Read Sabrina Haake's substack The Haake Take: Passivity is the enemy- dog update, it inspired me to write this. Here's an excerpt:
MAGA reminds me of chaining a dog
Hearing a dog bark all night while it’s 20ยบ F outside, I realize I feel the same way about MAGA voters as I feel about people who chain their dog(s) outside 24/7. Anyone who has ever loved a dog knows how barbaric this practice is. Neanderthalic and needlessly cruel, dog chainers and MAGA remind me that humans co-exist on a random continuum of evolution. We aren’t all plotted on the same line of the same graph at the same time; the dots veer off in all directions like electrons in an atom. Some countries and some people are stuck in the fifth century, while others show us the future. America’s choppy pas de deux with itself is a blend of forward steps, then backward, intelligent people dancing alongside morons. (Call this elitist, I don’t care, truth has to matter or what are we doing?) If Trump ever figures out how to implement his most hairbrained ideas, economically disadvantaged MAGA voters will suffer the most. A more evolved person than I am would pity them, but, like dog chainers, I consider them victims of their own cruelty and ignorance and find compassion for them nearly impossible.
My partner and I along with a friend had dinner with a new resident, a woman who grew up and and ran a ranch in a southwestern state, in the senior community where we live. It is a very progressive place but we still couldn't tell at first whether she was a Trumper. Instead of asking outright we segued into the topic and finally found out she was as anti-Trump as we are. Little did I know at the time that I'd end up blogging this morning about some of what we talked about.
Now to the dogs... she has a lovely 13 year old dog and we ended up talking about the pets we all had. Somehow the subject of people who abuse pets came up and I said that I would support capital punishment for them while I'd look at the murder of people more carefully since often there are extenuating circumstances justifying this. Everyone agreed with me. I said there's never an excuse for taking the life of healthy pet.
Everone agreed that people who did this were also likely to be Trump supporters.
Even though we live in a suburb of progressive Portland, Oregon, we ended up talking about personally feeling unsafe. This led me to describing a piece I posted on Daily Kos which, after posting over 1700 essays there, I got banned without explanation or recourse because someone misinterpreted what I wrote.
I wrote about what I would do if the Trump storm troopers attacked our liberal enclave. Since I was a reserve police officer for 20 years (perhaps something unusual for a dog and cat loving psychotherapist) I knew how to use fire arms.
You can read what I wrote about what I tried to post there. I included the old photo of me (above) in the story. I am pictured in front of the cranberry bog which we owned. The post was removed before I could copy it.Basically my Daily Kos story was about how I would use my skill in shooting to at least not submit without a fight to being rounded up by the Trump version of the Gestapo or SS. Someone flagged what I wrote as a promotion of violence when I was writing about self-defense.
Sabrina Haake writes about the good Germans. Of course she doesn't refer to modern Germans. Germany is one of a large number of coutries which ban the display of Nazi symbols including Russia (see Wikipedia). She is referring to the ordinary Germans who either went along with Hitler's atrocities or helped to implement them.
These are the Germans decribed in "Hitler's Willing Executioners." This should be as cautionary a book as Orwells "1984", Sinclair Lewis' 1935 novel "It Can't Happen Here" and Margert Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale."
This is from the Wikipedia page on Hitler's Willing Executioners:
Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust is a 1996 book by American writer Daniel Goldhagen, in which he argues collective guilt, that the vast majority of ordinary Germans were "willing executioners" in the Holocaust because of a unique and virulent "eliminationist antisemitism" in German political culture which had developed in the preceding centuries. Goldhagen argues that eliminationist antisemitism was the cornerstone of German national identity, was unique to Germany, and because of it ordinary German conscripts killed Jews willingly. Goldhagen asserts that this mentality grew out of medieval attitudes rooted in religion and was later secularized.
The book challenges several common ideas about the Holocaust that Goldhagen believes to be myths. These "myths" include the idea that most Germans did not know about the Holocaust; that only the SS, and not average members of the Wehrmacht, participated in murdering Jews; and that genocidal antisemitism was a uniquely Nazi ideology without historical antecedents.
In my title I ask whether it will take another Kent State Massacre to convince Trump supporter that he's gone too far?
Lamentably, I am pessimistic about this. The only hope I see is that Trump did not win the landslide he and his minions claim to have won. However, we are not as so many pundits claim, a 50/50 nation. Considering that about a third of eligible voters didn't vote we are a nation divided into thirds. One third are the Trump voters who either want authoritarian rule or were so gullible and uninformed they bought his lies and believed that his promises would benefit them, one third are democracy loving Americans, and one third didn't give a sh*t enough to vote.
Perhaps if Trump goes on an authoritarian rampage which results in the loss of life will there be enough hue and cry that there will be a true popular uprising to stop him. This may take the military to go against him because he orders them to do things that violate the oath they took to uphold the Constitution.
No matter who gives an order, even if it is a general, if it is unlawful members of the armed forces are obliged not to follow it.
Addendum:
Trump is a malignant (or psychopathic) and sadistic narcissist.. the grandiose narcissitic part isn't nearly the worst of it (lots of people are narcissists but don't enjoy hurting people)... it is that Trump has no empathy. Even worse than this, enjoys watching his enemies suffer, and if this isn't bad enough he is thrilled when he causes his enemies to have pain.
I am among the therapists like Dr. John Gartner, Dr. Bandy Lee, Dr. Lance Dodes, who have been warning about this since 2017. In his first term he was restrained. Now his cruelest impulses will enabled by people with similar psychopathology.
I wrote the column Trump’s sadistic, malignant narcissism (here) in October. 2018 in Capitol Hill Blue. To say that what I and other mental health experts were saying about the dangerousness of Trump before and soon after he was elected Trump proved to be correct is an understatement.
Yesterday I wrote The malevolent magnetic malignant narcissism of Trumpworld .
