When a narcissist dies, he wants to take us all with him
Rebecca Gordon for the TomDispatch
I’m
opposed to it in general. (In wiser moments, I know that this is silly and that
all life feeds on life. There is no life without the death of other beings,
indeed, no planets without the death of stars.)
Nonetheless, I’m also opposed to mortality on a personal level. I get too much pleasure out of being alive to want to give it up. And I’m curious enough that I don’t want to die before I learn how it all comes out (or, for that matter, ends). I don’t want to leave the theater when the movie’s only partway over—or even after the credits have rolled.
In fact, my antipathy
to death is so extreme that I think it’s fair to say I’m a coward. That’s
probably why, in hopes of combatting that cowardice, I’ve occasionally done
silly things like running around in
a war zone, trying to stop a U.S. intervention. As Aristotle once wrote, we become brave by doing brave
things.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Trump's second term conduct only make sense if you remember he is a malignant narcissist. As such, he cannot conceive of a world beyond his lifespan. When Hitler realized he was about to die, he ordered all vital infrastructure destroyed (an order not obeyed). He blamed the German people for his impending doom and decided they did not deserve to live. Trump also has nothing but contempt for the world and no desire for it to go on after he is dead and buried on one of his golf courses. Thus, the destruction of Social Security, Medicare, health programs, foreign aid, the environment, the economy and world peace are required to appease his ego. Who knows? Maybe on his deathbed or the end of his term, whichever comes first, Trump will grab the nuclear football and press the button. - Will Collette
Remember That You Are Dust
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| Trump made this drunken fool - Pete Hegseth - the US Secretary of Defense. Qualifications: Fox News host and MAGA supporter. |
A priest “imposes,” or places, a smudge of ash on each congregant’s forehead, saying, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
That action and those words reflect the brevity and
contingency of human life, while echoing Christianity’s Jewish roots in the
understanding that human life must have both a beginning and an end. Psalm 103
puts the sentiment this way:
You don’t need to believe in a compassionate divinity to
feel the loneliness of that windswept field, that place that remembers us no
more.
In the 20th century, it was proclaimed by both Emiliano Zapata, the Mexican revolutionary,
and the Republican heroine of the Spanish civil war, Dolores Ibárruri, also known as “La
Pasionaria.” I wish I could discern in my own breast that passionate preference
for a dignified death over a life of suppression or slavery, yet I find that I
can’t make myself feel that way. When I think about death—dignified or otherwise—my
mind strays again to that empty windswept field and I am afraid.
It’s odd—and a little disgusting—that I seem to share U.S.
President Donald Trump’s horror about
the numbers of people dying in Russia’s war against Ukraine. I also want that
war to stop. I don’t want one more person to lose his or her chance of finding
out how the story ends. Yet I also understand why people choose to fight (and
possibly die)—in Ukraine, in Gaza,
and on the Jordan River’s West Bank.
The Death of Millions
Here’s an observation often attributed to Russian autocrat
Joseph Stalin that was, in fact, probably lifted from
a German essay about French humor: “The death of one man is a tragedy. The
death of millions is a statistic.” Whoever said (or wrote) it first, the point
is that, while we can imagine a single death with its personal details of life
and extinction, the human brain has trouble truly grasping large numbers of
anything, including deaths.
In particular, we’re not good at understanding the numerous deaths of people who live far from us. At the end of February, The Associated Press reported that six infants had died of exposure in Gaza over the previous two weeks. One father said of his two-month-old daughter, whose body turned cold at midnight on a windswept Mediterranean plain, “Yesterday, I was playing with her. I was happy with her. She was a beautiful child, like the moon.”
We can imagine one child, beautiful like the moon. But can we imagine more than 48,000 babies, children, teenagers, adults, and old people, each with his or her own story, each killed by a military force armed and encouraged first by the Biden administration and now by that of Donald Trump?
Indeed, while former President Joe Biden finally denied Israel any
further shipments of 2,000-pound bombs (though not all too many other weapons),
President Trump’s administration has renewed the transfer of
those staggeringly destructive weapons, quite literally with a vengeance.
