Ain't Gonna Work on Maggie's Form No More

A Twitter friend sent me the following by DM yesterday evening, and I didn't notice it until later:

Does @maggieNYT’s latest change your opinion any?

My opinion of what? I assume she must have posted another obnoxious, defensive tweet, and it's so bad I'll really stop coming to her defense myself, like she's my girlfriend and the scales will fall from my eyes and I'll ask for my ring back.

Look, she's not my girlfriend. I've never met her and it's unlikely I ever will. If I saw her at the smoked fish counter at Barney Greengrass I would pretend, as I always do with celebrities, that I didn't recognize her. I don't want to know her. More important, I really need for people to start distinguishing between the profoundly stupid question, "Is X a Good Person or a Bad Person?" and the important question, "Is a thing that X is doing having a good or useful or pleasing impact or a bad or unhelpful or ugly impact? and what do we need to do about it?

For the Record: In Defense of Haberman

Drawing by KAL for The Economist, 11 July 2019.

Collaborative piece by Matt Flegenheim and Maggie Haberman opening caused some howls I thought weren't justified:

Jesus.

For the record, I didn’t think that. With @deanbaquet, as with Trump, I know there is no bottom.

— blue four seasons meme (@TheBlueMeme) November 24, 2020

The headline and lede.

— blue four seasons meme (@TheBlueMeme) November 24, 2020

The people Baquet wants to appease aren’t expected to read past the lede.

— blue four seasons meme (@TheBlueMeme) November 24, 2020

It's hard for me to imagine how Dean Baquet has any control over this prose at all, let alone a sinister plan of some kind—to achieve what? Lull us into believing that Trump likes some things better than others when he really doesn't?

The Strongest Possible Case

Really finding myself irked by this Democrats-in-disarray story I heard on NPR and apparently traces back to Politico, about the "moderate" freshman Democrats who unexpectedly jumped on the impeachment train in September when the Ukraine whistleblower story emerged and now want to control the narrative:

Rep. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, one of more than three dozen Democratic candidates who flipped GOP-held seats in 2018, made clear Wednesday that she thinks Ukraine is where the impeachment probe should stay focused.

“I know that there's some people who are interested in kind of a kitchen sink approach — let's throw all kinds of things in there because we can and talk about all the things we're concerned about regarding the president,” she told reporters.

“We have been taking the country down this road on this very targeted issue of Ukraine and the issues around the president using his office for personal and political gain,” Slotkin added. “And that's what I think we should focus on.”

I don't know how many of these there are, but if they think the alternative is a "kitchen-sink" approach, they aren't paying attention. It's weird that Slotkin seems to have no idea what a broad category could be represented by "the president using his office for personal and political gain" in application to Trump—that would really be a kitchen sink, ranging from the foreign and domestic emoluments violations to having the White House Communications Director plug his and his daughter's tchotchkes on live TV, to say nothing of using Twitter to make the stock market jump up and down, from which somebody is surely making a profit.

Ontological insecurity

You don't need to have it on the couch in a psychiatrist's office to identify this animal, and diagnosing Donald Trump's narcissism is the same kind of thing.

The great psychological thinker and writer Alfie Kohn (you may recall the time we caught David Brooks not only plagiarizing him but pretending the material he stole meant the opposite of what Kohn intended) has offered some important remarks from the liberal psychologist's point of view on the Trumpian narcissism, not bothering with the false humility of saying you can't diagnose illness at a distance (you can when it's on that scale), which I recommend everybody read in full:

Even if you set out to consider different sorts of deficits, you’re pulled back to the psychological issues. It’s not just that he’s ignorant or even incurious; it’s that he seems incapable of acknowledging that there’s something he doesn’t know. It’s not just that he lacks the cognitive wherewithal to view himself as others view him (or to reflect on his failings) but that his psychological makeup is such that he can’t bear to stop and think about who he is; he’s like a shark, a blind eating machine that must always move forward or die. Similarly, while his speech rarely ventures beyond elementary-school vocabulary or grammar, what’s more alarming than his cognitive limitations is his egocentrism. One careful analysis found that he inclines not only to the monosyllabic but to the megalomaniacal: The single word he uses more than any other is “I” — and his fourth-favorite word is his own name.

Donald Trump seems to me a textbook illustration of how a lifelong campaign of self-congratulation and self-aggrandizement (acquiring as much as possible and then pasting his name on everything he owns) represents an attempt to compensate for deeply rooted insecurity. He fears being insignificant, worthless. In fact, his quest to humiliate and conquer, to possess and flaunt, may be strategies to prove to himself that he really exists, reflecting a condition that R.D. Laing called “ontological insecurity” (in a chapter of that name in his classic book The Divided Self). He doesn’t even bother — or maybe just lacks the sophistication — to conceal how desperate is his craving for attention and approval, how precarious is his mental state....

The implications going forward are nothing short of chilling. It’s not just how little he knows but how little that fact bothers him — the overweening arrogance that leads him to believe he has nothing to learn, that he knows “more about ISIS than the generals do.” It’s not just that he’s an extreme risk-taker, but that he takes those risks purely in the service of his own wealth and glory. It’s not clear that he has any principles, as such; what he has is an overwhelming need to be the center of attention, to be liked, feared, admired. Apart from considerations of personal profit, his foreign policy is likely to be determined at least in part by which individuals on the world stage stroke his ego and which ones criticize him — never mind that despicable leaders may do the former and reasonable leaders the latter (which is actually more likely than the reverse, if you think about it).

His hunger for approval means he’s likely to keep surrounding himself with those who tell him what he wants to hear and flatter him — the engine of Shakespearean tragedies. His belligerence and volatility, that hair-trigger temper, are the last qualities you want to see in someone holding a position of power, particularly when they’re coupled with a childish us-versus-them view of the world: xenophobic nationalism and compulsive competitiveness. His disorder leaves no room for consensus and collaboration. How can one not tremble at the thought that someone like this will command the military and have access to nuclear weapons?

There's a lot more, with attention to the issues we're going to be facing and some to the terrifying question whether we'll be able to do anything about it.

Some Unexpected Pit

Kibera School for Girls, Nairobi. Photo by Nicholas Kristof/New York Times.

And the award for single most infelicitous sentence in any David Brooks column in history goes to...

His drunken stepfather beat him constantly; when he was 5 the beating was so relentless, all the feces escaped from his body.

I always thought "getting the shit beat out of one" was just an expression.

Today's column, "The Things They Carry", is not about people carrying things, as in Tim O'Brien's great book about American soldiers in the Vietnam War, but about one person who has succeeded in not being burdened by his horrible memories, so that it might be more appropriate to call it "The Non-Things He Doesn't Carry", but that is a minor quibble.

The subject is the Kenyan community organizer Kennedy Odede, who has just published a book in collaboration with his wife Jessica Posner under the title Find me Unafraid: Love, Loss, and Hope in an African Slum which is praised by Chelsea Clinton, Lonnie and Muhammed Ali, Gloria Steinem, and Wanjira Maathai, the son of Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai. He also openly acknowledges having been born in Kenya, so I'm confident he's not running for president over here.