Book Ends

I understand that the book du jour is Mary Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man, and if I care a whit about keeping The Nob au courant that’s the book I’d be blogging about this week…but it’s not. It’s not that I have any issue with her book. Quite the contrary. I’m grateful that a trained clinician has finally brought an in-depth psychological analysis to the Narcissist-in-Chief. As I’ve written in past posts, Trump’s psychiatric dysfunction overrides even the most serious questions about his chaotic politics or gross incompetence. Everything about him stems from a severe, unmistakable case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD, and I’m glad that Mary Trump has chosen to address that professionally. Hopefully this very important part of her book will garner as much attention as the mashed potatoes dumped on Trump’s head. The book that gets my attention for this post, however, is a nearly decade-old book about another of the world’s most extreme and dangerous narcissists…Adolph Hitler. At the risk of breaking Godwin’s Law against cavalierly invoking Nazi comparisons, let me say up front that I’m not saying Trump is Hitler. Trump totally lacks Hitler’s focus, energy, and coherence. What they share, though, is NPD, which comes in all shapes and sizes, but has one common core thread…the subordination of all other people and things to the raw id of the NPD sufferer. In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson, the book I’m talking about here (and thanks to son-in law Niels Froelicher for recommending it) is not only linked to Mary Trump’s book by dueling portraits of dangerous men with NPD. Both authors also devote considerable attention to the people and conditions that allow manifestly dangerous men to gain control over masses of others. Larson’s book focuses on the family of William E. Dodd, the US ambassador to Germany during Hitler’s consolidation of power. It draws heavily on the copious letters and diary entries of Dodd and his daughter Martha. I’m ashamed here to admit that until I read this book, I knew absolutely nothing about Dodd and his family. Upon finishing it, however, I’ve concluded that the Dodds may be the quintessential American family. They were the living, breathing embodiment of the pastel version of the American family found in popular culture…Jimmy Stewart-like, slightly muddled, paragon of patriotic virtues dads; quietly intuitive, always supportive Donna Reedish wives; lovable, though somewhat wild kids…Beavers, Dobies, Dennis the Menaces one and all. But the Dodds didn’t act out on a soundstage set of bucolic suburbia. They were thrust into Berlin as it was barreling toward Babylonian horror. It is totally in keeping with their American innocents abroad personae that when they first arrived in Germany they were alternately beguiled and tolerant of what they saw of imminent Nazisism.Dodd, a college professor, was FDR’s bottom-of-the barrel pick for the post. Dodd's hero was Thomas Jefferson; he admired Woodrow Wilson, who he knew personally; and his life long ambition was to capture the nobility of the old South in a definitive history. He routinely referred to Nazi treatment of Jews as its “Jewish problem”. In a lame attempt to get Germans to ease up on their (pre-oven) restrictions, he assured them that other nations of the world, including the US, also had a Jewish problem. There were other, less offensive ways of dealing with it, he vainly argued. All of this, of course, would’ve gotten Dodd banned from most social media sites today and made him a pariah, if not unemployable, in academia.Daughter Martha, who at 24 followed her father to Germany to escape an unsatisfactory marriage, wrote glowingly about the good cheer, optimism, and blonde beautifulness wrought by Hitler’s revolution. She was such a fan of Hitler that at one point an elite German, a mutual connection between Martha and Hitler, facilitated a meeting between them believing that an American lover might be just what the chancellor needed to burnish his image and temper his behavior. Martha, a notorious mens’ girl, was game but came away largely unimpressed with Hitler, except for his piercing eyes. Martha was promiscuous in both body and mind. During her time in Berlin she juggled relationships with a French diplomat, a Gestapo chief, and a Russian spy. Her James Bond-like sexual appetite was matched by an intellectual dilettantism that took her from Nazi sympathizer to Soviet spy with insatiable aspirations to the literati all under an comfortable patina of Babbittry.  Like America itself, the Dodds were not irredeemable. As close friends and associates—and in Martha’s case, lovers—fell increasingly to Nazi brutality, the scales dropped from their eyes. They became less inclined to believe that there was a limit to how bad things could get or that the awfulness they were witnessing all around them was merely a bump in the road on the way to a fascist utopia. Martha, as was her fickle nature, went all in to embrace communism, petitioning Stalin to let her marry her Russian lover. Dodd himself tried valiantly to make America see what was happening no longer as Germany’s Jewish problem but as the Jews’ German problem only to be met with cold resistance from FDR and his administration. The American power structure didn't want to do anything that might jeopardize Germany’s repayment of US loans. In this it laid the the moral framework for the modern Republican Party in its willingness to tolerate any abomination for a price. And Dodd was like Hillary Clinton, a flawed but sure Cassandra, raising warnings of catastrophe fated to fall on deaf or dumb ears. What In the Garden of Beasts reveals is that dangerous men rise to power because other men…and women…don’t take them seriously enough. They lack the imagination to see how far a dangerous man will go. They trust that norms and institutions will keep such men in check and believe that mere human conscience is a fair match for a feral id. In short they don’t know shit about how to deal with narcissistic personality disorder, and the world pays a price…over and over again.Now for a word from our sponsor:  Now Playing Black Panther