Announcing an “emergency” grant of an extra $4 billion in military aid to
Israel, Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently explained the shift:
Since taking office, the Trump administration has approved
nearly $12 billion in major FMS [“Foreign Military Sales”] sales to Israel.
This important decision coincides with President Trump’s repeal of a Biden-era
memorandum which had imposed baseless and politicized conditions [emphasis
added] on military assistance to Israel at a time when our close ally was
fighting a war of survival on multiple fronts against Iran and terror proxies.
As Reuters observes, “One
2,000-pound bomb can rip through thick concrete and metal, creating a wide
blast radius.” That’s not exactly a weapon designed to root out individual
urban commandos. It’s a weapon designed to “cleanse” an entire city block of
its inhabitants. And we know that Donald Trump has indeed imagined plans
to cleanse the rest of Gaza before
(of course) converting it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” Perhaps Israel
can use its new bombs to level the rest of the strip’s remaining buildings to
make way for Mar-a-Gaza.
Yes, we can imagine the death of an infant, but can we
imagine the permanent displacement of more than 2 million of her fellow
Palestinians?
People Are Dying—and They’re Just Getting Started
If you can wrap your head around the destruction of Gaza, you’re ready for an even bigger challenge, one about which the new regime in Washington has said exactly nothing: Sudan, where civil war and famine threaten the lives of 5 million people.
Back in 2019, a popular nonviolent
uprising dislodged that
nation’s long-time dictator President Omar al-Bashir. Sadly, after a brief
period of joint civilian-military rule, the Sudanese army seized the
government, only to be confronted by a powerful militia called the Rapid
Response Forces. The historical origins of the conflict are complex, but the
effects on the Sudanese people are simple: murder, rape, and mass starvation.
And the new Trump regime has done nothing to help. In fact, as the BBC reported:
The freezing of U.S. humanitarian assistance has forced the
closure of almost 80% of the emergency food kitchens set up to help people left
destitute by Sudan’s civil war… Aid volunteers said the impact of President
Donald Trump’s executive order halting contributions from the U.S. government’s
development organization (USAID) for 90 days meant more than 1,100 communal
kitchens had shut. It is estimated that nearly 2 million people struggling to
survive have been affected.
Nor are Sudan and Gaza the only places where people are
already dying because of Donald Trump. The New York Times has produced a
lengthy list of programs frozen for now (and perhaps forever) by the shutdown
of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Those include “HIV
treatment programs that had served millions of people, the main malaria control
programs in the worst-affected African countries, and global efforts to wipe
out polio.” Even programs that count the dead have been discontinued, so we
will never know the full effect of those cuts.
On March 5, a divided Supreme Court ruled 5-to-4
that USAID funds must indeed be reinstated for now. However, two things remain
unclear: First, will the case be returned to the Supreme Court for further
adjudication? And second, will the Trump administration abide by its decision
in the meantime and release the funds that have been impounded? This seems
increasingly unlikely, given Secretary of State Rubio’s March 10 announcement that
83% of those USAID contracts will be permanently cancelled.
His comments have rendered the legal situation even murkier.
In any case, if, as seems all too likely, the administration continues to
stonewall the courts, then we have indeed already arrived at the constitutional
crisis that’s been anticipated for weeks now.
It’s not only overseas that people will die thanks to the actions of Donald Trump. While we can’t blame him for the recent measles outbreaks in Texas and eight other states, he is the guy who made Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services. And Kennedy is the guy who first downplayed the seriousness of measles; then, rather than vigorously promoting the measles vaccine, called it a matter of “personal choice”; and finally suggested that measles can be easily treated with Vitamin A. (In case you had any doubts, this is not true!) To date only two people—an unvaccinated child and an unvaccinated adult—have died, but sadly, it’s early days yet.
Meanwhile, there’s a new pandemic sniffing around for
potential human victims: the H5N1 strain of bird flu. It’s already led to the
culling of millions of chickens (and a concomitant rise in the price of eggs).
