it, they "just know"--despite any and all empirical evidence to the contrary.
I could go into the abusive methods of mind control used in fundamentalisms of all sorts: they are as cult-like as those we often regard as so beyond the pall of consensual reality that they have no legitimacy at all. The main difference in fundamentalist Christianity is that it is a splinter group of one of the largest religions in the world today, and as such evangelicals can draw on a history that we actually do share with them if we were brought up in the US or another European-descended culture.
But I want to emphasize here that this alternative reality is as real to those inside of it as our reality is to us. To not understand that is to not understand what we are up against. Trump's fantasies are not just Trump's fantasies: they belong to white supremacy, to authoritarianism, to a narcissism that is not the isolated symptom of one person who might be labeled mentally ill. There is, inside of our very own culture, a tendency to buy into exactly the things he has bought into. Why is that?
There is no single answer to that question, and I have certainly not even begun to uncover them all, but it concerns at least the origins of the authoritarian sensibilities of the far right. It also concerns the question of what narcissism is and where it begins: myself, I would start with familial/cultural cycles of deep narcissistic injury that are remnants of Calvinistic, Puritan, and, I think to some degree, old English and Germanic approaches to child-rearing (see Alice Miller's "Drama of the Gifted Child" for a very interesting, if underappreciated, exposition of a kind of emotional stoicism and repression that has roots in certain European beliefs about "discipline").
And that is just where I would begin to think about this. As much as I agree with Heather that we have a chance to rewrite a number of endings to the repeated uprisings of fascism, of authoritarianism, of exclusion and brutality in the cultures that we share--and that we must seize this moment to do so, I am not optimistic that we will succeed at all quickly. We may not succeed at all.
At the very least, we--and as usual I am mainly addressing those of us who are relatively privileged in the US: white (that would be me), of middle-class origins (if not still particularly financially well-off, maybe once upon a time, or perhaps our parents were able to wrest off a piece of the American Dream while it was still available to certain white families even if we have not been able to keep ahold of it), mostly well-educated (also me), able-bodied (not anymore, no), and probably overwhelmingly cisgendered and heterosexual (never was, no chance of it happening!), and even at least nominally Christian (also not me for years)--we have to look at the degree of our own complicity in the multiple alternative realities that have been circulating amongst us for so long that many of them are simply thought of as The Way Things Are.
Can we question our own assumptions? Have we? Are we willing to listen to BIPOC, to disabled people, to queer and trans people? If we don't, we won't be able to shake off the centuries-old heirarchical ways of thinking that are often considered to be "common sense".
Common to whom? Is it possible that some of our realities are also fictions? And if so--or even if not--can fiction be dismissed, or is it too powerful as a world-building tool for us to, well, write it off? Or cross it out, or try to erase it?
I don't wish to rain on whatever parades we might be able to pull together right now. As a collection of many communities and as the nation we apparently constitute, we certainly need something positive to build towards. But I do think it necessary to understand that we did not end up with Trump by accident.
We who call ourselves The Left are extremely diverse. Finding commonality among ourselves can be a tall order. But there are many, many, many, many people right here living among us who have had no alternative but to analyze the workings of what is called Western culture because they have been under its collective thumb for hundreds of years. And the far right is frightened to death that they/we will have their/our voices heard. But I really do think that listening may well be our only chance for pulling this off.
Erik, you've said so much profound truth here. The issues are not new ones and they did not spring up from the head of the Cheeto. He recognized a population that feels aggrieved and resentful, has values that place them outside the arc of history, and is searching for the Big Daddy who will take care of them to the exclusion of all others. Then he cynically molded a simplistic message to fit their profile and launched. These folks have always been there and, alas, will always feel aggrieved because their pastors and patriarchs have taught them that life is a zero-sum game: if someone else gains an advantage then they have lost. Re-educating people not to adhere to that idea is an almost impossible task, because the leaders who promote it enrich themselves by continuing to yell that message from their pulpits, soapboxes, AM radio stations, and cable channels.
I am from New York, from an entirely different background than you and I grew up with The Donald's presence in my media life (and sometimes imposed on my real life as when I had to watch beautiful old buildings destroyed and his monstrosities erected). Back in the 80s and 90s he was a Democrat, a Clinton supporter, pro-choice, and a so-called liberal because he had to work with the city government in order to get his buildings built and tenants in his apartments. He was just as cynical and inauthentic in his supposed liberalism then as he is in his neofascism now.
I’m from NY and thank you for expressing my understanding of the person behind POTUS and why I wept in disbelief when he was elected. My horror at his behavior has only increased over the past 4 years. What to do about a country where nearly half the voters support him is beyond me. I also propose that saying Republicans in GA are being encouraged to not vote feels like a plot to keep us from donating and volunteering to get every last Democrat registered and voting. ❤️🤍💙
Linda you wrote, "He recognized a population that feels aggrieved and resentful, has VALUES THAT PLACE THEM OUTSIDE THE ARC OF HISTORY, and is searching for the Big Daddy who will take care of them to the exclusion of all others."
Unfortunately, the folks that Trump attracts are not outside of the arc of history. One only need look at the (anti-Jewish) Pogroms dating from the 1st century CE; the constant turmoil between various factions of Christians who murdered one another; Christians against Muslims and vice versa; whites against Black, Brown, Red, Yellow peoples and vice versa; Stalin, Hitler, Franco, Mussolini, the Rwanda Genocide, The Delhi 2020 uprising; witch burnings; our own Civil War; violence against Native Americans; violence against workers/miners; police brutality against Blacks; The list is endless and began the day more than one human being inhabited this planet. The actions against the other are predicated on two things: FEAR OF THE OTHER and a perceived SUPREMACY OVER THE OTHER.
Throughout history charismatic leaders have been able to exploit those two elements and use them to attract people to their cause. People on both sides of a conflict consider themselves to be righteous. Leaders harness the fear and perceived supremacy of their followers who then amplify it. As technology develops and is used more widely amplification becomes easier. It's called persuasion. Those who are most successful rise to the top because they have been able to harness the so called "will of the people" best.
As you note, Trump and other authoritarian leaders prey on those who are disgruntled. Follow me, they say, we'll put "them" in their place and show them who's boss. They point the finger of blame at those who appear to be in a better place and accuse the "successful" folks of stealing from the less successful. There are also the very successful who are afraid they are going to have their wealth and security snatched away from them so it can be distributed to the under dogs.
Conversely, leaders who believe in a more democratic, community focused form of governance encourage their base to consider the needs of others. And those who prefer a more democratic form of government believe their way is better because balance and sharing the bounty is far more harmonious and leads to mutual respect and understanding amongst all participants, at least theoretically.
One of the things we must recognize is the fact that we have a history that has been, until recently, gravely misrepresented. We see it every time HCR presents a view of an historical event and we say, "I never knew that!" or "That's not what I was taught!" There are many in our country who want to keep all that dirt hidden under the carpet because it doesn't reflect well on our mythology and telling the truth will help shift the balance of power.
That's where we are now, Trump is harking back to a mythological era that has become lodged in the American Psyche as "The Good Old Days". Good for whom? Trump is banging hard on the drum of unfairness and hardcore resentment for those who voted against him. His people are in lock step and will stop at nothing, including violent retribution. And they are very much within the arc of history.
br, don't underrate your 'smarts' on the basis of the ability of many on this forum, not only to articulate complexity, but also to bring their erudition to help educate those of us who are less competent linguistically. Much as I enjoy those whose abilities are superior to my own, it's also a relief to engage with others on the sidelines with me!
Daria, I don't disagree with you on any of this except for the word "arc." :-) What I mean by the arc of history is that this country--its younger populations in particular--is becoming more open to ways of being in the world (LGBTQ, single-parent families, blended families, multi-ethnic and multi-racial families, a more secularist world-view for instance) that the typical Trump voter finds abhorrent because they reject the idea that the white supremacist view of the past is false. This I see as a positive development but one that is resented and feared by those whose whiteness defines their privilege. Believe me: as a medieval historian I have spent my career teaching about and engaging in reassessing the views, activities, and oppressions perpetrated under the guise of religion, "tradition," and patriarchy. The ways in which we teach medieval history now are quite different than they were when I was a student but this more open-ended and questioning way of approaching the past has been attacked by the current administration as "hateful" and "un-American" because it questions the actions of people in the past who promoted and enacted a white-privilege, supremacist worldview.
Ah, Linda, I misinterpreted your use if the word arc. Apologies for that. Yes, there is openness in the young to embrace differences and change. I sincerely hope, going forward, their energy and acceptance becomes contagious.
Thank you so much for responding to my comment and providing additional context. I respect your opinion and feedback.
Oh, yes. A friend of my father was one of the many, many subcontractors Donald refused to pay. When offered a chance to sub again, he refused. Yet that very man's son became a Trump supporter.
Well put eric. Trump is the nasty symptom, of DEEP disease ( like centuries old disease). There is ALOT of reconciliation we have to do as a nation.
I like Heather's suggestion to focus on reinstating the fairness doctrine as a crucial piece of government regulation as a priority. MAYBE this would allow more people to detect truth from fiction. As I see it, we have millions and millions of voters who have been brainwashed. Can a brainwashed person be rational? We're gonna find out.
I’ve been reading up on the fairness doctrine and why it was created and why and how it was taken down. There are reasons it was good and there are reasons it won’t work anymore without changes. I would like HRC to expand on the pros and cons
Absolutely agree. Russian obfuscation on social platforms in 2016 duped enough voters to create the disaster we've all seen. Now the regulation of "parler"(?) et al, seems even more daunting than trying to reign in talk radio fanatics.
