Obsession From Donald Trump To A Glass Menagerie - The Fungible Hysteria Of A Needy Woman

Vicki Bennett lived a quiet, peaceful, and uncomplicated life - house and garden, an immaculate kitchen, sundowners on the back porch, and tea parties in the Spring and Fall - unless the applecart was upset by Donald J Trump, President of the United States, demagogue, destroyer, devilish man of evil intentions. 

Despite the sinecure of a happy home in Bethesda, a faithful husband, and dutiful children, once the thought of The Madman of Pennsylvania Avenue niggled its way into her consciousness, she became as rabid as a hyena, a fiendish, feral, violent animal.  And once the thought took hold, rooted itself and started to grow, there was not shaking it loose.  It festered, rotted, and infected her, body and soul.  There was no way that she could go back to her geraniums or the evening's pot roast.  She was in its clutches and felt  herself being transported to the gates of hell. 

Vicki had always been a liberal, and was old enough to have suckled at the breasts of moderates - Republicanism was wrong for the country what with its Wild West individualism, Wall Street capitalist greed, and indifference to the plight of the working man and the poor; but it was a matter for democracy to resolve, a change of the guard, an upswelling of liberal opinion, a wave of progressive electoral victories. 

In the early days she had worked towards this democratic resolution - the good people of America on both sides of the aisle would eventually come together for the common weal in a nation of reformed ambitions, consideration, and consistent goodness. 

The Sixties turned the tables - its revolutionary fervor was just what young people like Vicki needed to shake off the sedentarism of the Fifties - the homespun treacle, the patronizing religion, the arrogance of middle class satisfaction. 

She became an activist, a woman on fire always first at the barricades, first to be hauled off by jack-booted police, and last to be released from jail.  She was a political vixen, a loud, shrewish partisan, the Mad Woman of Chaillot. 

Like for most of her compatriots such adolescent idolatry could not last.  Times change, youth matures, and the old allure of Kinder, Kirche, Kuchen is hard to resist.  For them and her, politics was not an obsession, just a unifying youthful jamboree.  One went to Woodstock and marched on the Mall.  It was the zeitgeist of a demographic - for the first time in American history the under-25s were a majority, and all the hoopla was a playground romp.  

Yes, the Movement had incidental agency. LBJ resigned, the Civil Rights Bill was passed, and the old pillars of satiated, fat, happy America came down; but for Vicki it was just a walk in the park. She believed, but not all that much.  It had not been an obsession, and in many ways she was just as happy that it faded and was folded into her familiar, predictable suburban life. 

Until Donald Trump that is.  What was it about the man that so riled women up? That awakened them from their decades-long slumber and brought them back to life?  Vicki herself was surprised at her reaction.  When she saw him on television, her heart started pounding, her mouth went dry, her fists involuntarily clenched, and she started to shake.  

She felt like the Peter Finch character in the Paddy Chayefsky movie Network who addled with anger, resentment, and frustration at the state of television, looks into the camera and shouts, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it any more'.  A man obsessed, a man whose reason has left him, a madman, but a prophet. 

This possession happens, Vicki a good but now ex-Catholic knew. The Old Testament prophets were visited by God, possessed by his spirit and obedient to his will.  The infidels of Judah might have thought them crazy, but they were the emissaries of the true, one, and only God. 

Of course Vicki did not consider herself crazed or even possessed.  The evil of Donald Trump was secular, and as vile as he was, he could be brought down by concerned, concentrated defiance.  Yet this time around she felt different.  His image did indeed provoke a kind of ironic euphoria.  She felt a strange but satisfying transformation. 

She did not try to calm herself down, to recover that old equanimity and moral poise she once had  It felt too good to generate this fulminating hate, this rich and tempestuous anger.  Without realizing it, she had become obsessed; but even more surprising was her complete surrender to obsession and the almost orgasmic feelings it produced. 

Whereas the youthful gatherings on the Mall in the old days were jamborees of camaraderie and good feelings, those now in opposition to Donald Trump were psychic, emotionally pure, devastatingly exhausting.  Being among those who felt exactly the same - a thousand obsessed harridans howling at the top of their voices, releasing the hatred and vile passions that had strangled them until now - was liberating and fulfilling. 

But obsession is a psychological disorder that has only indirect relation to the cause espoused. Donald Trump was only the catalyst for Vicki's obsession, the trigger for her pent-up psychological animus, the spark that set it all aflame.  Once the conflagration began, it became comprehensive, universally applied. 

Because obsession is a hungry animal and impatient in its hunt, Vicki soon found herself foundering.  She hated Donald Trump just as much, but the feral howls had stopped, the shaking and trembling were absent, and to be honest, she had become distracted.  An insidious 'let it be' perfume seduced her into quiescence. 

