I’ve read sadism, executive function disorder, narcissism, paranoia, etc.… UD will wade into the stream and propose: hebephrenia.
Remarks of his today in response to a baby crying during his speech.
Don’t worry about it. I love babies. I hear that baby crying, I like it. What a baby. What a beautiful baby. Don’t worry, don’t worry. The mom’s running around like — don’t worry about it, you know. It’s young and beautiful and healthy and that’s what we want… Actually, I was only kidding, you can get the baby out of here. That’s all right. Don’t worry. I, I think she really believed me that I love having a baby crying while I’m speaking. That’s OK. People don’t understand. That’s OK.
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Hebephrenia Update:
Charlie Black, a longtime GOP strategist, [commented: “He’s] Donald and he’s going to operate stream of consciousness a lot of times. You just hope he’ll have more days on message than days on consciousness.”
HANNITY: So you OK with a Donald Trump candidacy?
BENNETT: No, I’m not OK at all!
That was last October. Despite his anti-Trump vehemence, William J. Bennett also said, in that interview, that he’d support him if he became the nominee.
Bennett’s silence since then suggests that one of the nation’s highest-profile moralists continues to support a man who, even by the most unexacting, unpresidential standards, flagrantly fails every single chapter heading (“Courage,” “Compassion,” “Responsibility”…) in Bennett’s famous Book of Virtues.
If Bennett had included chapters titled “Cynicism” and “Expediency,” UD wouldn’t insist that he now publicly repudiate the human embodiment of the Anti-Book of Virtues. As it is, now that virtually everyone from every direction is, post-Khan, grappling with the fact that a major party has nominated a moral degenerate, it’s especially unconscionable that a person like Bennett, fundamentally animated as a political actor by moral seriousness, a national proselytizer for moral seriousness, says nothing.
Either you have moral standards and moral convictions or you don’t. It costs Bennett little to act on his convictions in this case – he’s not running for office, and no one says he has to vote for Hillary, whom he hates (not a virtue, methinks) with a passion similar to Trump’s. Where is William Bennett in this monumentally important election?
Everyone’s been asking him to, and UD has the transcript, hot off the press, of the candidate’s statement:
I have no one but myself to blame. I do not lay the fault or the blame of the charge at anyone else’s feet. For no one is to blame but Donald Trump. I take the responsibility. I take the blame. I take the fault. The Republican party leadership has been compassionate and kind and considerate and long-suffering toward me with some exceptions. To the thousands and thousands of ordinary Republicans who are godly, that uphold the standards of the Grand Old Party, its representatives that are heralds and criers of redemption, its candidates on the front lines… I have sinned against you and I have brought disgrace and humiliation and embarrassment upon you. I beg your forgiveness. To my campaign staff, you that are already bearing an almost unbearable load, to continue to say and tell the great story of Donald Trump, I have made your load heavier and I have hurt you. Please forgive me for sinning against you.
I know that so many would ask why, why? I have asked myself that 10,000 times through 10,000 tears. Maybe Donald Trump has tried to live his entire life as though he were not human.
Many ask, as I close, this: Will the campaign continue? Yes, the campaign will continue. Under the guidance, leadership and directives of my fine staff, we will continue to take our “Midnight in America” message all over the country. Thank you. Thank you and God bless you.
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There is already, however, talk of plagiarism.
… because, according to the investigative report in the aftermath of the Miami Dolphins’ Richie Incognito bullying scandal, he
lied to investigators, attempted to convince [the player Incognito bullied] to exonerate Incognito, and [himself] participated in the taunting of players
you might want to be careful. You might want in particular to keep an eye on the coach.
I mean, Manziel was all about bullying plus really disgusting and out of control behavior, all of which the team and the school, from the chancellor on down, not only tolerated but seemed to celebrate… And maybe, you know, it wasn’t such a great idea, reputation-wise, in the immediate aftermath of Manziel, to hire Jim Turner, fresh off being fired from the Dolphins for his apparently very bad behavior with his buddy Incognito.
Another reason you might want to keep an eye on this coach is that he seems rather bitter he’s been forced to lower himself from the big boys to college level ball – he’s filed a big-ass defamation suit against the guy who wrote the report that said bad things about him and Incognito… Seems to be trying to get his own reputation back and maybe ditch his school gig for another professional team. I mean, any school might want to avoid this character…
But Texas A&M, one of this blog’s perennial clown schools, is not any school. Texas A&M is a broad shouldered good ol’ boy football uber alles (though truth be told th’aint much alles there for football to be uber) kinda school and don’t matter to them one bit that they’ve got players like Manziel and coaches like Turner cuz that’s how you win games. Not that the school’s win/loss record looks very good, but, you know, it’s Texas (Rick Perry was an A&M cheerleader) and a boy can dream.
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So before I tell you the latest from Texas A&M, it might help to provide a specific example of the kind of guy Jim Turner, recipient of hundreds of thousands of dollars in salary from this school, is.