South Africa managed a reconciliation process between the colonizers and the colonized, but I honestly don’t see anything on the horizon like that here, or at least not at a national level. I’m not a student of S African history at all, but at the very least we have multiple reconciliations to consider and we are spread out across a much larger area, with the attendant regional subcultures that make united actions quite difficult.
That said, there are enough energetic pockets of Native Americans resistance here I the Western US to begin to consider them a cohesive movement; Standing Rock has been something of a watershed moment for many Native activists out here. And of course black resistance movements have been around for a good long time.
One question for me is whether even the white *liberal* mainstream is ready and willing to do the work of truly relearning history and searching out non-white voices so that we can understand what these populations have been through, how they currently see their own quite diverse histories, and begin to realize that they are the experts on their experiences. Most of us white folks know quite next to nothing about the people we demanded the most sacrifices from while consolidating our hold on wealth and power on this continent.
For white folks who are seriously interested in and willing to expand their knowledge of their own complicity, might I suggest Layla F. Saad's Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor. I'm working my way through the month of daily writing prompts now and am learning much. This is only one of the many titles available to white folx who want to progress.
I've read Robin DeAngelo's book, but haven't encountered Kendi's book yet. Another excellent title is So You Want to Talk About Race by Iljeoma Oluo. I listened to the audiobook narrated by Bahni Turpin while working on my house this summer.
I must take a look at that. Wasn’t the head of state there just recently—like sometime in the last decade—a rightward leaning nationalist? Cause for hope, perhaps. New Zealand’s leader I know is awesome. But I haven’t been paying as much attention to their neighbors.
You should look into the Waitanga Process in NZ and the Makarrata Process in Aus. The latest developments in Aus. Are at a State rather than National level. The current Federal PM is effectively on the right and perhaps a little too far but it doesn't necessarily stop national reconciliation.
I disagree. I've seen miraculous recoveries from deep diseases in my own patients. Of course, I've seen lots of deaths too. But, like HCR, I gave been called a pollyanna! The fight continues.
I could have written this, Eric! Thank you. I relate to a lot of what you said and you have provided a lot of food for thought. I have been saying for some time that rather than lobbing brick-bats at those we disagree with or consider "mental midgets", it might behoove us, no matter how distasteful it may seem, to try and understand what comprises some of these "alternative realities". The more we can understand those we disagree with the more we can engage them. Yes, with some that is simply impossible, and it can be hugely infuriating and frustrating. BUT, we need to try and tone down the screaming and yelling, the hysteria, the name-calling, the rhetoric, and try and figure this phenomenon out. It's like we're ALL trying to see the "big picture" that explains everything, but that "picture" may be bigger than we think. I offer up, provided one can get past the pay wall, an interesting article from NYT's writer Will Wilkinson on why so many people still voted for Trump. I do think there are many many answers to this, but he does name quite a few of them:
I can quote one of the comments from a Black reader, "Karen", I found particularly apt:
"I am black, but grew up in a white working class town before earning degrees from Stanford and Berkeley. The times writers cannot seem to understand that when people are shamed for who they are, they get angry and shut down. Trump, for all his flaws, allowed less educated whites to feel a sense of dignity and self worth - that being white does not mean needing to be constantly ashamed of who I am, and it is ok to be proud of being American. I am not excusing the 'sins' of racism nor the mind boggling disregard for science (I m a biology and chemistry teacher), but people need to feel good about themselves - reptile brain, and if liberals want this demographic to change, they have to view them with compassion instead of contempt. At 8 years old my family moved from an all black neighborhood in Philly to an all white one in a factory town in CT. And though there was one open racist in the neighborhood, everyone else treated me with kindness and respect. I swam in my friends pools, went to their parties, etc and this was mid 70s. Whites need to continue to examine and 'own' white privilege. It is there & I have the psychological scars as proof. But shaming never works. These are people who are terrified at how their worlds are changing, and yes, the world needs to change but it might work better to treat them with compassion, they did not create white privilege, they inherited it and they are bewildered. Change can happen. But it requires patience, kindness and time."
This forum today shows many good reasons as to why I find it so stimulating!
Thank you, Erik. I did not grow up in the Deep South but I did live there for 20 years. I know what you say to be true based on my experiences there. Years before that I spent time as a member of a fundamentalist evangelical church, and I know what you say is true because of my experiences there, as well. Like you, I have left both behind me. I agree that we did not end up where we are by accident and that the future is not assured. So, thank you for so eloquently voicing these thoughts and for encouraging us all to listen to others and to find commonality that may hopefully bind us together enough so that we can move forward towards a better future for all.
Hello Erik - Thank you for your careful labors. We do need to find ways of being 'gentle caring radicals' that do the hard work of working out our joint future with our historically incompatible cultures.
I am repeating a post I wrote up here because I join in a parallel way to your articulations. Thank you for the opportunity.
Hello Professor Richardson & Readers of "Letter from an American" -
Like Erik JM Schneider's post, I too want to contest the characterizations of "the alternative reality" and the persistent "fictional worlds" of Trump voters and the Republican voter community. While Erik JM Schneider lays out the hard and steep road ahead of us liberals to actualize a pluralist, inclusive and bodily inter-subjective culture and politics of self-governance in our diverse society, I want to contest the characterizations of 'the other' we are using to make sense of the persistent differences that make us liberals feel like hostages in our own country whose constitution feels like 'our document'.
I want to contest the characterization in this quote Prof. Richardson used in her post last night:
Burns goes on to say: “Ultimately, politicization and misinformation around COVID are having tragic real-world consequences.”
The communicative actions of Trump, Trump's operatives and campaign folks, and of Republican electioneering are often called 'politicization and misinformation' but as Erik JM Schneider lays out that these communicative actions play out widely held beliefs and values of the historical southern culture which fought back hard after the overwhelming military and legislative defeats of the Civil War. The North's military and legislative defeats over the South were not cultural defeats. The success of the Union over the Confederacy failed at institutionalizing cultural change. And the cultural institutions of the antebellum south are several millennia old! We do not have a real world self-evidently available to liberals and a false world persistently imposed on us by resistant republican voters; we have two cultural ecologies, one with older cultural institutions running for millennia and one that is a few hundred years old and is still figuring things out.
I feel it might help us liberals, the Biden Administration and the Democrats to emulate Congressman, Senator, Vice President and President Lyndon Baines Johnson, in taking seriously the workings and operators of the Cultural and Institutional Ecology of "The South". To take it seriously on Institutional and cultural terms would mean to act with an understanding of the inter-dependent action between values articulated through cultural institutions and the way they underwrite cognitive, normative and then legal institutions*. The bubble of fiction that has durable persistence for the Trump voter and holds the rest of hostage to their values is the big loud sign of the success and robustness of The South's institutional ecology.
I look forward to your comments and reactions.
Alok
(*) References for "cognitive, normative and then legal institutions" i.e. the "three pillars of Institutions"
- The "Three Pillars of Institutions" as Theory of Institutions was articulated in 1994 by W. Richard Scott, a Sociologist of persistently high standing in the community of scholars and researchers on role and character of institutions in organized life.
I haven’t read Scott and don’t know if he is addressing the institutions of the American South specifically or laying out a sociological theory of institutions more generally. But I’m not certain that I would agree that the South’s institutions are somehow more ancient than those of the rest of the country. Their interpretation of Christianity, especially concerning what has come to be called “End Times Theology”, is peculiarly American. End Times Theology and the Prosperity Gospel in particular arose here in the US quite recently, and both have taken on uncomfortably strong momentum among evangelicals since late last century, driving them into politics out of a fervor that seems somewhat contradictorily to want to save the world and hasten its destruction.
I make no bones about my view that theirs is a delusional, death-driven reality, but I call it a reality because it is also impervious to evidence against it. But I also understand that many who embrace this reality are in dire need of certainty in a world that is changing so quickly that, as a species, I am not convinced we humans as a whole can adapt to it in time to survive.
The irony, of course, is that we ourselves are largely the agents of this breakneck speed of change, driven by much more widely held values of productivity, growth, and something often called development that seems more to me like the maximization of exploitation and profit. In other words, and very briefly, we are all laboring under similar cultural demands, and their roots are as old and as varied as the history of the US, the history of Europe, the history of the Mediterranean, and all of the intertwined histories of human life on Earth.
So yes, “othering” can be problematic on all sides, and it can be a barrier to finding commonality. At the same time, we have a problem in the US particularly with a bizarrely authoritarian distrust of authority—if that authority is of the wrong kind of government or of the fiction known as the academic elite or, worse, attributed to satanic maneuverings. This is, as I said, a cultish worldview. And cults pick up their adherents by appealing to vulnerable people, people in one kind of pain or another. Perhaps one key to bridging this gap, as well as others I have alluded to in other comments, is understanding that pain.
Thank you for reading my post, Erik. I appreciate you engaging with my constructs. And you have engaged genuinely with the substance of what I wanted to offer.
Particularly I wanted to engage with this situation you lay out in your reply:
"I make no bones about my view that theirs is a delusional, death-driven reality, but I call it a reality because it is also impervious to evidence against it. But I also understand that many who embrace this reality are in dire need of certainty in a world that is changing so quickly that, as a species, I am not convinced we humans as a whole can adapt to it in time to survive."
