Gaslighting - I just found out what it is / The example of Venezuela

Here's one instance in which not watching movies slowed down my understanding of a commonly-used term: gaslighting.  Apparently it has little or nothing to do with gas or lighting (except for maybe some tangential element in the movie Gaslight).

As I understand it, it is the systematic psychological attacks on a person's grasp of reality.  The methods have to do with constantly making the person doubt his or her reason, by a constant onslaught of stupendously contradictory disinformation.  The link above will give you a better description of how it is done than I can, since I'm new to the idea.

In an earlier post, I discussed how Donald Trump was the source of a stream of confusing statements (many of them via Twitter) that ultimately had the effect of forcing a large number of voters to look to him exclusively for The Truth, since he (and many on the Alt Right) maintained that the Press was untrustworthy.  This could be considered an extension of the idea of gaslighting, on a massive scale.

Meanwhile, in another post, a Venezuelan writer explains how a dictator can polarize a country in such a way that the minority which can clearly see the harm that is being done can be made out to be The Enemy, and no appeal to reason or science or common sense can save the targeted scapegoats.  The writer does not suggest a plan, but you should read the post anyway.

The Women's March, 2017

I have just finished listening to Gloria Steinem.  Oh, what an inspiration; this was America at its classiest.  Articulate, gracious, insightful, determined!  So many wise observations.  She said, at one point, that one of the advantages of being long-lived, is that you can remember when things were worse.  Amen.  But we survived the deaths of Lincoln, John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and so many numerous inspirational leaders who were snuffed out, and we still were here to see Barack and Michelle Obama occupy the White House with such grace and decency, and to see Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton stand for election.  They are still alive, and there is still hope.

Gloria Steinem said that when we elect a "possible" president, we elect him and go home.  But we have an impossible president, and we're never going home!  What a great sense of humor!  But most of all, her long perspective allowed her to be optimistic and enthusiastic about the march.  It was an unprecedented gathering, and we must all hope that the women at the march caught fire with the success of it, in terms of the turnout.

Constant pressure: that's imperative.  If we tire of the effort, this administration will have an easy time of dismantling everything that not just Obama achieved, but Clinton, Carter, and even a few reasonable laws passed under Reagan.

[More later.]

Place the Mask over your own nose and mouth . . .

For those who have never traveled by air,

just before the plane taxies off to the runway, a designated flight attendant stands before the passengers, with instructions about what to do if there is a pressure loss in the cabin.  Oxygen masks will automatically drop down from the ceiling (triggered by the lower pressure), and you're expected to place the mask over your nose and mouth.  But if you have a child (or even an elderly person, or a handicapped person) near you, put on your own mask first, and then proceed to help the other person with theirs.

The idea behind this instruction is that you're not going to be any use to anyone around you if you succumb to the loss of air first.  (Falling air pressure is, fortunately, not usually instantaneously fatal.)

Drawing a (very tenuous) analogy with this state of affairs, I believe that one of the most important things we can do in this --what I see as-- very stressful and worrisome combination of political circumstances is to keep ourselves thinking positively, and feeling positive.

Obviously, we're not going to feel super positive; that's impossible.  But there are ways to combat this steady onslaught of sheer nonsense that emanates from the White House and Trump Tower.

We did not join the marches in Washington, but we saw them on TV.  (At the time, we were thinking that there would be a march beginning at noon.  What apparently happened was that the crowd was so enormous that it filled the entire route of the march.  So they stayed put in front of the speakers' platform, and listened to scores of future leaders, some of them seasoned orators, and others just practicing their oratory in front of an audience, probably for the first time.)

Most of the speeches were amazing.  (I was thinking that Scarlett Johansson's speech would have been a better article; it was long and considered, and was cut off before she was finished, but I look forward to seeing it in its entirely on the Web.)  Other speeches, too numerous to mention individually, were awe-inspiring, and incredibly articulate.  Some of those ladies had the knack of speaking about unmentionables in amazing euphemisms that make us laugh and become angry at the same time.  But the wonderful thing about these speeches was how they kept to the high ground, regardless of the depravity of the facts that they were recounting.  Now that's class.  One felt furious, but one felt positive.

Another tool for remaining sane in these times is to seek out the humor in the furiously inconsistent statements coming out of the White House.  (Hah.)  Steve Colbert and Trevor Noah can be relied upon to see the funny side of these pomposities, but I do wish that Noah would put his gloves back on; on one hand, he rarely completely crushes his targets, but I do remember a time when he wasn't quite as harsh.  Still, I am sure the viciousness level of his observations is lower than those of comparable commentators on the Alt Right, and much more intelligent.  Seth Meyers is another reliably funny commentator, and, for those with much greater tolerance, Bill Maher.

Some of the legislation in place --enacted by the Democrats, with the help of Independents and progressive Republicans-- was not in order to help their voter base, or even to annoy the GOP, or to deplete the coffers of the government.  They were the rational things to do to serve the population, especially its weakest members.  For instance, there are shelters for abused women.  There are shelters for recovering drug addicts.  There are shelters for ex-convicts, whose families do not want them back.  At one time, Republicans in Washington could safely assume that all these "losers" were probably either Democrats, or apolitical.  But those in the know are aware that many of these victims are from staunchly Republican backgrounds.  Democrats helped these people not in order to gain votes, but because it was the right thing to do.  But it is quite possible that when the Republicans take away the little support that the government extends to these people, that the former recipients of this help will turn their backs on the Republicans.  Of course, allowing money in politics enables the enormously rich stratum of the population (i.e. the 1%) to partially offset the desertion of this group of people by increased money from the Koch Brothers and other such wealthy jokers.  If moving into an underground barter economy is what it takes to keep money out of the hands of the wealthy, that's something we should certainly look at.