For Christmas 2012, Turner gave all the Dolphins offensive linemen gift bags. Inside the bags were inflatable female dolls. But Turner, knowing that offensive lineman Andrew McDonald was frequently harassed by other linemen with homosexual slurs, gave the tackle a male blow-up doll to join in on the “joke.”
When Turner was asked about the incident that plenty of others recalled without a problem, he said he couldn’t remember.
You see UD‘s point. You’re going to hire a coach with that bad a memory? UD‘s getting on in years, but she’s confident she could remember giving blow up dolls to offensive linemen for Christmas. Notice that “plenty of others” were able to reach back in time and recall that holiday season…
So anyway Texas A&M’s coach hires this guy, this Jim Turner, and gives him a big fat salary, and I don’t find any record of anyone minding… Like, say, maybe, a woman student or two, or a woman professor or two, might find something a little off about the whole thing… But no. The place is almost entirely a football school, and why bother? Turner in fact worked at the school in years past, before he got raised to the big leagues, and his good buddies there took him back and that’s that.
Anyway, not only did this school’s football coach not keep an eye on Jim Turner; he turned his back and let Jim Turner loose on the football team’s vast Texas fan base. He looked the other way while, at a big public event intended to appeal in particular to women, Turner and another assistant coach presented funny material – the sort of material you’d write if for a special seasonal gift to your friends you share the sexual technology that means so much to you – they’d written about women and football. (More images here.)
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There’s an old New Yorker short story titled Man Here Keeps Getting Arrested All the Time. UD thinks of this title when she thinks of the adorably incorrigible men of Texas A&M – men like Manziel and Turner and lots of others (the school has one of the highest arrest rates among university sports teams) who keep getting suspended and arrested all the time. Turner has just pivoted from being fired by a professional football team for being morally disgusting to being suspended by a university team for being sexually disgusting.
And when his two-week suspension is over?
You know the answer.
His $200,000 raise will be announced.
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Okay. And ladies? A&M ladies who were in the audience for Turner’s performance and complained about it?
You were offended? You tweeted the images and got ol’ Jimboy in trouble again?
Don’t come looking for sympathy to UD. One of the first safety rules you’re supposed to learn is Be aware of your surroundings. Your (chosen!) surrounding is Texas A&M!
Look for a school that isn’t run by people who slobber over Johnny Manziel and hump latex.
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As always, things only get really good when the local booster press has time to reflect on things and share its thoughts.
[L]et’s … not blow this out of proportion. [Jeff] Banks and Turner showed bad taste, but they meant well. It was a charity event that raised more than $20,000. It happened Wednesday night, with more than 700 women there, and it didn’t go viral until Friday. So 200 women didn’t email Woodward first thing Thursday looking for blood… [The head football coach, Kevin Sumlin,] should be commended on how A&M has remained off the police blotter recently, for the most part. A&M had seven football players arrested from the end of the 2013 seasons until early June, one of them (Darian Claiborne) arrested three times and another (Isaiah Golden) arrested twice.
A&M has had one arrest since the end of last season, wide receiver Speedy Noil, was driving without a license.
So kudos to Sumlin…
The nihilism meme is off and running in this (to quote Leon Panetta) “very screwy” presidential election, and UD follows with great interest the progress of that old warhorse down its latest track.
“Nihilism, American-Style,” Allan Bloom titled one of the chapters in The Closing of the American Mind, but he had something very specific in mind – the infiltration of high-level Nietzschean negation (of religion, values, meaning, knowledge) into the teaching of undergraduates in our universities. What people seem to have in mind when more and more of them, every day, refer to the nihilism to which Trump appeals, or which his personality and rhetoric have evoked in Americans, is something far more down-home – a visceral disgust with the current social/political scene – a disgust so intense it makes people simply want to destroy everything, and therefore makes poopoo-spewing Trump the avatar of choice.
What drives their loyalty to Trump — if not the person, at least the idea of Trump — is a sort of nihilism. As a close friend put it to me this week, “I don’t care whether Trump wins or not, I just want him to f— things up as long as he can.” … The Trump supporters have seen plenty of politicians with important agendas, but few with the zeal to push them through; at this late date, they would apparently prefer zeal without agendas to agendas without zeal.
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[T]he voter nihilism that Trump both reflects and stimulates is a symptom of political decay. “He’s not perfect, but anyone would be better than this corrupt bunch,” is the sort of thing many Italians said, once upon a time, about Silvio Berlusconi, or Russians about Vladimir Putin, or Venezuelans about Hugo Chávez.
Let’s end the historical analogizing there; it’s enough to show how often the cry of “blow the system to hell” has gone up among peoples living in freedom and democracy, sometimes just before they lost both.
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[Consider] Trump’s outrageous accusations of the press, his chronic lying, his glorification of political dictators and strongmen, and his repeated racist/sexist statements, triumphantly delivered at his rallies. These are not meant as arguments in a national debate about serious issues, these are acts of political vandalism delivered with glee and impunity. This is a political performance with the implicit message: See how far I dare to go! This is political behavior that comes straight out of the manual of the Russian nihilist Dmitri Pisarev, the one time inspiration for Lenin: “What can be smashed must be smashed; whatever will stand the blow is sound, what flies into smithereens is rubbish; at any rate, hit out right and left, no harm will or can come of it.”