I wanted to call attention to the assessment that humans are cultural animals much more than they are cognitive and simply biological animals. Our ideas and picture drawings including those of verbal narratives hold our intention-making and meaning-making much more than our body feeding and geographies of place-living.
I laid out a sketch of our current predicament in the US in the following way:
"And the cultural institutions of the antebellum south are several millennia old! We do not have a real world self-evidently available to liberals and a false world persistently imposed on us by resistant republican voters; we have two cultural ecologies, one with older cultural institutions running for millennia and one that is a few hundred years old and is still figuring things out."
The assessment that "the cultural institutions of the antebellum south are several millennia old!" is referring to the historical facts that since the last ice age when we began making mud- and bricks-based caves and grew 'civilizations', humans have been taking other humans as fruits of nature to be used for any purposes they fashioned. This regime of practices was only questioned in an institutionalized way with the advent of Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions and with Buddha like reformers. And then in the 1700s, The European Enlightenment to the institutional project of "the equality of all human" even deeper. But even that institutional project has had to be worked again and again in deep and detailed ways. The Suffragettes, the Labor movements of the early 1900s, the Women's Movement and the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s, are part of the slow and steep road of institutionalization work in the wider culture.
Consider all the work RBG had to do in her career, one case at a time, bringing them up to the Supreme Court to challenge the institutionalized invisibility of women's bodies and lives in US law and in common culture. We are still in the midst of making legal institutions out of the advances in making normative institutions out of what the cognitive institutions of women's bodily experiences. To exercise a body-based subjectivity - to walk and live in the feet and body of another to subjectively relate to the stories of their experiences takes an effort that is not available to the habits of self-evident discourse.
The cultural world that seems self-evident to us has been produced by the long labors of changing cultural institutions - the cognitive, the normative and then the legal. But they are not self-evident without that culture. Just as the sun and the moon were holes in the dark blanket of the sky to people living in early early human culture.
We liberals are fortunate that we have arrived at our pluralist future early, but we have our labors - for mobilizing and producing cultural change - handed to us just as the suffragettes had their labors handed to them in the late 1800s. Without achieving body-based inter-subjectivity in the other, by first achieving body-based inter-subjectivity in ourselves, we cannot cultivate out joint future and our joint culture.
Thank you again for reading and engaging with my constructions.
I will just say this and then stop, because I am tired and although it is morning here on the West Coast of the US, it is time to sit with the cat and slip into the comfort of sleep as it steals up on us. I keep weird hours.
I still cannot agree with your assessment of Southern culture. Two things: although it originated in an economy of human enslavement, its overall culture exceeds that origin in complex ways. Its conservatism is an American conservatism and a Christian conservatism, among other things. It is not possible to separate the American South from the American part, of which virtually all of us who live in the US are heirs, however we got here.
And I am not convinced that the history of human enslavement is as linear as you lay it out to be. I’ve studied history for a long time, although mostly in the form of the history of ideas rather than in history or historiography (my undergraduate program attracted people who couldn’t decide what to study, but philosophy and history were often on the shortlist of possible majors..). Several years ago I took some time on my own to study the Neolithic Revolution—or rather, the one that occurred in Western Asia. Turns out there were several—in search of answers to some questions I had about the transition in Europe from hunter-gathering cultures to intensive agriculture.
I can’t say I found those answers. As often happens, I found instead more questions, especially about anthropological and archaeological narratives as they have been constructed by mostly Western (and until very recently, overwhelmingly white male) researchers. Beyond the material descriptions of digs, I found many of them barely credible: so much read like backwards projection! Gender roles, economy, and inter-cultural relations too often meshed way too neatly with a seamless progression from the Savannah to a heteronormative culture engaged in capitalist modes of production and nationalistic consolidations of territories and populations via warfare.
There were/are some exceptions. Ian Hodder’s work at Çatal Hoyuk in Turkey was remarkable enough for including possible narrative explanations for the material found there from all participants in the dig. Not just the principle researcher, not just his closest assistants, and not even just the academics: everyone working there was invited to interpret the murals inside the houses, the contents of the trash, the single dwellings that appeared to have been burnt down deliberately while those adjoining were still occupied.
And some interesting alternative histories were offered, but honestly, none of them convinced me because none of the narratives themselves showed any evidence of critical reflection *on the narrative itself*. Maybe this was done off the record, but given the motivations behind the New Archaeology, as it was called, I doubt it, as critique of the dominant narratives was the point. But there was still no explicit examination of how alternate narratives might also be underwritten by present-day biases, which I found very curious.
Written history is complex enough, and constantly open to revisions in interpretation of textual evidence, which is not taken as self-evident. Well, assuming there are no “originalist” historians in the room—whom I fervently hope do not exist. ;)
Interpreting non-written cultural objects is bound to be fraught with even more complexities, especially grieved the historical distance that so often exists between those who created those objects and those who are studying them.
But not always: when Europeans learned that Native Americans took hostages from other tribes during warfare, they assumed that those hostages were enslaved, because that is what we find in the written records of Mediterranean history. How accurate our interpretations of those are I must leave for now, but the treatment of the “other”in Rome is not an air-tight case even now. And maybe some Native tribes did exercise some form of exploitation of their hostages. But many of these “slaves”, it turns out, were taken into the group that seized them, instructed in any new customs, and made into tribal members holding equal status with those born into the tribe.
To be sure, there is probably more to all of the stories than what I have read so far; I assume that is the nature of human life. When I see a straightforward story, I always look for the complications that have been left out, overlooked, and sometimes even deliberately obscured. The writers of history, of archaeology, of sociology, even of literature, TV, and film, where it is more or less expected but still often downplayed, are all working out of some motivation or another. Sometimes it is conscious, sometimes it is not. Some is personal, some is cultural, some may be absolutely inscrutable as to its origins.
But this is one of the questions I think we need to learn to ask more often: who is writing this, where are they coming from, and what is motivating them to do something so laborious? And what might they not even realize is speaking through them?
Me, I was taught somebody else’s language. In some very interesting ways, I was given somebody else’s self! Many such selves! Not one of of my ideas is original.
That, to me, is key.
And this was supposed to be short. It is way past my bedtime.
I am the one who wrote a post objecting to Heather's use of the terms of Trump's "alternative reality" and competing "vision" in contrast to Biden's.
For starters in terms of blog housekeeping, when you started a new post instead of replying under my post, I almost did not have opportunity to read all that you and numerous other readers wrote in response, nor would the 7 other readers who "liked" my original post. Your reply to my post would have generated an email alert to me. It was only by accident that I found your post. For your worry that your post would get lost, the Substack algorithm seems to count likes and replies, with the largest number putting a post to the top, as it did with yours to the #1 position. I do not mean this as any criticism.
Next I want to say that I immensely respect the brain power, the years of study, and the heart in these responses.
All I argued in my objection is that Heather's frequent use of the term "narrative" in her writing and talks appeared more accurate to me, including in a comparison of Trump's and Biden's differing messaging at this time. I wrote that a narrative connotes agency and subjective perception.
Subjective perception is exactly what you and numerous repliers were using to say that Trumpians' reality IS reality to them. I absolutely understand this and agree that in order to know what we're up against, as you say, we need to learn what has led the various groups of Trump supporters to believe his version of reality. (And we need to start by noting that Trump supporters are not a homogeneous lot. And of course that Trump is not an original thinker, but is very good at echoing and amplifying to play to his base. And that Trump has drawn a team of loyalists who have researched the cracks in the system and come up with creative ways to exploit them--and will continue to do so while in power.) I live my life by respecting cultural relativism, subjective perceptions, individuals' rights to self-definition, the validity of individual's own emotional experience, and meeting people where they're at in order to hopefully come to a mutual understanding, even if it's to "agree to disagree." I advocate keeping open lines of communication with active listening. I look for ways to expand and deepen understanding, and bridge differences. Trump supporters are interspersed among us, which gives us opportunity to demonstrate our values of respect, while holding to what is right and decent and countering the toxic narrative.
As for Trump's "reality," it includes his assertions that immigrants are dangerous, John McCain and members of the military were "losers;" industry has not contributed to climate change that correlates with worsening wild fires, hurricanes, tornados, and floods; there was no Russian interference in the 2016 election; and the 2020 election was rigged even though Republicans made down-ballot gains. As Heather herself and others have written, Trump's assertions have no basis in reality--objective, verifiable evidence points to the contrary--and Trump's assertions are outright lies. Why elevate lies to the word "reality" when "narrative" covers it?
The rest of what I wrote is:
Similarly, describing Trumpian narratives as “Trump’s vision” gives Trump way too much credit. With his narcissistic focus and salesmanship, Trump’s narratives serve to bolster his ego—as fed by sycophants and loyal adoring masses, and to perpetuate profitability of his exploits—including the revenue he can continue to draw into campaign funds. The Trumpian narrative is not crafted by Trump, but by his minions and minders who have painstakingly researched the cracks in our democratic system, and then imaginatively figured out how to exploit them. Trump’s visions are limited to a Trump Hotel in Moscow as the tallest building in the world, and maybe Ivanka as the first American female president, having nothing to do with feminism and everything to do with validation of Trump’s legacy.
Thank you, Erik, and to everyone, for sharing your thoughts on this topic and its wonderful meanderings.
Hello Erik - Thank you again for engaging with my constructions with your thoughts, erudition and very careful constructions. I appreciate your efforts very much.
