I have mixed feelings about Melanie Austin. I can’t help but feel sorry for her, but I know she doesn’t want my sympathy. I don’t blame the Pennsylvania state police for hauling her “off to the nuthouse” considering that she was inciting violence by posting about the need to hang Bill and Hillary Clinton and President Obama, but she has a point that she “didn’t get there on my own.” She’s been exposed to a ton of misinformation designed to deceive her and bilk her out of money. I feel badly that she won a sexual harassment case that awarded her north of $400,000 in damages only to see it overturned on appeal. I don’t really have an opinion on the merits of the case since I didn’t sit in court and hear the facts, but I can understand the disappointment she must have felt.
I also don’t like seeing her singled out like this, held up as example A of how unhinged and intolerant Donald Trump’s supporters can be. Yet, the reporter, Stephanie McCrummen, didn’t do much more than spend a couple of days with her during the Republican National Convention and report what she said and did. She brought the criticism, as well as the attention of law enforcement, on herself. At the same time, when she argues that she can’t be crazy because there are so many people out there who think just like she does, she is unfortunately correct in the latter part of that assessment. How many people are we going to certify as insane?
Maybe close to half the country deserves to spend some time in the nut house getting their medication sorted out.
She suffers from crippling anxiety, which makes me feel compassionate. But then I think about how she spends all day reading rightwing conspiracy sites that are designed to ramp up her level of fear and paranoia. I wish she wouldn’t do that and I have to hold her accountable for it, but I also am angered that these sites exist to prey on people like her.
Most of all, I can’t decide if it’s good to expose this women’s very personal voyage into craziness because it’s part of a wider phenomenon that needs to be understood, or if this is more of a way of dismissing all of Trump’s supporters, most of whom who aren’t quite this nuts.
. . . going to certify as insane?”
I’ve made this point before: a break with Reality is a common symptom of a range of clinically diagnosable mental illnesses. Given the widespread wingnut embrace of Reality-Denial, statements like “40ish% of the population is nuts” or “one of the two major political parties has gone batshit insane” barely even seem hyperbolic.
If the shoe fits . . .
And if it doesn’t fit?
Take it off!!!
AG
Could long term exposure to mass media and political messages of fear and hatred exacerbate preexisting mental disorders? Would not surprise me. To write people off as crazy because of their beliefs? Not comfortable with that.
“Could long term exposure to mass media and political messages of fear and hatred exacerbate preexisting mental disorders?”
Absolutely, yes.
Someone who is paranoid and delusional is already paranoid and delusional. The last thing you do is tell them that yes, there are liberals out there who want to take all of your stuff and give it to other people.
Certainly something I’d been thinking about. There was a book I read a number of years ago – came out in the 1990s – called The Culture of Fear. The author, a sociologist did a nice job of laying out how mass media news cycles as they existed at the time exaggerated threats, inviting their audiences to live in a state of heightened alert or fear. Although George Gerbner was not referenced, as far as I was aware, his work on cultivation theory seems apt. The mass media we consume cultivates a view of the world – he called it mean world syndrome. Strikes me that constant consumption of mass media products, whether traditional mass media as Gerbner would know or emerging media with which we are much more familiar, is already paranoia inducing under the best of circumstances. Expose someone who is dealing with severe anxiety, or who has a disorder leading them to have delusions and/or hallucinations and the potential for someone to be of harm to themselves or others goes up quite considerably. Add to the mix a ready supply of firearms and a mental health system that has been a shambles for ages. Not good.
I know you are not one of those who would laugh at the person featured in the story in the WaPo. Sadly there are plenty who will and use it for whatever ends they wish to (see, conservatives cray cray, or whatever). Having watched someone who was once a dear friend become increasingly unable to function as his schizophrenia symptoms worsened, it pained me to watch this person become increasingly suggestible to the worst our culture had to offer at the time. The guy had no tangible support system at the time, and ended up on the streets for a time. I found him on FB a few years ago, and by that time he’d bought into every right-wing conspiracy theory imaginable, and was convinced liberal Jews had stolen his music (in better times, he was a fairly talented singer songwriter). That, too, was painful. His spare time appears to be spent watching Fox, and reading Breitbart and other similar websites. He has found his answers for why he is tormented. I did try to send a message his way. He blocked me. Must have remembered who I was and what I believed, and that I was part of the conspiracy. So it goes.
Seems worth noting the sharp turn Reagan presided over re: the form of that shambles.
Meaning, of course, turning millions of mentally ill out of institutions (there were very good reasons to do that) — where they were mostly just being warehoused, or worse — onto the streets; but providing no societal infrastructure to support/treat them once they got there (for which there were no good reasons; and which almost certainly left many even worse off than when they’d been [or, later, would have been] institutionalized).
The pre-Reagan shambles was a horror, too. Inspired Kesey’s . . . Cuckoo’s Nest, out of his own personal experience with institutionalization, IIRC; though much worse than portrayed in it was well documented.
