Egos today are like those huge balloons floating bland-faced and with absurd solemnity above the crowds in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, except the balloons are tethered to the reality of tow-trucks navigating a complex course through congested streets.
Archive for the ‘narcissism’ Category.
The ritualistic courtesy of the Chinese and Japanese stems from their societies being overcrowded; absent an objectified code of personal interaction their countries would descend into violent chaos. America’s not overpopulated, but we have a much lower threshold for angry and irrational resentment than the Orientals, thanks to our having become infantile after 40 years of unrestricted self-indulgence, the evaporation of our educational process and the aberrant notion that we can heal our spiritual malaise by purchasing high-profile merchandise. There are simply no spurs to empathetic understanding in a nation whose religious worship consists of thanking God for easy credit and whose standard greeting runs, “Get out of my face, you fucking asshole.”
Political correctness is not about acceptance of the other, tolerance, affirmative action, doing the right thing or any other cultural or social issue. It’s a moral salve for the consciences of people who refuse to endure the strictures on behavior of a personal moral code. Imagine a woman who breaks her arm and goes to work as a municipal plasterer instead of seeing a doctor, on the grounds that “confining my limb to a plaster cast infringes on my individual freedom.” The more unbearable her pain becomes, the more civic wall-space she slathers with her featureless goo, crippled but convinced that she is beautifying the city.
Given how our culture has devolved—i.e., into narcissistic appearance-ism— a man whose psychology prompts him to seek the presidency is the very man we least need to have serving in that position.
Hollywood, Cradle of the Gold-Plated Castrato: A semi-tropical desert become a verdant fantasy park despite the absence of actual weather through the beguiling sorcery of agricultural irrigation. The altar of tasteless excess on which the carcass of Integrity has long since blanched in the sun. A hyperbolic monument of strident vibrating neon to all the cheap souls exterminated by the treacheries of art commerce. Accurate to the smallest detail, faithful only to the spirit of rapine. The town where no means, “Offer me some more money,” and yes means, “But I get to fuck you first.” Where people walk backwards in order to see the knives coming. Where egos drift serenely across the empyrean like dirigibles. Where slack-jawed women enthrall themselves from the looking-glass above the bed while their hairy-backed producers seek to elude their own perfidy by stuffing their entire bodies into the crevice of the Rotting Goddess. Where chicken-liver shakes its booty at Giorgio, and Rolls takes a dump on Mercedes. Where “opportunity missed” means a body is still on its feet. Where the values in the screenplays are guessed at by the self-mutilated eunuchs who not only can’t get their values up anymore, but can’t remember how it ever felt to have values. Where minimal self-respect requires the bloody abolition of all the other sleazoids doing business in this town. And where the Nine Muses alighted from the train in 1939 to get a feel for the place, but within the hour reentered the train and departed, never to grace these inhospitable precincts again.
The essential precept of Baby Boomerism boils down to this: “The rules are made for everybody else. They’re certainly not going to get in my way.”
The Baby Boomers were our first generation to wreck a whole ethos because of perceived parental overkill. First they were required to work for their allowance at the abusive rate of half an hour a week. Later on they had to do some homework. They were even forced to come downstairs and intermingle with the family on Thanksgiving. What with the TV and stereo blasting away in perpetuity, the message just didn’t get through that after adolescence they would be expected to take the reins and fund their own existence. Ultimately their folks refused to buy a Stingray for them on the occasion of their extrusion from high school, and that broke the camel’s back. They hit the road in high dudgeon, only to discover that Dad kept the allowance coming anyway. For the first time in their lives, the Babes were faced with making strategic decisions. They opted to spend their money purchasing 80% of the world’s drug supply. Everything after that was a psychedelic pisshaze with vagrant bouts of sexual activity and sloganeering attended by wine, incense and fingernails-on-the-blackboard music until they woke up in college, still siphoning their parents’ bucks yet acknowledging that the old farts had steered them right all along: the better the grades they made, the more money they would earn to finance their ongoing self-indulgence crusade. Additionally they were pleased to learn that they had Changed the World, a source of immense pride and distinction which they duly acknowledged by still wearing their hair long, growing mutton chops and ‘staches, and not wearing anything special to class. Viva la revolucion.
Overheard at the Intersection of Hollywood and Vine: A woman is using the payphone. I don’t have his pants. Why would I be walking around Hollywood holding Peter’s pants in my hands? Jesus…. So I’m the bad guy?…. The last time I saw the goldfish it was in the refrigerator door-rack.…. Hey this grungy-looking weirdo is staring at me. He’s checking out my tits. Wait a minute…. Okay, he’s gone. Are you saying I didn’t pick her up from school yesterday? Fuck that. Who’s got her?…. Oh shit. Look, can you go down and get her out for me? You can act like you’re me…. I would act like I was you, if you…. What’s the big deal, Breanne? Don’t you give a shit about my daughter?….