Yes, I am being a bit coarse-grained on the detail of history at the century by century and place by place level in order to stay with the institutions being re-enacted or contested and modified or replaced.
Thank you for considering my constructions and walking with me a for a short distance.
I have only one small objection to your comments: When talking of the women who worked for women's suffrage in this country, it is more respectful of their efforts to call them women's suffragists, rather than Suffragettes, which sobriquet was invented by those wishing to belittle their campaign.
Hello Lanita - I am super grateful to you for sensitizing me to the difference between these two labels and the institutional situations they refer to. And thank you also, for sensitizing me to the difference between the history and status of these labels between Great Britain and the US. It really matters to me to be tuned to the differences in the intentions of those using these labels for themselves or for others.
I read Alice Miller’s book years ago for a graduate course in education of the gifted child, and her discussion of ‘narcissistic deprivation’ struck me particularly hard, as I recognised myself as having experienced it, personally. That led me to completely rethink the rearing of my own child. Powerful and revealing stuff. Thank you for the reminder, Erik
Last week, David Brooks wrote in the Times about this and referred to the 2018 article "The Constitution of Knowlege" by Jonathan Rauch appearing in National Affairs magazine. It comes down to who defines the rules by which the nature of "truth" and "reality" are determined. (Brooks' and Rauch's thoughts sent me to a dictionary to find out the meaning of "epistemology.") For centuries, those who determined "reality" and "truth" said the world was flat and that the universe revolved aroung the Earth, even though there were some who believed the alt-truth that the planets revolved around the sun and that a ship disappearing over the horizon didn't fall off into space.
This is true to an extent. But questions of knowledge (epistemology) and of reality (ontology) do get complicated fairly quickly. On the one hand, I do think that communities of knowledge establish the values by which they judge reality and thus create narratives to interpret and explain that reality. Those values may be articulated as concepts and thus subject at least partially to linguistic habits—logic as persuasive argument, say, or even grammatical rules—but from my experience I would say that there underlies an unspoken, and possibly unspeakable, emotional or even what we might even call irrational basis for many values that can remain inarticulate and thus unspoken for... ever? Or at least for a very long time. And both the spoken and the unspoken parameters of knowledge are subject to power differentials: those with the power to speak, or to dominate through fear or charisma or other “charm”, as one might call it, get to control the narrative, and thus keep a fairly tight rein on what is recognized as knowledge.
But it is possible to evaluate those narratives even from the lower levels of a power structure. Knowledge can also be analyzed as a form of argument: its motives examined and its assumptions unearthed and even its underlying values questioned, if one has the heart to depart from a community’s spoken and unspoken mores. And it is possible to hold skepticism and critique as a value both for recognizing and evaluating knowledge. I am uncertain how best to pass that value along, though.
I would also say that empirical observation in the tradition of the scientific method is something of a special case. Although science in general shares values of consistency and predictability, it has proven remarkably efficient to take what we believe we know and to test it against what happens. The general, and over-simplified, idea in replicating results of experiments is that individual biases will “wash out” if a particular empirical result is obtained by different people undertaking the same methods.
Cultural bias is another question, though. Science under capitalism has run aground on secrecy and competition more often than is generally realized in US culture: hoarding data by labeling it “trade secrets”, keeping unprofitable studies from being published, and simply not funding research that won’t produce a monetary return produces “science” that is beholden to marketing rather than knowledge. There are at least a couple of fields of medicine in which this is quite a problem, but it hasn’t been widely addressed as far as I know.
On the other hand, “scientific” eugenics and race theory were eventually debunked even if it took us here on this side of the Atlantic an extra decade or two after WWII, where the horrors of their logical extremes were exposed at great cost.
Power and knowledge are no strangers to each other, but there are so many other forces in the mix. I just mean to underscore the complexity that Brooks often misses in his wish to retain conservative cred, even if some large portion of the US version of conservatism steps further and further to the right of him. That and indulge my fascination with how knowledge is created, upheld, and overturned. :)
"But it is possible to evaluate those narratives even from the lower levels of a power structure. Knowledge can also be analyzed as a form of argument: its motives examined and its assumptions unearthed and even its underlying values questioned, if one has the heart to depart from a community’s spoken and unspoken mores. And it is possible to hold skepticism and critique as a value both for recognizing and evaluating knowledge. I am uncertain how best to pass that value along, though."
I am so often discouraged by this very uncertainty - how to pass this value along. I seem to have been born to it. Before being exposed to public education, my only source of knowledge was the King James version of the Bible and my fundamentalist Christian family; yet I began to question and criticize those beliefs at the age of 4 when the nightly Bible stories horrified my own (innate?) sense of what was right, fair, humane. My siblings, on the other hand, became "God-fearing" T**** supporters all. Same background, similar genetics, completely different from day one.
My fear is that some defects in values and reasoning are inborn.
Wow, what you wrote really resonates with me. I don't know if I'd go so far as to think these defects might be inherited/inborn but it does bear consideration. On one side of my extended family all but two of my cousins are raging tRump supporters, evangelical Christians, and all that those descriptors imply. I thought about running away at the age of 6 because I felt that I just didn't belong with these people. My sister absolutely refuses to engage in any kind of conversation beyond the most shallow platitudes about the value of family, but I know she is a right-winger in her attitudes. I am finding it difficult to accept her decree that we should remain close just because we are family – even though in my mind we have very little more than blood relationship in common. I don't feel any real connection to her but still have guilt about cutting off all communication. The only alternative seems to be continuing to send holiday and birthday greetings but nothing more substantive. (We now live in states distant from one another so there aren't opportunities for seeing one another in person.) I'm in the process of writing my holiday letter which goes to friends and family, some of whom share my political leanings but many who do not. My first draft is rather preachy about the value of staying informed (using reliable sources) about politics and current events, defending democracy, fighting for racial and social justice, and climate change awareness. Not sure I can send it as I will either get pushback or, more likely, no response. I know the chances of actually changing anyone's attitudes with my letter are about nil but I find I just can't send a letter that doesn't address the tumult of 2020.
Is there a way to temper the preachiness by simply reporting on your own work in those valuable areas without pushing them to do likewise? I've never sent a yearly letter, but have been the recipient of those written by my parents. These epistles generally concerned their evangelical missionary efforts but somehow managed not to be preachy and were not overly obnoxious (and believe me, they knew how to preach and be obnoxious! Their private personal missives to me were burning with warnings of hell and damnation. Heavy sigh.)
As for how important it is to stay in contact, I think it's good to take these kinds of relatives in small doses. I no longer connect with my own siblings on FB, but my contact information is not secret and I haven't cut them off entirely. It is not my fault they have decided social media - with everyone reading their scary pro-T**** nonsense on my feed - is the only way they want to stay in touch.
Thank you for your comment, Lanita. I do like your idea/advice of reporting on my own work without pushing (shaming in my case!) them for what they do or mostly do NOT do. That makes a lot of sense and gives me some direction for my editing of the letter. Thank you sincerely. Small doses is right. Since they live far away that won't be difficult. Happy and peaceful holidays to you!
The variation among siblings is fascinating, as is the variation of resilience among children. Kudos to you for having such a strong moral compass and courage to challenge hypocrisy so young! I still bet on nurture over nature on this one.
Erik, very well written. the power of the diverse left may count on people like you who are open to thinking independently and with civil discourse in mind. I appreciate your opinion and it gives me hope. Burt
The Drama of the Gifted Child~~~ what a book. The beginning for me to find a way to heal. So much primogeniture and hierarchy in my family of origin. The hierarchy was a boon to those high in the hierarchy and kryptonite for me. If the hierarchy works for you, why would you question it? Still weeping over Vietnam, how many people felt alienated and left my friendship when I started protesting. MacNamara's too little, too late, admission. "And it's one, two, three, what are we fighting for...don't ask me cuz I don't give a damn. Next stop is Vietnam." And still.... it's the destruction of Mother Nature at such a rapid clip that keeps me weeping and heartbroken.
I wanted to address the idea of Trump's alternate reality, and one commenter's objections to naming it a reality at all, but this got long-winded, so I am putting out out here in the main thread where perhaps it will see more light for a moment or two than it would as a response to a single comment.
I can only offer my own view on what merits the name, obviously, but I do not think it is a complete stretch to call Trump's constructed cognitive universe an alternate reality. If the narratives he were pushing had all originated with him, were completely aberrant and inexplicible in their appeal, I would be more inclined simply to call them fictions and let it go at that, but much of what he says only amplifies what an extremely vocal minority of US citizens actually do believe is true. And dismissing their realities as fictions would be a dangerous understatement.
I grew up in the Deep South and deep within Christian Fundamentalism, where much the world of today's evangelical movement was itself constructed, and the standards of testing of reality are entirely different for those who are enthralled by their leaders to have faith in a version of the Gospels that extols individual righteousness as a matter of conviction, of what feels right, or, as my mother would put it, they "just know"--despite any and all empirical evidence to the contrary.
I could go into the abusive methods of mind control used in fundamentalisms of all sorts: they are as cult-like as those we often regard as so beyond the pall of consensual reality that they have no legitimacy at all. The main difference in fundamentalist Christianity is that it is a splinter group of one of the largest religions in the world today, and as such evangelicals can draw on a history that we actually do share with them if we were brought up in the US or another European-descended culture.
