Stephen Roney's Blog, page 90

Narcissistic Family Values

 

As we have established that Spiegelman’s Maus is a portrait of narcissism/hubris/pride, it becomes instructive. It explains a great deal. 

Art is inept at handiwork; the reason is because, as a child, his father criticised his every attempt. Vladek rubs this in by demanding Art come and help him with some repair. It is not enough when Art offers to pay for a tradesman.

Narcissists make terrible teachers. Their vested interest is always in being better than their pupil. So their interest is in preventing learning. 

This is an important reason why I believe the business of evaluation must be separated from that of teaching. Narcissists will be drawn to the teaching profession by the opportunity to evaluate and to be the centre of attention. Taking this away from them is one way to keep narcissists out of the profession, where otherwise they have an ideal chance to bully. Making the teacher the evaluator is asking for trouble.

Art explains that he went into graphic arts and cartooning because it was the one activity where he was confident his father would not follow. Only there could he be free. 

This is also why Franz Kafka went into writing—because he knew his abusive father would never read them. So only there could he be free.

Narcissists have no eye for art nor ear for fiction. They dare not step outside themselves far enough to experience the suspension of disbelief necessary to appreciate art. If they ever do read a story or watch a movie, they will want something painfully sentimental. Big-eyed kittens; a dying child; it is like being deaf and only hearing especially loud noises.

This is no doubt why Jesus spoke in parables. It meant the pigs could not see and trample the pearls.

And this is no doubt why writers and artists almost always seem to come from abusive childhoods. Hemingway said this was the one prerequisite for a writer.

Note how Vladek seems obsessed over his will. A normal person would just write it up once, and be done. By his own admission he keeps changing it. He repeats to Artie that Mala is after it, yet he wants to leave it all to him. What does he say to Mala? He is using it as a bribe to keep himself the centre of attention.

At the end of Maus I, Vladek reveals that he burned all his wife’s memoirs. And immediately after admitting this, he explains that they were written for Art. “I wish my son, when he grows up, he will be interested in this.” A twisting of the knife.

A narcissist has no family loyalties. He will try to disrupt any family loyalties other than to him. He will readily betray both wife and son. 

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The 51st State

 

Tucker Carlson has a large and enthusiastic audience. It seems likely his suggestion that Canada needs to be liberated will generate some attention in the US.

Which causes me to ponder: if the US invaded Canada, how would Canadians react? Would American GIs be greeted as liberators?

A few years ago, I would have thought the idea absurd. But not so much anymore. I noticed that the Freedom Convoy supporters, and attendees at other protests since, have been flying "friendship" flags that combine the Canadian and American flags. Why this at a protest—unless it is a call for unification?

There is no political party in Canada that supports the idea. You might think this proves there is no popular support. Yet that is neither here nor there. Political parties in Canada have a history of withholding choices from the public. Meech Lake, abortion, gay marriage, aboriginal rights,  come to mind. There are some matters the Canadian elite does not want people voting on.

The working class stiffs in the Freedom Convoy are probably aware that they pay a premium for Canadian independence. American wages are higher. The American cost of living is lower. The work opportunities are more plentiful. 

For the working man, and for the poor, there needs to be some good reason for Canada.

The original justification for English Canada was to preserve the ties to the monarchy, and to British traditions. This justification has, however, been hollowing out ever since 1867. Nobody thinks of Canada any longer as particularly “British.” No; it is now “multicultural,” and the elite generally dislike anything British. Down to renaming streets and schools.

Yet the old rationale h not been replaced by a distinct Canadian identity. This has happened in French Canada, and there was a concerted effort to develop a distinct Canadian culture beginning with D’Arcy McGee, who foresaw the need, and continuing up to the 1960s or so. 

Then, just as it seemed to be coming together, the elite crushed it. 

It has been destroyed by “multiculturalism,” now actually enshrined in the Canadian constitution. Any authentically Canadian culture is now condemned as "racist," or "white supremacist"; Justin Trudeau declares that in Canada, “there is no mainstream.”

