The Peripatetic Philosopher answers:

The President’s Farewell Speech

Comment & Response

JAMES R. FISHER, JR., Ph.D.

© January 11, 2017

A READER WRITES:

The terrible irony is that your opinion of Donald Trump is what you think he should be and not what he is.  He is a narcissistic buffoon with a serious personality disorder and you a psychologist and can’t see it for your own projection. The man is a sick son-of-a-bitch.  That you can’t see that with his daily antics is mind-blowing.   

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

When I wrote my reaction to this farewell speech of President Barak Obama, I expected nothing less and have not been disappointed.  It is near impossible to get past the emotional barriers that exist between us as an American people.  Yes, the Donald is narcissistic, but so are all Americans.  We have gravitated to this indignity over the last century.

 

Nearly forty years ago, Christopher Lasch outlined in “The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations” (1978) as precisely this.  Then three years later, Daniel Yakelovich in “New Rules: Searching for Self-Fulfillment in a World Turned Upside Down” (1981) verified it with copious statistical studies.

Americans over the last century have become used to being spoon fed the idea that they were special and that the rules of life that applied to everyone else on the globe did not apply to them.  But guess what?  

The world caught up with the United States, and wanted its own piece of the pie and to be acknowledged and treated with respect and dignity, and Americans would have none of it.  They wanted to continue to be seen as special and to have their cake and to be able to eat it,too.

And so politician after politician, educator after educator, social scientist after social scientist reinforced their narcissistic propensities until like Humpty Dumpty despite all these assurances, we came tumbling down.  That is where we find ourselves today.

The Donald was inevitable.  He is a reality check and it is clear that America and Americans were not ready for him.

If you read me carefully, you would see I am talking about the American people and not about the Donald.  He -- whatever you think of him -- is not the issue.  We Americans are the issue.  He represents a pin prick into our dilutions.

It is why he (or someone like him) has emerged.  

We pride ourselves in being a “nation of immigrants,” but immigrants who assimilated our culture and our language.  Today, we have tens of millions of "Americans" who have been here for 50 or more years and yet do not speak American English.  They have assimilated as little of the American culture that they have had to assimilate.

The president used the word "enclaves" advisedly in his speech.  That is what we have become, a series of contentious and tendentious enclaves with immigrants flooding into our midst in the last several decades assimilating little American English and American culture, while insisting that everything show Spanish and American labels as if we are a hybrid nation and culture.  

Our school system has placed a tremendous burden on our teachers, and as a consequence, school performance across the nation is not what it should be with tens of millions of students dropping out with no job skills and no sense of what they have given up for a life of drifting and alienation.  They would prefer that Americans be multilingual as if they were still living in Europeans or South or Central America.  

African Americans have assimilated the culture and the language and have been an important part of the fabric of the nation, despite the fact that they have been penalized for this.  Recent immigrants have insinuated themselves into becoming the majority of the minority group in the United States.  Now Spanish speaking immigrants out number African Americans, reducing their economic, political, social and cultural progress.

Many of these Spanish speaking immigrants live in cultural enclaves as if this were still their native country.  Forget about HOW IT SHOULD BE, this HOW WE ARE has placed a tremendous cultural and economic burden on the nation. 

The passivity of our political leadership has allowed this to happen as our declining capitalistic system exploits these enclaves of immigrants, and has forever.  The failure of these immigrants to assimilate the American cultural has, paradoxically, ensured a limitless supply of cheap labor for corporate America.

Someone wrote to me about my missive, “Why is religion necessary?” asking the question “Why is ethics necessary?” 

I wrote back that in our collapsing moral society what is legal is treated as synonymous with what is ethical, and as a consequence what is ethical has no meaning beyond what is defined as legal. 

We will continue to have this great debate -- I assume -- on the Electoral College because Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by a wide margin and lost the Electoral College vote by an equally wide margin. How this happened speaks to the nature of our times.

We have huge population centers on the West and East coast where Americans reflect the studies of Christopher Lasch and Daniel Yankelovich.  In these population centers, enclaves of immigrants can be easily manipulated to the will of politicians who make promises they cannot keep. 

On the one hand, we have the pretend society of Hollywood on the West Coast with the tinsel town idealism of Los Angeles, San Francisco and the Silicon Valley; and on the other hand, we have the pretend sophistication and mock idealism of New York City, Boston and Philadelphia on the East Coast.  

The two coasts believe they think and speak for all Americans, and have been shocked to find out that this has not been the case in the recent presidential election.

The evidence is that thousands of mayors and city councilmen, nearly two score of governors, as well as United States Senators and Congressman have been voted out of office across the American continent. Alas, American voters within these continental boundaries have thrown thousands of politicians out of office at the ballot box as an indication of their dissatisfaction.

If you read me carefully, that is what I am inferring.  President Barak Obama thinks he did a wonderful job, and being a politician, I would have thought he would have considered the ballot box a "reality check" of his administration, and an indication of the actual discontent of Americans.  But politicians as a profession are locked into cognitive dissonance.    

Obama has suffered the greatest party loss since early in the last century and that has been his legacy.  Being a charismatic leader, and he has been that, cannot change history.  

Were he not a failed president, this landslide of rejection would not have occurred.  It saddens me that it has, but it does not surprise me if you have been reading me carefully over the last several years (I have 17 published books and more than 2,000 published articles often touching on these subjects).  

People don't vote with their heads.  People vote with their emotions.  The Donald knew that.  He spoke to the American people in a language that they understood. Hillary Clinton did not.  I rest my case knowing that I change the opinion of no one.  

The world is in a mess not only because of the failed presidency of Obama but because leaderless leadership prevails across the globe.  

America has become addicted to learned helplessness and is seemingly suspended in permanent adolescence, waiting for someone to rescue it from itself. So why should we be surprised that a candidate of that adolescent character and temperament has risen to the most powerful office in the world?

In my long life, I have seen this drift in my own family and in my extended family, and I have observed it in the many careers that I have had the good fortune of having.  

We talk about grit and grime and the smell of hard work but have retreated from hard work as work has transmogrified from brawn to brains while we have retreated into our ubiquitous pacifiers (i.e., our laptops or iPhones), texting and tweeting and surfing the Internet.  

We think we are "with it" because we are high tech sophisticated while relating to each other at a distance as intimacy has been reduced to pornography.

We claim to be sophisticated and knowledgeable when only about 10 percent of Americans are familiar with American much less world history.  Consequently, 90 percent of Americans are not aware of the many struggles of our predecessors, people who sacrificed much to give us the baby sitting culture that we now enjoy.

The last eight years were not an aberration.  My wonder is if the world can survive intact for that timidity and pusillanimity.