Words Cannot Be Chosen Too Carefully

Even though, on this blog, I express opinions that are controversial for some (I am an unapologetic Marxist), I try my best to choose words that not only accurately convey my meaning (which qualifies itself in so many theses, negations, and sublations, it’s like a pendulum swinging perpetually between opposites), but that also convey it as persuasively and fairly as possible.

By “persuasively,” I mean that I try my best to find reliable sources to back up my arguments, which is easier said than done, given that bourgeois Google is bloody awful. (I don’t have time to sift through fifty pages in a search of an appropriate online article, no matter how hard I try to refine my keywords.)

By “fairly,” I mean I try to minimize bias (something never 100% eliminated by anyone), and I try to avoid promoting prejudiced attitudes against any disadvantaged group. Again, I cannot do a perfect job at that, but I try my best.

As a socialist, I want freedom from unfair advantages (often crudely defined as “equality,” but more accurately defined as, “from each according to his or her ability, to each according to his or her needs“), across the board. Social justice isn’t symbolized by a straight, flat line; it’s symbolized by the gentle, up-and-down flowing waves of an infinite ocean.

Still, even my best efforts are opposed by people who won’t read me as carefully as I try to express myself. I’ve had readers who troll me on the basis of only one paragraph, or even just one sentence I’ve written (or even just a part of one sentence!); they have chosen, instead of staying with me and seeing that one problematic passage in context, to jump to conclusions and judge the entire post, or everything on my blog, on that one little fragment.

I’ll give a few examples of such misrepresentations of my writing, starting with some people on the Facebook pages supporting victims of narcissistic and emotional abuse, where I used to share blog posts of my own experiences of that problem…before the ultra-offended began a cowardly campaign of reporting me and putting me in Facebook jail for days, or even a week’s length in time.

What were the usual reasons for this? My occasional criticisms of Trump, for one. My second post on my personal experiences with emotional abuse, which I suffered from my family, titled Narcissism In the Family, while liked by a lot of people, has also generated a lot of criticism, generally from brief comments I made in passing about the Donald, not from the overall content of the post.

Most of this criticism seems to have been centred around my use of Trump as an example of overt narcissism. Now, criticizing him has, for obvious reasons, become a tad political, to put it mildly, and I know we’re not supposed to share political opinions on those Facebook support group pages; so sharing that post–as well as Absence Makes the Mind Go Fonder, which also includes a brief criticism of the Trump administration–is a no-no. Still, let’s be reasonable: is there anything controversial about acknowledging Trump’s most obvious narcissism? In mentioning it, am I going off topic or something?

But even beyond that, let’s consider the politics. How can there be survivors of narcissistic and emotional abuse, in significant numbers, supporting Trump? Do these worshippers of right-wing authoritarianism have Stockholm Syndrome? Why do they think a billionaire narcissist actually cares about them, when they aren’t even in his economic league?

Just because he isn’t part of the Republican/Democratic duopolistic establishment doesn’t make him one of ‘the good guys.’ Trump supporters have no sense of historical materialist, class analysis, something that has been sorely missing in political discourse ever since the rise of neoliberal capitalism and the disastrous dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Trump is merely a dissident member of the ruling class; he’s part of its more nationalistic faction. Like all members of the capitalist class, though, be they conservative or liberal, their main concern is to protect and preserve their class interests, not to care about the common people. One must be willing to acknowledge how narcissistic capitalists are.

Trump speaks out against the wars to gain popularity with the anti-war right, and to be reelected in 2020, not because of his convictions (assuming he has any). His bloated military budget, interventions in other countries’ affairs, expansion of imperialism, bombings, and starvation sanctions are consistent with those of his predecessors.

One doesn’t have to be a pussy-hat wearer, talking nonsense about “Russian collusion,” to oppose him. All one has to do is see him do all the things that the American political establishment approves of him doing. What he says means nothing (except in how it displays his narcissism and lechery); what he does is everything, the same as with other politicians, past and present.

If he truly wanted to “drain the swamp” of corruption, he would never have appointed former Exxon-Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, who has hoped for a coup in Venezuela (and has been replaced by the far more charming Pompeo–sarcasm); nor would he have appointed Steven Mnuchin, formerly of Goldman Sachs.