Deinstitutionalization was a good idea in principle and one I still fully support. The failure to provide the needed social support infrastructure led to another kind of warehousing – skid row, prisons, etc. I wish I had the optimism to say that we could still fix this. Seen too many people needlessly suffer.
Mentioned in another comment, but deinstitutionalization works. Assuming you have a community that cares.
https:/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geel
https:
/aeon.co/essays/geel-where-the-mentally-ill-are-welcomed-home
Geel, Belgium has been taking care of the mentally ill for hundreds of years with excellent results.
Hell, Orwell described the kind of paranoid delusional state and media apparatus in 1984.
And I don’t laugh at people with mental disorders. Not only do they need help, but they should receive it. Ignoring it -or worse- provoking and profiting from it is the absolute low point of humanity, if it can be called such.
Here’s an interesting town I learned about in abnormal psych, and an article about the same town. It’s called Geel, Belgium, where mentally ill people are invited into people’s homes and treated like regular human beings. With amazing results, which shouldn’t be a suprise, really.
https://aeon.co/essays/geel-where-the-mentally-ill-are-welcomed-home
https://www.google.com/search?q=npr+geel%2C+belgium&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
That clinical paranoids exhibit this kind of ideation does not allow one to infer that those believing in such Ideas have clinical problems. The difficulty is that the disorders Austin exhibits are present in only a small minority of the population — a much smaller group than Trump supporters or likely even Alex Jones listeners. So there is just no valid inference that can be made here. On the other hand, if as in this case you have proven psychopathology, and if the ideation (as is also true here) is consistent with the pathology, it is not unreasonable (although still not bulletproof) to connect the two. And in any case if a major news organization such as the POST is going to do a story about Trump supporters, it can certainly be reasonably required to select supporters who are not definitely mentally ill — which was the essential point of my longer comment.
I guess this stems from having representing the mentally ill in commitment hearings, but this is nonsense.
It really springs from a lack knowledge of what mental illness is, and in a way is more ignorant than the views that are being raised here.
“To her, the president seemed so far away, so oblivious to the decay she saw around her that when Donald Trump began suggesting that Obama was not American, it made sense”
Hmmm, what could have ever led her to think the President didn’t see the decay around her.
The elites, the people most of us rely on to inform our beliefs, failed her and failed her community.
And so are we REALLY so surprised that she no longer believes them?
Is that irrational?
Brownsville is a sad story. After the local economy collapsed, speculators bought up much of the downtown with plans to turn it into a casino town, much like some of the small mining towns in Colorado. That project collapsed, and much of the downtown consists of shuttered and slowly deteriorating buildings.
The problem with Trump’s supporters is that all of them will vote for Trump, which is the much larger problem. Their pathologies and personal stories aside, they mean to do fatal harm to this country.
How “nuts” they are is irrelevant. How many of them vote is a different story.
The problem is that our society is producing great numbers of people who mean to do fatal harm to the country.
And most of them are on the far right and far left. But all of them are motivated by the great wrongs they perceive.
This is baloney. There are many apolitical folks with the same behavioral and cognitive issue, not to mention bunches of straight-forward centrist business owners and managers who have the privilege and power of acting out without getting themselves fired.
No.
They do not “mean” to do fatal harm to this country. Most of them…on plenty of evidence…believe that “fatal harm” has already been done. On purpose? As the result of failed policies? Whatever. You disagree with them about the potential results of a Trump win? Great. So do I. But do not lump them all in the same basket of deplorables.
By doing so you simply jump into the equal and opposite deplorable basket.
And then it’s just a matter of which basket weighs more on the electoral scales.
AG
They believe that fatal harms are in allowing gay marriage to be a protected constitutional right. They believe that fatal harms are in providing a safety net to “those people”. Or allowing Mexicans and Mooselmans to work and live within the US.
And as a result, they want to correct those fatal harms by undoing them. Which would be considered a fatal harm to the people who are protected by those laws.
The only difference in opinion is what a fatal harm actually is. Do you believe that SCHIP, Medicaid, SS, and gay marriage are fatal harms? How about first amendment separation of church and state (secular government)?
If Yes: Vote Republican and be seen to support fatal harms done to the country, by liberals.
If No: Vote Democrat and been seen to support the ongoing fatal harms, by conservatives.
The only real question is whether there are objective measures to what is considered a fatal harm.
A “fatal harm” is what kills you, n1cholas.
Not so far…
AG
So, would ending safety net programs be “fatal harms” to the people who would/could suffer and die?
You asked the question, n1cholas.
All I did was try to answer it as simply as possible.
I added “Not yet” because I was speaking of the big picture. Although seriously wounded in my opinion, the U.S. is not yet dead. Thus “fatal harm” on the large scale has not happened.
You responded by focusing in on one portion of the population.
Your question opens up any number of avenues.
The simple answer to your question is of course, “yes.”
My original comment was to the statement that “They [Trump supporters] mean to do fatal harm to this country.”