With no Britishness, and no local culture, there is no reason for Canada to exist as a separate nation. The economics are entirely in favour of joining the USA. At the same time, this seems increasingly advisable to protect our civil rights from rogue government. Not to mention protection from less friendly and more oppressie foreign powers, like China.

Our government and our elite may have murdered Canada.

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Canadian Soft Power

 

Here is one more indication of how Justin Trudeau has destroyed Canadaès international reputation.

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The Real Meaning of Spiegelman's Maus

 

Maus andMaus II are not about the Holocaust. This is a good example of how most peoplemiss the point of creative writing as of parables. John Lewis and hispublishers sought to cash in on Maus, and did, with a cheap imitation, Marchand March II, giving Lewis’s personal account of the civil rights movement. Butit was missing the essence of Maus. They had no idea.

Maus is acharacter study of Vladek Spiegelman.

Anything wehear about the Holocaust is entirely through his eyes. And he is not driven,like Elie Wiesel in Night, by a sense of mission to tell us about theHolocaust. He is resistant to talking about it. He would rather talk about his romanticconquests. And he burns his wife’s painstaking accounts of it. This is not theaction of a truth-teller.

Vladek is apeculiar character. Most obviously, he is parsimonious to a comic extent. Onemight imagine this came from his experience in the camps.

But he isnot consistently parsimonious. He scolds his second wife, Mala, for using awire coat hanger, the parsimonious choice, instead of a wooden one, to hang uphis son’s coat.

Then he secretlythrows his son’s coat in the garbage. Hardly parsimonious.

Granted, inthe first instance, it is his son’s loss, not his own. But then he must givehis son his own old coat.

The realmotive behind his parsimony is not to save money or conserve; it is to keepthose around him constantly on edge, and subject to criticism whatever they do.If not being parsimonious works better every now and then, parsimony must besacrificed to the higher objective. The point was to give Mala or Art that acidfeeling in the pit of their stomach, and to delight in awareness that he ismaking them feel bad.

Spiegelman’sVladek is a perceptive portrait of just what someone who has given in to thevice of pride, aka hubris, aka narcissism, is like. Vladek is the type ofHitler; and a study of the type.

Onecharacteristic of the narcissist or vice-bound is a comically two-dimensionalpredictability. They form the humours of the comic stage. Narcissists act like NPCs.Vladek’s general frugality is of that order.

Vladek appearsfirst in the tale to warn his son as a child that there is no such thing as afriend. Hitler’s starting point in Mein Kampf: it is the natural Darwinianorder that everyone just looks out for themselves. For individuals and for races,it is survival of the fittest. And this is the creed of the narcissist: it isthem against the world.

Moving tothe present, Artie goes to visit his father, and his father’s first twosentences on seeing him after two years are complaints: first, that he is late,and second, that he did not being his wife. Whatever Artie does, Vladek willfind reason to complain.

And he isthe same with second wife Mala, complaining about the wooden hanger. Or thechicken is too dry.

The hangercomplaint has a second function: it is meant to sow division between mother andchild. The narcissist will always foment conflict within the family. It is acontrol thing.

When Artieasks Vladek to “start with Mom. Tell me how you met,” Vladek tells him instead abouthow all the women chased him, and he had another girlfriend who desperatelywanted to marry him and was better looking than Artie’s mother. Anja, Artie’smother, was nothing to look at, and supposedly had a nervous disorder. She was,as far as he is concerned, lucky to have him.

This is notthe way a father should talk about his child’s mother. Again, he is sowingdivision within the family.

He then obliquelycriticizes Anja as a communist, who betrayed a friend to a three-month prisonterm. It might be true; but even if so why tell it unprompted? The point ofthis story seem to be to belittle the other parent in the eyes of the child.