Some survivors of narcissistic and emotional abuse turn to Christianity to give them comfort, which is no one’s business but their own, of course; but some of these will have a more conservative, fundamentalist-leaning faith. With this inclination, they may imagine that God appointed the obviously sinful Trump to the Oval Office, justifying their absurd convictions by citing where Scripture has given instances of God choosing sinners as kings before (“The Lord moves in mysterious ways,” apparently), instead of these fundamentalists just acknowledging how cognitive dissonance has blinded them, and how the real reason they support him is for his pro-capitalist, authoritarian, right-wing policies (e.g., his support for Israel).

I wonder if God has appointed the corrupt popes and hierarchy of bishops in the Vatican for the same mysterious, divine reason? Have the anti-Catholic evangelicals ever thought of that? I doubt it.

Have these Trump-supporting abuse survivors considered the abuse dished out by ICE at all the Latin American families being torn apart, children separated from parents, and put in cages before being deported? The fact that Obama was the deporter-in-chief of “illegal” immigrants (just so we’re clear, people are not illegal in my opinion; I don’t believe in nations or borders–I believe in people, and these people are often apprehended for minor offences, if any) doesn’t make Trump’s continuation of this injustice more acceptable.

If Trump supporters are so infuriated with the influx of Mexicans and Central Americans across the border and into Texas, have they given any thought as to the cause of this influx? The US government has thwarted most of the attempts of Latin American countries to elect left-wing governments and pull themselves out of poverty, violence, and despair; and these frustrations go right back two hundred years, starting with the Monroe Doctrine and the dwindling of the Spanish Empire’s hegemony over the region, continuing with the Roosevelt Corollary, and fully blossoming with American interference with the governments of such countries as Chile and Guatemala.

American overturning of democracy in their “backyard” has continued unabated to the present administration, with such interventions over the years, successfully or not, to remove Noriega, Chavez, Zelaya, Maduro, and currently…Evo Morales!

The purpose of all of these coups, whether successful or not, is not to promote “democracy” (the US does business with the head-chopping Saudi kingdom, for fuck’s sake!). It is done in the interests of capitalist imperialism: Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world, and Bolivia has lithium, whose production Morales wanted to nationalize to help his people, which would have stopped German and other nations’ companies from profiting from it.

With so many Latin Americans languishing in poverty and hopelessness, forcing women and children into prostitution, is it any surprise that many Latinos try to build a future for themselves and their families by crossing the Texan border, and trying to stay for as long as they can? Do the abuse survivors who support Trump have the empathy to consider Hispanic suffering?

The same applies to the ban against Muslims till we “can figure out what the hell is going on?” To stop terrorism and the influx of Muslim refugees into the West, we could start by acknowledging the American creation of Al Qaeda and ISIS, and not “bomb the shit out of” Middle Eastern countries. Abuse survivor supporters of Trump, how about some of that good ol’ empathy?

Finally, let’s consider Trump’s friendship with such abusers of power as the Clintons and sex offender Jeffery Epstein, who no intelligent person believes committed suicide. Now, to be fair to the Donald, we can’t technically prove if he’s guilty of forcibly raping a 13-year-old girl at one of Epstein’s parties, nor can we be sure if he’s guilty of the many, many sexual misconduct allegations he’s been accused of over the years; but given his manifest lechery, the pussy-grabber is probably guilty of many, if not most, or even all, of those allegations.

And yet there are Trump defenders, many female, who comment on those Facebook support group pages. It truly boggles the mind how these people remain wilfully ignorant of the facts.

Of course, it is possible that many, or most, of those Trump supporters aren’t actually victims of narcissistic and emotional abuse, but are just trolls who seek out anyone online who criticizes their beloved leader, and thus found my writing on those Facebook pages. Erich Fromm wrote much about the mentality of group narcissism, and the identifying with and admiring of the authoritarianism of the idealized leader.