I disagree. It’s a parsing system any way you cut it. The Trumpsters hear the parse one way, others hear it another. They think about their own lives and of those about whom they most care and many of them…most of them, I would venture to say…believe that the course that the U.S. has taken threatens “fatal harm” to their way of life. As I said, others…including you and me…believe otherwise. There really are no objective answers to that question to be had. Sorry, but there it is.
The will of the majority…should that “will” be counted accurately and assuming said majority will has not been so media-hypnotized into existence in the first place that it has no real “will” of its own, only that of the controllers…will make the decision, and soon.
So it goes.
AG
I’d disagree in the sense that taking away someone’s Medicaid, Medicare or SS can definitely result in actual physical harm, and hence a possible fatal harm.
Just because someone feels as if their way of life is threatened because they no longer have extra rights based on their ethnicity/religion/color/race/sex, etc., is definitely not a physical harm and hence, not a fatal harm.
Objectively speaking, it’s pretty simple. But the people who feel that their way of life is ending because “those people” are now equal under the law and in reality, is an artifact of their continued delusions about objective, observable reality itself. I.E. a mental disorder.
Mental disorders should be treated, not aggravated and provoked in order to gain electoral advantage.
You write:
Of course.
But…”fatal harm” can also arise from:
You also write:
t’s not about extra rights, n1cholas; it’s about everybody’s rights!!! The only people here who have extra rights are those who can buy that position…Hillary Clinton’s owners. Those who are scuffling for survival…poor whites, poor blacks, poor latinos, millennials struggling under massive, almost unpayable college loans, the poor of every race, creed and social substructure…know this damned well. The whitish middle and upper middle classes? This situation is just beginning to dawn on most of those people. Another 4-8 years of neroliberal failure is going to open a lot of peoples’ eyes.
Too late?
I dunno.
Maybe.
It’s too late for this election for sure, no matter which way the worm turns.
We shall see.
Won’t we.
AG
It’s a fascinating and horrifying story. It’s kind of … I don’t know. It’s deeply political, not in that it explains a ‘Trump supporter’ but in that it highlights the reason we need a functioning society. I know how patronizing this sounds–and I’m equally sure that Austin would reject my condescension and that she’s carried a lot more weight in her life that I have in mine–but it’s a real indictment of our culture that we’ve failed to ensure that people like Austin share the same (ie, ‘our’) reality.
It goes back to the failure of the elite and of the system. We shouldn’t kill communities without a plan to deal with the fallout. We shouldn’t allow sexual harassment to victimize people without making them whole. We shouldn’t let mental illness snowball unaddressed, and we shouldn’t invest so little in our education system that conspiracy conspiracies flourish.
Makes me think of Kevin Drum’s articles about how the economy isn’t that bad after all, wages are okay and every’s just whining for no reason. But there are economies that don’t revolve around money.
Who is the economy okay FOR?
Wall Street and the Banks got a trillion and change bailout in 2008 so they could get back on their feet and they are doing fine.
And that’s all that really matters, isn’t it?
Channeling Tommy Smothers: “The more-ons”
We’ve been assured for decades that globalization was a wonderful tide to raise all boats; whereupon the 0.01% assiduously spent the rest of those decades in their golden battleships offshore shelling the harbor where most of the boats were anchored. The failure to provide for the dislocated wasn’t a bug, it was a feature, baked into the system.
Then they used their giant megaphones to tell everyone it was the dirty fucking hippies/immigrants/lazy blacks/uppity wimmin/elites/college professors/gays who did it.
Since the masses were already primed to hate the dirty fucking hippies/immigrants/lazy blacks/uppity wimmin/elites/college professors/gays the hate radio crowd glued to those megaphones went right along with it.
So now they have their perfect Idiocracy candidate proclaiming Brawndo’s got what plants need, and that ‘wages are too high’.
Standard fascist tactics. Make everyone scared, then give them a convenient scapegoat.
I think that this is a two-edged sword, Booman. A bipartisan problem.
I have quoted the following interview here several times recently. Now I am going to do it again. Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush-Ron Suskind, Oct. 17, 2004
I firmly believe that the level of flat-out lying coming from the government of the United States…no matter who the president might be or which of the two supposed parties apparently control which parts of the governmental mechanism…points to the control of a “reality” (which we almost all perceive through one part of the media or another) that is absolutely beyond belief when looked at subjectively.
The right has its crazies who believe what the right-wing media produce. So does the left and so does the center. Then there are the “moderates” of each area…those who reserve themselves to mainstream actions regarding their beliefs.
But what if none of what they are being told even remotely resembles what is really happening?
What then?
Can you tell me with a straight face…after the many revelations about corporate accedence to massive surveillance of the citizens of the United States by its government that contradict years of flat out denial by the spokesmen for that government…can you tell me that you actually believe what the centrist candidates are saying about anything whatsoever? Republican or Democrat?
I certainly can’t.
