If you are reading this, your mind immediately went to Trump and his supporters when you read the title. And yes, Trump supporters are suffering from advanced stage Cult Of Personality Disorder (or COPD) but so is just about everyone else, and it must stop. You will never, ever form rational opinions or be able to truly protect your own self interests as long as you’re susceptible to being COPDed.
Why is this on my mind? Well, it’s always on my mind but a large volume of the tweets I’ve been seeing on Twitter for the past couple of days have really highlighted the problem for me.
A couple of days ago, TMZ reported that Michael Avenatti was arrested for felony domestic violence on his ex-wife. Now I didn’t know what to think, except that I did notice that the story was light on details and that I needed more to form an opinion. We knew that Avenatti was arrested, that he bonded out, and that he vehemently denied the allegations (who wouldn’t?). Yesterday, his ex-wife came out and said that she wasn’t involved in the incident and that he had never abused her. We also found out that he wasn’t charged with a felony. So some of the story is starting to fall apart, but he was arrested so something happened. Whether that something is just an allegation or an actual crime, we don’t know. People were really fucking quick to decide that he was either being set up, or a wife beating maniac. None of those people had any more information than I did. They were all projecting the opinions they had already formed about Avenatti on this situation to create a reality that would comport with the narrative they’d already established about him.
I have to confess that it was easy for me to have no opinion on the reporting, and to want to wait for more evidence because I’m conflicted about Avenatti as it is. I freaking loved watching him throw around Trump and Michael Cohen around like rag dolls when he first entered the public sphere. He’s clearly very intelligent, and an extremely skilled attorney. And then he started to do that whole, “I’m thinking about running for president” and “the next democratic nominee needs to be a white male” crap and I realized that he’s a time bomb ticking away, destined to blow up. He’s really fucking arrogant, and entirely too cocksure about his righteousness not to implode. So I didn’t feel any sore of irrational emotional attachment to Avenatti one way or another to come to a premature conclusion about what actually happened. I’ve said this a million times, but I’m not prone to see public figures in that way.
That said, I’m still slightly susceptible to being COPDed. Slightly. When news came out about Eric Schneiderman’s history of violence with women, I was sorely disappointed. I didn’t want it to be true, but I was still in the wait-for-the-facts camp. They did come out, and I was very saddened by what I learned about him. He was one of the best AGs New York ever had. But I accepted the truth and wholeheartedly embraced the calls for his resignation.
Michael Avenatti is not your daddy. He’s also not your abusive step dad. There’s no fucking reason in the world not to wait and see what we learn. And you can all wait a few weeks for your gratification or disappointment. There’s no reason to form an opinion now. Doing so, just makes you a child. And is makes you no better than a Trump supporter.
The same thing is happening with Nancy Pelosi. Before the election, it wasn’t acceptable to criticize her because “we need to stay united until the election”. This is not the right time to talk about another speaker of the house. Now that the election is over, this same twits have made her out to be the only savior of the democratic party. She is our great leader, and she is the only person who can do this job. And if you don’t agree, it’s because of misogyny. Well, some of us want a different speaker, and we’re not misogynists. We actually have excellent reasons for wanting someone whose priorities better align with the wishes of the constituents.
When Democrats took the house in 2008, did you know anyone who didn’t want investigations into the fuckery of the George W Bush administration? I mean, those motherfuckers took us into war by lying to us. They outed a CIA agent, and did a myriad of other things that expanded the scope of executive power far beyond what the constitution lays out. Republicans gave Bush the power to essentially declare war without congressional approval, for fuck’s sake. That had to be reined in to save our democracy. But no, Nancy didn’t want to look back because anything that happened in the past isn’t a crime, and we can only look ahead. Well guess what? The path ahead was exponentially more terrifying because you didn’t want to look back. President Obama enjoyed the powers that the previous administration gave him, and he didn’t always use them wisely. That’s a different discussion. My point is that she made a huge mistake that irreparably fucked our democracy.
“But she passed the ACA, and that makes her a goddess!” She did. I’ll give her that. She fought for a better bill than what Obama and his then Chief Of Staff was willing to fight for. But precisely no one in America was clamoring for the ACA. In fact, the majority of Americans wanted (and still do) single payer (or Medicare for all). In poll after poll, Americans want either the option of buying into Medicare or straight up Medicare for all. But Nancy took that off the table before negotiations even began. So we ended up with a fakakta version of Switzerland’s (the second most expensive in the world, after the US) health care system except where the Swiss cap “administrative” costs for insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and medical device companies at 5%, we went with a much more generous 20%. Twenty percent. Administrative costs are all of the costs that aren’t directly spent on delivering health care. They include marketing, profits, and lavish executive salaries. Medicare’s administrative costs are 4%. And unlike in Switzerland, the ACA didn’t cap profits for medical device companies or big pharma. In fact, it extended the time that drug companies can keep their drugs (which we subsidize the development of) under patent for 50% longer than they could before.
The ACA was a fakakta plan that was better than the shit show we had before. And with precisely the same number of republican votes, we could have gotten Medicare for all. At the very least, if democrats had opened negotiations with Medicare for all, we could have gotten something more robust than the ACA. But Nancy couldn’t do that because she had to protect the corporate donors.
She is very good at being Speaker. She knows how to whip votes, and she never brings a vote to the floor that she isn’t going to win. That makes her exponentially more competent than Chuck Schumer, who couldn’t even keep his caucus in line when it came to appointing a rapey, beer loving boofer to the Supreme Court. But her agenda does not support my self interests so I don’t support her.
I don’t have to make her the devil or an angel to have my opinion. She’s both very competent in the job of speaker, and very bad for me in that position. So I would be willing on taking a chance at someone who might not be as good at the job, but whose agenda doesn’t include bullshit like pay-go, which hurts me personally.
In making decisions like an adult, you have to look at all of the evidence before you (or wait for it all to come in) and then weigh the pros and cons. You do not delete the cons and overstate the pros (or vice versa) to make it easier on yourself. When that is your practice, you’re most definitely going to fall into the cult of personality disorder trap and it doesn’t matter where on the political spectrum you fall.
You can’t accuse Trumpistas of doing exactly what you’re doing.
FDR committed one of the most abhorrent atrocities in US history when he interned the Japanese and he single handedly created the middle class in America by being a traitor to his class. You have to acknowledge both of these things when deciding how you feel about him as a president. I have my thoughts, and I’m happy to have an intellectually honest discussion about him and a myriad of different people and topics.
I’m just despondent over the fact that Americans aren’t capable of this anymore. I know it’s not easy not to fall for a cult of personality, but we have to try harder.
