Tag Archives: embarrassment

Feeling No Shame

I keep thinking about the question that led to the downfall of McCarthy and McCarthyism–at long last, sir, have you no sense of decency?

I doubt that Donald Trump could spell decency, much less define it, but I think there’s another, related question we might pose–although we know the answer: at long last, sir, have you no sense of shame?

I recently looked into the concept of shame and its social utility. It turns out that the ability to feel shame is an essential element of what psychologists and psychiatrists call “pro-social behavior.” It prevents people from damaging their social relationships and reputations, and it warns one of social ostracism or disapproval. Feelings of shame motivate individuals to conform to group norms and expectations, and that helps members of a society function cooperatively.

Although shame can also be toxic, in its healthy form it serves as a natural mechanism for self-control and social regulation, and promotes a shared sense of values and expectations for behavior.  

As we learn daily, Donald Trump and his cast of incompetent clowns and sycophants are incapable of feeling shame or even of experiencing its dimmer cousin, embarrassment. In the wake of one of the most recent exhibitions of Trump’s detachment from reality, Lincoln Square ran an article bemoaning the fact that Trump isn’t simply embarrassing himself, he’s embarrassing America.

The author of that article, Kristoffer Ealy, wrote,

Every time I see a headline or a YouTube video that says, “Trump embarrasses himself by…” it irks me a little. Not because Trump doesn’t make a fool of himself — he always does — but because is it even possible for him to get embarrassed? Embarrassment requires self-awareness. It requires an understanding of social standards, the recognition that you’ve fallen short of them, and the capacity to cringe at yourself.

Trump doesn’t express any of these traits. He barrels through life like a man who believes the world is his open mic, and the crowd is obligated to applaud no matter how stale the jokes are. Embarrassment implies an internal governor that makes you stop and think, “Oh, maybe I shouldn’t have said that.” Trump is missing that chip. He is an indictment on the United States of America, and not just as a president but as a mirror of the worst parts of us — anti-intellectualism, cruelty as entertainment, and the delusion that bluster equals brilliance.

Ealy wasn’t even writing about the latest embarrassment–Trump’s rambling and incredibly inappropriate speech to an assembly of American military leaders. He was reacting to the equally senile and unselfaware word-salad delivered to representatives at the United Nations, which he characterized as “bad improv with nuclear weapons.”

The first gem was his declaration that other nations are going to hell. That’s not analysis; that’s Shao Kahn from Mortal Kombat mixed with Jimmy Swaggart. If the goal was to sound like a dictator moonlighting as a televangelist, mission accomplished. He said it with the same flourish that Swaggart used to beg for donations, except instead of promising salvation he was predicting damnation. Imagine sitting in that room as a world leader and hearing the U.S. president channel both an arcade boss fight and a disgraced preacher. That’s not foreign policy—it’s fan fiction written by a crank.

Then came his insistence that climate change is a hoax. This is where roasting almost feels too easy, because it’s not just dumb — it’s dangerous. Trump is proof of how far the Republican Party has fallen. I would never call George W. Bush a champion for climate action, but even Bush had the baseline sense to acknowledge that climate change exists. 

That embarrassing performance has been eclipsed by the more recent–and more shameful–display to America’s military leadership. (The overall reaction to both Trump and Hegseth was summed up in an Atlantic headline: “Hundreds of Generals Try to Keep a Straight Face.”)

Trump’s obvious inability to understand when he is making a fool of himself, his utter imperviousness to feelings of shame or embarrassment, are indicators–according to the psychiatric literature–of psychological conditions like narcissism and psychopathy. An inability to feel shame also accompanies a lack of empathy and a lack of self-awareness.

That lack of self-awareness must also be a characteristic of Trump voters, who evidently view his ongoing clown show and decline with equanimity, and seem perfectly okay with his demonstrable inability to govern, not to mention his destruction of America’s global status…

They’re shameful.

Comments

Oh Indiana…

When friends and family members bemoan Indiana’s retrograde legislature, I like to remind them that the domination of that assemblage by pious frauds and occasional fascists (paging Jim Lucas) is a longstanding one. In the late 1800s,  the Indiana General Assembly decided to legislatively change the definition of pi.

