Trump – Andy White Blog

Phoenix Aflame.

Love him or hate him the world is glued to Trump’s Phoenix mega church play date with his worshippers. But will this slow train wreck of a Presidency finally burst into flames in Phoenix? It seems rather likely. Somehow the intersection of plague, collective denial, magical immunity fantasies and an age old need for the dying king to sacrifice his finest to the Gods in order to prolong waning power is all too tempting for Fate to leave alone.

The part of Trump who would be king is bound by convention to propitiate the Gods with the lives of his nearest and dearest. It’s a tradition. The victims are either individually chosen, mostly by being foolish enough to get within reach, or they are culled collectively, as in the Aztec Flower Wars, whose sole purpose was the capture and sacrifice of fine specimens to please the divine powers behind the throne. Deprived of the convenience of war, this need for sacrificial victims most find some other expression.

Trump is a deeply religious man but not in the way you might normally think. His is more an identification with God, conferred by much laying on of hands, massive collective Messiah projections, and a narcissistic personality disorder the size of a large house.

It may seem entirely counter-intuitive to host an indoor chanting contest during the peak of air-borne plague, especially given his trajectory after Tulsa. It’s easy to forget that we are not dealing with rational forces here and would do well to remind ourselves that Covid does more than give an opportunity to flaunt your omnipotence. Whether this is on account of being bathed in the blood of Christ or having cleverly invented some high-tech ionization gizmo, guaranteed to kill 99.9% of corona virus or your money back, er, unless you signed a waiver, or unless you were just the unlucky statistic. It also means that you might die a martyr for your cause, which does great things for your adrenal and cortisol responses, bringing you closer to God in ways unspecified by the Good Book.

In his conquest of Central America, Cortez came across captives of the Flower wars, being kept plump for some festive occasion, and set them free. They were most put out and demanded to be sacrificed… Extreme Stockholm Syndrome? Maybe. Yet examples of martyrs offering themselves up for sacrifice abound through different times and cultures.

Perhaps part of the problem is that if life’s rewards are all deferred to some future idyll it might make folk all the keener to embrace it, not to mention the Brownie points in store for those laying down their lives for the Cause, ‘Greater love hath no man, than he who would drown in his own phlegm for his white picket fence and our way of life.’

So sometimes the excoriating ego death of genuine religious experience is acted out in an all too literal fashion, permitting you a pimped eulogy at your funeral without ever having had to change and grow.

The Aztecs also had a way you could be of service without having to be captured in battle. In the spirit of being willing to die for the economy a volunteer would be dressed up like the god Tezcatlipoca. His skin would be painted and he would wear a flower crown, a seashell breastplate, and lots of jewelry.

The man would be given four beautiful wives to do with as he pleased. He was only asked to walk through the town playing a flute and smelling flowers so that the people could honor him.

When 12 months had passed, he would walk up the stairs of a great pyramid, breaking his flutes as he climbed to the top. As an adoring crowd watched, a priest would help him lie down on a long altar made of stone. Then they’d rip his heart out of his body.

Afterward, a new Tezcatlipoca would step forward and start all over again.

We think we are so different from the Aztecs and so lose sight of the way in which the deep running currents of the collective psyche operate. What should frighten us is not that Trump is stupid or uneducated but that he operates from this archetypal layer of the psyche without the trivial garnish of ego functioning, one which might mediate the Old Testament quality of either sacred immunity or risking oneself for the sake of the glorious leader so that the path way to the Gods may be kept open.

It’s not even that he doesn’t care, he needs the martyrs and the martyrs need him. They are all having a religious experience. Unfortunately, it is at the level of ‘participation-mystique’, which is all about undifferentiated mergement, a state of being utterly un-phased by the body count. The gods must be propitiated.

The pundits criticize Trump for his selfishness. Bolton claims he makes all his decisions on the basis of personal interest. More frightening still is the thought that the wish to be above the law leaves a man at the mercy of unconscious processes wherein everyone’s rights and safety are threatened. His greed is the least of our worries. For the man who would be king, everyone else is sacrificial stock. Of course testing must be stopped. People cling to their leader in times of crisis… even if twas he that caused it.. No war time President has ever been deposed….

Giving the Devil his Due.

In the wildly phantasmagoric, ‘Essene Gospel of Peace’, an alchemical coagulatio of Gnostic wisdom and late neolithic enema rituals [great if you are handy with a calabash], there comes a bucolic moment when the Master berates his followers for going on at such great length about their suffering and how much they are tormented by Satan..

‘Satan torments you thus because you have already fasted many days and you do not pay to him his tribute. You do not feed him. You torment him with hunger.’

