Day 78 Heroic Narrative Becomes Passé; and, Its Replacement Can Only Be Power-With

I always appreciate Letters to the Editor from The New York Times. Rachel Lucas from Hickory, North Carolina weighed in this morning.

“When I read President Trump’s recent tweets insulting Nancy Pelosi, Stacey Abrams and Joe Scarborough, it occurred to me that given our leader’s great skill in attacking others, he should write a sequel to ‘The Art of the Deal’ called ‘The Art of the Insult,’ describing how to pick on people for their physical traits.

“One chapter could focus on ‘Assigning Nasty Nicknames’ and another on ‘Fabricating Crimes.’ He could complete his trilogy with ‘The Art of the Lie,’ with chapters including ‘How to Rewrite History’ and ‘Never Admit a Mistake.’”

I couldn’t have said it better myself. What a mish-mash of a horror show is the news this morning. Everywhere I went in the media, I found ratcheting reports of, as another letter-writer had it, “President Trump ... outdoing himself on the depravity index, if that’s possible, simultaneously checking a number of boxes as to how a monumentally failed leader and malevolent human being behaves when cornered, and in a time of crisis.”

I wonder what a rodentologist would say about the Vermin-in-Chief?

Now let’s add this from The Times’ Editorial Board member Michelle Cottle. “Trump Will Have His Coronation” rang the headline. I flinched.

“But Mr. Trump will not be denied his hours of prime time and his coronation. Grousing that the state’s ‘Democrat governor,’ Roy Cooper, is ‘still in Shutdown mood,’ he demanded in a Monday Twitter thread that Mr. Cooper ‘guarantee’ the festivities could proceed with ‘full attendance’ as originally planned. If not, he threatened, ‘we will be reluctantly forced to find, with all of the jobs and economic development it brings, another Republican National Convention site.’”

Shutdown is not a mood. A full convention arena will become a petri dish for coronavirus.

Of course, this move is all, all, all about politics and optics and what the Dauphin-in-Chief thinks is his due. Heaven forfend anyone suggest he put the good of the American people above his own. Some of us are more ... American? than others, I guess.

You know, as an aside, it dawned on me as I read some of the campaign costs cited in the coronation article to wonder why there are no politicians stepping up to use their obscenely- inflated, embarrassing waste of riches from political campaigns to ... oh, I don’t know, shore up state budgets, cover local constituents’ healthcare payments, or feed the children whose parents are in line daily at the sadly-depleted local food bank?

It’s called public service for a reason.

But, no, it’s politics as usual. Honestly, disgusting. But this is the article that helped me understand, or rather, put words on what the Deceiver-in-Chief is doing. From Peter Baker and Michael D. Shear: “At Cape Canaveral, Trump’s Search for a Heroic Narrative Is Thwarted.”

“The president had hoped to watch the first launch of NASA astronauts into orbit from the United States in nearly a decade. Nothing would say the U.S. is back with more verve than a rocket’s red glare.”

“CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.—For President Trump, it was a chance to rewrite the story line from tragedy to triumph.”

When the mission was aborted due to inclement weather, the Trumps beat a hasty retreat back onto Air Force One and promised to return for Take Two on Saturday.

This is not to say that there are not good things happening. There are. But ‘tragedy to triumph’ is a big stretch. There are random sunbeams, yes. There are glimpses of light, flashes of care and empathy. There are even sightings of that rarified being known as Hope. But triumph, no.

Here’s one of those hopeful possibilities. The always-insightful Kara Swisher writes in “Twitter Tsks, and Trump Fumes,” “Twitter—Mr. Trump’s principal means of venting, picking petty fights, governing, campaigning and letting loose with torrents of all-caps—finally decided on Tuesday not to let him behave with impunity. Mr. Trump still has the very widest berth of any Twitter user on the planet to huff and puff away on his tiresome sousaphone of bloviation.”

“Interestingly, many people I spoke to at Twitter were less worried about Mr. Trump’s threats ... than about being able to come up with an information-integrity rubric that would not break apart immediately.”

Information integrity. That sounds good, doesn’t it?

I found it fascinating that the Deregulator-in-Chief and the Adamant-Executive-Orderer-in-Chief threw threats at Twitter about strident, stringent regulation. In all caps. With punctuation added.

The dichotomy amazes me. It’s quite literally incredible—which, if you’ll look at the word means, not to be believed.

There were myriad articles about the legalities of Twitter and the legalities of Free Speech and how the twain meet and dance together. No one knows what the new policy of Twitter will mean but author after author assured me that it will be worked out, over a long, long period of time, in the courts.