Artiecatches his father then in a lie at least of omission—a warning to us asaudience that he is an unreliable narrator. Doing the math, Artie realizes that Anja, his mother, must have alreadybeen pregnant when they married. This raises the possibility that it was aforced marriage; his father may have been playing around, heedless of the women’sinterests, and gotten caught.

Those whogive in to the sin of pride are also likely to give in to the sin of lust. Aswell as that of avarice, and so forth.

Caught outon this, Vladek tried to distract by throwing shade on Artie. He accuses him ofbeing premature: this looks like an ad hoc projection, not a truth. Then heclaims the doctor had to break his arm to extract him, and that, as a child, thathe often raised his arm in a “Heil Hitler” salute.

This doesnot sound plausible. Does a diffuclut birth ever require the breaking of anarm? Does the breaking of an arm ever cause involuntary movements for months oryears after? Narcissists when caught out can say almost anything. They can seemto be momentarily delusional, as M. Scott Peck has observed.

That Vladekis rattled at this moment is demonstrated by his spilling all the pills he hasbeen counting carefully.

He creditshimself with bringing Anja back from post-partum depression with his gentle andloving care for her in a Czechoslovakia sanitarium.

Does thissound like the Vladek we can ourselves observe?

Morelikely, seeing how he behaves with his second wife and his son, he drove Anjato the nervous breakdown. Then, rather than let her escape his grip, andpossibly have pleasant experiences without him, he grabbed the opportunity to gowith her to the posh sanitarium instead of tending to his work. As a result, byhis own account, he never got his new factory insured; it was robbed, and theylost everything.

It is surelyactually unusual for sanitarium patients to be accompanied by “Someone theytrust.” Few can afford such a thing; and it is surely considered bad for theirrecovery. The idea of the sanatoriums was to get away from their daily life, whichis apparently troubling them, not to bring some of it with them.

He tellsabout the factory being robbed, presumably, because he thinks it reflects badlyon Anja. Look at the trouble her mental illness caused! Look at how I sufferedbecause of her!

And thoughhe probably believes it himself—narcissists are expert at self-delusion-- “Idid not have time to have it insured before we left” does not sound plausible.Had time been the issue, he could have had his father-in-law insure it for himwhile he was away. He was simply irresponsible; too irresponsible to think ofsuch things. And, as narcissists always do, he finds a scapegoat.

There ismuch more, but this post is eating up too much time. I may continue later.

But the predictableeffect of having a hubristic spouse or parent is, of course, to drive the restof the family, especially his designated scapegoats, into depression. In Vladek’scase, his first wife commits suicide, soon after his son is released from apsychiatric hospital.

And, of course,he blames his son to all the relatives for this; while his son blames hismother for this. For whatever perverse psychological reason, nobody ever dares blamethe narcissist. That feels too dangerous.

On top ofit all, his mother having just committed suicide, and his father blaming him,Artie at twenty is also expected to console his father, who makes himself againthe centre of attention with his dramatic expressions of grief.

The narcissist,when distraught, must take it out on his scapegoat. If not venting his anger onthem, he will be venting his sorrow. It amounts to the same thing: the emotionsof the narcissist become the family’s problem. It is up to them to do somethingabout it.

This is theroot of all “depression” and much, perhaps most “mental illness”: victimizationby a narcissist in the family.

Maus laysit out plainly, and most people refuse to see it.

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On Drawing With Strong Lines

 

When the Sistine Chapel murals were cleaned some years ago, many complained that the restoration made the images too clear and vivid. They preferred the murkiness of centuries of smoke and oil.

Teaching a student to write well, one essential piece of advice is to be clear, and avoid qualifiers. The purpose, after all, is to communicate. This is exactly the opposite of what I was told as a grad student, even in the humanities: I used to be criticized for speaking too plainly, for refusing to use them. It got me branded “arrogant.”

Many students struggle to do this, to write clearly, although it seems the simplest possible thing. As Mark Twain put it, “Writing is easy. All you have to do is take out words.”

