He has this disease because he’s more afraid of not being seen as a man than dying… I don’t think he’s afraid of killing himself if the price would be to avoid what he feels is the humiliation of wearing a mask and submitting to common sense and care for others…

Didn’t take much time for UD to find a commentator who agrees with her about DJT’s suicidality. Giridharadas’s theory of the president’s self-destruction tracks precisely with theories about why so many macho men in Alaska, Wyoming, and Montana (America’s BIG suicide states) kill themselves. (This blog has covered our suicidal macho/nihilist states forever.) Angry, isolated, obsessed with projecting strength, these are men who, like Trump, can look back on sordid personal lives that make unavoidably graphic the lovelessness they feel and inspire. Care for others, in Giridharadas’s words, is felt as a humiliating depletion of their strength; rage at others for … for obscure reasons, I guess having to do with others trying to draw love out of these men… ? … eventually finds its way inside the man himself and attacks him. As Andrew Sullivan notes, Trump is “dead inside apart from regular swoons of rage and resentment.”

Goes without saying that these same presuicides in our reddest states represent the very heart of Trump’s voting bloc, his demographic par excellence. Everyone noticed, during the last campaign, that Trump’s most solid support unerringly came from America’s most pilled-up, ginned-up, gunned-up, nihilistic counties and states (see, for instance, West Virginia).

************************

Look at it this way: These guys really need their guns, since they’re probably going to want to use them on themselves. They really need a president who supports the NRA.

A New Republic writer identifies Trump as the leader of the “Flailing Masculinity Death Cult.”

***********************

And Trump’s other high-profile, 80% support demographic? Self-destructive ultraorthodox Jews – many of whom, by the way, share the heartland presuicide’s love of violence (this group spent last night rioting, burning masks, and assaulting people on the streets of New York) – cultish enclaves seemingly unmoved by the many covid infections and deaths among them.

How unsurprising that these two morbid, isolated constituencies are viscerally drawn to our nihilist in chief, whose “psychotic unraveling [is there] for all to see.”

If you listened closely, you could hear them:

As flies to wanton boys were we to Donald Trump;

He killed us for his sport.

I dread very deeply the idea of this tormented soul remaining at the head of the country for another three months. I find some relief in Nancy Pelosi just now having announced that she and her colleagues will discuss the 25th amendment tomorrow. I actually think we run the risk that Mr Trump’s mania combined with his rage will prompt him to kill himself. That will certainly be a first. The first American president to kill himself while in office. “After watching the interview, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that Trump has come completely undone.”

Pelosi spoke after Trump was interviewed on Fox Business Network in a frenzied almost hour-long interview where he suggested Gold Star families may have infected him with COVID, claimed again he was ‘cured,’ equivocated over whether he is still on powerful steroids, demanded AG Bill Barr indict Joe Biden and Barack Obama and twice called Kamala Harris a ‘monster.’

With remarkable persistence, New York’s ultraorthodox have kept their children fatally ignorant.

It’s the only chance you’ll ever have to see a word in any way similar to “virtue” next to Trump’s name.

… gets the Lit Nobel. I’ll look at one of her poems after my Instacart shopper and I conclude our brief affair.

And put an umlaut over her U, dammit.

**********************

Since Halloween is close, here’s “All Hallows.”

Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
sleep in their blue yoke,
the fields having been
picked clean, the sheaves
bound evenly and piled at the roadside
among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:

This is the barrenness
of harvest or pestilence.
And the wife leaning out the window
with her hand extended, as in payment,
and the seeds
distinct, gold, calling
Come here
Come here, little one

And the soul creeps out of the tree.

****************

So Glück writes brief lyrics in the key of longing. She’d prefer a world infused with religious spirit (one where cinquefoil is not merely a plant but – remember? – a common decorative motif in churches), but will take, with a sigh, the secular modern one she was handed. All Hallows is typical of this attitude, evoking an all-hollowed-out landscape – but hollowed almost in a gesture of propitiation: I’ve assembled a pure world of new possibility for you, oh hallowed ones: Come!

Or: Once you see precisely how nakedly dispirited this world is, you’re going to be compelled to respiritualize it!

And one of the saints does: a soul creeps out of a tree — ready, with the turn of the season, to respond to the imminent reseeding of the world.

The farmer in other words stages the landscape in order (holding treats in her hand) to coax the dubious soul-kitten out of the tree.

It’s all very Veni Creator Spiritus, in other words. If you’d prefer a more… ample version of this come-hither, go here.

By setting himself against masks, largely on aesthetic grounds, Trump … opened himself up to charges that he doesn’t take the virus seriously.

Respect? No. Slavish obedience. That’s very different. You can respect someone and at the same time be aware of the limitations of their intelligence — and act accordingly, for the sake of your and your family’s health. Cultic loyalty to rabbis unable to understand the germ theory of disease is nuts, man. Time for the New York Times and other local papers to be less diplomatic in dealing with people who are rioting, assaulting, and burning.

