No excuses for Trump loyalists

I never experienced consciously a single molecule of anger, much less rage, throughout my childhood and adolescence. Every frustration had been absorbed into my fear and dissociation, leaving the only manifestation of bad feeling to be my burning of ants on a light bulb, age eight or nine. And I didn’t even grasp that this was anger-pain until I began writing papers in my clinical counseling program thirty-five years later. During my college years, after all the silent build-up of unspoken frustrations and injustices, there would only be object rage and no anger. If a pencil broke or I hit one too many wrong keys on the typewriter, I’d jerk out of the chair, berserker around the room like a short-circuiting Terminator, ripping my shirt apart with buttons flying. I never, from year zero to twenty-six, got angry at a person.

This changed during my twelve-year marriage to a vicious Borderline. Though I never reached the manly reality of anger that would match that woman’s craziness, some anger would push through the old fear and dissociation when I needed to protect myself, bitterly restraining her.

This disclosure is meant to introduce my “evolution” to a species of sublimation, where childhood “justified rage” (Alice Miller) transmuted to rage at authority and at all the supporters of Donald Trump. I find their complicit offensiveness intolerable. Following is my recent news magazine comment section’s response to one of those two-dimensional fools who enjoy declaring that Trump has never done anything wrong:

It won't help you, but you should understand that people like you who love and admire a narcissistic sociopath are very troubled. Have you heard of those female attorneys and cops who fall in love with serial killers in prison, write them love letters and sometimes marry them? Do you think they are normal? You're in the same boat.

Future society will probably never criminalize people whose willed delusions are destructive, in act or principle, of a humane society. But many of us feel justified rage that they can gain hegemony in Congress, this administration, among gerrymandered voters, and this rage should circle back to each individual who contributes to the destruction of that society.

We can say there is no excuse for a parent to beat his child, because that parent might have read himself a little better, or read a parenting book, or gone to therapy, and would thereby have found the pain behind his projecting. No different to admire the incarnate ugliness of this mistaken president. To love a sociopath is to necessarily have other sicknesses, whose symptoms and signs might be noticed in oneself. Free-floating hate, domestic violence, global bigotries, solipsism, lack of empathy: These could signal to someone that all is not right inside. Excuses shouldn’t be accepted.