Day 80 Everyone Answers to Someone; and, A Common Denominator for a New Day

The Quitter-in-Chief resigned the United States’ membership in the W.H.O. “‘We helped create the W.H.O.,’ said Dr. Thomas Frieden, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has worked with the organization since its creation in 1948. ‘Turning our back on the W.H.O. makes us and the world less safe.”

No wonder the Accuser-in-Chief is scrambling; he’s killing off his dragons faster than they can appear. Now he no longer has the W.H.O. to blame.

Now you and I know that W.H.O. stands for World Health Organization, but what if it didn’t stand for anything? Except the word that the acronym spells: who. Because the irony doesn’t escape me at all. Of course. The I’m-the-Most-Important-and-Only-Important-Person-in-the-World-in-Chief has resigned from all the who[s] in the world.

He does not, he will not, he cannot, he refuses to recognize the humanity in any of us, not even in himself. Now I think on it, maybe it’s not irony at all, maybe it’s parody. He’s like a merciless Alec Baldwin parody of Screwtape’s Boss, known in C. S. Lewis’ epistolary classic, The Screwtape Letters, as “Our Father Below.”

Screwtape is, of course, a training demon. Set in the educational division of hell, or is it Hell?, he’s educating his nephew, Wormwood, in the skills needed to corrupt humanity for their side. First published in February 1942, the story takes the form of a series of letters from a senior demon Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood, a Junior Tempter. The uncle's mentorship pertains to the nephew's responsibility in securing the damnation of a British man known only as ‘the Patient.”

Critical care doctor Daniela J. Lamas’ article in The Times this morning said baldly, “Covid-19 has become a disease of the vulnerable.”

And it is just that—the vulnerability of all human beings—that the Denier-in-Chief willfully ignores, belittles, and does whatever he can to distract us from.

It is our vulnerability that flows in the veins of our similarity that connects us to one another.

Vulnerability undergirds both our personal and collective losses to The Trump Pandemic.

Vulnerability is the fatal, long-disguised, seemingly eternal undertow to, as Dr. Lamas says, “the systemic inequities this virus has made visible.”

What is the strangest of the oddities of this moment to me is that I have credited the Incumbent with a willfulness that has caused him to ignore what is in front of his orange face, but I am beginning to think it’s less willfulness than an internal attention thermometer that drives him.

The under-demons surrounding him, to be sure, use their wills to ignore what is also in front of their faces, but I don’t think Our President of Lies does. I think he measures the world in simple terms: how much attention am I getting? Is it enough? Do I need more? What is the fastest way to get the most of it? It’s limbic brain, not frontal cortex, in charge.

Screwtape, far more sophisticated than the limbic, explains how to defang prayer. It’s a good, if chilling, lesson.

“It is, no doubt, impossible to prevent his [the Patient, or anyone who prays] praying for his mother, but we have means of rendering the prayers innocuous. Make sure that they are always very ‘spiritual,’ that he is always concerned with the state of her soul and never with her rheumatism.”

This is code: Stay at the level of the herd, the macro, and never, ever look in the face of pure human need. In fact, make sure pure human need never even has a face.

“Two advantages will follow. In the first place, his attention will be kept on what he regards as her sins, by which, with a little guidance from you, he can be induced to mean any of her actions which are inconvenient or irritating to himself. Thus you can keep rubbing the wounds of the day a little sorer even while he is on his knees; the operation is not at all difficult and you will find it very entertaining.”

Media circus, anyone? 24-hour news cycle? Never without a device? Compulsive swiping? Calculating likes?

“In the second place, since his ideas about her soul will be very crude and often erroneous, he will, in some degree, be praying for an imaginary person, and it will be your task to make that imaginary person daily less and less like the real mother—the sharp-tongued old lady at the breakfast table. In time, you may get the cleavage so wide that no thought or feeling from his prayers for the imagined mother will ever flow over into his treatment of the real one.”

Reduce it all—every last thing—to zeroes and ones. It can all be digitized, Beloved. Make no mistake, we are leaving analogue behind forever!

Puh-lease.

I submit to you a list of names: Christian Cooper, Jennifer Finney Boylan, Amy Cooper, George Floyd, Mark Frey, Gretchen Whitmer, Jamelle Bouie, Andrew Cuomo, Nancy Pelosi, Susan Corso, and please, feel free, to add your own.

Not a one of these is a zero or a one. Every one of us is analog, not digital. No one of us is macro, we’re micro all the way.

Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel has the diagnosis for the president well in hand. He said, “The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.”

What we face at the top of our nation, Beloved, is nothing less, and nothing more than indifference. Sadly, it doesn’t stop there. It cascades through our government all the way down to the neighbors on either side of you.

Not all of us, fortunately. And not all of us as completely as the Indifference-in-Chief, but we all hold a piece of indifference, otherwise our government would not be showing it to us in such high and debilitating relief. We are the People who elected them, after all.

In “On the Economics of Not Dying” yesterday, Paul Krugman wrote, “[Money’s] not the only thing that matters. In particular, you know what also makes a major contribution to the quality of life? Not dying. ... One way to put it: Trump and his allies don’t want us to wear face masks but do want us to wear blinders.”

Some of us not only do, as do we all to a certain extent, but some of us put them on eagerly.

Mr. Krugman again, “[T]he push for reopening rests on a foundation of willful ignorance. Never mind G.D.P.; the most fundamental job of any leader is to keep his people alive. Unfortunately, that’s a job Trump doesn’t seem interested in doing.”

No, he doesn’t because he isn’t. In addition, he doesn’t think that’s the job he was elected to do. He thinks he’s the CEO of the USA, and he’s so not.

David Brooks’ Opinion piece yesterday had me near tears. “If We Had a Real Leader.” He writes, “If we had a real leader, he would have realized that tragedies like 100,000 Covid-19 deaths touch something deeper than politics: They touch our shared vulnerability and our profound and natural sympathy for one another.”

There is it again, vulnerability—with the perfect adjective: shared. Mr. Brooks goes further citing a profound and natural sympathy for one another.

Who can look at the video of Amy Cooper and not feel for bird aficionado Christian Cooper?

Who can look at the CNN crew arrest and not feel for the black professionals simply doing their jobs?

Who can hear of the Republican legislators who were informed of a colleague’s Covid diagnosis and chose not to let the Democratic caucus in the same body know they were being exposed as they worked closely in committee and not be dumb-founded at the willful cruelty?

Mr. Brooks, “In such moments, a real leader steps outside of his political role and reveals himself uncloaked and humbled, as someone who can draw on his own pains and simply be present with others as one sufferer among a common sea of sufferers.”

He doesn’t see us as having a common anything with him. Never did. Despite the absurdist theatre of populism that he insists he’s playing in. More like playing at.

“Of course, right now we don’t have a real leader. We have Donald Trump, a man who can’t fathom empathy or express empathy, who can’t laugh or cry, love or be loved—a damaged narcissist who is unable to see the true existence of other human beings except insofar as they are good or bad for himself.”

In TrumpWorld, there is only one human being, and it’s a singularity, not a collectivity.

The proper word for such a diagnosis is wounded narcissist, and ask any psych professional you know, they’ll all affirm that a wounded narcissist is the most dangerous of the species.

“But it’s too easy to offload all blame on Trump. Trump’s problem is not only that he’s emotionally damaged; it is that he is unlettered. He has no literary, spiritual or historical resources to draw upon in a crisis.”

And this is the part that worries me deeply. This is the part that makes me lose sleep at night. This is the part that makes me wonder what my responsibility as a spiritual teacher might turn out to be. I have a philosophy that gives me an internal spiritual compass.

“[H]istory is revealing how vital moral formation really is.”

Moral formation. Spiritual formation. Ethical formation. These ideas call me ever further into the role of teacher/awakener. Believe me, I’m working on it daily, and when I figure out what I’m called to do to assist this monumental change in our citizenry, you’ll be the first to know.

I take heart, somewhat surprisingly, from the epigraph of The Screwtape Letters. These are the words of Martin Luther.

“The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.”

Well, there you go. A simple, useful response to the sad but deadly dangerous narcissist in charge of this charade of government. Scorn. We’ve seen his petty reactions to scorn, haven’t we? Luther is right. It works. We might use a bit more of it.

Mr. Brooks brings us back. “One of the lessons of this crisis is that help isn’t coming from some centralized place at the top of society. If you want real leadership, look around you.”

Send all the scorn you want at The White House. Write it. Speak it. Sing it. Preach it. Oh, and here’s an assignment from your new, building-the-plane-as-she-flies-it spiritual teacher. Close your eyes. Fast forward to January 2021. Spend 17 seconds every day imagining Joe Biden, hand on the sacred book of his choice, taking the Oath and restoring the dignity of [the Oval] Office.

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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