It’s also infected dairy cattle, cats, and even a few human beings, including one resident of Louisiana
who died of the disease in January 2025. To date there are no confirmed cases
of human-to-human transmission, but the strains circulating in other
mammals suggest an
ability to mutate to permit that kind of contagion.
You might think that Trump learned his lesson about underestimating a virus with the Covid-19 pandemic back in 2020. That, however, seems not to be the case. Instead, he’s endangering his own citizens and the rest of the world by pulling the U.S. out of the World Health Organization, where global cooperation to confront a potential pandemic would ordinarily take place.
And Kennedy is seriously considering pulling an
almost $600 million contract with the American pharmaceutical and biotechnology
company Moderna to produce an mRNA vaccine against bird flu. That’s what I
call—to use a phrase of the president’s—Making
America Healthy Again.
Kennedy has also postponed indefinitely the February meeting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s advisory panel on flu vaccines. This is the group that convenes regularly to make decisions about which strain of seasonal flu should be addressed by the current year’s vaccines. Deaths from flu and attendant pneumonias vary across time.
During the 2022-2023 season more than 47,000 Americans died of flu
or flu-related pneumonia. Estimates of
last year’s deaths exceed 28,000. Without effective vaccines those numbers
would have been—and perhaps in the future will be—much higher.
There are many other ways Trump’s actions have killed and
will continue to kill, including through the suicides of transgender youth denied
affirming healthcare; or the deaths of
pregnant people denied abortion care; or those of people who come here seeking
asylum from political violence at home, only to be shipped back into the arms
of those who want to kill them; or even of fired and despairing federal workers
who might take their own lives. The list of those at risk under Trump grows
ever longer and, of course, includes the
planet itself.
As Elon Musk recently told podcaster
Joe Rogan, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” And
the strategy of Musk and Trump is, in effect, to pile the corpses high enough
that the numbers overwhelm our capacity for empathy.
People will die and, as was true of the cruelty of
Trump’s first term, their deaths are, in a sense, the point. They will die
because he has undoubtedly realized that, no matter how long he remains
president, one day he himself will die. His administration is, as he has told us, driven
by a thirst for retribution. He is seeking revenge for his own mortality
against everything that lives.
Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light
There is another murder I haven’t even mentioned yet, a
metaphorical killing of a particularly devastating sort, one that will
doubtless lead to many actual deaths before we’re done. I’m thinking, of
course, of the death of our democracy. Many others, including Timothy Snyder, M. Gessen, and Anne Applebaum, have
written about that process, already well underway, so there’s no reason to
rehearse the details here.
Contemplating this already violent moment in our history,
this genuine break with the rule of law and all that’s decent, brings me back
to the meditation on death with which I began this piece. I’ve long loved poet
Dylan Thomas’s villanelle on
old age, “Do not go gentle into that good
night.” As I climb higher into my 70s, it speaks to me ever more
directly. The first three lines are particularly appropriate to these Trumpian
times:
I’ve always been a partisan of the “rage, rage” faction. I’m
not going gentle. Give me all the “heroic measures.” No do not
resuscitate or DNR for me. And yet, paradoxically,
our rage at the dying of democracy’s light will indeed drag some of us, I
believe, burning and raving into that good night.
I know that certain of us may well be called upon, perhaps sooner than we imagine, to die for liberty here in this country. It’s happened before. I doubt I would (or should) kill for freedom, but I hope I would, if put to the test, be willing to die for it.
© 2023 TomDispatch.com
Rebecca Gordon is an Adjunct Professor at the University of San Francisco. Prior to teaching at USF, Rebecca spent many years as an activist in a variety of movements, including for women's and LGBTQ+ liberation, the Central America and South Africa solidarity movements and for racial justice in the United States. She is the author of "American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes" (2016) and previously, "Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States" (2014). She teaches in the philosophy department at the University of San Francisco. You can contact her through the Mainstreaming Torture website.