So…here we are on this blog with many posters supporting Hillary Clinton for president. Why? Because she is somehow better than Donald Trump? She has been caught out in so many lies…”half-truths” being nothing more than lies told by accomplished liars…that were she a local merchant I’d cross the street to avoid her storefront. So too has Donald Trump been caught, only he is a less intelligent, less practiced liar…less subtle, at the very least.
Melanie Austin is now on anti-anxiety medicines because she couldn’t handle the lies. That’s it…that’s all there is to it. She was smart enough to see through the initial bullshit…you don’t need to be a genius to see what has happened in places like Brownsville Pennsylvania over the preceding 30+ years or so…but not smart enough and/or strong enough to be able to handle the revelations and not get arrested and udged in need of psychiatric help.
Anybody here remember the old media meme about how the U.S.S.R. used to put people in psychiatric institutions if they resisted the government?
Now they just medicate them and send them back to their miseries.
A kinder, gentler Big Brother, but Big Brother…Big Daddy, as Melanie Austin calls Donald Trump…nevertheless. With Big Mommy as his opponent.
Nice.
Pill up, babies.
It’s gonna be a long, anxiety-ridden slog no matter who wins. Especially if you continue to believe the liars.
Or…wake up.
The reality of things is easier to handle than is the virtual reality being peddled by out=r two lovely candidates. It is often said of Trump that he is a “reality TV” character.
True.
But what is the whole government but “reality TV” writ so large that people take it for the real thing?
WTFU.
You been had.
Later…
AG
P.S. Booman’s linked article is from the rabidly pro-HRC, CIA-allied Washingtoon Post. It is ostensibly a sob-piece.
Poor, misjudged, not-so-smart but hardworking Melanie. Don’t you feel sorry for her?
In a truly “reality-based” world, it would be titled:
But of course this media-induced world in which we all swim is not “reality-based,” it is virtual reality-based.
I can hear it now from the moderate, centrist crazies on this site…who are no smarter than Melanie Austin, just a little luckier in terms of where they landed at birth :
Ask a fish about water…the substance that has surrounded it all of its life…and it will answer “Water? What’s that?” That’s where you centrists are. You have been media brainwashed since infancy to believe whatever it tells you to believe.
All I can say is:
Watch this and then tell me that I am wrong.
Has anything changed since the whistle-blower heroes…who have been chased to the ends of the earth for their bravery…blew this particular lie right out of the water?
WTFU.
Do you really think it will be any different under Hillary Clinton?
Of course not. Even the dumbest among you have to know that she is part of this virtual package.
Yet you are going to vote for her and you oppose any thoughts whatsoever that question this choice!!!
“WTFU” isn’t a strong enough expletive.
Yes, the American dream of being what you want to be–drummed day-in, day-out in ad after ad. Oh, and there are laws for that; that’s another lie for lots of folks who are not well connected.
“…points to the control of a ‘reality’ (which we almost all perceive through one part of the media or another) that is absolutely beyond belief when looked at objectively.”
Not “subjectively.”
Duh!!!
AG
The other problem with a lot of the government’s information.
We know they are lying, but we don’t know which are the half-truths and which are the whoppers. Secrecy does that for a government and for politicians.
Cicero solved that problem. He also was assassinated.
The Snowden of his time?
Could be…
This “:tuthiness” tactic is certainly nothing new…the Roman Catholic Church used it to great effect for centuries. Take a morality-based worldview; mess around with some of its meanings and conquer millions upon millions of relatively simple minds.
So it goes…
AG
What you see in this article are the several sorts of double-binds that people in the class (how do you label them?) that Melanie Austin is in when they adopt conservative ideology and the American dream.
Towns like Brownsville elsewhere in coal country have been hard times pretty much except for a brief period in the 1960 when the UMW was strong enough to swing weight and the Federal programs, especially the Appalachian Highway Program, were adding jobs and pressure upward on wages.
If the stories are accurate, she experienced as vicious a campaign of get-out-of-the-white-man‘s-job as can be imagined. A jury certainly thought so, and having a sweetheart reversal of the case was a huge shock.
It seems that Ed Rendell and the Democratic Party lost big from the actions that occurred either with one of Rendell’s buddies or just from his being governor at the time. Rendell’s general ideology likely contributes at least something to Austin’s confirmation bias. Likely these are old actions coming back to haunt the Democratic Party.
In any other information environment than the rural radio environment ClearChannel and its imitators created a quarter century ago, these incidents might have been read differently or forgiven. But four decades of religious broadcasting and a quarter century of conservative shock jocks has burnt over large swaths of rural communities and turned the cafe morning conversation into increasingly out-of-control conspiracy mongering (juicy gossip hyped up).
And in the neighbor and church gatherings the stories fester and get more confirmation bias.
What Trump and his campaign has done is given permission for people to go over the edge in their acting out and speaking out what they have been fed and have invented off of that.
But because she is white and female, she was not gunned down when the police came to the door. Because she is in a rural area, the police likely knew who she was and how she typically acts.