Psychologically,

‘You are over-identified with being good. You therefor deny, split off and project your shadow and pay for this with a good solid neurosis. The way out of this mess is by repairing the relationship with this disavowed self.’

Nietzsche echoes this a few centuries later, with added flowery bits, when he made the observation in ‘Birth of Tragedy’, that the brothers Apollo and Dionysus have become estranged from one another in our culture. We have come to worship at the altar of only one of them with our sunny dispositions and political correctness and have driven the invaluable other underground, causing a great rent in the collective psyche..

‘Every culture that has lost myth has lost, by the same token, its natural healthy creativity. Only a horizon ringed about with myths can unify a culture, can save the Apollonian dream from indiscriminate rambling. The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, ubiquitous but unnoticed, presiding over the growth of the child’s mind.” F. Nietzsche

Any over-identification with a single story/storey, mono-anything, is going to have the effect of enervating the psyche, preventing development and generating schizoid, [indiscriminate rambling] characteristics in the personality. You begin to become unhinged and increasingly reliant on denial and projection to stay behind the picket fence of your preferred ism. Hence much of the paranoia of our age. Monochrome is a little threatened by red, yellow and blue, which it secretly wants to become.

Uncomplicated belief systems, produce split realities. If you won’t be complicated you will develop a complex instead, one that requires carefully choreographed conflicts in order to stay afloat. The cut and dried belief system in which all the questions are answered and there is no internal dissent is… well, cut and dried. It is severed from its roots with all the moisture sucked out of it. The cutting and the drying divides the self against itself, desiccates life, creating schizoid separation from self and world. In lieu of our daemonic guardians standing watch over us, they are suddenly co-opted into the kind of self care necessary to split realities. Preserving ‘our way of life’ becomes a divine mandate.

‘The transpersonal is placed in the service of defense’. D. Kalsched.

Instead of the transcendent function being used to create transitional space between self and other, the opposite happens. The psyche fractures to accommodate its denied multiplicity whilst the transcendent function is bused in to enforce social distancing and prevent the psyche from conferring with itself. I.e. reflecting. It becomes a sacred duty to hive oneself off from what is going on.

“The schizoid experience is split in two main ways: in the first place, there is a rent in his relation with his world and, in the second, there is a disruption of his relation with himself. Such a person is not able to experience himself ‘together with’ others or ‘at home in’ the world.” R.D. Laing.

We pay dearly for any belief in our own exclusive rightness, in ‘first and only’. Despite convictions of privilege, rectitude and self-congratulation, the price is internal division and disconnection from others which is why spending any time with a true believer will always leave your head spinning.

At the schizoid end of narcissism the problem is not simply lack of empathy for others, but more an actual denial of others. Others become statistics and collateral damage. Bad numbers. I’m put in mind of a patient who left, never to return, with the words, ‘I just can’t see you as a human being’.

”To feel potential and share with a beloved other is what the schizoid cannot do because their nascent longings were traumatically disappointed as children.’ Kalsched

Its a bit like saying that the way we collectively address when-Mother-is-missing, is to split off anxiety and bolster sudden fragility with life giving convictions and certitudes, whilst having to dumb down life’s complexities and infinite variety. This then drives the devil in us crazy… and vengeful, wanting his pound of flesh for the ongoing delusion that you are captain of your ship, and that there are no raptors aboard. Or at least if there are raptors, then its quite safe. And if its not safe then its not my responsibility. I wasn’t there. I don’t know nuffing about any raptors. I never met them.

The scary thing about Trump is that he really is a man of the people. Its not just that a hundred million people think this clearly ungodly man is blessed by Jesus. Its that he really does epitomize many of the values we all hold, including the right not to have to grow into long pants or go through life with any critical reflection.

‘‘Something in man is profoundly disinclined to give up his
beginnings, and something else believes it has long since got beyond all
that.” C G Jung CW9.

What else should we expect of a collective which has lost its mother?

The collective loss of the divine feminine produces a cultural response no different to that of an individual toddler who is suddenly forced by neglect or bereavement to adopt a position of absolute certainty in life in order to compensate for chaotic feelings of loss. All Mono’s are likewise full of full of passionate intensity and always know what’s going on. The widespread belief that we somehow cannot help but evolve seems to be undercut by the fact that whatever ism we belong to, it shares with all the others the same blinkered prejudice of an exclusive and ‘right’ way of looking at things consistent with schizoid defense structures.

Mr Trump’s recent assertion that intravenous bleach, a known suicide method, might be the miracle cure for Coronavirus, seems to demonstrate the addling effect, the split realities and the psychic enervation which results from first and only, from failing to give the Devil his due.

The Secret Masochist.