I am patriotic but there’s one statistic concerning our country which I never want to learn lest I renounce my citizenship in rage, and that is the percentage of Americans who gratify their suppurating egos by baiting, humiliating and taunting waiters and waitresses because they hold the power to decide the size of a tip.
“I carry an amulet of exotic Mayan derivation and I watch art or foreign movies on my DVD player whenever I have some free time. My father wears the same go-to-hell hat everywhere and he never lets a day go by without doing a crossword puzzle. I sure am glad I’m not like him. We just don’t have anything in common.”
Educational Manifesto Prologue: (1) Studying anything trains the brain for application to practical life, a notion that deprives children of effort-excusing statements such as “I’m not going to need geometry when I grow up.” IT MUST BE RIGOROUSLY AND REGULARLY POINTED OUT TO STUDENTS THAT THEY DON’T KNOW WHAT THE HELL THEY’RE GOING TO NEED TO KNOW WHEN THEY GROW UP. (2) Ignorance invites manipulation by robbing the student of a bullshit filter. (3) It doesn’t matter what standards we use as long as everybody attempts to meet them; general uniformity of conditions as well as routine activities reduces insecurity and enables the child to study creatively. (4) The term “self-esteem” shall not be vocalized within the confines of a public educational facility; instead, self-esteem will be fostered in the young through daily confrontations with new challenges, a procedure founded on the precept that the sooner kids fail the sooner they will learn not to fail, at which point they’ll begin to feel damn good about themselves. (5) Children need a vigorous physical-exercise regimen guided by the principle of collaborative competition; the consequence of this will be that when a kid becomes an adult he won’t imagine that he’s the only individual in the world whose wishes and needs require attending to.
The tagline of a series of fast-food commercials running now should be adopted as America’s motto, because it epitomizes the end-result of forty years of the unrestricted self-indulgence that began in the late ‘60s with the valiant admonition, If it feels good do it (till it hurts). It was seriously believed that what was needed by the most pampered generation in the country’s history—a generation that had already long-since placed its pleasure and comfort ahead of everything else— was even more pleasure. Not unpredictably, pleasure-seeking as the object of behavior soon devolved into simple appetite-satiation, but it took more than a quarter century for the socio-cultural consequences fully to manifest themselves. The ego’s descent into abject self-absorption and the consequent lack of consideration for others has ultimately metamorphosed into the universal, violent, infantile and gut-wrenching incivility we endure today. The tagline of the commercials goes: Don’t bother me, I’m eating.
The only industry with less shame than Show Business may be the fashion industry. During her tabloidized trial for shoplifting, actress Wynona Ryder wore the clothing of her favorite designer to court practically every day. When the trial was over (ending with the star’s conviction) the designer offered her a contract to model his line for a national marketing campaign. Surreality rules.
The Cell Phone’s Connected to the Self-Image Bone. [2002] Just about everything people do in public these days is intended to “send a message” or “make a statement.” The first generation of cell phone users, whipping the little chirping gadget out of their shoulder bags, purses and jacket side-pockets, were saying to the world, “Look how damned important I am!” Today’s cell-phoner takes a different approach, because more people own cell phones now, and consequently everybody’s getting more calls. This enables the user to announce on the whip-out, via body language and facial expression, that, “I’m connected to such a far-flung elaborate network of contacts that one or another of them always needs to check in with me!” Incidentally, the cell phone today is perhaps only half the size it was during the first generation, and with that in mind we may propose the following theorem: Thompson’s Law of Cell Phones: Egos have ballooned in volume in direct proportion as cell phones have shrunk.
One way you can identify solipsistic people is by the wide-ranging variety of their grotesque facial expressions coupled with their manic head-tossing.
“Discussing health never seems frivolous. It disguises narcissism with an aura of serious concern.” (Tina Brown) I am old enough to have recognized from experience that the rise of the health and fitness craze to universal prominence among the professional upper middle-class is exactly contemporaneous (along with the smoking-galls-my-ass movement) with the Baby Boomers’ arrival in their 30s, exuding trendoid sophistication and affluence; the whole thing started in the mid-1970s. What those designer-outfitted joggers (especially when they pose heroically at intersections), those Predator-head-shaped-helmet-wearing bicyclists, those pastel-leotarded gym fanatics, and those aerobicizing video prancers are really saying is, “Don’t just look at me. ADMIRE me!” And consult your own experience: Doesn’t the undisguised narcissist yammering about her broken fingernail, her disastrous trip to the deli, her family’s complement of turdballs, how much she likes the new Madonna CD, her received (“two thumbs up!”) opinion of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, even her cat’s stool, for Christ’s sake, look merely childish and petulant beside the pale-faced, aggrieved-voiced, solemn, graphic and detailed complainer of chronic colitis and the complicated curative course they’ve got her on? Whenever I hear this sick crap, what I really hear is: “You were in danger there of losing focus on me and I can’t afford to let that happen—how can you not empathize with me when you see that I am nearly not well?” It’s one of the many forms of emotional blackmail today practiced by the warped on the bored.