There are two opposing forces in culture, one trying to make things as clear and simple as possible, and one trying to make things as obscure and difficult as possible. I remember on first reading Milton Friedman, being shocked at how clear and simple his ideas were. Can this be academically legitimate? Can this be right? After all, unlike Keynesianism, it actually makes sense. Yes, breaking windows really does cost money. When you spend money, you no longer have it. The obvious truth had been obscured.

Plato or Descartes are also clear and well-spoken. What a shock to discover, after always being told otherwise, that the best thinkers actually wrote plainly. Yet, in most academic courses, the works of these great thinkers are kept from you, on the claim that they are too difficult, and you are required to read prevaricating commentaries on them instead. Which are far more difficult to understand than the works they are supposedly explaining to you.

How can this be? What is going on here?

The truth is, most of us are in denial. Which means we are in frantic flight from reality. The academic elite—the scribes and Pharisees—are clearly more in denial than most. 

But so too even many current poets.

The theme for this year’s National Poetry Month is “joy.” 

I don’t think any real poet could have chosen that theme. After all, no prominent poet seems to have written memorably on it. I cannot conceive of Leonard Cohen writing about how happy he is. I cannot imagine T.S. Eliot doing so. William Blake did, it is true. But he followed it with the symbol of the tyger devouring the innocently joyful lamb. Schiller wrote an “Ode to Joy,” which became embarrassingly popular. But he himself disowned it, as “out of contact with reality” and “of no value to either poetry or the world.” Browning seemed to do so with “Pippa Passes,” but later he denied having any idea what the poem meant.

A fraudulent joy is the resting face of all delusion. Happy happy joy joy. Accordingly, it is virtually impossible to write an honest poem about it. 

I think of the vacant smiles on the oldest Greek statues: a smiling sphinx about to tear you limb from limb; a smiling soldier about to skewer his enemy through the heart. Perhaps an ironic comment; but chilling. I think of Pogo the Clown, aka John Wayne Gacy.

A student of mine was assigned “coming of age” as his poetic theme. He wrote well of casting off the lines and drifting out to sea. And then, in the final stanza, wrote, “after all, if things go wrong, the reins are still right there by my side.” 

A deliberate confusion? But of course, in the metaphor he chose, they are not. Nor are they in real life. You cannot go back to being a child. 

When I pointed this out, he froze up. “But that is too sad.”

Denial.

I had to finish the poem for him.

True art must always tell the truth. That is the reason for art. If it does not, it has no purpose, or worse.

This is really the war between good and evil. Those who are committed to good will seek truth, and do everything they can to write or speak or paint clearly. Those who are committed to evil will have things to conceal, and will work hard to be obscure. And to silence those who speak truth.

George Orwell once observed that his real talent was an ability to honestly and unflinchingly face the reality of evil. It is a rare talent.

William Blake insisted that all visual art worthy of the name must have clear lines. He railed against “the Flemish ooze.” 

I agree with him. It is immoral. All unnecessary lack of clarity is immoral.

And the greater the general evil in a society, the worse the art.

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Nip It in the Bud

 

As a public service, here is a list of Anheuser-Busch-owned brands in Canada.