An arrogant young man gets on a train and sits opposite a little old lady. He begins to regal the carriage with his opinions, takes up everyone’s personal space, endless showing off. He gets off at the next stop but as the doors close the old lady opens a window and shouts out, ‘you left something behind!”. By now he’s running next to the carriage with his arms out, perplexity written across his face. ‘what is it, what did I leave?”

” A very poor impression…” she retorts, just as he runs out of platform.

There is really no such thing as a sadist or a masochist. Search and you can’t find one. Sado-masochism is a polarized continuum, like manic-depression, a kind of sliding between extreme states in order to know who you are, necessitated by narcissistic fragility and emptiness.

Narcissists tend to hide their unconscious masochism behind a front of cruel superiority. Sometimes this masochism has covert expression. Like toadying to Russians, or the ‘look what they done to us’ behind MAGA. Sometimes its done inadvertently by creating the conditions for perpetual investigation; and sometimes it just pops right out like the compulsive laying claim to government shut down. ‘I will take the blame, give me the mantle.”

The Sado-masochistic enactment unfolding on Pennsylvania avenue seems to be getting to the short strokes. Aided by the prophylactic restraint of seventeen strapping investigations…

Donald is finally going to cum.

Former US federal prosecutor Paul Butler recently described Trump as being ‘double teamed’ by the Mueller probe and the SDNY investigations. This image, now indelibly lodged in imagination, brought not a single blush to the cheeks of assembled MSNBC pundits whose blithe acceptance of such a metaphor suggests something a lot stranger than Russian collusion or Fraud is going on in the White House…

the unfolding sado-masochistic component of Narcissism.

Trump has the trade mark ‘big ego’ of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. The irony is it’s lack of a healthy ego that’s the problem. The ego is full of gaps. There are sections of it you can drive sheep through. Its like having a claim that’s only marked off by corner posts, one of which has been eaten by a bear.

One solution is to identify with the bear. Your personal space is immediately cubed. Nothing can take you down. Bear is untroubled by life’s contradictions. Berries and Elk are all the same. You can just shamble on regardless.

Unfortunately, you might then need the world’s greatest ever shafting to be restored to more appropriately human proportions, a process that initially unfolds as the sado-masochistic tryst of Me and Not-me, the hell of Other People, the horror of realizing you are not the only one in the room.

You’d hope such developmental needs get resolved with incremental frustration of the toddler concerned. If not, the need for containment will find a more problematic expression. Whilst it may be colorful there is a small problem with this arrangement. Someone always has to get shamed.

Even when you are being praised.

Trump couldn’t help himself on his recent visit to troops in Iraq. The only way he could find to honor their service was, ‘you are no longer the suckers of the world.’ You try to be happy about that but somehow can’t quite summon the strength.

Words matter because they create consciousness. Abracadabra. That which I speak, becomes. If you ask an eight year old on Christmas Eve if they still believe in Santa you are sadistically calling her world into doubt.

If you lack the basic internal cohesion required not to blow a Christmas media event for kids by casting aspersions on the existence of the main event, then the sadism is not just gratuitous, it states your values. Its like wearing a ‘blame it on the badger’ t-shirt to an animal rights meet.

Such behavior would not be tolerated round the household dinner table let alone by the leader of the free world and the reason is that kids and impressionable folk take their example from you, Donny.

In fact the bench mark of Democracy is not just that your job is the highest in the land but that every kid that ever there was secretly aspires to be you, to have power and authority..

and to use it for good..

but how the fuck can they when every example they are given entails someone being screwed over? I pummel the Other into the ground therefor I am. WTF?

What on earth must you be compensating for to want to put kids in cages? What ghosts must haunt you to justify it with the paranoid delusion that they ‘harbor’ disease? Not that some are sick and need your help but that they sneak in armed with it, all sheltered and weaponized.

When an innocent child, fleeing for his life from situations others cannot even acknowledge, let alone survive, is then so failed by the hero he hoped would save him that he dies from sadistic neglect, you send a message. It is not a message of deterrence. Numbers are up. But it is a message of How-to-Be, delivered into the living rooms of every family in the Nation and around the world.

And finally, mounted on top of the heinous betrayal of that poor boy’s faith, a faith he held for hundreds of miles of weary trudging towards the fabled arms of safety, is the cowardly insinuation from Nielsen’s report making this not only his own fault but on account of his malign ‘harbouring’, as though he was some kind of gook whose evil plan backfired.

as though their not giving a shit constituted counterintelligence.

When a person in high office stoops to such gaslighting the moral being created is way beyond giving permission to hold office without embodying it in any way shape or form. It’s not simply the absence of something, a lack of care, or the failure of empathy.

Nor should we limit ourselves to Adam Serwer’s excellent u-tube blog that cruelty is something Trump has elevated to political virtue.

