CommentsONE MAN’S OPINION-How do mental illness, vulturism and politicos interact with each other? All three are vast subject areas meriting research, books to be written, and extensive public discussion, but one initial step is to recognize their existence.
“Mental illness” is a term that is becoming obsolete as we become more sophisticated about human behavior. The illness model was an advance over demonology, but most of the bad behavior we see is not medically caused. The DSM (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) was and is an on-going process to objectively classify human behaviors.
The nation, however, has been dealing poorly with its first mentally ill President. Someday, society will understand that all people have personality patterns. We will admit the need to describe candidates’ psychological patterns such as Trump’s Histrionic Personality Disorder as well as his raging Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Presently, people shy away from Trump’s obvious mental impairments much in the way that cancer was not discussed in the 1950s.
All the blame for the nation’s failure to deal with Trump’s mental deficits should not fall on the psychological community. They too live in a society where “vulturism” has become a virtue and craven politicos pit one segment of the population against the other for the personal aggrandizement of the political elites. The Goldwater Doctrine was used to suppress what little discussion that began about the individual mental processes of Trump. The reason to stamp out public recognition of Trump’s mental defects was political. Pelosi thought it would be easier for her and other Dems to regain power with Trump as President than if Pence took over. Being right and being moral do not always coincide.
It seems likely that the reason there was no collusion with Russia was not Trump’s lack of desire but rather Putin’s more honest assessment of Trump’s mental state. Trump exhibits all the traits that Putin loathes. Trump is a draft-dodging coward who stabs friends in the back. He is a braggart who basks in the cheers of the crowd and is intellectually shallower than a kiddies’ rubber wading pool.
Odds are that Putin has Trump’s tax returns and knows every oligarch to whom Trump owes money. He might have even bought up those debts. There’s no need to collude with someone you own. If our craven politicos had shown more concern for the nation, they would have acted upon the extreme threat that Trump posed for the nation. The 25th Amendment was written for someone like him. Had the Dems and moderate GOP, who hated Trump, and the military and Trump’s family deployed the Nixon Option, Trump would have stepped down.
Vulturism Has Become A Way of Life
Vulturism is corruptionism at its most vile, where predators are permitted to abuse the most vulnerable. Trump, LA City Hall, and California’s judicial system all condone vulturism. It underlies the taking of children from their parents and locking them in cages. When Border Patrol agents followed these reprehensible policies, America as a nation acquiesced to vulturism. Not a single American was made one iota safer by this cruelty.
When people look back on this era in American society and ask, as people ask about pre-WW II Nazi Germany, “how did it happen?”, one thing people will discuss is how the American people allowed Trump to victimize the toddlers. Victimizing a toddler is worse than similar treatment of a baby who cannot recognize what is happening. Right wingers love to tout Sodom and Gomorrah and praise themselves. Yet, did the rulers of Sodom stoop so low as to abuse the toddlers of strangers the way we allowed Trump to treat the most vulnerable strangers in our midst? The fact the nation did not spontaneously condemn Trump as this point shows how low we have fallen.
Similarly, Los Angeles City Hall has pursued a policy to destroy the homes of the poorest people, kicking the elderly, the disabled and children onto the streets to suffer and die. Why has the Garcetti Administration followed this wretched policy? So that developers can make bigger profits by demolishing rent-controlled apartments. It’s cheaper to buy rent-controlled apartments than to buy a building with market rate units. City Hall policies have targeted the homes of the poorest following the Buy Low Sell Higher maxim. We see the Sell High portion when luxury units abound while homeless people sleep on the sidewalks outside the new high rises. No one should deceive themselves into thinking the vulturous City Hall policy is the product of the GOP – LA is a Dem town. “Hollywood” also bankrolls a lot of the national Dem campaigns; so, it does not take an Einstein to figure out why the Obama Administration allowed vultures to prey upon poor Angelenos.
Ah, the Politicos
All politicians do not merit the appellation Politico. It is reserved for those who use their power for personal aggrandizement to the extreme detriment of the nation. Some like Trump suffer from personality disorders, while others have not been classified. The Dem counterpart to Trump is not Obama or Hillary, but Pelosi. Some day we may recognize whatever disorder Nancy Pelosi exhibits. And all this brings us back to Group Rights.
Group Rights Supports Vulturism
When one joins a gang, the group’s goals become paramount and values cease to control conduct. Pelosi’s Identity Politics is symbiotic with Trump’s White Supremacism. One could argue that right wing violence makes them less dangerous in the long run as most people recognize the harm from murder. What people fail to appreciate, as de Tocqueville pointed out in the 1830s, is the destructiveness of “equality” as played out in Identity Politics. The equality banner is as seductive as it sounds implying that everyone will play together nicely. In reality, it is a political strategy for internecine hatreds so that people remain forever divided. It is no more complicated than first year Latin. Divide et Impera – Divide and Conquer.
While the craven politicos may promise to help some group, they always blame some out-group for all their in-group’s woes. Pelosi would have Gays hate the Christian right, while ignoring the role of Muslim homophobia which drove Omar Marteen to murder 49 people at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Trump continually whips up hatreds of Mexicans. Now he wants to close the border with Mexico.
Pelosi is using anti-Semitism to magnify her power among Dem politic, and no one has the guts to challenge her. Among the nine billion Dems running to be President, none have spoken out against Pelosi’s promotion of Group Rights. The Dems will continue to demonize teenagers who wear MAGA hats, while Trumpsters will want a 1,000-foot high wall along the southern border. Neither the Dems nor the GOP will entertain the idea that truly made America great: treating each person as having individual inalienable rights including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney and a CityWatch contributor. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Abrams’ views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