Do what you think best. I will be boycotting them all in perpetuity. This matters little; I almost never drink, and never drank Bud Light.
Not just because of their use of Dylan Mulvaney as their spokesman (word is used advisedly); and Mulvaney is offensive on many levels. He is a parody of femininity, insulting to women. He is a terminal narcissist, and it is vital that narcissism never be indulged. It gets worse. He insists he is a woman, and lies should never be endorsed. If he believes it, he is delusional, and delusions must never be encouraged. This is harmful to the deluded., who need to know the truth. He pretends to be a young girl, celebrates his "girlhood," and this suggests the marketing is aimed at the underage, who should not be drinking alcohol. Not to mention suggesting they should doubt their “gender.”
It seems to be mocking the working class, the usual drinkers of beer.
And he is aesthetically disgusting. Beauty and ugliness matter.
But aside from that, this list of brands demonstrates a disturbing level of hidden monopoly. 
Let’s support local brewers whose investments and profits stay in Canada and in our communities.
Here's the list:
Accent
Alexander Keith's
American Vintage
Archibald
Babe
Banded Peak
Bass
Beach Day Every Day
Becks
Bitterhouse
Blue Star
Boddingtons
Bon & Viv
Brava
Brickworks Ciderhouse
Bud Light
Budweiser
Busch
California Cooler
Corona
Crystal
DrinkRunnr
Elysian
Foster's
Goodridge & Williams
Goose Island
Guinness
Hell's Gate
Highball
Hoegaarden
Jockey Club
Kokanee
Kombrewcha
Kootenay
Labatt 50
Labatt Blue
Labatt Extra Dry
Labatt Genuine
Labatt Ice
Labatt Lite
Labatt Max Ice
Lakeport
Leffe
Lowenbrau
Lucky
Michelob Ultra
Mike's
Mill Street
Modelo Especial
Natural Light
Negra Modelo
Nutrl Vodka
Odouls
Okanagan
Oland Export
Pacifico
Palm Bay
Palm Bay Vodka Soda
Rockstar
Rolling Rock
Schooner
Shock Top
Shop Beer Gear
Sid
Spaten
Spiked Seltzer
Spritzd
Stanley Park
Steeler
Stella Artois
Tail Spin
Teasy
Tempo
Verger Lacroix & Cidrerie
Wildcat
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Stormtroopers

 

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Effeminate Thugs

 

In and of itself, there is nothing wrong with cross-dressing. But if the intent is to deceive, to present a man as a woman, or a woman as a man, that is a lie.

So much for the “transgender” movement. As opposed to the fairly harmless quirk of cross-dressing known in several cultures.

Conservative commentators suggest that cross-dressing is a “sexual fetish.” It may be that; or it may be that the issue is not sex, so much as self-love, expressed in sexual terms. To pretend to be the opposite sex sounds auto-erotic. It is like ouroborus, the cosmic serpent devouring its own tail.

Which is an image of the perfectly narcissistic self.

The desire to parade before children, which the transgender seem to have declared a non-negotiable right, sounds too like narcissism. Narcissists, seeing themselves as godlike, assume the power to determine reality, and then to impose it on others. This is why the narcissist loves to lie, to “gaslight”: it is mind control. For this, children are the easiest, most vulnerable victims. They must be forced to accept whatever “reality” the narcissist decides to impose on them, and in particular they must accept the authority of the narcissist against their own perceptions or any rival norms. This assures the narcissist of a godlike control. They need this for self-validation, since they identify themselves as gods; otherwise they are being “erased.” Just as the ancient Olympians required regular worship.

But of course, children are not enough. Sooner or later, everyone else must also be put under narcissistic control. One demands, for example, the right to declare one’s own pronouns. Everyone must then use them. If you say you are a woman, everyone else must be forced to verbally assent.

But this can never be the end of one’s demands.

And one becomes violent. Violence is another weapon of control, an expression of dominance. One shouts down. That feels good. One threatens, one holds captive. One grabs a gun and shoots up schools or churches. All must obey.

And then, if we are not alert, brave, and lucky, these stormtroopers take over, and the business of killing achieves industrial scale.

The picture above, by the way, is often interpreted as a depiction of Uranus; but it does not fit the myth in several ways. Although alluding to the Greek myths, what I think it is instead is a depiction all in one panel of the various expressions of the greater spirit of narcissism to which the various Greek myths of Uranus, Cronus, and Aphrodite refer. Devouring one’s children, centre; betraying one’s parents, right. Self-adulation and auto-eroticism, left. And behind the devouring parent, behind all, the spirit that animates, the ouroboros. The instinctive reptile mind that believes it contains all things, and eternally devours.

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No Escape

 

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Why Are We Not Hearing about This?

 

https://twitter.com/i/status/1644305201921159169

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.