Scroll down for the fantastic state by state graphic, which so dramatically gives Montana, Wyoming, and Alaska pride of place!

Good on ya, gunny states! You’ve got ’em dropping like flies.

Yes, Utah is one of those big manly gunned-up states (also Montana, Wyoming, Alaska…) where you better not mess with me cuz I wanna mess with me. Suicide, ho!

UD firmly believes that a lot of men buy guns with their own eventual suicides in mind. The suicide option may not be at the forefront of their thinking as they amass scads of weapons; but you know that implicit in the wide-open-spaces nihilist’s life (drinking, driving pointlessly about at high speed, divorcing like crazy, alienating everyone around you) is a clear endpoint, an obvious moment somewhere in your late fifties, early sixties, when you lose your bad boy bounce, you’re all alone, and the winters are long.

Far out: New Mexico’s gun-splashed city is so unstaunched at this point that the governor has declared a health emergency! As in like you can’t leave your house, man, without some chance of being pulped; and that goes for your kids, too — so parents are increasingly reluctant to send their kids to school.

A pretty dire outcome for America’s dumbest state, and recent winner of Worst State Overall in which to live.

Suicidewise as well NM vies with The Headblaster Three (Montana, Wyoming, Alaska) for Berettas to the brain. It’s right up there (this is from 2020), almost always securely in the top five.

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So for 30 days the cowboys can’t carry their guns in public, says the governor, and ‘course they’re all pissing their high-waisted Y-fronts at the news. ‘Course the governor’s a fucking dictator and when Trump comes back he’s putting her in front of a firing squad.

All of America’s pig-calling states have among the highest number of guns, the laxest gun laws, AND by far the nation’s highest suicide rates. SOOEYcide!

Alaska

Wyoming

Idaho

Montana

Y’all come on down when you’re ready to blow your head off!

Add to this clear evidence of psychological decline – all sorts of bizarre statements/behaviors – since I posted (Nov 21, 2020).

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

Why Donald Trump Might Kill Himself.

He’s an old white guy full of rage, despair, and vindictiveness; all of the strategies he’s used throughout life to be a winner have lately failed, and he now finds himself a very public loser. 

Because he is narcissistic, the public nature of his failure is close to unendurable, and he continues to try everything in his power to reverse events. The collapse of these efforts only adds to his public humiliation.

He has been in bad physical health.  It’s quite possible that at his age, and just having recovered from the corona virus, he has a number of serious medical problems, though these will not have been disclosed to us.

Many of his former friends and associates are bailing on him, or giving him the silent treatment.  He feels lonely, isolated. He has isolated himself. Maureen Dowd calls him “a child isolated and miserable living inside a national landmark, lashing out and spiraling into self-destructive acts.” Former FBI counterintelligence director Frank Figliuzzi goes so far as to describe Donald Trump as currently a “barricaded subject.“

Hey. I ain’t drawing the pictures.

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

He is the very embodiment, in other words, of the suicide. 

Demographically, he stands smack in the center of the self-slaughter sweet spot.

You’re shocked. You think it’s a crazy notion. Allow me to quote a recent NYT headline:

‘How Did We Not Know?’ Gun Owners Confront a Suicide Epidemic

Try to keep in mind two salient features here (You probably won’t be able to, because people HATE to think about suicide.):

1. A suicide epidemic. In some states (Montana, Wyoming, Alaska, Utah, Idaho, New Mexico), the numbers are staggering.
2. General ignorance about the suicide epidemic.

“Utah has very permissive gun laws, but we also have a very low homicide rate. What we didn’t realize was we have a huge suicide rate.”

How can you not realize that you have enormous suicide numbers, like Utah? How can you fail to notice that three of your counties have suicide rates 58% higher than the rest of the state? Than the rest of the state with close to the highest suicide rate in the nation? You can only succeed in not seeing this carnage if you’re totally determined not to see it. Just the way you will not see – will laugh off – the idea that the president of the United States might not be immune to the suicide epidemic, even as he’s flagrantly melting down in front of the nation.

I don’t say it’s likely. I do say it’s possible.