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I had a fabulous title for this post, but I've forgotten . . .

Well, under Franklin Roosevelt, the Democrats became the party of the underdogs, and a reluctant pile of southern former slave-owners joined them, because of course they weren't going to join the party of Lincoln, who screwed up that whole thing.  When Lyndon Johnson (yes, the one with B as his middle initial) became president on the death of John Kennedy (the one with F), and once Johnson had to deal with the powerful Civil Rights movement, and decided to sign off on the new legislation, the Southern White contingent was deeply unhappy, but they were somehow kept within the Democrat fold.  After the train wreck of the Seventies ground to its final pileup, the battle changed direction: the Democrats took up the fight about economic justice, and equality of women, and Choice, and the GOP retreated to lick its wounds.  Eventually, they would settle on the so-called Pro Life, Pro Guns, Anti-Taxes, and Anti Soviet Union planks.  Their members who were passionate about each of those issues were largely unconcerned about the other issues; for instance, there were many Pro Gun republicans who were perfectly moderate about Pro Choice.  But it was a fragile coalition that was still strong enough to withstand the Democrats, especially since an energy crisis and the fall of the Shah of Iran ran in to distract the population from the fact that the Democrats were more likely to make life livable for the ordinary folks.

After the Reagan-Bush era, Clinton occupied the White House for eight years.  He famously gave the Republican Congress numerous excuses for mounting hostile personal attacks on him, attempting to impeach him, etc, etc.  Many of those attacks, some of them led by one Kenneth Starr (formerly a member of the Beatles*), put Clinton on the defensive, and paved the way for the slackening of checks and controls on Banks, in particular, Wall Street investment banks, which in turn led the way for the vicious lending practices of credit card companies, and ultimately the home mortgage crisis of 2007.

Despite their frequent missteps, in my view, the Democrats have usually kept the welfare of the ordinary people foremost.  However, the laws they passed, and the mechanisms they created for the relief of poverty were abused by a few: Reagan famously described a so-called Welfare Queen, a recipient of welfare who parlayed these entitlements into supporting what was considered a lavish lifestyle.  Such abuses were far from being of epidemic proportions, but the GOP quickly learned that those sorts of mental pictures did not need to be accurate true to be effective.  It was quite possible to speak about some fictitious situation that gets the population mad against some group or other, and the population has now been conditioned into retaining those feelings of indignation long after that fictitious story has been thoroughly discredited.

Another tactic that the GOP deployed with, from their point of view, great success, is simple obstructionism.  It is a distortion of the Credit Game: the Republicans sabotaged every initiative brought forward by the Democrats, simply to be able to claim that the Democrats were ineffective in office.  Learning quickly, and not having the perspective to see where this policy could backfire, the Democrats also fell back on the same idea to obstruct Republican initiatives, but without much success, being in the minority.  What the Republicans are doing with "Obamacare" is also simple obstruction for its own sake, a transparent effort to destroy Obama's legacy.  As one observer pointed out, the implementation of Obamacare, or the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was carefully crafted to appeal to the largest number of Republican lawmakers, to enable it to pass both houses of Congress.  Almost any implementation the Republicans can devise is sure to be more left-leaning than the ACA.  But the GOP is determined to find a way to do it, which is amusing in the extreme.

The important thing is that any Democrats out there, you should not lose sight of the main goal that has driven the Democrats for decades: to make the lives of ordinary people easier and rewarding.

Many Democrats, smarting under Trump's unexpected victory, are determined to make Trump feel their ire.  Trump will not suffer under such a slap on the wrist for very long; neither is it likely to make the lives of ordinary people easier or rewarding, and nor is it likely to prevent other Republican hopefuls from adopting the same rhetorical tricks in the future.

Republicans, too, are not happy with the Trump Presidency; in fact they are a lot happier about their majorities in Congress and the Senate.  They too are wondering how to get what they want while Trump is in office, while Trump is busy getting what he wants.  My theory is that Trump wants to change the legislation that taxes the very rich.  In addition, there must be some commercial basis on which Trump can benefit from the Presidency, and you have to look to minds more acute than mine to be able to predict what Trump's angle is.
[Added later: my suspicion is that offshoring of jobs will rise under Trump to unprecedented levels, and he will probably blame some inoffensive piece of Democrat-initiated legislation, e.g. the minimum wage, for running amok with offshoring.]

My Republican friends are eager to persuade me that there is a large number of Republicans who also want what is best for the ordinary folks of the US (as opposed to the very very rich).  I find this hard to believe, but on the outside chance that it is true, we should not lose opportunity to collaborate on any initiatives on which we see eye-to-eye with these fabulous Republicans whom I have never seen or heard of.

The ball is firmly in Trump's court, and that is something we cannot change.  Preemptive strikes, as advocated by youthful hotheads, will move matters onto the line between uncivil and reckless behavior and common decency, on which politics has been dancing for the last several decades, with only a few Democrat leaders holding themselves above the brawling.  Brawling, verbal or physical, is a direction in which I for one prefer not to go.  But the minute Trump makes a move, I think the Democrats must respond decisively.

It is still not clear, but there is an even chance that Trump's cabinet nominees will be approved with only token resistance from the various Senate committees.  But there is a chance that at least some of the members of these committees, even Republicans, take their offices seriously.  It is baffling how little thought working class Republicans give to Education.  If they think a voucher program is to their benefit, either they know something that I don't, or they have no brains at all.  I am fully aware that most of my friends (and my readers) believe that Republicans are all fools, but I find that hard to believe.

At any rate, it ain't over until the fat lady sings (or the slightly overweight lady), and I'm simply advocating that the response of those who are concerned about the likelihood that the President will do something utterly stupid should be: be careful.  Wait until we really know what he has decided to do.

Arch

*Just to see whether you're paying attention.