The television show The Apprentice verified the dictum that mediocrity and superficiality are the hallmarks of clueless ambition, showing us again that the emptier a mind is, the more readily it lends itself to camouflage, in this case corporate shtick. Thompson’s Law of Jumped-Up Nonentities: The rate of speed required for the transformation of dorm lizard or Super Bowl groupie into well-tailored killer drone is inversely proportionate to their ability to define the term morality as something other than “Whatever I can get away with.”
Gainsay Me If You Can: Be advised that I am going to compare an intangible societal process with a mechanical device in order to make a point about morality in a conceptually graphic way; consider the device to be metaphorical, in something like the way the intangible process is tangible in its consequences, except in reverse. Let’s say morality, which occurs at the intersection of private and public concerns, is a conventional timepiece, and then let us remind ourselves that the watch is driven by a mainspring. If the watch “runs down,” it may be rewound by tightening the spring; but if the spring breaks, then the watch stops telling time. The mainspring of American morality was broken forty years ago, and the ultimate consequences, as opposed to the innocuous and even rather enjoyable immediate effects, are now growing starkly apparent. When the fate of a society remains in doubt, its members must not only work hard to survive as individuals, but also work together to survive collectively; and the basis of working together is mutual trust and reliability. When the fate of a nation is in doubt, the consequences of lapses and mistakes are immediate, always crippling and sometimes lethal, and therefore the maintenance of public and private discipline is the sine qua non of the nation’s existence. But when the staunchly maintained discipline has resulted in victory over enemy and circumstance, then a measure of prosperity ensues, and with it a false sense of security that tempts the human being to relax both self-discipline and communal/institutional discipline. As the consequences of error and laxity are not immediately adverse during the flush of prosperity, people ask why the dreary and laborious maintenance of discipline is still necessary, and then they decide that it is not. At that point a very few people retain their disciplined behavior believing that right is right and wrong is wrong, while the vast bulk conclude that if no punishment ensues then no behavior is criminal or sinful, or if it is criminal or sinful nothing adverse is going to come of it, and so everything is permitted. That is the point at which the mainspring of American morality was broken. And now we approach the time when the enemies and circumstances we have been discounting when we haven’t been ignoring them are going to make us pay the price for our dissolution. If we reward children with food, we should not be surprised when they make pigs of themselves. When we spare children punishment for their misdeeds, we should not be surprised when they grow up to be scofflaws. When we deprive children of love, we should not be surprised when they grow up to be sociopaths. When we abuse children psychologically or sexually, we should not be surprised when they abuse their children in the same ways. We shall know the tree by its fruit. If a people comes to feel that satisfying their appetites is the highest priority and legitimize any means deemed useful in achieving that goal, then we should not be surprised when sheriffs guard or even operate their county vice rings, when judges sell decisions, when lawyers trick juries into freeing hardened criminals, when politicians lie to those whose fate depends on their leaders’ honesty, when educators deliberately disaffect students from their heritage and civic identity, and when journalists distort the facts in order to present reality to the citizenry through an ideological lens. None of this should surprise us in the least because the mainspring of morality is broken and the mutually reinforcing interaction between the Self and the Other is broken with it. The self-involved self cannot be “socially aware,” in spite of what the liberals preach. The broken mainspring cannot be repaired. It has to be replaced.
