”What’s the ugliest part of your body?

What’s the ugliest part of your body?

Some say your nose

Some say your toes

But I think it’s your mind…”

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I think we are witnessing, to alter a famous title, The Closing of the Mentally Ill American Mind.

I think a large majority of the country is finally actionably creeped out by the cerebral twistedness of the Republican right.

Consider John Kennedy of Louisiana, a loyal Trump man in the Senate. Consider his many hebephrenic voicings. “You make me want to throw up in my mouth,” he said to Jack Smith during a hearing. In a recent interview about the midterms, he said, “A smart man washes his hands after he urinates. A wise man doesn’t urinate on his hands. We need to stop urinating on our hands.”

No one knows what these statements mean. Jack Smith, hearing a Senator confess to him that he wanted to vomit in his own mouth, said nothing. Nor does anyone know what Kennedy’s statements about urinating on your hands means. Maybe he meant to say urinating in your mouth.

Everyone, however, knows the marks of a truly disordered and repellent mind. It’s like that famous scene in The Snake Pit when Olivia de Havilland, surrounded by madwomen saying mad things, suddenly realizes she doesn’t belong in the madhouse — that she may be troubled, but she is not insane like the people around her. “You’re getting better,” her psychiatrist tells her.

We’re getting better. We’re getting out of the snake pit.

[The class] just happened to include an elite member of the U.S. Special Armed Forces who’s taught CPR classes for years, Navy SEAL veteran Matthew Melton.

The students saved the lecturer’s life.

A HANDBOOK

The country’s run by thin-skinned narcissists, from Trump down.

Huang was quite arrogant. He had little tolerance for disagreement and almost no capacity for open discourse. When you contradicted him, even over the most trivial matter, it was like lighting a fuse. Stick to your position and soon he exploded, screaming at you for your idiocy. A harangue from Mr. Huang could last an hour or more; his executive staff appeared genuinely afraid of him.

One tubby hulk after another plunges, his hull cracking under the weight of his hubristic confidence in its strength.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Huang have a fair amount in common: the bluster, the narcissism and, I suppose, the womanizing. 

UD doesn’t care about the womanizing. If he’s abusing women, that’s something else. And if they’re using him to break laws or to perform espionage or whatever, go for it.

But you’d think geniuses like Huang would be able to detect implosive patterns in other alphas (Tiger Woods has been right out there for all of us to see) and find the self-control to stay afloat.

… and one well-known to us all in gunny America. One fresh aspect, however: The tale unfolded a few blocks down from La Kid’s place. Plus a few blocks from the White House. She texted us in real time to let us know she was safe.

Same way an old friend of ours, back in 2022, let us know she was safe after walking by a mass shooter positioned on a balcony on Upper Connecticut Avenue.

As the tabloid NY Post notes, amid a “ritzy” neighborhood’s luxury apts, fine cafes, and high-end gyms, a rich gunned-up paranoid let rip from his balcony. Then he tried to burn down the building. Then he blew his brains out with one of several unregistered firearms.

The urtext is of course 2017/Las Vegas, but that rich paranoid at a window with scads of guns produced a massive bloodbath, while this latest blast of bullets from on high seems to have killed one and injured four. The paranoid content here involved an unresolved mold problem in the paranoid’s million-dollar unit, and indeed his first target – now dead – was the building manager.

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Here’s another one. Rich paranoid in Atlanta blasting away on his balcony.

In every case, signs of madness were there to see – including strong identification with other rich gun-toting paranoids (the latest guy was much-taken with Luigi Mangione) – but no one did anything.

NOVEMBER 9TH, 2022

‘Boebert called a man born and raised in Montrose County a groomer – a term for a person who sexually abuses children. The remark, directed at Don Coram, a conservative Republican and rancher whose son happens to be gay, is just one example of Boebert’s casual yet crass cruelty.’

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She lost. Finally.

‘Our country — in the grip of a vengeful, Constitution-shredding president and his inner circle of sadistic stooges and rapacious tech allies — was becoming unrecognizable to us and to our former friends around the world…

Trump called female reporters “piggy,” “ugly” and “stupid.” Both Trump and Vance hurled bigoted insults at Abdul El-Sayed about his Muslim faith; Trump called him a “jihadist” and “Mohammed,” and Vance called him “very, very evil.” Hegseth offered a list of soldiers he doesn’t want, saying, “no fatties, no trannies.”’

‘For Republican candidates and campaigners this cycle, cruelty became almost a central campaign tactic. Many of them struggled to mount a serious policy case, and found themselves stuck with a historically unpopular president as party leader, so they fell back on the tried-and-true maneuver of beating up on the weak, hoping it would work as well as it seemed to throughout the Trump era.

“People are craving decency, especially given the cruelty that this president governs with.” (Andy Beshear)

“[The notorious campaign ad] could be an all-time backfire for Ramaswamy — and it raises the possibility that Trump and Vance will also suffer politically for rushing to defend it.” (Sarah Longwell)’

‘During his now-infamous interview with CBS News, Donald Trump admitted that he hates his foes with so much fury that he wouldn’t even forgive them in order to get into Heaven. “I do hate some of my enemies,” he said, “and I always will.” Trump’s expression of unquenchable rage has caused widespread consternation among leading Christian figures, including his supporters. Writer Rod Dreher lamented that “he hates his enemies more than he fears God.” Pastor Franklin Graham, a longtime Trump backer, indirectly asked whether Trump has repented sufficiently to avoid Hell. Another backer worried that “Trump is not a Christian.”’

