My Impurities

I'm sitting there in front of my TV one recent Sunday. I've got the Patriots on with Direct TV's Sunday Ticket. I've got a homemade grilled sausage sub with peppers and onions on the plate in front of me. And I'm reviewing my retirement stock portfolio. I'm a liberal, so all this does not come without a haunting from Mr. Guilt, who stands over my shoulder, tsk…tsk...tsking. Sausage? The product of the demonstrably inhumane US meat industry? Football? The product of the NFL, the modern day Moloch, feasting on human sacrifice? And the maggot-infested stock market! Jesus must be pounding his sweet, thorn-pierced noggin against a wooden cross that those scoundrels not only wormed their way back into the temple, but into every other human institution that matters. Still, I eat my sausage, appraise my balance sheet, and root for my team without embarrassment. (Check that. I am greatly embarrassed that the Patriots, a perennial offensive juggernaut, can only score three points in the first half.)

So how do I manage to keep Mr. Guilt at bay…behind me rather than standing in front of my big screen with his chastising fly wide open as he whizzes all over my sausage and portfolio? As you may know, I started out in life with ambitions to be a martyr  (a calculated risk for anyone who takes Catholic instruction seriously…or at least it used to be). I was not only eager to mimic Sir Thomas More in my youth, but actually succeeded in ways that managed to cost me, if not my head, my spunk. By the time I was 21 and actively involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement, my opportunity for proving my virtue (by going to jail, at least) was upon me. My hero at the time was David Harris, a more moderne and appropriate model than the self-flagellating Man for all Seasons. Harris was about to go to jail to protest the war, and I was eager to follow in his footsteps. I dropped out of the seminary, which had been providing me with comfortable but not exactly conscience-clearing sanctuary, and waited for my confrontation with the draft board. I waited and waited. When my righteous fervor finally got the best of me and I marched down to the draft board for my grand defining moment, I ran into a kindly government bureaucrat who advised me to get back into the seminary quick as a bunny. Otherwise, she promised, they'd have my ass in jail or the rice paddies in six months. It turned out to be a defining moment after all, because it was the first real big compromise of my very young life, and it forced me to develop a tolerable relationship with the fine art of compromise ever since. Harris helped smooth the way. His salutary parting words for those who did not follow him to the jailhouse were these: "I'm in for you and you're out for me."

And so I have been, lo these many years. I have tried to lend moral, financial, editorial, even tactical support to the many causes that prick my conscience. I've even taken to the streets on a few occasions. Mostly, though, my activism is confined to the comfort of my own living room. I once divested my portfolio of a valuable stock that was heavily invested in South African apartheid. I refuse to eat Chick fil a or Papa John's on principle (they are so bad unfortunately that this sacrifice lacks as much in nobility as it does in nutritional value). And I was about to cut Starbuck's off cold turkey when it changed its inane latte & firearms policy. If the NFL announced tomorrow that it was turning to flag football for the health and well-being of its players, in solidarity I'd sign again up for Sunday Ticket. So I'm not a total sell-out. But I do believe rather strongly that if you're going to go all-in on for a cause, you better be aware of where all-in leads and be willing to go there. In truth, if I followed the purity of my heart on many matters of my conscience, I would've had blood on my hands a long time ago.

I started ruminating on this squishy compromising side of my character at the end of last week's blog post when writing about Sen. Ted Cruz's professed willingness to "do anything" to end Obamacare. Part of me says, "Yeah, I'm feelin' you, Ted. I was there when I was about 16." But the curse of maturity has made me realize that being willing to do anything for a cause covers a lot of scary ground. We have only to look at our brethren the suicide bombers and the assassins of abortion doctors to glimpse the bloody landscape such righteousness creates. I call these terrorists brothers without irony. It is a major conceit of this blog--owing to its roots in the works of Norman O. Brown--that we are indeed all one family, and the only way to comprehend the profound complexity of that notion is to admit that the bad in others is not some alien evil, but a reflection of the inherent potential for evil that exists in all of us. Brown writes, "The distinction between self and not self is made by the childish decision to claim all that the ego likes as 'mine,' and to repudiate all that the ego dislikes as 'not mine.'"

That's a nice thumbnail summary of NPD (narcissistic personality disorder), the Walter White/Ted Cruz affliction. This extreme form of narcissism results from arrested development at that stage in infancy where the individual believes the whole world is at its service. Nobby maintains that healthy development is quite a bit different, that it is in fact an eternal compromise between mine and not mine:

"The dualism of self and external world is built up by a constant process of reciprocal exchange between the two. The self as a stable substance enduring through time, an identity, is maintained by constantly absorbing good parts (or people)  from the outside world and expelling bad parts from the inner world. 'There is a continual unconscious wandering of other personalities into ourselves.' Every person is many persons; a multitude made into one person…"

Small example--at the start of the recent government shutdown, Chris Hayes--the best thing to happen to cable news since the mute button--asked himself on camera if he would be more approving of the shutdown if it were, say, engineered by liberal Democrats trying to stop a war he opposed. He answered, yes, he would be more approving. And now he would have to view the action that so appalled him through a more empathetic lens. It was the kind of self probing, Socratic questioning that we rarely get in our media, and never in our politics. It gave Hayes's subsequent coverage of the shutdown a depth and nuance that was beyond most of his peers because he had asked himself the critical question: Where am I in all this? (which is totally different than the usual media question: What's in all this for me?)

I once had a conversation with someone more versed in NPD than I was, and gasped when I started recognizing some of myself in the description. When I voiced my concern out loud, my mentor on the subject laughed and said, "Well, there you go. A real NPD personality would never question himself like that. So you're fine." And so I am, or so I believe, which may be why over time I came to adopt the clever and resourceful Bugs Bunny as my cartoon hero, rather than that sputtering wacko bird Daffy Duck.

It also may explain why one of my favorite lines in pop music (not written by a man named Bob Dylan) is this one by Jackson Browne from the song in the video above: "Please do not confront me with my failures. I have not forgotten them."

One of the truly awful effects extreme narcissism has had on our society is that far too many people--especially those in positions of power and influence---are far more willing and able to confront others with their failures than reflect on their own.