If you’re a reader of this blog, then you know that I have often said that two things will destroy our world — the failure of Alexandrian leadership (leadership from the front) and the lack of education, with the second creating the first.
We are living in a time when education has failed badly, when students and teachers have been straitjacketed by the far right and the far left so that many lack any real knowledge and concomitant respect for language, history and science. As a result, the public, or at least the minority that controls many elections in this country, has given power to those who do not best serve the people but those who best serve their baser instincts, who reflect their own narcissism.
This chicken has come home to roost once again in the Jan. 6 hearings into the insurrection at The Capitol that are now being televised, with coverage resuming 10 a.m. EDT Wednesday, June 15. The far right has been spewing vitriol about there being nothing new here, so we should just all move along. But, of course, there’s plenty new here, including that Trump supporters began moving on The Capitol around 10:30 a.m., about an hour and a half before then-President Donald J. Trump spoke. So this was no spontaneous outpouring of anger. This was a premeditated, coordinated effort to stop the Congressional validation of President Joe Biden’s lawful election.
As noted by Representative Liz Cheney — the Republican vice chair of the Select Committee on the January 6 Attack and the admirable “gentlewoman from Wyoming,” as chair Bennie Thompson calls this true profile in courage — the attack was done at Trump’s instigation and with his approval. But don’t expect him to be charged.
Narcissists know how to push your buttons and get you to do their bidding while they hang back so that they can wash their hands of any responsibility should events suddenly go south. And things always go south. Remember, a narcissist can never be wrong, and the way to ensure that you are never wrong is by getting everyone else’s hands dirty.
Trump hammered and hammered the Big Lie that the election was stolen, only it turned out to be his big lie. But by then he had his faithful — incapable of critical thinking and refracting his narcissism by displaying their own — who actually thought they were starring in some patriotic movie of their lives, with Trump as their Gen. George Washington, leading the charge as they bashed police officers, smashed windows and spewed venom. Listen to their chants of “Whose House? Our House.” In other words, not your Capitol or mine. Just theirs. Watch the reports that when they got into trouble, they tried to reach Trump by phone — to no avail.
Where was he? Not leading the troops in Alexandrian fashion but back in the White House, doing nothing as insurrectionists threatened to hang his own loyal vice president, Mike Pence.
Narcissists are perhaps the ultimate paradox. Everything they have and do is the best. Yet they’re always crying “poor, poor me.” They are a bottomless, Lake Titicaca of need. And yet a relationship with them is like diving into the shallow end of a pool: You’re only going to break your neck.
If the hearings do nothing else — and I suspect they’ll do a lot more — they will demonstrate just how fatuous and dangerous is the allegiance to someone who cares about nothing but himself.