But I want to emphasize here that this alternative reality is as real to those inside of it as our reality is to us. To not understand that is to not understand what we are up against. Trump's fantasies are not just Trump's fantasies: they belong to white supremacy, to authoritarianism, to a narcissism that is not the isolated symptom of one person who might be labeled mentally ill. There is, inside of our very own culture, a tendency to buy into exactly the things he has bought into. Why is that?
There is no single answer to that question, and I have certainly not even begun to uncover them all, but it concerns at least the origins of the authoritarian sensibilities of the far right. It also concerns the question of what narcissism is and where it begins: myself, I would start with familial/cultural cycles of deep narcissistic injury that are remnants of Calvinistic, Puritan, and, I think to some degree, old English and Germanic approaches to child-rearing (see Alice Miller's "Drama of the Gifted Child" for a very interesting, if underappreciated, exposition of a kind of emotional stoicism and repression that has roots in certain European beliefs about "discipline").
And that is just where I would begin to think about this. As much as I agree with Heather that we have a chance to rewrite a number of endings to the repeated uprisings of fascism, of authoritarianism, of exclusion and brutality in the cultures that we share--and that we must seize this moment to do so, I am not optimistic that we will succeed at all quickly. We may not succeed at all.
At the very least, we--and as usual I am mainly addressing those of us who are relatively privileged in the US: white (that would be me), of middle-class origins (if not still particularly financially well-off, maybe once upon a time, or perhaps our parents were able to wrest off a piece of the American Dream while it was still available to certain white families even if we have not been able to keep ahold of it), mostly well-educated (also me), able-bodied (not anymore, no), and probably overwhelmingly cisgendered and heterosexual (never was, no chance of it happening!), and even at least nominally Christian (also not me for years)--we have to look at the degree of our own complicity in the multiple alternative realities that have been circulating amongst us for so long that many of them are simply thought of as The Way Things Are.
Can we question our own assumptions? Have we? Are we willing to listen to BIPOC, to disabled people, to queer and trans people? If we don't, we won't be able to shake off the centuries-old heirarchical ways of thinking that are often considered to be "common sense".
Common to whom? Is it possible that some of our realities are also fictions? And if so--or even if not--can fiction be dismissed, or is it too powerful as a world-building tool for us to, well, write it off? Or cross it out, or try to erase it?
I don't wish to rain on whatever parades we might be able to pull together right now. As a collection of many communities and as the nation we apparently constitute, we certainly need something positive to build towards. But I do think it necessary to understand that we did not end up with Trump by accident.
We who call ourselves The Left are extremely diverse. Finding commonality among ourselves can be a tall order. But there are many, many, many, many people right here living among us who have had no alternative but to analyze the workings of what is called Western culture because they have been under its collective thumb for hundreds of years. And the far right is frightened to death that they/we will have their/our voices heard. But I really do think that listening may well be our only chance for pulling this off.
Erik, you've said so much profound truth here. The issues are not new ones and they did not spring up from the head of the Cheeto. He recognized a population that feels aggrieved and resentful, has values that place them outside the arc of history, and is searching for the Big Daddy who will take care of them to the exclusion of all others. Then he cynically molded a simplistic message to fit their profile and launched. These folks have always been there and, alas, will always feel aggrieved because their pastors and patriarchs have taught them that life is a zero-sum game: if someone else gains an advantage then they have lost. Re-educating people not to adhere to that idea is an almost impossible task, because the leaders who promote it enrich themselves by continuing to yell that message from their pulpits, soapboxes, AM radio stations, and cable channels.
I am from New York, from an entirely different background than you and I grew up with The Donald's presence in my media life (and sometimes imposed on my real life as when I had to watch beautiful old buildings destroyed and his monstrosities erected). Back in the 80s and 90s he was a Democrat, a Clinton supporter, pro-choice, and a so-called liberal because he had to work with the city government in order to get his buildings built and tenants in his apartments. He was just as cynical and inauthentic in his supposed liberalism then as he is in his neofascism now.
I’m from NY and thank you for expressing my understanding of the person behind POTUS and why I wept in disbelief when he was elected. My horror at his behavior has only increased over the past 4 years. What to do about a country where nearly half the voters support him is beyond me. I also propose that saying Republicans in GA are being encouraged to not vote feels like a plot to keep us from donating and volunteering to get every last Democrat registered and voting. ❤️🤍💙
Still donating, no matter what, Deborah
Linda you wrote, "He recognized a population that feels aggrieved and resentful, has VALUES THAT PLACE THEM OUTSIDE THE ARC OF HISTORY, and is searching for the Big Daddy who will take care of them to the exclusion of all others."
Unfortunately, the folks that Trump attracts are not outside of the arc of history. One only need look at the (anti-Jewish) Pogroms dating from the 1st century CE; the constant turmoil between various factions of Christians who murdered one another; Christians against Muslims and vice versa; whites against Black, Brown, Red, Yellow peoples and vice versa; Stalin, Hitler, Franco, Mussolini, the Rwanda Genocide, The Delhi 2020 uprising; witch burnings; our own Civil War; violence against Native Americans; violence against workers/miners; police brutality against Blacks; The list is endless and began the day more than one human being inhabited this planet. The actions against the other are predicated on two things: FEAR OF THE OTHER and a perceived SUPREMACY OVER THE OTHER.
Throughout history charismatic leaders have been able to exploit those two elements and use them to attract people to their cause. People on both sides of a conflict consider themselves to be righteous. Leaders harness the fear and perceived supremacy of their followers who then amplify it. As technology develops and is used more widely amplification becomes easier. It's called persuasion. Those who are most successful rise to the top because they have been able to harness the so called "will of the people" best.
As you note, Trump and other authoritarian leaders prey on those who are disgruntled. Follow me, they say, we'll put "them" in their place and show them who's boss. They point the finger of blame at those who appear to be in a better place and accuse the "successful" folks of stealing from the less successful. There are also the very successful who are afraid they are going to have their wealth and security snatched away from them so it can be distributed to the under dogs.
Conversely, leaders who believe in a more democratic, community focused form of governance encourage their base to consider the needs of others. And those who prefer a more democratic form of government believe their way is better because balance and sharing the bounty is far more harmonious and leads to mutual respect and understanding amongst all participants, at least theoretically.
One of the things we must recognize is the fact that we have a history that has been, until recently, gravely misrepresented. We see it every time HCR presents a view of an historical event and we say, "I never knew that!" or "That's not what I was taught!" There are many in our country who want to keep all that dirt hidden under the carpet because it doesn't reflect well on our mythology and telling the truth will help shift the balance of power.
That's where we are now, Trump is harking back to a mythological era that has become lodged in the American Psyche as "The Good Old Days". Good for whom? Trump is banging hard on the drum of unfairness and hardcore resentment for those who voted against him. His people are in lock step and will stop at nothing, including violent retribution. And they are very much within the arc of history.
As someone said in reply to a post yesterday...Oh SNAP!...
You 'Wicked Smart' people and posts are 'the real real' for me. Thanks all. And HCR of course.
br, this is a pretty incredible forum, to be sure! And if it weren't for HCR, well, we might be "homeless".
br, don't underrate your 'smarts' on the basis of the ability of many on this forum, not only to articulate complexity, but also to bring their erudition to help educate those of us who are less competent linguistically. Much as I enjoy those whose abilities are superior to my own, it's also a relief to engage with others on the sidelines with me!
"In the 'smarts' department I'm definitely on the sidelines but I'm having a wonderful time!" hashtag, me too, br, me too!
Daria, I don't disagree with you on any of this except for the word "arc." :-) What I mean by the arc of history is that this country--its younger populations in particular--is becoming more open to ways of being in the world (LGBTQ, single-parent families, blended families, multi-ethnic and multi-racial families, a more secularist world-view for instance) that the typical Trump voter finds abhorrent because they reject the idea that the white supremacist view of the past is false. This I see as a positive development but one that is resented and feared by those whose whiteness defines their privilege. Believe me: as a medieval historian I have spent my career teaching about and engaging in reassessing the views, activities, and oppressions perpetrated under the guise of religion, "tradition," and patriarchy. The ways in which we teach medieval history now are quite different than they were when I was a student but this more open-ended and questioning way of approaching the past has been attacked by the current administration as "hateful" and "un-American" because it questions the actions of people in the past who promoted and enacted a white-privilege, supremacist worldview.
Ah, Linda, I misinterpreted your use if the word arc. Apologies for that. Yes, there is openness in the young to embrace differences and change. I sincerely hope, going forward, their energy and acceptance becomes contagious.
Thank you so much for responding to my comment and providing additional context. I respect your opinion and feedback.
And I yours Daria!!
Well said, Daria. Thank you.
Thanks, Karen.
Excellent observations, well expressed, Daria.
Thanks, Mim.
So glad others remember the pre-POTUS T****. He has never been a principled human being.
Oh, yes. A friend of my father was one of the many, many subcontractors Donald refused to pay. When offered a chance to sub again, he refused. Yet that very man's son became a Trump supporter.
Well put eric. Trump is the nasty symptom, of DEEP disease ( like centuries old disease). There is ALOT of reconciliation we have to do as a nation.
I like Heather's suggestion to focus on reinstating the fairness doctrine as a crucial piece of government regulation as a priority. MAYBE this would allow more people to detect truth from fiction. As I see it, we have millions and millions of voters who have been brainwashed. Can a brainwashed person be rational? We're gonna find out.