Next thing you know you’ll tell us George Soros doesn’t have cloven hooves.

Caps mine.

It’s kinda on the tragicomic side. You got people who can’t act rationally, who can’t compromise, because their commitment to a particular political issue is immovable – based as it is on inerrant biblical truth. It’s like public executions, or women’s suffrage: the bible says yes on one and no on the other and that’s that. Onward, Christian soldiers.

Then there’s everybody else. Many people have no trouble with some restrictions on abortion, but because they are not religious fanatics, they are, broadly speaking, supportive of the right to choose. Americans “overwhelmingly backed pro-abortion rights ballot measures and candidates Tuesday night.” The blue wave was a powerful pro-choice wave.

The big exception was Idaho, Land of Shining White Supremacy. Get thee hence. Read down to End Notes.

Wowsa.

Hyperaffluence, and hyperinequality, generate some fascinating social pathologies in these United States. When lots of people here have tens of millions, up to billions, in personal wealth, it tends to make them arrogant to the point of sadism. Hence my term the Sado-state; hence William I. Robinson’s term, “sadistic capitalism” — both are efforts to capture the escalating cruelification of our country’s money and governing elites. Not just master sadist Donald Trump, of course, but his important allies and appointees: V. Ramaswamy, JD Vance, Stephen Miller, Jim Jordan, John N. Kennedy — all of them easily diagnosed as what Freudians would call sub-clinical paraphilic coercives.

 Perverted money viciousness goes way back – recall the pre-revolutionary French court – but our inconceivably rich country has been generating its own particular forms of this depravity. In 2014, for instance, a reporter snuck into an ultra-private dress party for the financier members of a club called Kappa Beta Phi, where, not long after the national financial collapse, the partygoers reveled in the pain many of them had caused.

[V]eteran Kappas … gorge themselves on racks of lamb, throw petits fours at the stage, and laugh uproariously [while ridiculing] the real harm [they caused] to millions of people in the form of foreclosures, wrecked 401(k)s, and a devastating unemployment crisis… [A] group that included many of the executives whose firms had collectively wrecked the global economy in 2008 and 2009 [was] laughing off the entire disaster in private, as if it were a long-forgotten lark. (One of the last skits of the night was a self-congratulatory parody of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” called “Bailout King.”) These were activities that amounted to a gigantic middle finger to Main Street.

In sadistic capitalism, the suffering and deprivation generated become a source of aesthetic pleasure, leisure and entertainment for others, says Robinson; it’s as if the very effrontery of being an ordinary person with ordinary life struggles immediately qualifies you for brutal blows. Just as importantly, the very fact of having successfully exploited the American economy to an obscene degree now elevates you to a position of sadistic overlord, like the head of Oracle, who simply bought up many houses in a development near his estate and deposited his extensive personal staff in them. Established homeowners there, unaccustomed to thinking of their community as a feudal settlement, complained, but could do nothing.

The Cruelty is the Point, Adam Serwer titles his recent book, and in titling it so, he underscores the specific rough beast whose hour has come round. Although we have Ramaswamy’s attack ad to thank for prompting a national conversation about sadism, there is so much more to be said.

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For instance:

Vance’s bet is that the US is an isolationist country with white nationalist sentiments; that it will punish foreign wars and high prices and reward racism. But what the results of the midterms show is that the US is a pluralist country with a limited appetite for public cruelty…

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It’s like… Imagine a bunch of Trumpist operatives sitting around a table and discussing this Atlantic article, whose subtitle reads

SOME MIDTERM VOTERS MAY HAVE BEEN

DRIVEN TO REPUDIATE CRUELTY.

Uh-oh! Preliminary thoughts, people?

Yeah. We’re fucked.

Why?

Well haha you know the Latin. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. If you seek our monument, look around you. Sadistic politicians inspired by sadistic Trump. Sadistic policies. It’s what we do. It’s what we are.

Can we change?

What? You mean undergo the Ludovico Technique? Do you see the lengths they take to program Alex out of the ecstasy of viciousness? For our lot, it’s orgasmically intense, hurting other people. I don’t see us changing.

Maybe find a new, kinder, leader?

All possible Trump successors are younger, more energetic, bestials.

In short, we’re fucked?

Yup.

Naught’s so foul, that on the earth doth live, as frat foul.

Maybe Bret Stephens is right. Maybe Vance is trying to blame it on the Jews.

Me, I just recalled the one group of Americans Vance has always singled out as the source of our national failures – “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” I assumed he’d blame them for the blue wave.

Maybe Vance meant to say “Jewish childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

… black Senator? Heads up, y’all! Get a load of them Ole Miss students doing monkey grunts right on camera!

Oh no wait I made a mistake. That footage was back in 2013 when about 400 Ole Miss dudes were super-pissed that a black guy got elected president. What a fuss they made! Burned his pic! Also on camera.

No, this latest one was a bunch of Ole Miss missies being racist just tuther day. Hard to keep up.