[Recall Trump’s comment yesterday about some of the speakers at the Democratic National Convention: “You know what, I wanted to hit a couple of those speakers so hard. I would have hit them — no, no — I was gonna hit them… I was gonna hit one guy in particular, a very little guy. I was gonna hit this guy so hard, his head would spin. He wouldn’t know what the hell happened… I was going to hit a number of those speakers so hard, their heads would spin, they’d never recover. And that’s what I did with a lot of people — that’s why I still don’t have certain people endorsing me. They still haven’t recovered, okay, you know?”]
Just smash the reigning order. It’s all a “jolly laugh” for the nihilist.
… Nihilism feels deeply resentful towards kindness, reason and open-mindedness. Its preferred currency is negativity; it has no positive vision of an even remotely attractive social and political order, and, more importantly, it does not even feel the need to have such a vision. Its preferred mode of communication is not conversation or even negotiation, but agitation, an excited mix of self-justification, accusation, denunciation, and rousing calls to action. It’s preferred political tactic is that of the scorched earth, “just smash the reigning order”. The ideal politician is the cocky hell-for-leather man, who “tells it as it is”, the crowd and the nihilist leader egging each other on in an ecstasy of liberated xenophobia.
… And here is the dilemma that political nihilism presents for the open democracies in which it currently thrives: as it is not about arguments, it cannot be countered with arguments. The register of political nihilism is emotion, symbols, charisma and performance. And performers need an audience. Nihilists like Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, the Dutchman Geert Wilders and the Austrian Heinz-Christian Strache, effectively tap into a miasma of free-floating anger and resentment…
UD thinks Brian Leiter, in the first fifteen minutes of this lecture on Nietzsche, does a very good job of explaining why American culture might devolve into the sort of enervated, self-hating, everything-hating nihilism that would grasp at the mindless charismatic ‘aesthetic’ option – in this case, the stimulating empty destroy-everything performance of Trump – as at least a way of continuing to feel alive. This emergent sensibility is a darker version of what people in earlier decades phrased the society of the spectacle or amusing ourselves to death. It’s where you go when your ‘eighties techno-passivity (tv, computer, film – one rigged-up Truman Show consumer spectacle after another) morphs into an ideology. Too much nothing eventually makes you desperately want something – any something. Zeal. Zeal without agendas. Pure agitation. Cocky hell-for-leather. But America is a very violent country, where millions and millions of people have home arsenals. Trump has a very violent imagination and he is charismatic.
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Actually, not any something will do. The something can’t be anything having to do with traditional somethings – God, social progress, justice, love of humanity – because all of these, let’s say, have been, or are well on the way toward being, nihilized away… Why did the Democratic convention feature so many love-in, what-the-world-needs-now, lean-on-me performances? Because when all other vitalizing, motivating, foundations give way, you’re left with that one.
Did you watch long enough, last night, to catch that poor reverend at the end of the convention, trying to give the benediction? Did you hear what he said as the room continued to erupt with balloons? “I don’t know how I’m gonna pray in this chaos.” Not that the convention was chaotic; I thought it was great. But the spectacle, if you will, spoke multiple volumes to ol’ UD.
You won’t catch Trump farting around with prayer. He’s transcended it.
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Nihilism is often hilarious, because it is so pretentious and at the same time such an empty infantile pose. Everyone loves The Nihilists in The Big Lebowski (Ve believes in nossing, Lebowski. Nossing. And tomorrow ve come back and ve cut off your chanson.); and if you were lucky enough to see Robin Williams and Bill Irwin in Waiting for Godot, you know what a laff riot that play is. Before Godot, there was the piss-yourself-giggling Ubu the King. And the nihilistic comedies of the ancient Greeks. Artists have always known that Hillarian moderation is much less stimulating than Trumpian over-the-tops and hysterias and absolutisms and extremisms.
And of course somehow at the same time nihilism has a certain plausibility as a way of thinking about or even feeling about existence. Christopher Hitchens got at this when he characterized what he considered male-tinged humor:
Nietzsche … described a witticism as an epitaph on the death of a feeling. Male humor prefers the laugh to be at someone’s expense, and understands that life is quite possibly a joke to begin with — and often a joke in extremely poor taste.
Nihilism wouldn’t be so funny if it were just pretentious and infantile; it needs the spin on it that a certain philosophical legitimacy gives it.
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Yet our most Beckettian humorists have also always known that – in the words of Beckett himself – I can’t go on I’ll go on is the reality on the ground.
This is why, for UD, the realest moment of the Democratic National Convention came when Joe Biden, alluding to the death of his son, said
As Ernest Hemingway once wrote, “The world breaks everyone and afterwards, many are strong at the broken places.”