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

Suicide, writes A. Alvarez, is “a terrible but utterly natural reaction to the strained, narrow, unnatural necessities we sometimes create for ourselves.”  Donald Trump is trapped in exactly this way: he has created necessities having to do with power, prestige, money, sexual conquest, cruelty, and above all victory in every contest.  Yet he is about to lose power; he is widely viewed as a vulgarian; he has much less money than he boasts, and stands to lose a large chunk of what he does have as a result of many lawsuits; he is too old for sexual conquest; most people regard his cruelty as contemptible, and it certainly no longer works as well as it once did to frighten people into giving in to his demands; he has lost by six million votes to Joe Biden.  Only the all-out paranoid or self-servingly degenerate are willing to appear on television to defend him. He himself has become quite paranoid. He moves in a paranoid world: “Under Trump, the Republican identity is defined not by a set of policy beliefs but by a paranoid mind-set.”

This horrible outcome is a result of extensive conspiracies against him (he appeared in front of the nation last evening, ranting in this instance about pharma conspiracies).  There are too many of these conspiracies to count, and he feels undone by unrelenting deep state machinations.

What are his options? He lacks the courage and the cohorts to stage a coup; the prospect of doing anything on the outside after having been in the Oval Office is completely depressing. Degrading. For all his talk of 2024, he knows he’s already too tired to do the job, and that, realistically, he won’t have the energy to run again.

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

There’s no compensation in affective life awaiting him – a cold wife; various ex-children, some of whom (paranoia, and an intolerable sense of being displaced, rising again here) clearly intend to ride his coattails into political positions of their own; a dwindling number of people willing to be seen with him on a golf course.

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

Then there’s guilt. People think he’s incapable of it, but his fatal failures in the matter of the pandemic gnaw at him. He knows he acted badly there; and not only badly. At night, in bed, he considers whether it’s true as many say that he is responsible for a lot of deaths. During daylight hours he can convince himself he’s a great man who saved many people. At night, images of the sick and suffering, of funerals, visit him. He thinks he begins to be haunted.

Another conspiracy against him. A conspiracy of the dead.

The only real pleasure left derives from the thought of the dread and misery he’s inflicting on his enemies. Also from the reception and broadcast of his suicide note, which he has written a thousand times in his head: Hope you enjoy seventy million Americans rising up to beat the shit out of you now that you’ve driven me to this…

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

Strangely, what sticks in his craw the most from all of this is his own daughter-in-law, Lara Trump. It’s so clear that, of the second generation, Bionic Woman, who even named her daughter for the state she plans to run in, will be the mid-twenty-first century Trump. Jesus.

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

Finally: It is in the nature of cults that the cult leader kills himself. He may, like Jim Jones or Marshall Applewhite or David Koresh, take everyone with him one way or another; but Trump has far too many followers for this to be practicable. He’ll have to take one for the team.

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

How? Barricaded subject shoots himself in the head, at his desk in the Oval Office.

Smith&Wesson blasts back at deep state harassment over its kid-friendly/shooter game ad campaigns for human-pulverizing toys. Wee1 must also be pissed:

Not to mention BabyGun or whatever its called:

A little known fact is that rather than featuring in romper room play, most guns are simply used to kill yourself. Self-slaughter holds a vast majority over any other use. Guns are largely about blowing your brains out with one hundred percent certainty (other methods fall short of this standard), and in some states (Alaska, Wyoming, Montana) they’re scooping wildcatters and cowboys off the floor pretty much 24/7.

For instance, Utah, another gunny he-man state, boasts this remarkable statistic:

Utah has one of the highest death by suicide rates in the country, currently ranked sixth. According to the Utah Department of Health, suicide rates in the tricounty area [northeast Utah: Daggett, Uintah and Duchesne Counties] are 58% higher than the rest of the state.

Got that? The state’s already comfortably in the top ten; but the tricounty area is 58% higher than the state’s rate!

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

So one thing UD has never understood is why gun makers don’t feature ease and certainty of suicide in their advertising, since this happens to be the gun’s calling card, its claim to fame, the primary reason tens of thousands of owners own guns. One obvious campaign would feature pre-death videos solicited from, say, tricounty suicides, in which they explain why choosing a gun to blow their brains out was, well, a no-brainer!