Yale Law professor emeritus Peter H. Shuck writes in, “Trump’s ‘Horrifying Lies’ About Lori Klausutis May Cross a Legal Line,” “Mr. Trump’s first tort is called intentional infliction of emotional distress, which the courts developed precisely to condemn wanton cruelty to another person who suffers emotionally as a result. This tort, which is sometimes called ‘outrage,’ readily applies to Mr. Trump’s tweets about Ms. Klausutis. They were intentional and reckless, and were ‘extreme and outrageous’ without a scintilla of evidence to support them. And they caused severe emotional distress—the protracted, daily-felt grief described in Mr. Klausutis’s letter to Mr. Dorsey. ... The Klausutis family has suffered enough for almost 20 years without having to endure Trump’s crocodile tears and malicious raking of the coals. Tort law might hold our brutish president to account.”

Have you too noticed that so much of the news is in conditional future tense? Or qualified with words like ‘might’ and ‘could?’ It means that it’s not really news, not like the reporting this morning, a Thursday, on Governor Andrew M. Cuomo’s 11 o’clock meeting at The White House yesterday. That actually happened. The rest is a journalistic form of speculation.

Over and over again, Trump seeks aggressively to cast himself as the hero. Again and again. He isn’t one. He’s not even strong enough a character to be an anti-hero, sad to say. What it’s making me wonder is if the classic hero’s journey, the story scaffolding for most literature, a lot of television, theatre, and almost all of Hollywood, has become passé.

Are we entering a new power era? An era of power-with rather than power-over that has become synonymous with the patriarchy since Attila the Hun? It could be.

There are several articles from the archives of coronavirus that have been written about women leaders doing a better job managing coronavirus.

This is from The Times on May 15th, 2020. “[I]t may be less politically costly for women to [overcome gender expectations] because they do not have to violate perceived gender norms to adopt cautious, defensive policies.

“That style of leadership may become increasingly valuable. As the consequences of climate change escalate, there will likely be more crises arising out of extreme weather and other natural disasters. Hurricanes and forest fires cannot be intimidated into surrender any more than the virus can. And neither can climate change itself.

“Eventually that could change perceptions of what strong leadership looks like. ‘What we learned with Covid is that, actually, a different kind of leader can be very beneficial,’ Dr. Evans said. ‘Perhaps people will learn to recognize and value risk averse, caring and thoughtful leaders.’”

That’s the top-down version of power-with. Creating consensus. Consulting experts. Taking measured, thoughtful steps and speaking transparently about who, when, where, why, and how.

Here’s the bottom-up version of power-with.

The headline read, “Young idealists form a mutual aid society for the modern age.”

“Among those wanting to help their community were three young idealists from the Detroit area—Justin Onwenu, Bridget Quinn and Lauren Schandeve. So they organized. And with nothing happening in person, they turned to Facebook, creating a group called Metro Detroit Covid-19 Support.

“‘For my age group, if we don’t walk away from this moment understanding there are things we really need to change, we will have failed,’ Mr. Onwenu said. ‘It was just so clear early on: This is a generational moment and it’s going to be on us. You look at history and there are certain moments where the psyche of communities completely changes, and this will be one of them.’”

It’s called responsibility, Mr. Trump. It’s called responding to what is, Mr. Trump. It’s called meeting people where they are with what they need, Mr. Trump.

Let us return to the Letters To the Editor, this one from May 21st, 2020. Monique VanLandingham writes from Somerset, Virginia.

“I am glad to see female heads of state getting well-deserved attention for their remarkably successful leadership during the pandemic, but I was disappointed that the women’s leadership was characterized as ‘cautious’ and ‘risk averse’ in contrast to more aggressive and forward leadership attributed to males. You have it backward.

“When others took a cautious wait-and-see stance, women took swift, decisive action to fight the pandemic. They led their countries to ‘go hard, go early,’ in the powerful phrasing of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand.

“They established aggressive national testing and tracing programs. They communicated forcefully and clearly. And they did all of this at great political risk. Imagine how they would have been pilloried if these costly interventions had been no more successful than the laissez-faire approach of some of their male counterparts.

“We must stop stereotyping women’s leadership as passive and tentative. In this instance, it was men like Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro whose leadership was passive, weak or absent.”

Ms. VanLandingham says, “You have it backward.”

Maybe, just maybe, we’ve had it backward all this time. Maybe we’ve timed out the efficacy of the laissez-faire of wait-and-see, what’s-in-it-for-me heroism? Maybe, instead, it’s time for a mass uprising of power-with. In fact, I’m going to go out on the proverbial limb, and say, it’s way past time for each of us to find our own superpower-with, right where we are, and take action.

Dr. Susan Corso is a metaphysician and medical intuitive with a private counseling practice for more than 35 years. She has written too many books to list here. Her website is www.susancorso.com

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