This boy’s death sets the bar of what it means to be human at a new low. Suddenly, all our lives are cheaper; contaminated, not by diseased migrants but by the malignant use of an Office to which the Nation looks for guidance, finding at bottom only the secret puerile need to be sent to the naughty corner so that he can get through another day without medication.

Trumpty Dumpty.

Trumpty Dumpty bet on his wall,

Trumpty Dumpty had a great fall,

All of his Base and all Putin’s men,

Couldn’t put Trumpty together again!

Did you ever wonder about the meaning of Humpty Dumpty? A mere cautionary tale for naughty children? I think not…

The nursery rhyme has been associated with Richard 111’s defeat at Bosworth. And with the execution of Charles 1. But the best candidate for any historical origin has to be Charles the V1 of France whose love/hate relationship with his brother Louis resulted in strange behaviour for the normally outdoorsy king. After a number of setbacks he retired to a gloomy room where he remained immobile for hours under the delusional conviction that he was made of glass and might break if moved about….

The glass delusion then became rather fashionable and for the next two hundred years it slowly gained popularity, becoming more and more common until the 1600s,

”when it turned into a genuine cultural phenomenon.”E. Inglis-Arkell.

Can there really be fads in madness? Was the glass delusion a way of faithful if misguided subjects identifying with their leader to the point of sharing his affliction? Or were both king and commoner suffering from some dark zeitgeist of the times?

The glass delusion is much less popular than it was. I have only come across a single instance in thirty years of practice, a man who could not look at me for fear of his malady’s contagion and kept his gaze safely fixed upon the wall for as long as he had to share space with anyone getting so dangerously close..

But even though modernity may not be able to boast of the auntie in the attic who cannot be moved for fear of terminal splintering, you still find more people seeking therapeutic help than you might think whose experience harks back to the fragile vulnerability of Charles V1, who fear being ‘seen through’ and shattered as a result, who feel unable to act for fear of breaking their shell thin self construct.

Without the specific delusion of being actually made of glass, a person is no longer schizophrenic but might still be dissociated to the point of warranting a diagnosis of Multiple Personality Disorder or Schizo-affective Disorder, both of which are rather confusing terms because what the MPD really needs is loads more different aspects of himself and for them to hang out together, instead of being bounced between one limiting corner of his psyche at a time, wherein he can only have restricted engagement with self and others.

It’s like having most of the village chased off into the jungle and those that remain alternately claiming to be the sole survivor.

Like wise the term ‘schizo-affective’ might lead you to assume loads of emoting but actually denotes the fragility of a very narrow feeling range, like trying to play the piano with most of the keys out of action which means banging out a few chords over and over to make up for loss of nuance and variation….

In modern literature Lewis Carroll’s looking glass fantasy features Humpty…

” as a rather uppity egg who uses words however he wishes to, without worrying that nobody else will understand him. ” Interesting literature.

which is just what dissociation does. Truth is not truth.

  “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
    “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
    “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.” Alice through the Looking Glass.

It looks as though Humpty is all about power but actually it’s about making sure he doesn’t break into a thousand pieces. In order to do that, the meaning of everything becomes negotiable in the effort to stave off experience that threatens Humpty’s precarious perch.

“I know words, I have the best words. I have the best, but there is no better word than stupid.” Donald J Trump.

An egg can symbolize the wholeness of inner unity, but it also represents having all your eggs in one basket, that being-on-the-edge-of-disaster and flying by the seat of your pants which constitutes having just a very few timeworn if familiar faces to show an infinitely more complex and demanding world.

Such restricted perspectives are invariably the fate of Kings, Princes and Special Children who have their hands on the nation’s tiller or feel they ought to because they are compelled to identify with archetypal energies that exclude the Principle of Relatedness. King Ludwig of Bavaria referred to his mother as ‘the widow of my late predecessor’. And that was when he was in a good mood. Otherwise she was referred to as, ‘the Colonel of the 3rd Artillery Regiment.’

If mother is a regiment what does that make baby?

If women have to identify with their masculinity to keep abreast of men then their mothering function will collectively suffer. The mother/infant bond will be invariably undermined where the divine feminine has been driven out or degraded. Mother’s anxiety at being so under-represented has to be parceled off and lived out by the child instead, who must now forgo her own feelings about what is happening into the bargain.

Under such circumstances what is baby to do?

The horror of what is unfolding has to be projected. Mother cannot be the recipient because it is from her that this toxic dilemma has come. So the child hives off the trauma into the future where it can be kept at arms length. True, the child is left with any number of shattering fears about what the future holds, but at least ‘now’ is safe.