The simultaneous contempt for people like Melanie Austin that the “you’re on your own” personal responsibility ideology forces on difficult situations and the unserious solutions that right-wing pandering offers as policy add yet another double bind that self-reinforces with anger, And they don’t understand that Trump still considers them “white trash” and the preachers consider them “marks” and the radio shock jocks consider them “goosing up ratings”. The actual condition of their lives are of no concern to those seeking to make money off of their misery.
If Democrats had not ruined their brand (“the donkey is dead”), they might have policies that would have already dealt with some of this psychic pain. But that was not bi-partisan enough.
Although TarHeel Dem is trying hard here, the mistake is the same one that McCrummen made (with less excuse): taking what Austin said as some serious indication of ratiocinative activity. It is plainly obvious that her political ideas are an outgrowth of her mental-health issues — which is precisely why the article made no sense, unless the POST wanted to slime Trump’s supporters generally as mentally troubled. In TarHeel Dem’s defense, Longman’s original post expresses some of the same confusion. But the bottom line is as I mention in my longer post: this is simply a seriously failed effort, from a clueless paper and an oblivious reporter, to try to account for a political phenomenon they just don’t understand. And in the process of demonstrating that they don’t understand Trump’s supporters, they also show that they haven’t got a clue about mental illness either.
It was a terrible thing to go through the sexual harassment lawsuit and win only to have it taken away. That would upset many otherwise stable people. But it strikes me that the right wing Wurlitzer, as noted by the author, is everywhere and is doing serious damage. I have seen it in my own life, and wonder how seemingly rational people accept nearly anything put out by them. it only confirms to me that if you repeat and embellish a lie often enough, even a outrageous one, some people accept it. I recently ran across a person on my Face Book , who among other things posted, as I recall, noted 52 deaths the Clintons were involved in and no one denied it but a few of us. So, while I can accept that the author showed no real concern of Austin, there is a kind of evil out there that infects too many. And that is reflected in a national party whose sole goal is to block what the President and opposing party propose and issue endless and egregious lies about it.
Yes!!!
Indeed.
With one exception:
Yes, on some level…but what about the “mental health” of those who vehemently support HRC despite the many instances of her being wrong…sometimes not just wrong but potentially (in a non-fixed system) guiltily wrong…on any number of levels?
Why is it always the outliers… financial outliers, mostly, because it’s not just a matter of race…who are called “crazy?”
The young black urban community that has turned the “n” word into a term of friendship amongst themselves? They have also turned the “crazy” word upside down.
“Man, that brother was havin’ a crazy good time!!!”
I hear this among my many students as well…I teach mostly fairly high-level brass musical instrumentalists in NYC. I’ll show them something really new to them and they will admiringly say “Wow!!! That’s crazy good!!!” All races, all levels of the economic spectrum. When I tell them that it is not “crazy,” that it’s just common good sense that not many teachers understand, they often react negatively…either confused or even sometimes insulted.
Another retrograde inversion due to misuse of the original term.
If Trump supporters are “crazy” because they support a serial liar, then what are HRC supporters?
Really.
“Practical?”
This country has “practically” gone all the way to hell over the last 3 presidencies. Read the news for more on that…terror attacks, random bombings and other types of massacres…a weekly occurrence now.
Want more of the same policies that have brought us to this state?
HRC is your candidate!
Want potentially worse policies?
Vote Trumpf!
Tired of the same-old same-old?
Either vote for someone with no chance to even make a dent in the election or refrain from voting and hope that the U.S. doesn’t tank so far and so fast that there is no longer any hope of surviving without some sort of total collapse.
Kind of a four-way Scylla and Charybdis, looks like to me.
Scylla and Charybdis squared.
A six-headed monster, a whirlpool, a hurricane of some sort or (best case scenario) stuck on the same bullshit ship for another 4-8 years.
Nice.
Stop the world. I want to get off.
AG
You can describe the same core problem a dozen ways, and write about it for all of eternity.
Is it better for society to collapse altogether, or for the continued triage and treatment of a thousand maladies until some of the disease can be amputated off?
Damned if I know.
But…more importantly, I have absolutely no say in how it goes.
None.
Nada.
Zilch.
Zero.
All I can do is survive as I have survived…way out of any mainstream part of the culture you could name…and await fate to do its job.
And…perhaps reach a mind or two ore three while waiting.
Dassit.
Everything else is pipe dreams unless one has spent a lifetime inside the hustle, and even then…even a long-time, massively successful hustle like HRC’s…can be tripped up by one hard fall, a carnival barker masquerading as a statesman or a well-timed “emergency.”
And the universe continues, unperturbed.
So it goes.
AG
my guess is the Post is it’s a way to malign Trump and his voters, plus writing off the Trump voters’ issues.
Excellent point. So how seriously should we take anyone’s self-story in the absence of knowledge about professional psychological encounters? Or how seriously should we take it in trying to integrate fragmented knowledge of those encounters?
What is the role of an article like this from the Washington Post in a political context?
There is something serioiusly politically dysfunctional in this election, but when anyone attempts to get a handle on what it is, the very act of trying to explain why conventional political norms are being transgressed runs into a wall of political correctness.