I’ve been reading up on the fairness doctrine and why it was created and why and how it was taken down. There are reasons it was good and there are reasons it won’t work anymore without changes. I would like HRC to expand on the pros and cons
Absolutely agree. Russian obfuscation on social platforms in 2016 duped enough voters to create the disaster we've all seen. Now the regulation of "parler"(?) et al, seems even more daunting than trying to reign in talk radio fanatics.
"the nasty symptom, of DEEP disease ( like centuries old disease). There is A LOT of reconciliation we have to do as a nation."
I got lost at the jump from DEEP, centuries old disease to "reconciliation".
Deep disease leads to death.
South Africa managed a reconciliation process between the colonizers and the colonized, but I honestly don’t see anything on the horizon like that here, or at least not at a national level. I’m not a student of S African history at all, but at the very least we have multiple reconciliations to consider and we are spread out across a much larger area, with the attendant regional subcultures that make united actions quite difficult.
That said, there are enough energetic pockets of Native Americans resistance here I the Western US to begin to consider them a cohesive movement; Standing Rock has been something of a watershed moment for many Native activists out here. And of course black resistance movements have been around for a good long time.
One question for me is whether even the white *liberal* mainstream is ready and willing to do the work of truly relearning history and searching out non-white voices so that we can understand what these populations have been through, how they currently see their own quite diverse histories, and begin to realize that they are the experts on their experiences. Most of us white folks know quite next to nothing about the people we demanded the most sacrifices from while consolidating our hold on wealth and power on this continent.
For white folks who are seriously interested in and willing to expand their knowledge of their own complicity, might I suggest Layla F. Saad's Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor. I'm working my way through the month of daily writing prompts now and am learning much. This is only one of the many titles available to white folx who want to progress.
Also recommend:
White Fragility (audio/video summaries available) by Robin DiAngelo and How To Be an AntiRacist by Ibram X. Kendi.
I've read Robin DeAngelo's book, but haven't encountered Kendi's book yet. Another excellent title is So You Want to Talk About Race by Iljeoma Oluo. I listened to the audiobook narrated by Bahni Turpin while working on my house this summer.
The Australian Government and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait peoples are going down this track now.
I must take a look at that. Wasn’t the head of state there just recently—like sometime in the last decade—a rightward leaning nationalist? Cause for hope, perhaps. New Zealand’s leader I know is awesome. But I haven’t been paying as much attention to their neighbors.
You should look into the Waitanga Process in NZ and the Makarrata Process in Aus. The latest developments in Aus. Are at a State rather than National level. The current Federal PM is effectively on the right and perhaps a little too far but it doesn't necessarily stop national reconciliation.
I disagree. I've seen miraculous recoveries from deep diseases in my own patients. Of course, I've seen lots of deaths too. But, like HCR, I gave been called a pollyanna! The fight continues.
OK. "Lots of deaths" and some "miraculous recoveries".
Just trying to prepare and brace the pollyannas.
I could have written this, Eric! Thank you. I relate to a lot of what you said and you have provided a lot of food for thought. I have been saying for some time that rather than lobbing brick-bats at those we disagree with or consider "mental midgets", it might behoove us, no matter how distasteful it may seem, to try and understand what comprises some of these "alternative realities". The more we can understand those we disagree with the more we can engage them. Yes, with some that is simply impossible, and it can be hugely infuriating and frustrating. BUT, we need to try and tone down the screaming and yelling, the hysteria, the name-calling, the rhetoric, and try and figure this phenomenon out. It's like we're ALL trying to see the "big picture" that explains everything, but that "picture" may be bigger than we think. I offer up, provided one can get past the pay wall, an interesting article from NYT's writer Will Wilkinson on why so many people still voted for Trump. I do think there are many many answers to this, but he does name quite a few of them:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/27/opinion/trump-democrats-coronavirus.html
I can quote one of the comments from a Black reader, "Karen", I found particularly apt:
"I am black, but grew up in a white working class town before earning degrees from Stanford and Berkeley. The times writers cannot seem to understand that when people are shamed for who they are, they get angry and shut down. Trump, for all his flaws, allowed less educated whites to feel a sense of dignity and self worth - that being white does not mean needing to be constantly ashamed of who I am, and it is ok to be proud of being American. I am not excusing the 'sins' of racism nor the mind boggling disregard for science (I m a biology and chemistry teacher), but people need to feel good about themselves - reptile brain, and if liberals want this demographic to change, they have to view them with compassion instead of contempt. At 8 years old my family moved from an all black neighborhood in Philly to an all white one in a factory town in CT. And though there was one open racist in the neighborhood, everyone else treated me with kindness and respect. I swam in my friends pools, went to their parties, etc and this was mid 70s. Whites need to continue to examine and 'own' white privilege. It is there & I have the psychological scars as proof. But shaming never works. These are people who are terrified at how their worlds are changing, and yes, the world needs to change but it might work better to treat them with compassion, they did not create white privilege, they inherited it and they are bewildered. Change can happen. But it requires patience, kindness and time."
This forum today shows many good reasons as to why I find it so stimulating!
Thank you, Erik. I did not grow up in the Deep South but I did live there for 20 years. I know what you say to be true based on my experiences there. Years before that I spent time as a member of a fundamentalist evangelical church, and I know what you say is true because of my experiences there, as well. Like you, I have left both behind me. I agree that we did not end up where we are by accident and that the future is not assured. So, thank you for so eloquently voicing these thoughts and for encouraging us all to listen to others and to find commonality that may hopefully bind us together enough so that we can move forward towards a better future for all.
Hello Erik - Thank you for your careful labors. We do need to find ways of being 'gentle caring radicals' that do the hard work of working out our joint future with our historically incompatible cultures.
I am repeating a post I wrote up here because I join in a parallel way to your articulations. Thank you for the opportunity.
Hello Professor Richardson & Readers of "Letter from an American" -
Like Erik JM Schneider's post, I too want to contest the characterizations of "the alternative reality" and the persistent "fictional worlds" of Trump voters and the Republican voter community. While Erik JM Schneider lays out the hard and steep road ahead of us liberals to actualize a pluralist, inclusive and bodily inter-subjective culture and politics of self-governance in our diverse society, I want to contest the characterizations of 'the other' we are using to make sense of the persistent differences that make us liberals feel like hostages in our own country whose constitution feels like 'our document'.
I want to contest the characterization in this quote Prof. Richardson used in her post last night:
Burns goes on to say: “Ultimately, politicization and misinformation around COVID are having tragic real-world consequences.”
The communicative actions of Trump, Trump's operatives and campaign folks, and of Republican electioneering are often called 'politicization and misinformation' but as Erik JM Schneider lays out that these communicative actions play out widely held beliefs and values of the historical southern culture which fought back hard after the overwhelming military and legislative defeats of the Civil War. The North's military and legislative defeats over the South were not cultural defeats. The success of the Union over the Confederacy failed at institutionalizing cultural change. And the cultural institutions of the antebellum south are several millennia old! We do not have a real world self-evidently available to liberals and a false world persistently imposed on us by resistant republican voters; we have two cultural ecologies, one with older cultural institutions running for millennia and one that is a few hundred years old and is still figuring things out.
I feel it might help us liberals, the Biden Administration and the Democrats to emulate Congressman, Senator, Vice President and President Lyndon Baines Johnson, in taking seriously the workings and operators of the Cultural and Institutional Ecology of "The South". To take it seriously on Institutional and cultural terms would mean to act with an understanding of the inter-dependent action between values articulated through cultural institutions and the way they underwrite cognitive, normative and then legal institutions*. The bubble of fiction that has durable persistence for the Trump voter and holds the rest of hostage to their values is the big loud sign of the success and robustness of The South's institutional ecology.
I look forward to your comments and reactions.
Alok
(*) References for "cognitive, normative and then legal institutions" i.e. the "three pillars of Institutions"
- The "Three Pillars of Institutions" as Theory of Institutions was articulated in 1994 by W. Richard Scott, a Sociologist of persistently high standing in the community of scholars and researchers on role and character of institutions in organized life.
His book is here: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Institutions_and_Organizations/NbQgAQAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0
W. Richard Scott's Wikipedia page is here:
https://g.co/kgs/4B363v
His chapter on The Three Pillars of Institutions is here:
https://us.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-assets/56769_book_item_56769.pdf
I haven’t read Scott and don’t know if he is addressing the institutions of the American South specifically or laying out a sociological theory of institutions more generally. But I’m not certain that I would agree that the South’s institutions are somehow more ancient than those of the rest of the country. Their interpretation of Christianity, especially concerning what has come to be called “End Times Theology”, is peculiarly American. End Times Theology and the Prosperity Gospel in particular arose here in the US quite recently, and both have taken on uncomfortably strong momentum among evangelicals since late last century, driving them into politics out of a fervor that seems somewhat contradictorily to want to save the world and hasten its destruction.
I make no bones about my view that theirs is a delusional, death-driven reality, but I call it a reality because it is also impervious to evidence against it. But I also understand that many who embrace this reality are in dire need of certainty in a world that is changing so quickly that, as a species, I am not convinced we humans as a whole can adapt to it in time to survive.
The irony, of course, is that we ourselves are largely the agents of this breakneck speed of change, driven by much more widely held values of productivity, growth, and something often called development that seems more to me like the maximization of exploitation and profit. In other words, and very briefly, we are all laboring under similar cultural demands, and their roots are as old and as varied as the history of the US, the history of Europe, the history of the Mediterranean, and all of the intertwined histories of human life on Earth.