”Catastrophic expectation is a memory.” D. Winnicott.

The glass delusion’s fears of being broken can still be warded off with magical protective clothing or by staying super still, or having expensive lawyers, giving the idea that the prospect of shattering can be omnipotently avoided when in fact it has already occurred.

Unfortunately, the Humpty gambit has small print. You may not have to experience your fragility till tomorrow but the bow wave of it will produce paranoia today. Paranoia is the implicit recognition that the resources you have to manage current situations are somehow incomplete and that you can not function optimally in your environment. So it seems as if the world is full of frustrating forces trying to drag you down with only a brittle shell to prevent you getting scrambled.

If such dilemmas remained the preserve of weird historical figures it would not be so scary. The story of Charles V1 and his long legacy of fellow glass citizens suggests that such things not only tumble through generations. They are contagious and infect entire populations.

From the recent best seller, ‘The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,”…

”His madness is catching, too. From the trauma people have experienced under the Trump administration to the cult-like characteristics of his followers, he has created unprecedented mental health consequences across our nation and beyond. It’s not all in our heads. It’s in his…” Bandy Lee

Yes, and….

when the fall finally happens, dancing till dawn in the streets will need to be leavened with the sobering thought that Trump is more than a man who thought he was above the law. He symbolizes the entitlement, the belligerence and the dissocciated fragility of Western superiority itself. After he is gone, we will still have to address the narcissistic shadow of the culture that spawned him within the inner recesses of our own souls.

The Emperor’s New Clothes.

What if the Emperor had been cunning enough to perceive some advantage to himself in the wiley tailors’ ruse to gain a whole bunch of gold and silk thread for nothing? What if, for his own purposes, he went along with the idea that failing to see the garments supposedly woven by them meant incompetence of office? And if so, what could that possibly be?

Rachel Maddow’s perceptive response to the Singapore summit was the question, ‘What was it for?’. The agreement between Trump and Kim contained no tangible gains for the US, not even a working definition of the term, ‘denuclearization’, much needed given that vocal promises from the North Koreans since the early 90’s have been somewhat compromised by dropping out of the non-proliferation treaty and making lots of bombs.

It looks as though Kim had it all his way. He gets to be a legitimate businessman and gets the Americans off his back for the forseeable future. Trump critics are keen to point out what an insubstantial deal this has turned out to be and are additionally shocked at the un-negotiated and impromptu gesture of cancelling planned war games for August, announced without consultation with either the South Koreans or even his own military commanders.

Can you imagine being the ranking officer concerned and receiving news about the cancellation of your entire operation from the TV? Delivered as a freebie after the agreement has already been signed.. Why would he do that? Because he liked Kim so much he wanted to give him a party favour bag after the show was over?

Having demanded complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization before any concessions are given to North Korea so loudly it even has its own acronym, CVID, Trump cancels annual wargames that have been sacrosanct in the American military heart for three generations. For nothing.

What gives?

Rachel goes on to surmise perhaps Donald is giving a gift, not to Kim but to the Chinese and Russians who have long wanted an end to the presence of American military hard ware on their front doorstep and would prefer it if they went home.

The treachery of collusion aside, commentators are quick to attack Trump’s delusional deal making, citing his bankruptcies and failed business ventures as corroboration,

‘Trump is too stupid to know that he has been played. ‘https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btAgFtaW4Wc

But they forget that the goal of Narcissism is not wealth or success or toadying, but the treading of a thin line between abandonment and engulfment. Early scarcity of resources in a maternal environment that alternately smothers and rejects means that way before money or public approbation, Narcissism wants to shore up vulnerability and create the groundwork for future bouts of bad behaviour by making sure there are patsies onto which his secretly precarious world can be foisted..

Trump’s freebie would seem to chime perfectly with the equally unscripted insistence that Russia be admitted into the G7 and it looks like it’s for the same reason, that he is doing Putin’s bidding. But this is predicated on the assumption that Trump is just a bumbling fool doing his best to prevent incriminating material from sousing the public domain, pee tapes being the least of his worries.

What if there was some method to his madness? Are there more common denominators to these recent events than sucking Vladimir’s dick? The fabled book of warfare, The Book of Five Rings, warns that when you are under attack the most fatal flaw is to underestimate the enemy.

What if our desire to mock and vilify in defense of instinctive fears momentarily masked over some crucial clue, some vital piece of understanding that ties up Trump’s behaviour in a way other than that of simply heeding his masters voice?

Pundits wax lyrical about how Trump has given Kim this international platform to rub shoulders with the leader of the free world with nothing substantial to show for it beyond the promise of thinking about being good. But maybe he has some private agenda, something that may be good for him even if its not good for the country. What could it be?

