Donald Trump has been diagnosed with COVID and the feeling that I experience is sadness. I don’t think it is “SAD”, in Trump’s disdainful voice, but sad. Just sad. Lance Dodes, a psychoanalyst who has been quite critical of Trump, maintains that Trump is not a politician – and cannot be – because of a mental condition. Dodes has diagnosed Trump with malignant narcissism, a form of psychopathy that, in Dodes opinion, prevents Trump from being able to empathize with others. This means that he is incapable of functioning as a politician – because he is incapable of being a functional member of a polis because his concerns are centered only on himself and his own survival.
Trump has belligerently trumpeted his independence and I think this is one reason that we "enjoy" him so much - whether are for or against him, we cannot seem to get enough of him. Trump believes himself to be above the law. He can shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not be prosecuted for it. He has also, apparently, believed himself to be above the laws of science - both in his failure to address climate change and in his failure to wear masks or to insist that those around him do.
The feeling of sadness rather than something like anger or vindication comes out of a feeling of depletion. I went to a college reunion some years ago and I was dismayed that one of my favorite teachers talked about the “slog” of the year. I loved – and idealized – my college experience. Each week there was new stuff to learn. I think I forgot that, at a school without semesters but classes that went throughout the year, I would frequently fall behind in the third or fourth week and never quite catch up. Talk about a slog!
Teaching to a mixed group in person and on line is terrible pedagogically – the people online, with a very few exceptions, don’t participate very much – they become part of the wall paper – unless I come up with exercises that force them to participate. OK, this isn’t terribly different than in regular in person teaching. I have to prod people to participate there, too. But I can see them and their reactions – the ways that they nod their heads – or turn their noses up – at something I say or that someone else in the class says. And we can do exercises where we get up and move around the room. And I’m not wearing a mask…
But more importantly, I think it is the feeling that the slog is shared by the students without the offsetting benefits I used to observe – seeing them standing in knots in the parking lot after class – and joining them for a moment as they connect with each other and enjoy each other’s company. This is all gone. I have described it as grim before, and it still is, but it feels increasingly like Groundhog Day (the Movie) in which the same predictable series of events occurs day after day with no end in sight.
Not that I am above irresponsible behavior. Last weekend, worn out from isolation, the reluctant wife and I went to the local mall just to have some novelty and to think about how we might redecorate the house (since we spend all of our time here – except for the moments I duck out to campus to teach a class or run to the grocery store to get food). I have no idea how good the air circulation is in the mall, and there were lots of people whose face coverings were haphazard – nose after nose peeking out of a mask. I am in a two week waiting period to see if I was infected.
I think I feel tired from living in a variety of types of isolation. Running into people on walks in the neighborhood feels like an opportunity to shout at each other across the street, not to be in touch. Our regular dinners with close friends are gone – though we do sometimes eat with friends down the street on the porch with distance. I miss running into other faculty in the halls, and talking before and after various meetings that are now taking place on zoom and that don’t feel spontaneous in the ways they did. And I miss the illusion that I could meet more people for lunch than I actually do. Not to mention missing the noontime basketball game.
This can’t last forever. Trump's illness might, eventually, cause his supporters to see the light of the importance of prevention (He might even come out in favor of it based on this having happened to him – though I am not betting on that). In one of the few enlightening moments in the debate, I heard Joe Biden proposing that he would demand (I don’t know if a President can do this) that the federal fleet become all electrically powered. If that happened, that would establish electric fueling stations all over the country and we could all work on transitioning off of fossil fuels. That would be a good thing, right?
But a little light in the tunnel does not sweep away all the darkness. Our great American experiment in self-government – our attempt to throw off the yoke of an oppressive power – is devolving into battles over whose interests should be served. Can we, before it is too late, realize that we are all in this together? Or will the self-serving approach to government and living that Trump espouses continue to hold sway? Of course, there will always be tension between these two poles – we will never resolve this tension completely, but will we, reluctantly though it will necessarily be, realize that, for the good of all, we will have to give up some of our individual freedoms? That we will have to inhibit our drive for absolute personal power so that we can achieve a greater good?
So, rather than pathologizing Trump, perhaps we ought to, in retrospect (God willing), talk about him as an example of our shared struggle to mature. And we need to recognize that this is a process that each new generation has to undertake on their own. We aren't born mature. We grow to that position. We learn how to inhibit our worst impulses (and some other ones as well). We also learn how to act when the time is right. Individually and collectively, over and over, we have to struggle to get that boulder to the top of the hill - and to try to help our children prepare to do that as well. We stumble, the boulder rolls back down, but we put our shoulder to it, and work at getting it back up there because the alternative is, as we are seeing, unacceptable.
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