July 17, 2020
I’ve always been excited when in the theater or in real life, I heard the call, “Is there a Doctor in the house?” That call for help always makes me aware that someone in the audience has a serious medical problem and, if a real Doctor is in the audience, all will be well and the person in trouble will get immediate, professional help. However, during the past three and a half years of living in a totally mentally sick country, under the control of a seriously mentally defective President and an equally mentally deficient Republican led Senate, I’ve never heard that call –until just recently. And then, it wasn’t the call of the theater manager or any person in the audience (or electorate), it was the Doctor herself who proclaimed her presence and offered the evidence that we are being led by a very mentally sick individual, our ‘wonderful’ (self-proclaimed) President, Donald J. Trump. That ‘Doctor’ is none other than the niece of our President, Doctor of Clinical Psychology, Mary L. Trump! Her book titled: Too Much and Never Enough is subtitled: How my Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. That title seems like a teaser but the sub title is enough to give any citizen of the United States of America goosebumps!
You can be pretty close to sure that something is seriously wrong when a member of a socially well-positioned family writes a book declaring and defining a key member of that family as mentally ill and a danger to our world’s society. This is especially disconcerting when that family is now considered our ‘first’ family and the mentally sick person is now the President of the United States of America! This isn’t the stuff of weekday afternoon soap opera! And, most important of all, is that the ‘Doctor’ is a medical school (Adelphi University, Garden City, New York) certified, Clinical Psychologist! I, personally, found it more interesting that Mary L. Trump received her undergraduate degree in English Literature from Columbia University (no small change refuge for the mentally impaired!) where her graduate thesis in English Literature was a psychological diagnosis of the mentally dysfunctional, and fictional, Compson family, as described in William Faulkner’s book, The Sound and the Fury. I have been a Faulkner enthusiast since my college days at St. Louis University where my best friend (and who would be my ‘Best Man’ when I married) Vernon T. (Ted) Hornbeck, was writing his doctoral thesis on Faulkner and I had to read almost everything Faulkner had written just to be conversant with my friend Ted. If she could psychologically diagnose a ‘Faulkner’ family, diagnosing a member of the Trump family would be ‘a piece of cake’—in my book! (Note: if you doubt my logic, just try to read Wm. F’s book The Sound and the Fury.)
I have previously written too many words in this blog series describing what I perceived as serious personality disorders of our ‘wonderful’, ‘really smart’ (his words, not mine) President, Donald J. Trump to want to, or need to, rehash them again. However, what I have been able to read in the bits and pieces of Mary Trump’s book, as quoted in various periodicals, has given me a few new insights into Donald’s condition. Simply put, he grew up in a love-less home environment in which his father’s basic religion was hatred of ‘others’ (including his children, other than Donald), and his mother was physically and emotionally a non-presence —due to physical problems experienced in and immediately after her last child, Donald’s, birth. His father’s only interest was ‘money’ and ‘self’. As the saying goes, “Like father, like son!” Now that we have ‘Donald explained’, I’m anxiously awaiting some Doctor of Political Psychology to write a book explaining just how almost half of our electorate, and the majority of our electoral college, wanted a mentally defective person to be our President. Historians are going to have a field day explaining this issue.
I haven’t watched or listened to a ‘Rachael Maddow’ show in years but I was determined to stay awake for her program last (Thursday) evening because I had read somewhere that her entire hour long ‘news analysis’ was going to be an interview with Mary L. Trump, discussing her ‘tell all’ book about the dysfunctional Trump family. Sorry, wrong number. Rachael spent what seemed like the first half hour being ‘wonderful Rachael’, and I almost fell asleep waiting for her to allow Mary to say anything. Poor (correction, now ‘rich’) Mary looked like a ‘deer, frozen in the headlights’ for the entire broadcast. If she smiled once I must have fallen asleep when she did it. Rachael, never got around to asking Mary to explain how Donald’s psychological disorders qualified him to warrant the title of The Most Dangerous Man in America as the sub title of her book claimed. Regardless, all I really learned from my hour-long effort to stay awake and learn something is that I don’t have to watch a ‘Rachael Maddow’ broadcast ever again.
So, here we are, less than two months away from the Dem’s and Repub’s planned National Conventions and we have; a certifiably diagnosed, mentally dysfunctional, President, a totally non-functional Republican controlled Senate, a totally corrupt Attorney General, and an electorate so seemingly unconcerned by the entire political scene that it only wants Disney Land, the bars, the restaurants, and the Strip Clubs to re-open, without face masks required, so we can get to the college and professional football seasons to start, and ‘life as we want it to be’ will go on again. That’s a big ‘as if’ the Covid 19 virus never really happened , much less is still really happening! We have a government and an electorate in total denial! God bless America!
Hubris says everything will be OK –as long as the alfalfa supply doesn’t run out. Horse sense wins again. No riding this evening, the monsoon season is here and every evening is a thunder and lightning event. So—–
Adios Amigos –and stay safe. Until next week,
Lou
Copyright, July 17, 2020, Louis J. Christen