How many heartless bastards does it take to screw up a country?
I’m not going to promise that this is the last column I ever write about the shortcomings of Dat Guy. There is an overwhelming wealth of material, refreshed daily from the source, as Hair Twitler sits on his Golden Commode every morning and lets his miniscule thumbs do the talking. However, to daily respond to these inherent, incessant outrages is to get lost in the orange coils of what passes for a mind in Dis Guy.
But we need to understand him, first, from the level of that psyche, so that we can indeed separate the important from the immature. He is a physical coward; any courage is skin-deep. We all saw the look on his face those few times during the campaign where the Secret Service had to approach the podium. His first instinct was flight, not fight.
Connected to this, he is a germophobe. Even while running for President, he minimized hand shaking. He prefers fast food, like McDonalds, because he believes that a successful corporation’s quality control will provide the most germ-free meal.
Further connected to this, he is a bully. He is physically unable to protect himself, so he uses his wealth like a shield and a club. He revels in punching down, in beating the little guy who dared stand up to him, or just said something honest about him.
He has no taste, no sense of the sublime, no artistic inclinations, no aesthetic appreciation of art, poetry, music etc. The net monetary worth of these things is the measure of their worth to him. Net monetary worth is also equivalent to self-worth for him. It has to be: as a functional illiterate, it’s the only area in which he excels, and that only because of Daddy’s money, not his. If he had had to make it on his own, he’d have died a long time ago.
Also inherited from Daddy: a Klansman’s sense of superiority over lesser mortals, especially other races, rooted in a belief in eugenics, which provides a pseudo-scientific rationale for everything from segregation to slavery, from apartheid to genocide, simultaneously “proving” that his wealth is a mark of superior breeding.
Unsurprisingly, Dis Guy has become the poster child for Grandiose Narcissistic Personality disorder. He is so jealous of his carefully constructed Übermensch persona that every deal or contract of employment includes ironclad non-disclosure clauses. He sues anyone who questions his personal version of reality, especially his net worth.
Those dependent on him or wishing to curry his favor feed into his pathology – note the compulsory use of “Mr” in front of Dat Name or the article where his ex-butler reported that he routinely told Dat Guy his practice golf shots were going 20% farther than they actually did. Advisers reported during the campaign that the only way to approach him with a critique was to first wax rhapsodic over his personal greatness, then to introduce the detail they’d like to change as seemingly insignificant. Outright criticism is seen as hostility, no matter how well-intentioned.
Chuck Todd recently made a throwaway comment that echoed what we’ve heard several times: Dat Guy not only can’t take a joke, which inherently is a criticism, he also seems not to understand a joke or even to grok humor in any way other than as a weapon (yet another) against his perceived enemies. He never laughs, not in any sort of an honest, jolly way, and any attempts at “humor” are actually mean-spirited disparagement – what is known as “aggressive” humor.
This is no mere quirk, but a key to Dat Personality.
Psychiatric studies recognize four types of humor: affiliative, aggressive, self-enhancing and self-defeating. At various times, we make use of all four types. However, your basic personality is closely correlated with some types of humor, and not so much with others. The way you make or take a joke is, obviously, closely linked to how you view your relationship to the world of others.
For example, people who have a solid, positive view of their own self-worth rarely engage in humor injurious to others, whereas people who have an unstable, inflated or negative view of their own self-worth usually do.
Here are some traits that studies show correlate with aggressive humor: neuroticism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, detachment, and, most especially, antagonism.
People who are detached and/or antagonistic are personally cold. They do not share communal values. They do not make close friends. They are not given to expressions of warmth. They are unconcerned with how their moral decisions affect anyone outside of themselves. Without that moral compass, they lack inhibition. They are manipulative in their dealings with others. Their main concern is the protection of their own agenda, whatever they conceive that to be; therefore, they often use aggressive humor to dominate or intimidate (aka, bully).
Lyin’ Ted. Little Marco. Low-energy Jeb. Crooked Hillary.
Ha. Ha. Ha.
Coldness, detachment, manipulation, amorality, unstably inflated self-worth, neuroticism, psychopathy, disinhibition, bullying: it’s all a not-very-funny joke to, for, and about…
Dis Guy:
Psychomedy: if you laughed, get help.
Flat out truth: if you need any further evidence that this election was helped by raw racism, all you gotta do is close your eyes and picture Jeff Sessions as head of the Justice Department for the whole damn country. Jeff Session, who once claimed that he liked the Ku Klux Klan until he found out that they smoked marijuana. Which makes me need some marijuana.
KellyAnne went on Fox News this morning for her usual grooming and said …
The Juanita Jean Time Machine says … oh, really?