My father always insisted that children’s pudding bowls remain firmly on the table. You weren’t even allowed to steady the rim while you spooned what you could in silence, made all the easier for being refused the right to speak at table. Meantime the bloated sack of shit would lean back in his chair, also forbidden to children and eat his pudding with bowl balanced on his vast gut, strawberry jelly liberally sprinkled with sugar, another privilege of parenthood.

At the time it was enough to hate him. Later, in the spirit of needing to know the enemy, I had to ask what made him tick without too much frothing at the mouth so that I could become coherent in my own purpose. There is no strategy without knowing what truly motivates the psychopath who is trying to pluck you one feather at a time.

The first mistake is to assume he is stupid even though the evidence seems to be to the contrary. He seemed to delight in playing the fool, almost as if it were camouflage for some more sinister intent. The old man bought a patch of land, drew up plans for a factory with his own tiny hands on proper blueprint paper, built it himself with homemade bricks, installed plumbing, lights and workbenches but it never made anything and sat empty till bank threats forced a sale. He didn’t care. The whole town mocked his business failings but he remained implacable because his true purpose was not wealth or power or even the small joy of successfully marketing a good idea.

Who builds a factory without first deciding what it is for? Somebody with an ulterior purpose greater than money laundering or tax evasion, somebody for whom financial loss is actually capital invested in the meta project of ‘Fuck you’, one that says, ‘I want nothing more than to show you my brilliance, brilliance which defines you as shit and makes it my duty to demean.’

Tyrants have one weakness. They also, secretly, want to be vassals. Sadism and masochism go together. They come on the same plate. After all what is the bragaddocious for if not to mask over feelings of inferiority? In order to keep this from consciousness big compensatory gestures are not enough. An underclass has to be created to carry the projections adequately.

‘If there were no Jews we would have to invent them.’ Goebbles.

When Trump gives a massive un-negotiated concession to Kim in the form of USFK troop withdrawl from the world’s hottest border, he’s as happy for it to look like the impulsive antics of a buffoon to his detractors as he is for it to seem like a peace deal to his supporters. Either way, he gets to make a gesture of ‘noblesse oblige’, a unilateral utterance of sovereignty, the preserve and stamp of kings and emperor’s.

When he announces that Russia should be admitted back into the G7, this is not just an offensive diplomatic gaff, it too is the language of kingship, a sweeping decree whose content is actually secondary to the statement of divine right implicit to it.

This is about more than arrogance, greed or toadying to the Russians. He’s saying, ‘the arbitrary annexation of anyone is okay depending on who you are’, and in the process creates entire swathes of the planet that are now home to second class citizens without rights or recourse to justice.

The idea of pardoning himself does more than confess criminality by implication, which is where most criticism seems to stop. It does more than horrify sensibilities that no-one is above the law. It sets the precedent that, by the same token, no one else has recourse to the law. It does not just give him super powers, it takes away the protection from tyranny enjoyed by everyone else.

For what is a king without a dungeon?

So Kim looks like a winner and Trump is happy for you to think that. But he wins too, though not in a way you might think or want to consider. Rubbing shoulders with a man who executes his people for the high crimes of watching movies and listening to the radio does a great deal more than legitimize the human rights abuses of a vicious regime half a world away. It creates a new low for his own potentiality. It normalizes the violent repression of a new underclass within his own borders, crucial to the maintenance of that thin line between abandonment and engulfment so crucial to the narcissistic personality disorder.

Hanging out with Kim and praising him beyond the requirements of international diplomacy makes public execution by anti aircraft guns a new bench mark of normal, something that is now this side of the horizon. Citizens can be loved and crushed without contradiction.

When the Emperor swans out into the street without a stitch he does so in remembrance of the fact that his is the one office in the land that does not include competence in its job description, so it doesn’t matter whether he sees the clothes made for him by the corrupt tailors or not. Kings and emperors are not ensconced by fitness to rule, but by underlings – one group of which are prepared to deny reality in the process of subjugating another on the basis that they are ‘enemies’.

‘The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.” A. Huxley.

So parading naked is worth a bit of a breeze about your privates if it serves to reveal the devotions of your subjects, establish new norms of conduct by a whole class of people who can deny reality, for what better way to crush people than to turn them into slaves without them even realizing it, who condemn the evidence of their own eyes as personal failing and unworthiness?

“They want to believe, and would only hate the argumentative expert who tried to injure the object of their faith.” Grete De Francesco “The Power of the Charlatan.”

.. all of which means that the child who shouts out, ‘the Emperor is naked!’ does not need to be dealt with…. The crowd, already given over to baser instincts and the opportunity to be one with the glorious leader’s command, will take care of him all by themselves.