And there’s no reason consumers need to degrade their final act by choosing cheap pistols and smaller arms; in one celebrity spot, manufacturers could feature quarterback Tyler Hilinski’s use of an AR-15 in his suicide. (A Glock will only set you back $500 or so, whereas an AR-15 costs around a thousand. Tag line in this campaign: WHEN YOU CARE ENOUGH TO END THE VERY BEST.)

Guns command a vast and growing suicide market; their makers need to exploit this fact. A lot of drunk lonely cowboys are right now sitting on the fence suicide-wise; a strong ad campaign is probably all they need.

He’s an old white guy full of rage, despair, and vindictiveness; all of the strategies he’s used throughout life to be a winner have lately failed, and he now finds himself a very public loser. 

Because he is narcissistic, the public nature of his failure is close to unendurable, and he continues to try everything in his power to reverse events. The collapse of these efforts only adds to his public humiliation.

He has been in bad physical health.  It’s quite possible that at his age, and just having recovered from the corona virus, he has a number of serious medical problems, though these will not have been disclosed to us.

Many of his former friends and associates are bailing on him, or giving him the silent treatment.  He feels lonely, isolated. He has isolated himself. Maureen Dowd calls him “a child isolated and miserable living inside a national landmark, lashing out and spiraling into self-destructive acts.” Former FBI counterintelligence director Frank Figliuzzi goes so far as to describe Donald Trump as currently a “barricaded subject.“

Hey. I ain’t drawing the pictures.

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

He is the very embodiment, in other words, of the suicide. 

Demographically, he stands smack in the center of the self-slaughter sweet spot.

You’re shocked. You think it’s a crazy notion. Allow me to quote a recent NYT headline:

‘How Did We Not Know?’ Gun Owners Confront a Suicide Epidemic

Try to keep in mind two salient features here (You probably won’t be able to, because people HATE to think about suicide.):

1. A suicide epidemic. In some states (Montana, Wyoming, Alaska, Utah, Idaho, New Mexico), the numbers are staggering.
2. General ignorance about the suicide epidemic.

“Utah has very permissive gun laws, but we also have a very low homicide rate. What we didn’t realize was we have a huge suicide rate.”

How can you not realize that you have enormous suicide numbers, like Utah? How can you fail to notice that three of your counties have suicide rates 58% higher than the rest of the state? Than the rest of the state with close to the highest suicide rate in the nation? You can only succeed in not seeing this carnage if you’re totally determined not to see it. Just the way you will not see – will laugh off – the idea that the president of the United States might not be immune to the suicide epidemic, even as he’s flagrantly melting down in front of the nation.

I don’t say it’s likely. I do say it’s possible.

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

Suicide, writes A. Alvarez, is “a terrible but utterly natural reaction to the strained, narrow, unnatural necessities we sometimes create for ourselves.”  Donald Trump is trapped in exactly this way: he has created necessities having to do with power, prestige, money, sexual conquest, cruelty, and above all victory in every contest.  Yet he is about to lose power; he is widely viewed as a vulgarian; he has much less money than he boasts, and stands to lose a large chunk of what he does have as a result of many lawsuits; he is too old for sexual conquest; most people regard his cruelty as contemptible, and it certainly no longer works as well as it once did to frighten people into giving in to his demands; he has lost by six million votes to Joe Biden.  Only the all-out paranoid or self-servingly degenerate are willing to appear on television to defend him. He himself has become quite paranoid. He moves in a paranoid world: “Under Trump, the Republican identity is defined not by a set of policy beliefs but by a paranoid mind-set.”

This horrible outcome is a result of extensive conspiracies against him (he appeared in front of the nation last evening, ranting in this instance about pharma conspiracies).  There are too many of these conspiracies to count, and he feels undone by unrelenting deep state machinations.

What are his options? He lacks the courage and the cohorts to stage a coup; the prospect of doing anything on the outside after having been in the Oval Office is completely depressing. Degrading. For all his talk of 2024, he knows he’s already too tired to do the job, and that, realistically, he won’t have the energy to run again.