History through the Classroom Window: The American teenager today may acquire all the condoms he desires from his high-school nurse’s station, but he’s forbidden by that very institution to have a burger for lunch or crack a cold Diet Coke to slake his thirst. To understand what has become of our educational system and its “clients”—our kids—we must go back in time to the fall of 1945. The generation that persevered through the rigors of the Great Depression, then slogged and battled their way to victory in World War II, had spent an average of three to nine years in school before necessity compelled them to take up the duties and responsibilities of adulthood. They liked to say their real education occurred in the school of hard knocks, and they were not wrong in thinking that. On the other hand, the ultimate vindication and success these provincial young men and women wrung from global conflict after a decade and a half of poverty and grim travail unlocked America’s long-restrained human energy the way the Manhattan Project had recently unlocked the power of the atom. The G I Bill of Rights and the post-war continuation of the government’s awarding of research grants to universities gigantically expanded the country’s educational apparatus just as the rise of the big corporation and evolving science and technology as well as the understandable desire to experience something better than a subsistence-level existence impelled the returning soldiers to enter the halls of ivy for a “college education.” In another decade and a half, America’s revitalized educational system in conjunction with our spectacular prosperity (for the energies of our industrial base had also been liberated) had converted our population from credulous hard-scrabble pluggers into skeptical-to-cynical sophisticates perusing their navels in the lap of luxury and security even as The Readers’ Digest tapered off in popularity while Playboy and Esquire became the periodicals du jour. It amazingly occurred that a generation of men and women who had become adults by the age of thirteen raised a generation of young people who remained adolescent deep into their twenties, as often as not displaying their superior cultivation by cruelly mocking the tastes and attitudes of the parents who had made possible their lives of idle frivolity. Meanwhile, the expansive and dynamic post-war culture also transformed the population, from practitioners of frugal and prudent self-restraint, sacrifice and head-down hard work into easy-credit no-sweat narcissistic hedonists. These big metamorphoses were facilitated by a class of teachers who evinced more interest in their professional status and political influence than they did in educating the young (a boring, crude, obsolete and trivial notion to be sure); very soon there emerged a phalanx of radical academics to provide the teachers with rigorous focus and direction. These were the militant disciples of Antonio Gramsci who proceeded to disaffect the younger students from their traditional values and heritage in order to inculcate into them as they matured an ideology of personally amoral secularism and collectivism—under their tender care the fundamental value of American life ceased to be the freedom of the individual and became uniform equality, the better to manipulate you with, my dears. And as if that were not sufficient to burn away the heritage bequeathed us by the Greatest Generation, commercial advertising as transmitted first and foremost by television converted the population into robotic consumers of merchandise, excitement and sensation—the Me-Pepsi-Now Generation. The 60’s academic radicals, who might never have remained in the universities to work their evil had the Anti-War Movement not encouraged them to hole up on campus during the Vietnam War, are the specific treacherous agents of our disastrous values revolution—disastrous to good order, that is, and as regards the replacement of ideals motivating constructive activity by appetitive self-indulgence—, but they never could have succeeded in their mischief if those admirable and heroic veterans had known the critical importance of and taught their progeny the value of knowledge for its own sake instead of perpetuating their forefathers’ conviction that education is the strictly utilitarian agency that endows the young with the rudimentary skills and knowledge they need to earn a living. This crucial concept of knowledge (and of art, too, as long as we’re on the subject) as a human birthright to be appreciated and desired intrinsically—this missing complement of liberty itself and free enterprise—is as alien to American life and popular thought as eating horsemeat and snails, and our forfeiture of it has done as much as or more than any other factor to cause us to “lose” the country to a belief system founded on tossing dollars out and shoveling stuff back in and not giving a damn for the ultimate costs or consequences, because that is now the government’s responsibility. And yet the guys who forged our victory in the Battle of the Bulge and on the island fortress of Okinawa with their blood and sweat and valor are telling us now (I can hear them even if you can’t) that it is time to quit our bellyaching and our scape-goating of others for the troubles we have made for ourselves; it is time to suck it up and to shoulder our responsibilities. They are right. That is what I’m going to do from here on out, and as far as I’m concerned the journey towards truth and a wholesome productive life for everybody begins with the right naming of names.
untitled, Zeus Bascon, 2010, International Hotel Manilatown Center
Summary Conclusion: Modern Liberalism is a mass dysfunction prevalent in large segments of the upper middle class, a population category that is noted for practicing the sheltered prolongation of adolescence through the college years. Originating in the 1960s when both advertisers and educators began regarding teenagers as consumers to be coaxed and humored, as they had been regarded when children by the makers of toys, clothes and breakfast cereal, Walt Disney and a host of other merchandisers, this Indian summer of adolescence experienced by youth in the universities results in an elephantine inflation of the ego plus the implantation of a sense of entitlement, both to rectitude (product of the displacement of education by quasi-sophistication) and to effective control over society through the exercise of professional expertise. Many Conservatives have wasted years of their lives and an incalculable amount of energy (that might otherwise have been spent productively) in trying to “reason with” Liberals, an erroneous approach founded in the Liberals’ habit of clothing their narcissism in the rhetoric of intellectuality and socialistic altruism. The ego of a liberal is an ego that is perpetually shrieking: “I want to be a good person without having to be a good person!” Clearly, reasoning with the emotionally constipated and mentally disjointed is foolish because the afflicted are inhibited by their embattled egos from examining their assumptions. The most effective way to communicate with Liberals, as Ann Coulter has correctly diagnosed, is to strike them over the head with a baseball bat. A proposition deriving from the argument: Not every young person who enters college is a member of the upper middle class, but everyone who passes through college is, psychologically, aspirationally, stylistically.