June 10, 2020--Kool Aid

Desperately in need of the oxygen they provide, an embattled Trump announced he will soon resume mega-rallies. Perhaps as soon as later this week in Texas. 

Polls show Trump and Biden in a statistical dead-heat in the Lone Star state. Four years ago Tump carried Texas by nine points. But Texas is now trending blue, and that has Tump's attention. One thing he knows is how to count. For example, if Biden wins Texas, he will be elected. It's as simple as that.

At these rallies there will be no social distancing, masks will not be in evidence, just thousands of defiant Trumpers in MAGA hats packed together in stifling, virus-ladened arenas.

No matter what health risks his most fervent followers will be exposed to, all that matters to Trump is that they will be there for him, to lift his spirits during this his darkest, most politically perilous hour.

This lack of concern for their very lives reminded me of the victims of the Jonestown cult.

Remember it? Back in 1978 charismatic cult leader, Jim Jones got hundreds of followers from his California-based Peoples Temple to join him at his compound in Guyana to wait for the end of the world.

Settled there and feeling the encroachment of governmental authorities who were concerned about what they were learning Jones was up to, he cranked up the intensity of orgiastic life in the compound.

Then one afternoon Jones assembled his people for a Kool Aid party. What they didn't initially know was that the Kool Aid was laced with cyanide. 

But in spite of this they kept downing the sugary concoction.

As a result 909 died, making it one of the largest non-governmental mass murders in history.

Resisting the temptation to link Jones and Trump too cavalierly, it does not feel too much of a stretch to suggest that Trump's lack of concern for his people (and the rest of us) is not so dissimilar to Jones's disregard for members of his "temple."

Thus, by the end of this election season, Tump is likely to be responsible for the sickness and deaths of scores of his most passionate supporters. 

He claims he is the leader of a movement. To me it seems more like a death cult.

March 11, 2020--Germaphobe In Chief

Isn't it ironic that the world's best-known germaphobe, Donald Trump, may be in the process of being brought down by a whopper of a germ, the coronavirus.

I knew Trump was serious about running for president when he mingled in crowds and shook hands with people along the rope line without wearing gloves.

Years before that, occasionally in Manhattan, we would run into him and he always wore gloves, even in the middle of summer.

Even now, he is desperate to pretend everything is normal, claiming without evidence that the virus, like a "miracle" will soon just "disappear," the stock market will come roaring back, and in a romp he will win reelection.

Thinking about this and how Trump is behaving, a number of friends have been saying that the virus doesn't have to disappear to keep his supporters in line because, like his claim that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it, he could bungle the response to the pandemic (as is currently happening) and none of his people would care.

They would go along with the talking points which assert there is no public health problem. Like Ukraine, like with North Korea, like behaving as an apologist for Vladimir Putin, it's all a media-generated "witch hunt." The coronavirus is a "hoax" intended to bring Trump down.

But what is unfolding is categorically different than "lock her up" or calling the press the "enemy of the people." By comparison they are benign.

What we are seeing now is hitting much, much closer to home. It is literally a matter of life and death. Not some insipid chant at a feel-good Trump rally.

For example, many of his followers have aging parents or are elderly themselves. They have underlying medical issues such as COPD or heart disease and they know if they contract the virus there is a good chance they will die.

This is not an example of a Trump-inspired cost-free political frolic but a deeply feared threat. So lying about this is very different than lying about Benghazi. Deception will not make the virus go away.

In crises like the Bay of Pigs or 9/11presidents are supposed to remain calm and help people get through the trauma, not make matters worse by being flippant or incompetent. They need to feel our fear and pain, not exploit it for their own political benefit.

There is one good thing--Trump has made such an obvious and blatant mess of this existential crisis that people are finally coming to realize he is a fraud and cannot be depended upon to make us feel safe. Even some of his own people. Making citizens feel protected is a president's most important responsibility.

The current situation then represents a huge political disaster for him from which there is no easy recovery. Even members of cults (or Congress) have on occasion broken away from their charismatic leaders. I expect that something similar will soon change the narrative for some of Trump's most fervent acolytes. 

The fun for them is over.

March 10, 2015--Lincoln Brigade

Last weekend reading about how Mohammed Emwazi ("Jihad John") was drawn to ISIS and became its most infamous executioner and how three young men from Brooklyn were apparently headed in the same direction, I was reminded of other examples of young men being drawn to ideological struggles, signing up for them because they believed in what they were seeking to accomplish, often by bloody means.