I have mixed feelings with psychological professionals pointing out concerns for private patients given the failure of the APA ethics committee to prevent torture and the subversion of its ethics experts into consultants for torture.
Pray tell what of Melanie Austin’s story we can take as a normal report of an ordinary individual, or are we to consider it all suspect? Of her condition speaking instead of being witness to facts in the same sense as “ordinary” people.
Oh come on, the failings of that ethics committee are supposed to reflect upon every single clinical psychologist?
The failings of every single clinical psychologist have to do with holding the profession accountable loudly and publicly for what their ethics committee did so that they lend their weight to the political efforts to stop the use of torture as a political practice.
If you can nitpick a post and a set of comments on BooMan, maybe you can also rise to deal with a real issue of ethics.
Not to mention advocating for funding of quality mental health services in low-income areas and having police stop shooting the mentally ill people they are sent to restrain and protect.
It just seemed so much a matter of straining at a flea and having ignored several camels.
Also, it seemed a way of completely dismissing what Melanie Austin did say about the reality of her personal political situation–remember the feminist line that “the personal is political” and the way she experienced the power she had over her own life.
My wife is a longtime licensed clinical psychologist, now in private practice, which gave us a particular perspective on this article. We both thought it was a ridiculously lengthy, cruel, and useless piece of condescension by a reporter with a serious conscience deficit who inveigled a woman living a difficult life and obviously suffering serious mental-health issues into a great deal of self-disclosing nonsense. (One of the tipoffs is Austin’s injection in the hip, about which she complained. The medication was likely a long-lasting antipsychotic, injected because she could not be trusted to stay on oral medication.)
It’s not difficult to get people in this situation to talk; If they trust someone, as Austin clearly trusted this reporter, they will talk endlessly. But to what end? Was the POST trying to suggest that the typical Trump supporter is mentally ill? If not, what is the point of this feature story? Nor is this the first time for the POST. Some time ago they ran another sadistic little piece about a former Olympic skater and medical doctor now living in poverty because of mental-health issues. That piece had as little value as this one does. Both that person and Austin would have much better been left alone.
Martin is wrong in that sense about the reporter’s actions. Austin didn’t “bring this on herself”; the reporter chose to do so. There was a whole universe of things McCrummen could have written about; why select this woman — and put it on page 1? And, no, it was not good to expose Austin’s delusions to the world. It served no worthwhile purpose whatever — least of all as an index of the motivations for Trump’s supporters generally. They will find this piece insulting, and they will be right. I understand that many major media outlets, having ignored working-class Americans for so long and now getting a rude shock from them, are scrambling to understand these apparently outlandish types. McCrummen’s piece is an excellent guide on how not to do that.
Had McCrummen wanted to treat this story as serious political reporting, she might have asked Austin some questions about her ideas. Austin was able to work her way up from office work to operating a railroad engine because liberals for decades fought to open up such jobs to women. Has Austin thought about that? Austin’s struggles with sexism are a major piece of the article; but why, then, would she support the most raging sexist and misogynist to run for major political office in recent history? McCrummen doesn’t ask these obvious questions; she just transcribes. And what she transcribed should have been left to Austin and her mental-health counselor, not shared with the world.
thank you for your comment. yes, cruel and condescending article. horrifying really. furthermore, also worse than useless to delve into her personal life rather than looking at the larger social context – essentially shredded social fabric.
I am a very loNg term licensed clinical psychologist and I basically agree with you and your wife, afdiplomat
My wife and I thank you for your support.
Austin was able to work her way up from office work to operating a railroad engine because liberals for decades fought to open up such jobs to women. Has Austin thought about that?
Why would she think about that? She was born in 1964. Has lived her whole life in a community with two major and preexisting assumptions: whites are superior and Christianity informs and doles out all the goodies.
The 2nd wave of feminism to secure equal rights for women had legal accomplishments in the late 1960s through the mid-1970s. But was spent when the ERA failed to be ratified. Culturally it got all mixed up. (Women could go to male strip shows but also continue to disapprove of men consuming porn even as it became more and more prevalent.) By the time this woman was sixteen years old, we were twelve years into the GOP Southern Strategy and two years into the Moral Majority, and her town has been continuously crumbling her whole adult life.
Who to blame? Those she felt more natural affinity with or the godless, POC foreigners? Retreating into a deeply partisan position is a great drug because it can explain away all personal distress as long as one’s political party doesn’t hold absolute power long enough to reveal exactly what its public policies create. If the polity over a few decades doesn’t deviate much from a 50/50% baseline, both can point a finger at a devil. It also helps if bipartisan public policies that aren’t supported by a majority are effected behind closed doors or in the dead of night. Thus, a majority of the public could blame GWB for the financial meltdown because he was sitting on the hot seat when it hit. The GOP propagandists could point to Carter and Clinton for policies to increase home ownership rates. And the truth gets hidden from all but the most well-informed and thoughtful, but they’re leftie wackos and nobody listens to them.