We’ve followed the supremely dumb sports programs at Notre Dame on this blog forever (first post is about the cathedral; scroll down); but who knew the campus altogether – from its infected president on down – was so fucking stupid?

Several people in fact wore masks at the Rose Garden event (check out a photo). Notre Dame’s leadership seems keen to model a herd – lemming? – mentality for its students.

… sounds as though it has claimed its … thirty-fifth? … victim. And this one is said to be in the hospital in grave condition: Crede Bailey, head of the WH security office (!).

The hebephrenic-in-chief’s latest announcement reminds UD of one of her favorite essays, Gore Vidal’s 1978 “How to Find God and Make Money.” Gore already knew all about the long-popular fundamentalist Christian claim that getting a dread disease is the very best thing that can happen to you.

Thank God I Have Cancer! by Clifford Oden has best seller written all over it. Arlington House tells us that “When Rev. Oden learned he had cancer eight years ago he turned to God in prayer. He asked God to show him how to cope. Now he is living proof that cancer can be controlled by natural means – without surgery, without radiation or chemotherapy.”

Over 200,000 Americans have died. The economy has tanked, shedding tens of millions of jobs. The White House itself is the center of a massive Covid-19 outbreak that has infected the president, the first lady, several senators, and many other administration and Republican Party officials. Far from a beacon of resilience, the president has become a symbol of just how deeply the country has been affected by the pandemic. In public appearances since contracting the virus, he appears hoarse, shaky, and frightened; reports of his hospitalization include at least two concerning drops in oxygen level and a cocktail of drugs that indicate pneumonia...

Trailing in the polls with only 30 days left before the 2020 election, the president has embraced a reelection strategy that is, even for him, profoundly stupid...

Trump is now trailing with every age group of voters and is underwater with senior citizens — a voting block that helped him immensely in 2016. He is trailing by increasingly large margins in every swing state and [Biden] appears to be pulling away in Florida and Pennsylvania. A landslide defeat grows more likely by the hour…

The person many consider the nation’s top immunologist resigns in disgust from the government’s politicized anti-covid activity.

Public health and safety have been jeopardized by the administration’s hostility to the truth and by its politicization of the pandemic response, undoubtedly leading to tens of thousands of preventable deaths… More than half of the states in this country are reporting rising covid-19 cases. Nine months into the pandemic, the United States continues to grapple with failed White House leadership. Instead, we get the recent spectacle of the president exploiting his own illness for political purposes and advising the nation, “Don’t be afraid of Covid.”

Other researchers will leave in the same disgust, hoping that their gesture will somehow move the country away from rule by self-serving idiots.

The EU Court of course rules against Hungary’s having hounded out the Central European University.

Hungary long ago decided it wanted to be the Alabama of Europe. Countries are free to be cultural pits, if that’s what they want to be. Nobody writes about Hungary anymore, except for when the EU Court makes its meaninglessness official.

… sets NY on fire (while shouting “TRUMP! TRUMP!“), an Israeli journalist offers a fascinating account of the escalating violence among ultraorthodox Jews in both countries.

[T]here are elements in the Haredi community intentionally generating hatred of Haredim among the rest of the Israeli population.

The “barriers should be higher,” these people believe; you can never be too separatist a cult, and making people outside the cult loathe you guarantees they won’t get anywhere near you. So — refuse basic health measures in a pandemic. To be sure, a lot of cult members will die; but this is the will of God. What’s more important is that viciously, insistently, imperiling the life of anyone anywhere near you keeps appalled outsiders far, far away.

But is this really a good way to guarantee the flourishing of your cult?

Well, consider your hero, Mr Trump. He and his vile advisor, Giuliani, obsessively say and do things that make people sick. Does this work to repel and intimidate their enemies, so that they stay hands off?

No. Reason? There’s an escalation written into the strategy. Almost all human beings respond strongly to cruelty; cruelty attracts sadists, to be sure, but there aren’t that many sadists. Mainly there are normal people horrified by cruelty. When you intentionally generate hatred by your cruelty, you eventually mobilize some outsiders against you.

If you’re an ultraorthodox Jew, your cultic paranoia may overreact to these mobilized people and double down on that which sets you apart, which builds the walls higher: You look and act increasingly bizarre (your mohels refuse to stop sucking infants’ penises, for instance); your contempt for state authority becomes more and more violent; your disbelief in the germ theory of disease becomes more and more adamant.

Trump and the ultraorthodox take the path of escalating grotesquerie – and the grotesque certainly stops people in their tracks.

But then we recover from being stunned, and we realize that there are basic human values we need to defend against Trump and his battalion.

Unlike Trump and his battalion, we hate war. But we are willing to fight.