Shades of Marjorie Taylor Greene…

When Indiana makes national news, it is almost never because our lawmakers have done something positive, so it wasn’t a surprise when, earlier this month, the state made headlines in the Washington Post.

That linked headline was a follow-up to an earlier article reporting on Indiana’s successful rush to pass one of the nation’s strictest anti-abortion bills. It featured comments received in response to that report–comments that put the legislation into proper historical context.

Indiana becoming the first state to pass an antiabortion law post-Dobbs is reminiscent of Indiana becoming the first state to pass forced sterilization, in 1907. To understand the state’s history of white-supremacist and misogynist legislation — catering to the Ku Klux Klan, the John Birch Society and other extremist groups — one needs to review the state’s conservative religious and political cultures. Not that this will liberate its citizens, but it gives context showing the state’s long history of oppressing individual liberty.

Another letter amplified the point by noting that, In the 1920s, Indiana was the only state in the union where every single county had its own chapter of the KKK.  (Still another letter-writer proved the continuing influence of Klan defensiveness, by insisting that both the John Birch Society and the KKK had Black members and integrated chapters…)

Friends who listened to the arguments over passage of SB 1, the anti-abortion bill, recounted the numerous references to Jesus–clearly, there are no First Amendment scholars in Indiana’s GOP super-majority! They also noted the divisions within the party over whether to allow any exceptions for rape, incest or the life of the mother. (“Pro-life” sentiments obviously don’t extend to the life of the women those lawmakers  dismiss as mere incubators…)

Disregard for the lives and autonomy of women is hardly the only evidence of what late NUVO editor Harrison Ullmann dubbed “The World’s Worst Legislature.” Our “pro life” lawmakers’ love affair with guns has led to increasing permissiveness–this year, despite the GOP’s purported support for police, the General Assembly ignored the testimony of law enforcement officials and eliminated the requirement of a permit to legally carry, conceal or transport a handgun within the state.

Ours is a state where the culture war dominates. It wasn’t that long ago–under the guidance of Mr. Piety–aka Mike Pence–that Indiana passed RFRA, another legislative effort that earned Indiana national headlines. As an article in the Chicago Tribune advised our lawmakers in the wake of that travesty,  “If you have to emphatically reassure citizens that your law won’t result in discrimination, it might be a bad law.”

This morning, the governor of Indiana signed a very bad law. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act is defended by its supporters as a means of protecting the religious liberty of each and every Hoosier of every faith.

That is what we in the “that’s a bunch of baloney” business call, not surprisingly, a bunch of baloney. This law, and others like it that are bubbling up in state legislatures across the country, is a transparent reaction to the swift expansion of same-sex marriage rights. The law effectively allows any business to refuse service to gay or lesbian people on religious grounds.

I’ve posted previously about the success of the legislature’s “Christian warriors” campaign to divert education funds to private, largely fundamentalist Christian schools via the nation’s largest voucher program.

That program isn’t the only attack by Indiana legislators on public school classrooms that has made national headlines. Vanity Fair was one of the many outlets reporting on Republican senator Scott Baldwin’s assertion that teachers must be “impartial” during lessons about Nazism and related “isms.” (Baldwin subsequently tried to walk back his statement, but it was too little, too late.) I suppose Hoosiers should be grateful for all the adverse publicity Baldwin generated; it was probably the reason the bill to ban teaching of (an invented) Critical Race Theory in the state’s public schools failed.

I absolutely agree with  one letter-writer to the Vigo County Tribune-Star. During the pandemic, as our intrepid legislators were protecting our freedom to infect our neighbors, he wrote:

It is better to be thought fools, than to pass legislation and remove all doubt.

In January 2022, Indiana Representatives plan to vote on House Bill 1001. The bill requires private businesses to accept any made-up excuse from employees refusing vaccination. Obvious bullpoo cannot be challenged…

 As an educator, I applaud any attempt to cure stupid. But, quarantining the worse cases in the House is not the answer.

Comments

Bring In The Clowns. Don’t Bother, They’re Here.