So how are we supposed to explain this behavior?
Michael Folk, a Republican legislator who is also a United Airlines pilot, posted a tweet Friday night saying: “Hillary Clinton, you should be tried for treason, murder, and crimes against the US Constitution… then hung on the Mall in Washington, DC.”
“Lock her up” chants?
Are we supposed see these as rational statements by well functioning adults?
Unfortunately for clarity, belief in paranoid ideas cannot be directly linked to clinical psychopathology. Certainly not all of those giving heed to Alex Jones or Donald Trump can be “diagnosed” in this way — especially when so many clearly high-functioning individuals in other areas have cooperated with them. (Mitt Romney, who does not exhibit any clinical indications, went out of his way in 2012 to seek Trump’s endorsement at a time when Trump’s main claim to public attention was his continued flogging of the racist and conspiratorial birther lie.)
In this case, however, we do not have to speculate about whether Melanie Austin is seriously mentally ill; the reporter makes that clear. And that in itself makes her an unsuitable subject to be treated as an example of why people in general support Trump — unless, of course, one wants to leave the impression that Trump support is somehow generally correlated with psychopathology, a disparaging assumption for which the article provides no support. That no one involved with this article at the POST recognized this serious problem before putting this drivel on Page One makes it a major professional fail.
So Michael Folk is a high-functioning adult who just happens to think Hillary should hang? Thanks for clearing that up.
And how do we explain Hawaii GOP rep nominee Angela Kaaihue? She’s accused her opponent Tulsi Gabbard and associated Dems of being demon worshippers.
Have you ever gone on to Restate or even the National Review and read the comments?
Try it sometime then come back here and tell us how normal and well-adjusted these people are.
version of the valid point you’ve been making here:
And yet I see no basket of deplorables brought out for the money men who have switched sides or play both? The ones complicit in the Wurlitzer. Which group is creating the most real societal harm, eh, the deluded or the deluders?
You say Martin is wrong,in saying “She brought the criticism, as well as the attention of law enforcement, on herself.”
Her actions deserved criticism, and law enforcement should pay attention to people saying the things she said, is that wrong to think this?
The ideas she has seem to be the norm in many communities, and she isnt dangerous enough to put her away, so she is a free person, with the dangers of the real world, and the consequences.
If you are really interested you could ask the author what the intention was. Or maybe you could try to find out where the mental health system is to blame. Since you are a professional, that should be interesting to you, but you dont, you just comment.
See what i did there?
But like what Martin said in his last paragraph, i also cant decide if this is good to be shown, or bad. I certainly dont agree with any superior moral outrage that assumes a whole lot of things.
Actually, the attention of law enforcement was highly appropriate and no doubt necessary, and Austin brought that on herself. My wife and I live in a townhouse, and our next-door neighbor has been declining for years into serious paranoid schizophrenia, along with various kinds of depredations in the development. (Among other things, she stole a computer printer from our porch, broke it into pieces, and shoved the remnants down a storm drain.) We were quite grateful when the police and Adult Protective Services showed up to take her away for treatment, in the process declaring her townhouse unfit for habitation.
What I was referring to was the Page One treatment in the POST. That Austin did not ask for; it was the idea of POST staff. And it did neither her nor the POST’s readership any good. Those of us who are paying for POST subscriptions, as my family is, learned nothing of value about what motivates Trump supporters generally, because Austin is such an atypical case. And to the extent that this vast amount of coverage affects Austin at all, it is likely to ratify her feeling that she’s on the right track, which could make her even more resistant to treatment for serious issues such as the “homicidal ideation” identified in her mental-health status report.
That the Post, one of the few remaining, national, broadsheet “journals of record”, would probably no longer exist if not as a convenient tax write-off for the stingy CEO of a global corporation. Not a very aspirational culture there, I’m guessing.
With the opportunity to reflect, I agree with your take on this piece, and the reporter does deserved harsh criticism.
What’s sad is the delusion that people like her are gripped by. Trump isn’t the answer for what she has a right to be angry about, i.e. what has happened in places like Brownsville. Conservative “trickle down” ideology contributed greatly to the economic condition of working class white folk. The rub is democrats, having co-opted right wing economic policies to stay politically relevant with the so-called establishment, have not been the answer either, tinkering around the edges of issues, just enough of a veneer of progressivism, but having abandoned altogether any claim to being “the people’s party” and what that means. The propaganda has been well orchestrated, to the extent that, their own heroes not delivering is not a problem, as long as they throw out the red meat they so love.
Examples resonate where generic characterizations (even if more accurate) do not.
The difficulty with examples is saying exactly what each one is an example of. This one seems to be substantially more oblique than average. The further difficulty is that any concrete untypicality can be fastened upon to discredit the example and any deductions made from it.
In other words, nutpicking is one of their things, not one of our things; we shouldn’t do it even where the temptation is as rich as it was in this case.
“Nutpicking.”
Nice!!!
But…you write:
‘Scuse me!!!???
Who “they” and who “us”?
I have heard almost nothing but disparaging remarks about Trump from the supposed “us” side, about his followers and about the admittedly execrable Republican Party even since the primary season first began.
“They’re all crazy!!!” just about sums it up.
Some are; some aren’t.
How about the Democrats?
Some are; some aren’t.
They’re just more in agreement with the general craziness of the middle left is all.
I personally think that Trump is only partially “crazy.” Driven by his own strange genetics, yes. But smart about it.
Crazy like a fox.
That goes for the controllers who have sided with him
Crazy like foxes.
All of them.
Do not underestimate them, even now that Trump seems to have taken a big hurt.
It ain’t over ’til it’s over.
Watch.
AG
Who “they” and who “us” ?
Why don’t you ask Ronald Reagan? (What’s that you say? He’s dead? Somehow I didn’t think you’d call that out as an obstacle. No matter; any of his people will do, and they’re Trump’s people.)
I didn’t even have to ask Reagan; he told “us” when he sent “us” into internal exile.
Where were you?
I had been in voluntary ‘exile” since about 1965. Reagan didn’t do shit to me. I ignored him and went on with my real bvusiness…making great music and trying to understand how the world rerally works..
And…it edventually become evident to me that your “us” and “them” is pretty much the same “them” to me….two sides of a counterfeit political coin, minted by the Permanent Government to keep y’all in line.
The whole deal is like the sports scam writ large. Two leagues, both devoted to the profit of an owner class. People root for their team, win or lose. The winning teams hold a championship contest every so often. The games are “fixed” in various ways…jiggering salary regulations so that one team doesn’t win all the time, changing the rules so that things remain competitive, turning a blind eye to various transgressions that keep the rubes rooting, etc.
Like dat.
It’s the way things work, here and almost everywhere else.
Every once in a while the games get so rancid that no amount of fixing actually elicits the approval of the rubes. Then the game either dies and is eventually replaced by another game or it “revolutionizes” itself. Either way, the same type of controllers eventually run the ongoing scam.
Bullshit!!!
WTFU.
AG
Thank you, Marduk. I await your “1” ratings w/’bated breath. They only serve to confirm what I think about you lockstep leftiness types.
Clomp clomp clomp clomp clomp clomp clomp clomp clomping along.
And then you always wonder why and how you got co-opted.
You be co-clomped!!! Time and again.
And then? And then you scream “Wait’ll next year!!!”, just like the other brainless fans of sports teams.
The most recent “next year” time zone from Dem history began and ended with FDR. Might’ve been another one w/JFK, but the controllers got rid of him pronto. Bobby too.
Since then?
Only pretenders, mostly. Pretenders and predators. On both sides. Except Jimmy Carter, and he wasn’t a very good power player.
So it goes.
Come out of your hiding place and talk to me, Marduk.
If you have the xourage to do so.
Otherwise…just keep on “1”-ing along.
That’s what Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the rest of the DNC cowboys did during the promaries, and look where it got them.
Fired and quite possibly losing as well.
See ya somewhere, in some guise.
Buh-bye…
AG
Marduk??
Marduck is obsessed with downrating Arthur; Arthur is obsessed with marduck’s downrates.
And so it goes….
I used to constantly attack Gilroy’s ridiculous posts…until one time I sarcastically praised him and he thanked me, making clear that (as he subsequently admitted, guilelessly) he’s so self-absorbed that he doesn’t even bother to pay attention to who’s who around here; he just blithely does his thing, and the rest of us are a gray fog. It makes me feel like I’m trapped in a Flaubert novel.
And it’s especially regrettable because TarheelDem, Marie3, fladem, MNPundit (and so many others here) are so smart.
If those posters (and others) are so smart…and pay rewspectful attention to what I am saying, whether they agree, disagree or remain on the various fences…has it not occurred to you that those who oppose my very existence on this blog (apparently including you) might not be as smart as you think you are?
I doubt it.
You’re not smart enough to doubt yourselves.
AG
Obsessed? By Marduk?
No.
I was alarmed at the outset because I did not quite understand how downrating might affect my status here.
Now that I do understand it, let me say that I am obsessed…if that is quite the right word…with the free interchange of ideas. That is why I am still here. Unlike dKos and several other, smaller “progrssive” blogs that have deservedly bitten the dust, Booman continues to run an open shop. Good on him!!! When someone ….and obsessively appears to be the right word…when someone obsessively downrates a given poster, that downrater is refusing to engage in free speech.
As Lenny Bruce once said regarding censorship, “If you can’t say ‘fuck’ then you can’t say ‘Fuck the government.’ “
I am basically saying “Fuck the government” here, and censorship…implicit or explicit…is the wrong way to go about stopping me. You don’t agree? Great. Tell me about it. Tell everyone else here about it.
But engage!!!
AG
Reading this article, you might not have guessed that Brownville went 67% for Obama (versus 32% for Romney) in the 2012 election.
. . . datum!
Source?
http://triblive.com/politics/2907104-74/county-election-fayette-results