Politicians and bowling balls and hubris
Sort of connected but hey what is this an English class? Nah. Some kitties toward the end.
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Tom Scharpling on the way
All my interviews are wonderful and every guest is my favorite. Of course. But I gotta say the one with comedian and writer Tom Scharpling the other day has stayed with me. You’ll hear it in a few weeks.
Tom has written a memoir called It Never Ends where he opens up about the very rough time he had with suicidal ideation as a teenager. He was in two different in-patient facilities for extended periods and in the second one he received the mid-80s version of ECT or electro-convulsive therapy. The treatment worked well at stopping his suicidal problems but it wiped out a lot of his memory in the process. Huge sections of memories of his childhood are simply gone now. Good memories and bad. He wonders all the time if it was worth it.
The rest of the book is about his becoming a radio host and television writer and very little mental health stuff is mentioned through what is the majority of the book. His career is more or less a long steady climb to success.
I don’t know if it was intentional that he did this but the rough times of mental illness and the rough mixed results of its treatment cast a long shadow on the rest of it. With the memory loss, he has to go out and create a new life using a fundamentally different brain. And it’s a successful life but I certainly sensed a lot of pain and sadness kind of built in there.
Analogy time!
Think of the bowling ball as major depressive disorder or generalized anxiety disorder or obsessive compulsive disorder and the attempted sports are you just trying to get through your day.
Can you be more specific in this terrifying ongoing horror crisis? Thanks.
The new book by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa has terrifying stories of Donald Trump being, well, crazy following the 2020 election and leading up to Joe Biden’s inauguration.
From a CNN analysis by Chris Cilizza:
"Woodward and Costa write that [Joint Chief Chairman Mark] Milley, deeply shaken by the assault, 'was certain that Trump had gone into a serious mental decline in the aftermath of the election, with Trump now all but manic, screaming at officials and constructing his own alternate reality about endless election conspiracies.'
"Milley worried that Trump could 'go rogue,' the authors write.
There are a lot of mentions of “mental health” in the piece and it certainly paints a vivid picture. And there’s no way to provide a diagnosis of specifically what’s happening in the guy’s brain without a qualified professional working with a helpful patient.
But some specificity would be nice. Are we seeing senility? Pre-senile dementia? Is it a straight behavioral disorder like narcissistic personality disorder? Is it consistent with substance use issues? Certainly, Trump hasn’t agreed to be analyzed but there’s enough in the public record and, with book’s like this new one, the private record about what he was doing that good experts can form pretty conclusive and well-informed conclusions.
And that’s important because there are people out there who would really like to, oh, overthrow the government. It would be nice to know what that government is up against.
The Herman Cain Award
I really didn’t think I’d get this hooked on a subreddit but here we are. I’ve been obsessively reading r/HermanCainAward for a while now.
Nominees have made public declaration of their anti-mask, anti-vax, or Covid-hoax views, followed by admission to hospital for Covid. The Award is granted upon the nominee's release from their Earthly shackles.
The subreddit is story after story after story after story of the anti-mask, anti-vaccine people who shouted their beliefs on social media and then caught the disease. In most stories they die and then their family asks for money on GoFundMe.
It’s classic hubris. It’s Oedipus defying the prophecy. And the stories are ghoulish.
Cain, of course, was a former Republican presidential nominee who tweeted this
And then caught covid at a Trump rally and died from it.
I don’t know why I read this subreddit so much. I’m not proud that I do. I don’t want these people to die from covid. I don’t want anyone to die from it. Yeah, they of course should have worn masks and got vaccinated but I don’t want them to die or for them to inadvertently kill others.
Still. I think that in this chaotic horror world we’re living in, there’s something… reassuring?… that actions (or inactions) have consequences. Like, we live in a world where injustice reigns. People who are born in the wrong place or of the wrong color or gender will generally not have the rights that they are owed. The rich exploit the poor. Castes and races of people are systematically oppressed.
But this covid proposition is simpler than that: get the vaccine you dumb bastard or you may very well die of this stuff. And if you get the vaccine, you almost certainly won’t.
I mean, Herman Cain did not win. He lost.
Noping out: it’s not just for athletes
The band Faith No More has called off upcoming tour dates, not out of covid concerns but to protect the mental health of front man Mike Patton.
Says Patton:
Sorry to report that due to mental health reasons, I cannot continue with the currently scheduled Faith No More and Mr. Bungle dates.
I have issues that were exacerbated by the pandemic that are challenging me right now. I don’t feel I can give what I should at this point and I am not going to give anything less than 100 percent. I am sorry to our fans and hope to make it up to you soon.
It’s not often you hear mental health and the phrase “Mr. Bungle” in the same sentence.
Says the rest of the band:
We believe that forging ahead with these dates would have had a profoundly destructive effect on Mike, whose value to us as a brother means more to us than his job as singer. He can count on our 100% support to do what he needs to do to get things right.
There’s a change coming in the world, folks. People are going to take better care of themselves and they’ll take better care of people who take care of themselves. Even Mr. Bungle. ESPECIALLY Mr. Bungle.
Faith No More! These guys: