Ghosts are very uncomfortable

Comment to a New York Times op-ed article –

Remember the well-known lines from Yeats’ poem, “The Second Coming”: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” That’s what you say when the best lose, as they did in 2016. But the bests’ conviction will probably win the day in Nov. 2020. The truth behind the poetry is that there is nearly endless energy in projected pain, which is the fuel that people like Tucker Carlson live on. Why are pain and injury often louder than health and wisdom? Ask your local therapist, or look to Dylan Thomas and his “rage against the dying of the light.”

This is just psych speculation about a broad notion: that the haters are louder than the lovers, the marchers more fanatical than the protesters, the Republicans more assiduous in pouring acid than the Democrats are in defeating wrongs.

Real happiness blooms in a field of contentment. Manic or delusional happiness, unreal, does not. Contentment, serenity, peace – these are not loud and driven. But pain that has been swallowed in childhood, embedded deep, is driven to express itself and escape from itself. It howls at the world because it could never condemn the parents. It kills six million Jews and knows that sixty million wouldn’t have been enough. These Republican pundits, like Carlson and Limbaugh and Pirro, are angry ghosts trapped in their past. They do not – really, they do not – know what they are angry about and so they must scream and curse and destroy forever. A content person will feel many oceans deep at the dying of the light. The ghost will rage forever.