A Not-so-Tongue-in-Cheek “Trumpian Traumatic Stress Disorder”
No doubt like many others who awoke to the news that President Maduro of Venezuela and his wife, Cilia Flores (a serving member of the Venezuelan National Assembly with a distinguished career in government), had been ‘captured’ or ‘seized’ by the US and were being transported to NYC to stand trial, my initial reaction was one of shock and disbelief. That any state – even a rogue state like the US – would have the gall to act so brazenly in defiance of the UN Charter and international law, and get away with it, seemed incomprehensible.
Just as shocking was the uniformity of the corporate media’s scramble to euphemise what had happened. The euphemism of (almost unanimous) choice was the word ‘captured’, which carries with it the connotation that the persons concerned were criminals who had escaped.
It was as if editors had been briefed beforehand and told what word to use. As if expunged from their collective vocabulary, the words ‘kidnapped’ and ‘abducted’ were nowhere to be seen.
No need to wonder how the same media would have reacted if Russia had ‘captured’ King Charles and his wife, Camilla. Members of a family whose list of crimes and misdemeanours would provide a much richer source of material for rationalisation – by, say, RT – than the Maduros ever could.
Reminding myself that the US had a long and grisly track record of this type of crime and worse, and that the corporate media always do as they are told, did little to assuage my sense of phantasmagoria and unreality.
Just saying it sounds crazy: “they kidnapped a sitting president of a sovereign country and his wife who are now in NYC facing ‘trial’ on ‘Trumped-up’ charges as drug lords!”
It sounds like a bad (Trump) joke or the theme for a C grade Hollywood movie.
In swift confirmation of the incident’s bizarreness, President Trump then issued a follow-up threat, saying “If they [what’s left of the Venezuelan Government] don’t behave, we will do a second strike.”
He is now openly talking (again) about ‘acquiring’ Greenland and not ruling out the use of military force to do so.
It all made me think that I had been doing a lot of this sort of thing lately, that is, trying to reconcile the lunacy of events like this with the fact that they seem to have become so commonplace and acceptable.
And I wondered whether it might be driving me slightly insane.
This short essay argues that more and more in the Trumpian world that we inhabit doublethink has become the norm and that this erodes deeply held principles and values and our sense of who we are and of reality.
Not-so-tongue-in-cheek, it is suggested that the resulting stress is damaging to our mental health and could lead to a chronic mental illness, a neurosis, which I call Trumpian Traumatic Stress Disorder (TTSD).
The aetiology of the condition, its symptomatology, and treatment options are discussed briefly below.
Aetiology
TTSD develops as a result of prolonged and repeated exposure to behaviour by people in positions of high authority and standing that contradicts what you have been brought up to believe in and value.
The stress of witnessing or being subjected to such behaviour is heightened by the fact that the perpetrators are never held to account. Indeed, one could say that they flaunt their flouting of the law and their complete disregard for standards of decency and fairness and humaneness.
Imagine the devastating effect on an eight-year-old child of realising that his or her revered teacher all along had been breaking rules that she had been teaching her class to uphold. She was a cheat and a liar, a bully, a thief, a murderer, and a racist. She was also greedy and spiteful, and vain, uncaring about others, pretentious, unreliable and inconsistent, and completely without empathy.
Respect for figures of authority and the law and values and beliefs such as those transgressed in the above example are central features of normality and good citizenship. They are deeply ingrained in our sense of who we are and what we would like our children to be.
They are the psychological glue that holds individual psyches, communities and societies together.
Without them, we as individuals and our societies begin to fall apart, as seems to be happening now in the US, as Chris Hedges and others have been arguing for some time.
It is the accumulation of stressful events such as the most recently committed Venezuelan crimes, the genocide in Gaza, and the countless others like them that lead to the development of TTSD.
Symptomatology
Of course, being a Trumpian condition, this is not just any old neurosis.