Of Cockerels and Presidents.

My ex’s response to my request for a divorce was to buy a large white cockerel which announced every coming dawn at 4am and attacked anyone who came into the yard. ‘Pat’ was thirty pounds of malevolent fury. Our four year old got gashed across his shoulder in short order and any venturing out of the backdoor now required the vigilance of counter-insurgency training to remain unbloodied.

I asked her to get rid of her pet for the sake of our son. Despite the fact that a boy in the next village had just lost an eye in a similar situation she refused, so I had to take matters into my own hands.

Pat was afraid of nothing. He had two inch spurs and the momentum of a pro footballer. Get within forty feet of him and he would come straight at you, narrowing all options to fight or flight. But the day I made a firm decision to reclaim the yard and came out the backdoor with my air rifle, he took one look and fled. He knew his time was up.

How?

Chickens are smarter than you think but there was no way this particular specimen could have known what a rifle was or that he was my intended target. What I had slung casually over a shoulder could just as easily have been a rake or a plank of wood. Yet as soon as he saw me that day, his last, he fled to the bottom of the garden faster than he’d ever run, neck craned forward and wings a flapping.

He knew.

Cause and effect are not so neatly squared away as we might like to think. What you know is invariably more than you have ever been exposed to or taught in school.

Such events cannot be explained scientifically. They seem to occur without reference to time and space, and though we cannot grasp the dynamics involved anymore than you can truly understand the concept of quantum super-positions, they happen anyway and compel us to consider that there is more in the mix than we’d like to admit.

When you see someone engaged in profoundly self destructive acts it looks just crazy from the outside, but that is because you are not in possession of all the facts and haven’t considered the possibility of an x in the equation without which events just don’t seem to make sense.

A man goes for a job interview. He really wants the position, needs the money and feels excited about his new prospects but inexplicably gets high right before the meeting and fluffs the whole thing. It doesn’t make sense, until you take up the context and consider the mischief that can be made by an autonomous complex split off from consciousness, demanding he remain infantile and dependent.

Sometimes what trips us up in our intentions is not just the regressive pathology of childhood resurfacing to keep us on an even keel, the devil that you know being safer than the angel you do not, but precisely what is best and most noble about us.

Jung comments that ”the experience of the Self is always a blow to the ego.” The reason for this is that the ego is deposed from its place of primacy in the psyche in the process of realizing its context. It had formerly assumed itself to be at the centre of things with the feeling that the totality of the psyche is a ‘nothing but’ derived from consciousness but then finds itself a mere satellite of something superordinate that will not be reduced to inconvenient material that has simply been repressed.

The Self was there first and it was out of this primordial sea that the land mass of ego emerges. This greater, sentient, encompassing awareness, wants to be realized, wants incarnation, expression, daylight. And if it doesn’t get it… it will make trouble for you.

While the ego continues in its struggles to establish agenda and hegemony, the Self thwarts its intentions past a certain point. Ego satisfaction is not the goal of life. The caterpillar has yet to fulfill itself and must give up its delicious leaves for something that looks like death if meaningful life is to continue. In the process it might well feel as though the Universe is working against you and not a little paranoia can be generated along the way. After all, something unknown is doing I don’t know what.

‘We had thought it was the outer event that had happened to us but now, watching this director’s movement, we see that it is we who happened to our selves.” Frances Wickes. p134 The Inner World of Choice.

This ‘happening to ourselves” is the process of individuation, which the ego might well experience as an attack insofar as it is compelled to acknowledge its source and get off its high horse yet without it, without submitting to the will of the Self, no amount of fulfilling ego’s ambition ever feeds us for more than a moment. Indeed, it can send us spiraling into despair.

Transformation is achieved not by incremental additions to an ever expanding ego but by a humble acknowledgment of its limited powers in respect of an inner principle which affords life meaning in direct proportion to our reliance upon it.

”With this transformation, humiliation becomes humility, guilt is replaced by a responsible attitude towards one’s own ignorance [and] the certainty of one’s own rightness gives way to vulnerability.” ibid

And so, whilst we might wonder at the strange, self-destructive antics of the world’s most powerful man and puzzle over behavior that seems to invite catastrophic sanction, impeachment, or worse..his enactments have significance above and beyond the apparent stupidity of appointing incompetent lawyers which incriminate him at every turn, beyond the foolishness of policies that inflame public opinion, beyond ill advised appointments whose corruption must splash back on his own shoes and even beyond the childlike wish to be brought to book by any adults left in the room. His own soul wants him to fail so that he can grow and to that end compels him to make all kinds of counter-intuitive gestures unconsciously designed to invite reflection and perspective., the kind that might even need a long quiet jail term to integrate.