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

There’s no compensation in affective life awaiting him – a cold wife; various ex-children, some of whom (paranoia, and an intolerable sense of being displaced, rising again here) clearly intend to ride his coattails into political positions of their own; a dwindling number of people willing to be seen with him on a golf course.

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

Then there’s guilt. People think he’s incapable of it, but his fatal failures in the matter of the pandemic gnaw at him. He knows he acted badly there; and not only badly. At night, in bed, he considers whether it’s true as many say that he is responsible for a lot of deaths. During daylight hours he can convince himself he’s a great man who saved many people. At night, images of the sick and suffering, of funerals, visit him. He thinks he begins to be haunted.

Another conspiracy against him. A conspiracy of the dead.

The only real pleasure left derives from the thought of the dread and misery he’s inflicting on his enemies. Also from the reception and broadcast of his suicide note, which he has written a thousand times in his head: Hope you enjoy seventy million Americans rising up to beat the shit out of you now that you’ve driven me to this…

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

Strangely, what sticks in his craw the most from all of this is his own daughter-in-law, Lara Trump. It’s so clear that, of the second generation, Bionic Woman, who even named her daughter for the state she plans to run in, will be the mid-twenty-first century Trump. Jesus.

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

Finally: It is in the nature of cults that the cult leader kills himself. He may, like Jim Jones or Marshall Applewhite or David Koresh, take everyone with him one way or another; but Trump has far too many followers for this to be practicable. He’ll have to take one for the team.

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

How? Barricaded subject shoots himself in the head, at his desk in the Oval Office.

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).

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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.”

Yet even a cursory glance at his demographics – 55 years old, white, living alone, estranged from his children – puts him squarely in the highest risk group for suicide in the United States. Strong silent macho states – Alaska, Wyoming, Montana – consistently top the suicide lists; add an elite education, wealth, privilege, and good looks to that, and transfer it to a luxury high rise in LA, and nothing much changes. Everyone thinks money buys happiness, and maybe for lots of people that’s true; but for lots of people – especially those born to great wealth – it’s not true. In fact, the wealth can be a real burden. Gerald Grosvenor was a depressive.

Whether it’s autumn or winter, young mass murder’s always in season at Texas A&M Commerce and environs. Those of us trying to follow today’s double homicide among the impulsive tyke demographic were sent over to last October’s bloodbath among the babes. So that’s… October, November, December, January… We almost made it through three months without a big ol’ Texas A&M killing.

Now this one, UD‘s thinking, probably involves Commerce having admitted a mentally unstable freshman… This sorta little feller, say… Down Texas way a man – even a nineteen year old man – ain’t raised to go all boohoo and talk to some counselor or what have you. In our manly states (Texas, Wyoming, Montana, Alaska) you tend to deal with your problems by killing yourself (an extremely popular thing) and/or killing other people but the point is it’s gonna be something with a gun. Montana has the highest suicide rate in the nation and I think there’s like ten psychiatrists in the state. Who needs a shrink when you have a schwarzlose?

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

I was wrong. A random thug, from whom his ex-girlfriend (who was visiting her sister, a student at Commerce) should have been given protection (a career criminal, he was released from jail when he, uh, shouldn’t have been) killed the ex-girlfriend and her sister. Specifically, he was

free on bond related to an alleged assault family violence incident that took place last week. The report was filed by Abbaney Matts, one of the shooting victims.

... Abbaney said Smith assaulted her Jan. 26 … with a frying pan, lamp and then pulled out a knife …. Though she was not hospitalized, Abbaney reported injuries to the right side of her head, her eyes and had red marks and abrasions after the alleged attack.

[Jacques Dshawn] Smith was arrested and an emergency protective order was issued on Abbaney’s behalf. Smith was freed Jan. 29 after posting $15,000 bond.

… Smith has a string of priors dating back four years with charges including evading arrest, theft and aggravated robbery.

Three whole days in custody! I’m sure Abbaney’s surviving family feels real good about that.