There’s a cartoon making the rounds on social media that shows Lt. Col. Vindman–in his military uniform– testifying during the impeachment hearing before the House Intelligence Committee. Congressman Devin Nunes, in full clown regalia, is asking him “What’s with the uniform?”

I loved it.

As Impeachment proceedings move to the Judiciary Committee, I thought I’d do a quick review of some of the more vocal–okay, looney-tunes–Trump defenders on the Intelligence Committee.

Nunes is a hysterical ( in both senses of the word) Trump devotee; during the Mueller investigation, reporters caught him running information to and from the White House in an effort to exculpate the President by disparaging American spy agencies, and engaging in a variety of other behaviors that were not, to put it mildly, in furtherance of the rule of law.

Indeed, despite once sponsoring something called the “Discouraging Frivolous Lawsuits Act,” Nunes may be the poster child for legal frivolity.

According to a column in the LA Times, 

He has sued:

¤ A stone fruit farmer in Dinuba, and two other people, for conspiring to damage his 2018 reelection by asking that Nunes not be allowed to call himself a “farmer” on the ballot.

¤ The research firm Fusion GPS and a Democratic group called Campaign for Accountability for attempting to interfere with his “investigation” (quote marks are mine) into ties between President Trump and Russia when he was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

¤ Twitter and a couple of parody accounts, including @DevinCow, who has called Nunes “a treasonous cowpoke.” He is asking for $250 million to assuage his hurt feelings.

¤ McClatchy, parent company of Nunes’ hometown paper, the Fresno Bee, for writing that he had a financial interest in a winery sued by an employee who was asked to work on a charity cruise where men behaved very, very badly.

¤ And, most recently, Esquire magazine and the journalist Ryan Lizza, who Nunes claims have defamed him to the tune of $75 million in writing about the Nunes family dairy farm, which is not in California, but in Iowa, a fact Lizza alleged Nunes has sought to downplay. Lizza also wrote about how undocumented workers form the backbone of the Iowa dairy farm industry, and how the industry would collapse without them.

(The New York Times says the cow now has 600,000 followers, far more than Nunes…)

Each of Nunes lawsuits describe him in the following glowing (arguably wildly inaccurate) terms:

“Nunes’ career as a U.S. Congressman is distinguished by his honor, dedication and service to his constituents and his country, his honesty, integrity, ethics, reputation for truthfulness and veracity.”

Then there’s language from his suit against the more popular cow. I think it’s fair to characterize it as somewhat over-the-top:

“In 2018, during his last re-election,” says his lawsuit against Twitter and the cow, “Nunes endured an orchestrated defamation campaign of stunning breadth and scope, one that no human being should ever have to bear or suffer in their whole life.”

As the author of the column put it,

It’s almost as if Nunes thinks he is the victim of a vast bovine conspiracy, when what he is really doing is weaponizing the American legal system in an effort to shut down criticism, punish his antagonists and prove to Trump World that, like the president, he will stop at nothing to destroy those who would dare to oppose him. Or call him names like “Milk Dud.”

In all fairness, Nunes isn’t the only Republican clown on the Intelligence Committee. Jim Jordan is only slightly less ridiculous; his high-decibel expressions of righteous indignation over suggestions that the Emperor/Commander-in-Chief might not be wearing any clothes was in striking contrast to his utter lack of such indignation–or appropriate action– over the sexual exploitation of numerous wrestlers by the team doctor while Jordan was assistant coach at Ohio State.

Gotta give Jordan props: when he’s on your team–be it wrestling or governing– he’ll cover for you. After all, what are friends for?

There are others, of course, who haven’t exactly been models of legislative comportment–let alone integrity. Feel free to identify your personal favorites in the comments.

Despite the number of contestants, it’s my view that Devin Nunes has gone above and beyond (far, far beyond) and is richly deserving of the title of Head Clown. Despite what has definitely been a valiant effort, Jim Jordan falls short.

That said, as the proceedings move to Judiciary, Nunes may have to increase his quotient of batshit crazy in order to keep the Clown crown. Louie Gohmert is on the Judiciary Committee…

Comments