So yes, “othering” can be problematic on all sides, and it can be a barrier to finding commonality. At the same time, we have a problem in the US particularly with a bizarrely authoritarian distrust of authority—if that authority is of the wrong kind of government or of the fiction known as the academic elite or, worse, attributed to satanic maneuverings. This is, as I said, a cultish worldview. And cults pick up their adherents by appealing to vulnerable people, people in one kind of pain or another. Perhaps one key to bridging this gap, as well as others I have alluded to in other comments, is understanding that pain.
Thank you for reading my post, Erik. I appreciate you engaging with my constructs. And you have engaged genuinely with the substance of what I wanted to offer.
Particularly I wanted to engage with this situation you lay out in your reply:
"I make no bones about my view that theirs is a delusional, death-driven reality, but I call it a reality because it is also impervious to evidence against it. But I also understand that many who embrace this reality are in dire need of certainty in a world that is changing so quickly that, as a species, I am not convinced we humans as a whole can adapt to it in time to survive."
I wanted to call attention to the assessment that humans are cultural animals much more than they are cognitive and simply biological animals. Our ideas and picture drawings including those of verbal narratives hold our intention-making and meaning-making much more than our body feeding and geographies of place-living.
I laid out a sketch of our current predicament in the US in the following way:
"And the cultural institutions of the antebellum south are several millennia old! We do not have a real world self-evidently available to liberals and a false world persistently imposed on us by resistant republican voters; we have two cultural ecologies, one with older cultural institutions running for millennia and one that is a few hundred years old and is still figuring things out."
The assessment that "the cultural institutions of the antebellum south are several millennia old!" is referring to the historical facts that since the last ice age when we began making mud- and bricks-based caves and grew 'civilizations', humans have been taking other humans as fruits of nature to be used for any purposes they fashioned. This regime of practices was only questioned in an institutionalized way with the advent of Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions and with Buddha like reformers. And then in the 1700s, The European Enlightenment to the institutional project of "the equality of all human" even deeper. But even that institutional project has had to be worked again and again in deep and detailed ways. The Suffragettes, the Labor movements of the early 1900s, the Women's Movement and the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s, are part of the slow and steep road of institutionalization work in the wider culture.
Consider all the work RBG had to do in her career, one case at a time, bringing them up to the Supreme Court to challenge the institutionalized invisibility of women's bodies and lives in US law and in common culture. We are still in the midst of making legal institutions out of the advances in making normative institutions out of what the cognitive institutions of women's bodily experiences. To exercise a body-based subjectivity - to walk and live in the feet and body of another to subjectively relate to the stories of their experiences takes an effort that is not available to the habits of self-evident discourse.
The cultural world that seems self-evident to us has been produced by the long labors of changing cultural institutions - the cognitive, the normative and then the legal. But they are not self-evident without that culture. Just as the sun and the moon were holes in the dark blanket of the sky to people living in early early human culture.
We liberals are fortunate that we have arrived at our pluralist future early, but we have our labors - for mobilizing and producing cultural change - handed to us just as the suffragettes had their labors handed to them in the late 1800s. Without achieving body-based inter-subjectivity in the other, by first achieving body-based inter-subjectivity in ourselves, we cannot cultivate out joint future and our joint culture.
Thank you again for reading and engaging with my constructions.
Alok
I will just say this and then stop, because I am tired and although it is morning here on the West Coast of the US, it is time to sit with the cat and slip into the comfort of sleep as it steals up on us. I keep weird hours.
I still cannot agree with your assessment of Southern culture. Two things: although it originated in an economy of human enslavement, its overall culture exceeds that origin in complex ways. Its conservatism is an American conservatism and a Christian conservatism, among other things. It is not possible to separate the American South from the American part, of which virtually all of us who live in the US are heirs, however we got here.
And I am not convinced that the history of human enslavement is as linear as you lay it out to be. I’ve studied history for a long time, although mostly in the form of the history of ideas rather than in history or historiography (my undergraduate program attracted people who couldn’t decide what to study, but philosophy and history were often on the shortlist of possible majors..). Several years ago I took some time on my own to study the Neolithic Revolution—or rather, the one that occurred in Western Asia. Turns out there were several—in search of answers to some questions I had about the transition in Europe from hunter-gathering cultures to intensive agriculture.
I can’t say I found those answers. As often happens, I found instead more questions, especially about anthropological and archaeological narratives as they have been constructed by mostly Western (and until very recently, overwhelmingly white male) researchers. Beyond the material descriptions of digs, I found many of them barely credible: so much read like backwards projection! Gender roles, economy, and inter-cultural relations too often meshed way too neatly with a seamless progression from the Savannah to a heteronormative culture engaged in capitalist modes of production and nationalistic consolidations of territories and populations via warfare.
There were/are some exceptions. Ian Hodder’s work at Çatal Hoyuk in Turkey was remarkable enough for including possible narrative explanations for the material found there from all participants in the dig. Not just the principle researcher, not just his closest assistants, and not even just the academics: everyone working there was invited to interpret the murals inside the houses, the contents of the trash, the single dwellings that appeared to have been burnt down deliberately while those adjoining were still occupied.
And some interesting alternative histories were offered, but honestly, none of them convinced me because none of the narratives themselves showed any evidence of critical reflection *on the narrative itself*. Maybe this was done off the record, but given the motivations behind the New Archaeology, as it was called, I doubt it, as critique of the dominant narratives was the point. But there was still no explicit examination of how alternate narratives might also be underwritten by present-day biases, which I found very curious.
Written history is complex enough, and constantly open to revisions in interpretation of textual evidence, which is not taken as self-evident. Well, assuming there are no “originalist” historians in the room—whom I fervently hope do not exist. ;)
Interpreting non-written cultural objects is bound to be fraught with even more complexities, especially grieved the historical distance that so often exists between those who created those objects and those who are studying them.
But not always: when Europeans learned that Native Americans took hostages from other tribes during warfare, they assumed that those hostages were enslaved, because that is what we find in the written records of Mediterranean history. How accurate our interpretations of those are I must leave for now, but the treatment of the “other”in Rome is not an air-tight case even now. And maybe some Native tribes did exercise some form of exploitation of their hostages. But many of these “slaves”, it turns out, were taken into the group that seized them, instructed in any new customs, and made into tribal members holding equal status with those born into the tribe.
To be sure, there is probably more to all of the stories than what I have read so far; I assume that is the nature of human life. When I see a straightforward story, I always look for the complications that have been left out, overlooked, and sometimes even deliberately obscured. The writers of history, of archaeology, of sociology, even of literature, TV, and film, where it is more or less expected but still often downplayed, are all working out of some motivation or another. Sometimes it is conscious, sometimes it is not. Some is personal, some is cultural, some may be absolutely inscrutable as to its origins.
But this is one of the questions I think we need to learn to ask more often: who is writing this, where are they coming from, and what is motivating them to do something so laborious? And what might they not even realize is speaking through them?
Me, I was taught somebody else’s language. In some very interesting ways, I was given somebody else’s self! Many such selves! Not one of of my ideas is original.
That, to me, is key.
And this was supposed to be short. It is way past my bedtime.
Hello Erik.
I am the one who wrote a post objecting to Heather's use of the terms of Trump's "alternative reality" and competing "vision" in contrast to Biden's.
For starters in terms of blog housekeeping, when you started a new post instead of replying under my post, I almost did not have opportunity to read all that you and numerous other readers wrote in response, nor would the 7 other readers who "liked" my original post. Your reply to my post would have generated an email alert to me. It was only by accident that I found your post. For your worry that your post would get lost, the Substack algorithm seems to count likes and replies, with the largest number putting a post to the top, as it did with yours to the #1 position. I do not mean this as any criticism.
Next I want to say that I immensely respect the brain power, the years of study, and the heart in these responses.
All I argued in my objection is that Heather's frequent use of the term "narrative" in her writing and talks appeared more accurate to me, including in a comparison of Trump's and Biden's differing messaging at this time. I wrote that a narrative connotes agency and subjective perception.
Subjective perception is exactly what you and numerous repliers were using to say that Trumpians' reality IS reality to them. I absolutely understand this and agree that in order to know what we're up against, as you say, we need to learn what has led the various groups of Trump supporters to believe his version of reality. (And we need to start by noting that Trump supporters are not a homogeneous lot. And of course that Trump is not an original thinker, but is very good at echoing and amplifying to play to his base. And that Trump has drawn a team of loyalists who have researched the cracks in the system and come up with creative ways to exploit them--and will continue to do so while in power.) I live my life by respecting cultural relativism, subjective perceptions, individuals' rights to self-definition, the validity of individual's own emotional experience, and meeting people where they're at in order to hopefully come to a mutual understanding, even if it's to "agree to disagree." I advocate keeping open lines of communication with active listening. I look for ways to expand and deepen understanding, and bridge differences. Trump supporters are interspersed among us, which gives us opportunity to demonstrate our values of respect, while holding to what is right and decent and countering the toxic narrative.
As for Trump's "reality," it includes his assertions that immigrants are dangerous, John McCain and members of the military were "losers;" industry has not contributed to climate change that correlates with worsening wild fires, hurricanes, tornados, and floods; there was no Russian interference in the 2016 election; and the 2020 election was rigged even though Republicans made down-ballot gains. As Heather herself and others have written, Trump's assertions have no basis in reality--objective, verifiable evidence points to the contrary--and Trump's assertions are outright lies. Why elevate lies to the word "reality" when "narrative" covers it?