The principal symptoms of TTSD, which therefore should be writ large and with superlatives ‘like no one has ever seen before’, are the following:
Free-floating and excessive or disproportionate anger and irritability characterised by intense, often unexplained rage that seems to have no specific cause, or irritability and anger that are triggered by factors that under normal circumstances you would consider to be trivial.
Intense feelings of dislike – almost hatred – towards Trump and his henchmen and women combined with an irrational tendency to generalise these feelings to US citizens as a whole.
Feelings of hopelessness and futility, helplessness, loss of interest, isolation, and guilt for not being able to do anything, or enough, to right the wrongs that you perceive.
Difficulties with concentrating and sleeping, hypervigilance, and hypersensitivity.
Obsessive thoughts about precipitating or causative events such as those referred to above.
Pronounced and frequent incredulity or disbelief and a sense of unreality. Could this really be happening?
Constant questioning of one’s beliefs and values and a growing uncertainty and anxiety as to what and whom to believe.
Cognitive dissonance or the recurring feeling that you are constantly under pressure to hold or countenance two irreconcilable or incompatible beliefs or attitudes at the same time. What Orwell referred to as ‘doublethink’: shock/horror is the mundane, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, kidnapping is capture, peace prizes are for warmongers, euphemism is menace, and so on.
Some combination of the symptoms outlined above can persist for months or years and are highly likely to coincide with Trump administrations and similar ones that might follow in the US or be in place among US allies.
The effects of TTSD on personal and work relationships, and social functioning generally, can be severe and debilitating.
Treatment
The jury is still out on which of the social sciences is the most ‘dismal’. Unfortunately for TTSD sufferers, however, the front runners in this never-ending and fiercely contested race are still the disciplines of economics and psychology.
The treatment of most psychological ailments either relies on very expensive voodoo-like or shamanic rituals such as psychoanalysis, psychiatric drugs that keep you heavily sedated and dead to the world, or the shock and awe of electro convulsive therapy (ECT).
Regarding the latter, apparently its advocates have ‘discovered’ that administering very large electric shocks to a person’s brain while they are strapped immobile to a bed temporarily makes them less manic or reduces them to a semi-catatonic (but more manageable) state – a state of ‘shock’ you might say! The treatment usually comes as a course, meaning that it is not just a one off. The logic and sophistication of this ‘scientific discovery’ are akin to that of showing that if you hit someone very hard and repeatedly on the head with a sledgehammer, they will probably die.
Accordingly, we do not recommend any of these ‘treatment’ options.
For now (and probably a lot longer), our advice to those with TTSD is to just grimace (!) and bear it.
Otherwise, for those of you who have voodoo sympathies or inclinations, perhaps just buy a Trump doll in which you can stick pins or at which you can throw darts. It won’t do any real good, but it might make you feel a little better.
The Law of the Jungle
Clearly, in international affairs a la US, the rule of law is no more, a condition that is unremarkable given that the US has been hurtling towards this goal since the end of WWII.
The always semi-rules-based global order has been replaced by the law of the jungle, that is, a chaotic, primal struggle for power and control in which the biggest and baddest participant wins (Mearsheimer’s Offensive Realism). A state that has been brought about largely by a country whose leaders personify, and whose words and actions corroborate, the idea that the fish rots from the head.
So much so, that the King and Queen of Denmark would do well to beware being kidnapped and charged with claiming suzerainty over a territory that rightfully belongs to the Trump Empire.
Sounds crazy? No prizes for guessing how long before the mainstream media announce that Greenland and its indigenous peoples have been ‘brought under the protective wing’ of the US and that – following the widespread protests in Iran that through sanctions they have created the conditions for, and fomented in other ways – the US and Israel have ‘rescued’ the Iranian people by ‘deposing’ or ‘replacing’ (assassinating) the Iranian leadership, and so on.
Or are these thoughts just a part of my TTSD, examples of some of my more intrusive and obsessive fears, fantasies, and free-floating anger and irritability?
Where did I put those darts?
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