I want to be careful here. What ISIS is perpetrating is as evil as anything we have seen in a century. And so I do not want even to imply a false equivalency. But when we struggle to figure out what about ISIS is so compelling to these gullible and pathetic young people, we might want to take a close look at what drew other young men from around the world to take sides in the Spanish Civil War, especially Americans who made their way there as part of the Lincoln Brigade.

Though many of liberal persuasion today see what the Brigade stood for to be admirable--it was militantly anti-fascist and, in the case of many Brigade members, pro-Soviet, socialist, and communist--still, like ISIS, it was a magnet for thousands of alienated, revolutionary youth of its era and, as much as some supported its agenda, at least as many saw these foreign volunteers as outsider interlopers who had no business meddling in what initially a local struggle.

The Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939 pitted Nationalist fascist forces under General Francisco Franco against the army of the duly elected socialist Republican or Loyalist government. The former were supported militarily by Nazi Germany, who field-tested modern forms of blitzkrieg and air warfare in Spain, including the indiscriminate bombing of civil populations, while the Republicans were directly aided by the Soviet Union. Thus, the war was seen to be a dress rehearsal for World War II.

The Nationalists won and Franco ruled Spain with an iron fist for 36 years.

It was in support of the Loyalists that the Lincoln Brigade was organized and attracted 2,800 fiercely committed Americans. 750 died in combat. At the time, those who left for Spain were roundly criticized as radicals who had no business fighting for a country other than the United States.

Attempts to understand the appeal of causes and movements of these kinds find that though ideologies may differ--even radically--there are psychological characteristics among recruits that are consistent across the spectrum. The best thinking suggests that groups that are most appealing offer disaffiliated recruits what they crave most--a sense of belonging and a place to act out their resentments.

This may sound like psychobabble, as is any attempt to summarize something as complex as the appeal of radical groups and cults, but to dismiss participation as a simple expression of evil is not helpful. Again, to join ISIS is far from the same as enlisting in the Lincoln Brigade, but there are useful lessons that might help offer alternative appeals to youth seeking affiliation and, failing that, suggest ways to fight the scourge that is the Islamic State.

March 2, 2015--Manias

Manias of the historical kind are a form of collective mental illness with some of the same characteristics of the classic psychological state in individuals where manias include periods of great excitement, euphoria, hyperactivity, and delusions. A full blown cultural mania sees these characteristics generalized to affect hundreds, thousands, even millions and can crop up periodically over centuries.

I find these mass manias to be fascinating, where desires become uncontrollable and otherwise simple interests become obsessive. Not only do they often have an amusing side (for example, the Dancing Mania of the early Renaissance), but they also give us insight about the human capacity to be drawn into collective or mass movements of all sorts, from global religious extremism to obsession about things as seemingly meaningless as tulip bulbs and blue and black or white and gold dresses.

Among my favorite historical manias is the Dancing Mania that reached its peak in 1518 in Strasbourg, Alsace and was so pervasive that it was called the Dancing Plague.

It broke out through a wide swarth of Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries. It attracted thousands of participants including men, women, and children who danced until they collapsed.

One notable outbreak occurred in Strasbourg in July 1518. There, hundreds took to dancing for days without rest and many died of heart attacks, strokes, or exhaustion. Musicians typically accompanied the dancers in an attempt to distract them but their presence only made matters worse.

Though the St. Vitus' Dance, as it was described, was widely reported at the time it was poorly understood. No one then or since has come up with a convincing analysis of what brought it on and what inner human sources it tapped. Some who studied the mania suggest that it emerged from religious cults that were widespread but, for that matter, there is no generally agreed-upon theory as to what attracts people so totally to cults or religious movements. So the mystery remains as to the origins or human proclivity to participate in what some have labelled mass psychogenic illness.

Of a very different sort, but at least as intriguing, is the Tulip Mania that occurred in Holland between 1636 and 1637. It was the Dutch Golden Age and financial investments and instruments of various kinds were proliferating. None more inexplicable or as widespread among most classes, including the Dutch royals, was the one that saw the recently-introduced tulip soar in value to the extent that some individual tulips were traded for the equivalent of 10 times the annual income of a skilled craftsman.

And just as quickly as the tulip craze inflated it collapsed. Some economists consider this to be the first speculative bubble, not entirely unlike the real estate bubble of recent years that burst in 2007-8 and brought about the Great Recession.

Others, mainly conservative economists who dismiss psychological impulses as affecting economic behavior, see it as an example of the efficient-market hypothesis, where tulip trading was just as much an expression of rational investing as buying and selling Apple or Exxon stock.

I have a very different view, seeing the tulip market to be very much like the Dance Plague where inner emotional forces took control and overrode rational thought and constraint.