In our own, much smaller, humdrum lives, we do the same and inadvertently invite consciousness expanding catastrophe upon ourselves with poor matches in marriage, ill considered vocations and unrealistic intentions because all these things ultimately serve to wake us up by the fall from thwarted ambition that follows.

He who persists in his folly will become wise.” W. Blake.

preferably without also becoming someone else’s dinner.

Bad Baby.

Children need attention. If they don’t get it they will create it. The badly behaved child has simply had to resort to extreme measures in order to elicit something from otherwise empty vessels.

Even dog trainers know this.

It’s the owner.

The ‘naughty child’ is then rewarded in his efforts with shaming, which, though it has a pitiful prognosis, still gives emotional impoverishment a nucleus around which to cobble some semblance of going-on-being.

The problem with this, the price to be paid, is that such a child must then continue to behave in a way that elicits shaming in order to confirm their identity and continue to shore up that poorly self construct.

The Rule of Intentionality says that things have a way of panning out as they are supposed to. If you married someone who runs you down, then they are fulfilling a sacred service and ought to be paid. If you wake up after a drinking binge full of remorse and self loathing then that’s the purpose of getting so drunk. Many a junkie is equally addicted to the identity of being failed and shameful, formed way before they ever laid hands on their poison and much more difficult to give up.

Fulfilling expectation is instinctual. The Psyche takes a bet that baby will be born into adequate environs. Neural pathways are wide open to any signal or stimulus that gives baby information about herself on the basic assumption of a good enough environment that she’s hardwired to expect.

So the child attributes parental failing to herself. The parent is full of distaste because baby is distasteful. So that’s what she has to be. And sometimes it’s so close that you can’t see it. In fact it..

”may go unnoticed for the simple reason that s/he cannot conceive of an alternative kind of relation of Self to Other.” Jean Liedloff.

The feeling of intrinsic shame cannot be readily endured and so the Psyche grabs hold of the next best thing to bonding which is to identify with mother instead. She accepts the booby prize of being special, more like sisters now, which both hammers a few rusty sheets to her ramshakle hovel and shields her from the shame that underpins it, now invisible but still an enduring structure in the Psyche. Whilst being special and praised for all kinds of other things that have little to do with you may get you through the day, the underlying need to confirm the shame is biding its time.

”Instinctive forces do not reason. They assume the immense weight of their experience of Nature’s ways that it will serve the individual to be stabilized according to his initial experience.” ibid

So even though the narcissistic character is full of vanity and bluster, full of the archetypal power of mummy, consumed with specialness, so is he compelled by yet a deeper force to end up in the gutter one way or another, to bungle life despite himself.

In my opinion this is why Mr Trump seemingly does everything to hasten his own demise. Alienating his own secret service, making enemies of people who have dirt on him. He’s mocked for doing stupid things. These stupid things have an agenda, the end game of which looks like self-destructiveness but they might actually serve to keep him out of hospital. In the meantime the mockery and vilification will do nicely.

Sometimes things don’t make sense until you include in the mix a need to be scorned and hated. The apparent goal of domination and control is actually the means to an end, to obtain that which serves internal security better than loyalty, philanthropy or crushing your enemies. Humiliation.

Who is a stinky baby!

And so while it seems that fate comes to him from the outside, from the woodwork, from people dishing enough dirt, enough stink; it has all been carefully if unconsciously orchestrated and for a while shame and specialness will share the stage in a masochistic self-immolation of First and Only.

While all this entertainment is going down the rest of us run the risk of forgetting that Mr. Trump is a symbol. He is an expression of the Collective Psyche, the natural product of a culture that denigrates Mothering and rejects the Divine Feminine. This cancer runs through all of us Chosen People. Are you not special? Do you not have a political system so superior that it is exported through the bomb bay doors of Magnanimous Benevolence killing other mothers and babies for their own good every day of the week?

or at least if there is profit in it?

Strangely the number of enemies killed by our generous instruction in Afghanistan these last couple of years is not as high as the number of our own soldiers committing suicide in the privacy of their barracks.

Not to mention a hundred people a day in America alone who die of opioid overdose and the fifty thousand others a year that find more creative ways of commiting suicide in the face of unbearable shame.

Why else does a person kill themselves if not because they can no longer hold up their head? Behind all the Western facade of technological and moral superiority lurks a syndrome whose ultimate purpose is dark implosion.

and its way bigger than Trump.

Shame is systemic in our culture. If we do not wish to be ruled by tyrants then getting rid of them is only the beginning.

If you liked this article and want to explore my books, you can type the titles ‘Abundant Delicious’ or ‘Going Mad to Stay Sane’ into the search bar for descriptions and sales.