The stupid talking heads: Orlando

The news intellectuals have declared that this week’s mass murder in Orlando, if spun as a “terrorist” attack, would accrue to D. Trump’s electability. That’s because he is the Mind who’s been right about terrorism and the need to do something very angry about it. H. Clinton is – in this non-dominant-hand crayon-drawn caricature of mature discourse (picture the Founding Fathers all sitting around playing with Silly Putty) – wrongheaded and weak and bound to lose, because she’s . . . less angry?

An influential number of stupid adults (or at least those who shape the world and bend our ear) believe not only that a religion – Islam – that’s lately been gotten drunk and incoherent at the party makes people into murderers, but also that a man (his name is Mateen) becomes an ideological assassin by naming his like for a group (ISIS) that has date-raped that doctrine. By this logic, if Mateen had, while shooting up the place, mentioned his admiration for Bonnie and Clyde, we would know he is a Bonniclydean apostle and zealot, driven solely by his strong faith.

I want the “national security experts” and other valley girls who live on cardboard-cutout ideas to know that people do bad things because they are psychologically warped, not because they pledge allegiance, or lip service, to a belief system or join a particular club. That means mentally ill. A schizophrenic who starves because “the government poisoned my food” is mentally ill. The psychopath who works for Animal Control and kills people along his route is mentally ill. Madoff, who didn’t care about gutting people’s lives, is mentally ill. An individual who believes something that makes no sense is mentally ill – though that is controversial because most people need, at some level, to believe untrue or unlikely things to feel better in their life.

People don’t like to be reminded of their psychic muck, and in their outer world really don’t want to see under the surface of what’s thinkable and actionable. They don’t want to think how their childhood bent them angry or people-pleasing, or that their parents were incompetent, immature, unloving, deaf to their words and blind to their soul – were to blame. They do not want to see terrible storms like genocide and fanaticism and realize that the grand is really the sub-microscopic, the personal psyche, one life. That a Hitler is one beaten and disturbed child, and that there are many parents like his, like a virus, in a time and culture. That this child will hold, radiate or take his pain elsewhere. He will throw a toy, kick the dog, punch himself. His heart will be burnt and he’ll feel uncomfortable around someone whose heart is warm. And eventually he will take ideas, which soothe us all, to give him a reason for his pain.

People don’t want to see this. Why not?

They don’t want to think of mental illness, because it becomes a mirror. It becomes personal.