Permit me to digress for a moment. It will become apparent why soon enough. While traveling through western Montana during the early spring of 2007 my wife and I came upon the site of a former Native American encampment and battlefield on the Big Hole River. It was there we learned the story of Hinmatóowyalahtq, popularly known today as Chief Joseph (1840-1904), the leader of a band of Wallowa Valley Nez Perce. Joseph had negotiated an agreement with the US government in 1873 to guarantee that his people could remain on their ancestral tribal lands in northeastern Oregon as specified in two land treaties signed in 1855 and 1863. Nevertheless the government forced them off their lands during the so-called Nez Perce War in late 1877. Joseph’s band and other tribal allies fled first into neighboring Idaho, and after clashing with white settlers there, finally into Montana in an attempt to seek asylum in Canada along with the Lakota after their defeat at the Battle of Little Big Horn, in 1876. Federal troops pursued and skirmished with Joseph and his band across Idaho, Wyoming, and again into Montana to the Bear Paw Mountains just shy of the Canadian border. It was there that Joseph and just over 400 surviving Nez Perce surrendered on October 5, 1877. Another 250 or so managed to escape into Canada.
Upon surrender Chief Joseph spoke through an interpreter and said that he was tired of fighting. The chiefs and tribal elders were mostly dead. Children had no food or blankets and were freezing to death with the onset of winter. It was time to put a stop to the violence and death. "Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever." What courage it must have taken to end a struggle for the better good.
I have always been struck by those memorable words. Was it really a surrender or simply a wise man refusing to allow the cruelty experienced by his band of Nez Perce to continue? A New York Times editorial published a short time after the surrender condemned the government’s actions. "On our part, the war was in its origin and motive nothing short of a gigantic blunder and a crime." For the past three years I have also been in a struggle to make sense out of what our government and its "leadership" has turned into. Failing in that effort, I began to call out the ignorance, the idiocy, the audacity, the lies, and the sheer criminality of the current White House administration. Even this has provided little self-satisfaction nor a salve for the injustice of it all.
More recently, the US media has continued to confront that man in the White House, taking him to task for his lies and disinformation only to be insulted and forced to listen to yet a new litany of lies fueled by his anger, his paranoia, and his pathological narcissism. I have questioned why the media continues to accede to this incessant bullying and less than adolescent behavior. Would they not be better off gathering and reporting the facts and the science directly from the experts without first filtering them through the bantam mind standing before them and dictating what they are permitted to reveal to the public? Now I have to ask myself. Why am I even listening to this man and trying to make sense out of something bordering on the incomprehensible?
Then I read Tom Nichols’ article, "With Each Briefing, Trump is Making Us Worse People," in the April 11, 2020 issue of The Atlantic. Nichols writes that the president "is draining the last decency from us at a time when we need it most." Nichols characterizes the 45th inhabitant of the White House as "spiritually impoverished" with an "utterly disordered personality." He is immoral, shameless, unstable, and a "malignant narcissist" incapable of reflection or remorse and unable to recognize in himself the slightest possibility that he might not know the answers to everything, nor the solution for every problem. He is devoid of any degree of contrition nor is he capable of "moments of reflection, even if only to adjust strategies for survival." He is a "spiritual black hole."
Having never run across the term "malignant narcissist" before I learned that the term was coined by Dr. John Gartner, a psychologist and psychotherapist at Johns Hopkins Medical School who specializes in the treatment of borderline personality disorders. In 2017, shortly after Trump took office, Gartner collected the signatures of over 40,000 mental health professionals on a petition stating that the president was not mentally fit to discharge the duties of his office and urged that he be removed pursuant to the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution. Gartner also contributed to The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump (2017), a collection of essays by similar mental health professionals underscoring the clear and present danger represented by the president’s mental pathologies, including the perpetuation of chaos, personal harm, and suffering. Gartner believes that they "inexorably compel him to hurt and kill large numbers of people — including his own supporters." Gartner also believes that sadism and violence are central to Trump's malignant narcissism and his decision-making throughout the COVID-19 / coronavirus pandemic. Like other sadists, Gartner also believes the president exhibits a deeply dysfunctional relationship with other people, including those he was elected to protect and defend. Gartner concludes that the president is engaged in "democidal behavior," that the victims of the pandemic (almost 100,000 dead in less than three months) are not collateral damage from his policies, or lack thereof, but rather the obvious result of his inability to make educated and timely decisions on matters of life and death.
Nichols, addressing the more recent epic daily White House briefings to address the COVID-19 / coronavirus pandemic, describes how the president is a man who "lumbers to the podium and pulls us into his world: detached from reality . . . . " As we have listened to him prattle on, his "spiritual poverty increases our own, because for the duration of these performances, we are forced to live in the same agitated, immediate state that envelops him" until he concludes in "a fog of muttered slogans and paranoid sentence fragments." He "invites us to join a daily ritual, to hear lines from a scared and mean little boy’s heroic play-acting about how he bravely defeated the enemies and scapegoats who told him to do things that would hurt us. He insists that he has never been wrong and that he isn’t responsible for anything ever."
I am reminded of something Abraham Lincoln said in his second inaugural address in 1864 when this country was still in the midst of an existential crisis. "We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature." And now Nichols reminds us that in this time of crisis unlike any we have faced in decades, we should be seeking out these same better angels, finding what is best in ourselves. I do not consider the situation in this country hopeless although sometimes it seems we are tipping along the precipice. We will have an opportunity come November to apply the necessary corrective in order that we might once again function as a caring and compassionate nation. I have to believe that.
That said, I also believe there is no longer any practical reason for me to submit to the jabberwocky ramblings of an individual who continues his vulgar attacks on the media, the Democrats, and anyone else who refuses to take his word as gospel. Nichols is quick to point out that by this submission "all of us, angry or pleased, become more vulgar like Trump, because just like the president, we end up thinking about only Trump, instead of our families, our fellow citizens, our health-care workers, or the future of our country. We are all forced to take sides every day, and those two sides are always ‘Trump’ and ‘everyone else.’"
We must learn to step back from this void of irrational thinking and from confrontation with an individual who has no interest in what we have to say and begin to think on our own. We cannot allow the spiritual poverty of this small and insignificant person to force us to listen to the lesser angels surrounding us. " We are all living with him in the moment," Nichols writes, "and neglecting the thing that makes us human beings instead of mindless fish swimming in circles. We must recover this in ourselves, and become more decent, more reflective, and more stoic—before Trump sends us into a hole from which we might never emerge."
So I have decided to distance myself from the abyss. When Chief Joseph was faced with the simple fact that nothing he could do or say could ameliorate the situation in which he and his people found themselves, he took what action he though necessary to protect his desperate people from further harm as best he could. He saw the futility in running and he promised "I will fight no more forever." So allow me to paraphrase this brave leader and protector of his people when I look at our sad excuse for a president. It is futile to try and contend with what Alexandra Petri describes as his "factless, futureless, contextless void," as if goldfish swimming around bowl bumping into the glass. I refuse to share his bowl. I will listen to him no more forever.
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