The rest of what I wrote is:
Similarly, describing Trumpian narratives as “Trump’s vision” gives Trump way too much credit. With his narcissistic focus and salesmanship, Trump’s narratives serve to bolster his ego—as fed by sycophants and loyal adoring masses, and to perpetuate profitability of his exploits—including the revenue he can continue to draw into campaign funds. The Trumpian narrative is not crafted by Trump, but by his minions and minders who have painstakingly researched the cracks in our democratic system, and then imaginatively figured out how to exploit them. Trump’s visions are limited to a Trump Hotel in Moscow as the tallest building in the world, and maybe Ivanka as the first American female president, having nothing to do with feminism and everything to do with validation of Trump’s legacy.
Thank you, Erik, and to everyone, for sharing your thoughts on this topic and its wonderful meanderings.
Hello Erik - Thank you again for engaging with my constructions with your thoughts, erudition and very careful constructions. I appreciate your efforts very much.
Yes, I am being a bit coarse-grained on the detail of history at the century by century and place by place level in order to stay with the institutions being re-enacted or contested and modified or replaced.
Thank you for considering my constructions and walking with me a for a short distance.
Alok
I have only one small objection to your comments: When talking of the women who worked for women's suffrage in this country, it is more respectful of their efforts to call them women's suffragists, rather than Suffragettes, which sobriquet was invented by those wishing to belittle their campaign.
Hello Lanita - I am super grateful to you for sensitizing me to the difference between these two labels and the institutional situations they refer to. And thank you also, for sensitizing me to the difference between the history and status of these labels between Great Britain and the US. It really matters to me to be tuned to the differences in the intentions of those using these labels for themselves or for others.
Super grateful to you!
Alok
I have to admit my own objection to the term is not universal among women.
But interestingly, the British activists then embraced and adopted the name Suffragettes.
Then I worried about any connection to the word “suffer,” but the etymology of suffrage is Latin suffragium, “a voting tablet” or “the right to vote.”
Good point about the UK activists.
I read Alice Miller’s book years ago for a graduate course in education of the gifted child, and her discussion of ‘narcissistic deprivation’ struck me particularly hard, as I recognised myself as having experienced it, personally. That led me to completely rethink the rearing of my own child. Powerful and revealing stuff. Thank you for the reminder, Erik
Last week, David Brooks wrote in the Times about this and referred to the 2018 article "The Constitution of Knowlege" by Jonathan Rauch appearing in National Affairs magazine. It comes down to who defines the rules by which the nature of "truth" and "reality" are determined. (Brooks' and Rauch's thoughts sent me to a dictionary to find out the meaning of "epistemology.") For centuries, those who determined "reality" and "truth" said the world was flat and that the universe revolved aroung the Earth, even though there were some who believed the alt-truth that the planets revolved around the sun and that a ship disappearing over the horizon didn't fall off into space.
This is true to an extent. But questions of knowledge (epistemology) and of reality (ontology) do get complicated fairly quickly. On the one hand, I do think that communities of knowledge establish the values by which they judge reality and thus create narratives to interpret and explain that reality. Those values may be articulated as concepts and thus subject at least partially to linguistic habits—logic as persuasive argument, say, or even grammatical rules—but from my experience I would say that there underlies an unspoken, and possibly unspeakable, emotional or even what we might even call irrational basis for many values that can remain inarticulate and thus unspoken for... ever? Or at least for a very long time. And both the spoken and the unspoken parameters of knowledge are subject to power differentials: those with the power to speak, or to dominate through fear or charisma or other “charm”, as one might call it, get to control the narrative, and thus keep a fairly tight rein on what is recognized as knowledge.
But it is possible to evaluate those narratives even from the lower levels of a power structure. Knowledge can also be analyzed as a form of argument: its motives examined and its assumptions unearthed and even its underlying values questioned, if one has the heart to depart from a community’s spoken and unspoken mores. And it is possible to hold skepticism and critique as a value both for recognizing and evaluating knowledge. I am uncertain how best to pass that value along, though.
I would also say that empirical observation in the tradition of the scientific method is something of a special case. Although science in general shares values of consistency and predictability, it has proven remarkably efficient to take what we believe we know and to test it against what happens. The general, and over-simplified, idea in replicating results of experiments is that individual biases will “wash out” if a particular empirical result is obtained by different people undertaking the same methods.
Cultural bias is another question, though. Science under capitalism has run aground on secrecy and competition more often than is generally realized in US culture: hoarding data by labeling it “trade secrets”, keeping unprofitable studies from being published, and simply not funding research that won’t produce a monetary return produces “science” that is beholden to marketing rather than knowledge. There are at least a couple of fields of medicine in which this is quite a problem, but it hasn’t been widely addressed as far as I know.
On the other hand, “scientific” eugenics and race theory were eventually debunked even if it took us here on this side of the Atlantic an extra decade or two after WWII, where the horrors of their logical extremes were exposed at great cost.
Power and knowledge are no strangers to each other, but there are so many other forces in the mix. I just mean to underscore the complexity that Brooks often misses in his wish to retain conservative cred, even if some large portion of the US version of conservatism steps further and further to the right of him. That and indulge my fascination with how knowledge is created, upheld, and overturned. :)
"But it is possible to evaluate those narratives even from the lower levels of a power structure. Knowledge can also be analyzed as a form of argument: its motives examined and its assumptions unearthed and even its underlying values questioned, if one has the heart to depart from a community’s spoken and unspoken mores. And it is possible to hold skepticism and critique as a value both for recognizing and evaluating knowledge. I am uncertain how best to pass that value along, though."
I am so often discouraged by this very uncertainty - how to pass this value along. I seem to have been born to it. Before being exposed to public education, my only source of knowledge was the King James version of the Bible and my fundamentalist Christian family; yet I began to question and criticize those beliefs at the age of 4 when the nightly Bible stories horrified my own (innate?) sense of what was right, fair, humane. My siblings, on the other hand, became "God-fearing" T**** supporters all. Same background, similar genetics, completely different from day one.
My fear is that some defects in values and reasoning are inborn.
Wow, what you wrote really resonates with me. I don't know if I'd go so far as to think these defects might be inherited/inborn but it does bear consideration. On one side of my extended family all but two of my cousins are raging tRump supporters, evangelical Christians, and all that those descriptors imply. I thought about running away at the age of 6 because I felt that I just didn't belong with these people. My sister absolutely refuses to engage in any kind of conversation beyond the most shallow platitudes about the value of family, but I know she is a right-winger in her attitudes. I am finding it difficult to accept her decree that we should remain close just because we are family – even though in my mind we have very little more than blood relationship in common. I don't feel any real connection to her but still have guilt about cutting off all communication. The only alternative seems to be continuing to send holiday and birthday greetings but nothing more substantive. (We now live in states distant from one another so there aren't opportunities for seeing one another in person.) I'm in the process of writing my holiday letter which goes to friends and family, some of whom share my political leanings but many who do not. My first draft is rather preachy about the value of staying informed (using reliable sources) about politics and current events, defending democracy, fighting for racial and social justice, and climate change awareness. Not sure I can send it as I will either get pushback or, more likely, no response. I know the chances of actually changing anyone's attitudes with my letter are about nil but I find I just can't send a letter that doesn't address the tumult of 2020.
Is there a way to temper the preachiness by simply reporting on your own work in those valuable areas without pushing them to do likewise? I've never sent a yearly letter, but have been the recipient of those written by my parents. These epistles generally concerned their evangelical missionary efforts but somehow managed not to be preachy and were not overly obnoxious (and believe me, they knew how to preach and be obnoxious! Their private personal missives to me were burning with warnings of hell and damnation. Heavy sigh.)
As for how important it is to stay in contact, I think it's good to take these kinds of relatives in small doses. I no longer connect with my own siblings on FB, but my contact information is not secret and I haven't cut them off entirely. It is not my fault they have decided social media - with everyone reading their scary pro-T**** nonsense on my feed - is the only way they want to stay in touch.
Thank you for your comment, Lanita. I do like your idea/advice of reporting on my own work without pushing (shaming in my case!) them for what they do or mostly do NOT do. That makes a lot of sense and gives me some direction for my editing of the letter. Thank you sincerely. Small doses is right. Since they live far away that won't be difficult. Happy and peaceful holidays to you!
The variation among siblings is fascinating, as is the variation of resilience among children. Kudos to you for having such a strong moral compass and courage to challenge hypocrisy so young! I still bet on nurture over nature on this one.
Thank you, Ellie, for the vote of confidence! I truly appreciate it.
So glad not to be the only one who resorts to the dictionary every time "epistomology" comes up!
Erik, very well written. the power of the diverse left may count on people like you who are open to thinking independently and with civil discourse in mind. I appreciate your opinion and it gives me hope. Burt
Pretty brilliant.
The Drama of the Gifted Child~~~ what a book. The beginning for me to find a way to heal. So much primogeniture and hierarchy in my family of origin. The hierarchy was a boon to those high in the hierarchy and kryptonite for me. If the hierarchy works for you, why would you question it? Still weeping over Vietnam, how many people felt alienated and left my friendship when I started protesting. MacNamara's too little, too late, admission. "And it's one, two, three, what are we fighting for...don't ask me cuz I don't give a damn. Next stop is Vietnam." And still.... it's the destruction of Mother Nature at such a rapid clip that keeps me weeping and heartbroken.