Her neighbors live in rural Arkansas, ground zero for nihilism, American-style. Their worst enemy is Elizabeth Warren, the Plan lady who not only thinks she can improve rural education and health care, but who thinks people in rural Arkansas want to improve them. Au contraire: they appear to like the chaotic destructionism of Trump. “[M]any here seem determined to get rid of the last institutions trying to help them.”

The intense hostility to political establishments of all kinds among what could be called “chaos voters” helps explain what Pew Research and others have found: a growing distrust among Republican voters of higher education as well as empirically based science, both of which are increasingly seen as allied with the liberal establishment.

As for caring whether Trump betrays Kurds and Ukrainians: “It’s an attitude that is against taxes, immigrants and government, but also against helping your neighbor.” If they’re not going to care about their neighbor, imagine how they feel about Kurds and Ukrainians.

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

Matt Taibbi puts it like this:

Implicit in this campaign of bureaucratic dismantling has been the message that pandemonium is a price Trump is very willing to pay, in service of breaking the “disaster” of government. Many of his top appointees have been distinguished by their screw-it-all mentality.

  The world is ending, so fuck it, let’s party. As crazy as it is, it’s a seductive message for a country steeped in hate and pessimism. Democrats still don’t understand it.

Think of the final scenes of Nevil Shute’s On the Beach. The world is ending (nuclear annihilation), so the inhabitants of the last city the fallout will reach stage endless insane suicidal car races, where drivers who have nothing to lose gun their engines until the final spectacular flame-out.

Leaving nuanced definitions to the philosophers, I would define nihilism as a combination of three basic elements: a refusal to hope for anything except the ultimate vindication of hopelessness; a rejection of all values, especially values widely regarded as sacrosanct (equality, posterity, and legality); and a glorification of destruction, including self-destruction—or as Walter Benjamin put it, “self-alienation” so extreme that humanity “can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure.” Nihilism is less passive and more perverse than simple despair. “Nihilism is not only despair and negation,” according to Albert Camus, “but, above all, the desire to despair and to negate.”

A nihilist is someone who dedicates himself to not giving a shit, who thinks all meanings are shit, and who yearns with all his heart for the “aesthetic pleasure” of seeing the shit hit the fan. Arguing with a nihilist is like intimidating a suicide bomber: The usual threats and enticement have no effect. I suspect that is part of the appeal for both: the facile transcendence of placing oneself beyond all powers of persuasion. A nihilist is above you and your persnickety arguments in the same way that Trump fancies himself above the law.

Another go at it:

[Evidence suggests a] significant share of Trump supporters are as nihilistic and destructive as Donald Trump himself, [which] supplies a sort of Occam’s-razor answer to all the questions about why they put up with him: His worst traits are a feature, not a bug, for those who take pleasure in chaos.

Democrats still don’t understand it, says Taibbi. Okay, so let’s zoom in a bit:

Self-destruction is apparently many Arkansans’ middle name. If they’re not panting piously after the end of days, they’re offing themselves with opiates, or putting one of their abundant guns to their heads. They make the Sex Pistols look like the Lennon Sisters. The Donald Trump Show is what they’re laughing at on tv while kissing their ass goodbye, exactly like their fellow end-stagers from states with similarly massive gun ownership/suicide rates (Montana, Alaska, Wyoming). We’re killing ourselves! But before we do, we’re voting Trump.

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

And on that chaos thing. UD has always liked William Arrowsmith’s comment about an education in the humanities:

[The] humanities are largely Dionysiac or Titanic; they cannot be wholly grasped by the intellect; they must be suffered, felt, seen. This inexpressible turmoil of our animal emotional life is an experience of other chaos matched by our own chaos. We see the form and order not as pure and abstract but as something emerged from chaos, something which has suffered into being. The humanities are always caught up in the actual chaos of living, and they also emerge from that chaos. If they touch us at all, they touch us totally, for they speak to what we are too.

So, you know, distrust higher education all you like. But be aware that it’s trying to make some serious moves against your chaos, that its novels and poems both acknowledge the foundational reality, and exploit the generative energy, of that chaos as we seek to emerge from it, on occasion, into form and order. Into organized life.