One of these haters of mine actually made a baseless accusation of racism on my blog posts. (No, readers, my quoting of racial slurs used in the movies I do analyses of does not indicate an encouragement or endorsement of their use, let alone the offensive attitude behind them; my quoting of them is meant as a commentary on the problem of racism. I don’t censor the words, just as I don’t censor four-letter words, because I don’t believe in censorship. It’s as simple as that.) I soon learned that my accuser was yet another Trump supporter who didn’t like my criticisms of him. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!

But enough of Trump. On the other side of the political coin, and ironically so, since this next case is also a reaction from Narcissism in the Family, a woman blogger who, from her writing, was clearly in a bad mood, got upset about this passage I wrote: “Though the narcissistic father is a formidable bully, I suspect the narcissistic mother is, in many ways, often much worse, if for no other reason than that she can cunningly exploit the stereotype of the angelic, saintly mother who criticizes her victim only out of ‘concern’.”

If I remember correctly, she quoted “narcissistic mother…much worse” in boldface. She ended her snarky response by most eloquently calling me a “muthafucka.” I gather from her response that she believed my passage was a sexist generalization (her whole blog post was an extended rant about every blogger she found who made remarks she didn’t like about females).

To be fair to her, she quoted my passage in context; but she didn’t seem very interested in that context. I did not say that all narcissistic mothers are worse than all narcissistic fathers because the former are women, as she had implied was my meaning. By saying “in many ways, often much worse,” I was implying that narcissistic fathers are also, in many other ways, often much worse than their maternal counterparts (though I hadn’t bothered to mention how). I imagined my qualification would be sufficient in avoiding a dangerous, sweeping generalization. Apparently, I was wrong.

The “many other ways” qualification included the narc mother’s ability to “exploit the stereotype of the angelic, saintly mother.” This wasn’t meant as a promotion of sexual stereotypes; it was just an acknowledgement of the problem. A narcissistic father, on the other hand, could use the stereotype of the ‘paternal authority figure who must never be questioned, only obeyed,’ making him, in that sense, much worse than a narc mother.

My own father had an authoritarian, conservative mentality that did him little credit; but he didn’t exploit it to play mind games on my siblings and me the way my mom did, so I can’t say I know the experience of being raised by a narcissistic father. He was a grumpy, mindless, bigoted old fool, but he was no narc. For these reasons, and not sexism, my blog post focused on narc moms instead of narc dads.

I suppose I should be grateful to that woman blogger for adding a link to my post, as it may bring me some more readers, who I hope will be open-minded enough to scan for the full context of what I was writing about, and thus realize I wasn’t being anywhere near as unreasonable as she was portraying me. I, however, won’t provide a link to her vituperative post, one she herself in her introduction admitted would be an unpleasant read. She can thus consider my omission of a link a favour I’m doing her.

It’s curious: my blog post criticizes a known narcissistic male chauvinist, and people (many of them women) are offended; a few paragraphs down from my brief critique, and I make another brief comment on narcissistic mothers, and it is I who am the male chauvinist. No matter how carefully you try to choose your words, you just can’t please some people.

To end off, I must discuss a recent reaction to my analysis of Belle de Jour, which is about a woman with masochistic fantasies who decides to become a prostitute by day. The reaction was one of offence, since the commenter believes it is utterly impossible that a woman would ever create such a story, let alone ever choose to be a prostitute herself, outside of poverty and exploitation.

Now, I wholeheartedly agree that the great majority of prostitutes in the world, especially in the Third World, are terribly brutalized and degraded (recall my words above about impoverished Latin American women and children, as well as the girls Epstein paid to be raped); in fact, in my analysis of the film, I emphasize the problem many times!

The socialist society I espouse would transform material conditions so thoroughly that everyone–man, woman, and child–would be adequately employed and provided for, thus reducing prostitution to a near 0%. Furthermore, the lack of alienation caused by capitalism would mean that men would no longer be treating women as objects, but as human beings.

That said, well…I’ll just leave these links here in response to what my commenter deems an utter impossibility. Not that I aim to endorse or promote such ideas, but, well…in the parlance of our time…just sayin’.

Seriously, people are way too easily offended these days. How carefully do I have to choose my words to avoid upsetting people?