However, as Professor of Psychiatry, Donaldson Parker of Johns Hopkins noted,

Obsession can be muted but never cured in the true obsessive.  It is viral, infecting each and every cell, synapse, organ, and fluid in the body. It is a drug more powerful than Fentanyl, more addictive than heroin, and with a psychological hold on individual like no other

'As importantly' he continued, it needs to be fed fresh meat' by which he meant new obsessively capturing causes; and so it was that Vicki turned her attention to climate change.  Her house was now strewn with oceanographic maps, tidal coordinates, the variations in the Humboldt and Gulf Stream currents, solar activity, melting and freezing on the Ross Ice Shelf, trans-Atlantic hurricane trajectories, temperatures in the Sargasso Sea, and the weather in the Great Plains.  She was no longer the passive observer of the past, but a woman determined to conclude without a shadow of a doubt that the earth was disastrously warming and to tell the world about it. 

She lost weight and much of her hair.  She shut herself in for days at a time, poring over ships' logs, NOAA predictions, meteorological models, and arcane articles from Zanzibar.  Her obsession, already at a fever pitch with Trump hatred, was even hotter and more commanding.  The same endorphins flowed through her veins and she was ecstatic. 

The neighbors were worried and then frightened when this haggard witch came to the door. 

When climate change had run its course - that is when the obsession had fed itself to satiety - Vicki looked for something to take its place, but now so disoriented after months alone in her house living only with millibars and temperature differentials, she hesitated to go out.  Instead, she took to cleaning the house, scrubbing, vacuuming, wiping, disinfecting, sweeping, and scouring until her hands and knees were red, cracked, and bleeding.  She stood for a moment in her now gleaming kitchen, sparkling and bright; but it still wanted polish, and so she began waxing and buffing until it was like a sunrise on a Florida beach. 

Unfortunately there was no one in her life to keep her frenzy in check - her husband had died recently, and her adult children were in Chad and Borneo - so it was only when Montgomery County after repeated concerned calls from neighbors, broke in to the house. 

There was Vicki playing with her glass menagerie, a childhood plaything she had always kept.  It was a replica of Laura's in Tennessee Williams' vision - an array of delicate fantasy animals in glass and crystal.  There was no way of knowing of course, but the attending psychiatrist in Baltimore suspected that, typical of her particular obsessive disorder, she had been moving, arranging, and rearranging the figures ad infinitum. 

So, one must have at least a scintilla of sympathy for the rabid women shouting and howling in front of the White House. If the staff at the Hopkins Psychiatric Center can be believed when true belief becomes an obsession, it is a disease. 

The Exhilaration Of War - The Passion Of An Affair In The Tribal Violence Of An African Jungle

Peter Benchley had not expected war to break out any time soon, or he would have cancelled his trip.  The central African country for which he, as senior program officer for the World Bank, was responsible had been involved in violent border skirmishes with its neighbor off and on for years, and no military analyst expected a full-scale conflict. 

The Air France flight was full, and First Class passengers were treated to the Beaujolais Nouveau of the new season, a drink that brought back memories of his youth in Paris, at Rubis, a bistro in the Latin Quarter.  'Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrivé!' announced the posters on every lamp post on Rue Bouchard, and Rubis on opening day spilled out onto the sidewalk up; and down the avenue.  Mme. Picot, the owner's wife made trays of canapes - caviar, foie gras, and Camembert - and M. Franchot, the baker at the boulangerie next door, supplied loaves of freshly baked baguette. 

It was hard to leave the plane after it set down at the international airport after its long flight from Charles de Gaulle - the atmosphere had become just like Rubis or more like a Sunday meal at Le Rouge et Le Noir restaurant in Nouakchott, a redoubt of la France profonde in the middle of the desert, filled with all the ex-colons and their families who had found ways to stay on after independence. Live lobsters from Brittany, Belon oysters, and the best vintages of vin ordinaire. 

The airport was as Benchley remembered it - dark, airless, rank and nasty, a chaotic jumble of lost luggage, shifting immigration queues, and fights for yellow immunization cards.  He looked for his fixer, an African he paid well to meet him and facilitate his transit through immigration and customs.  At first he didn't see him - a moment of anxiety - but then he was spotted pushing his way through the crowds towards him. 

As always once he had made it outside to his waiting car, he felt relieved.  Many were the times when the fixer had been restrained, held, arrested, and Benchley had to fend for himself, negotiating the most intimidating, brutal incivility never held in check, only delayed. 

All along the route to the hotel there were military convoys and security checkpoint.  At least five times his car was stopped, the driver pulled out and spread-eagled against a half-track while he handed over copies of his papers.  No foreigner in Africa ever handed over the originals - the illiterate recruits would never know the difference.

The hotel was cordoned with a ring of armored vehicles and a phalanx of heavily-armed soldiers.  Again he was asked for his papers, frisked and only then allowed to enter the hotel.  He had sorely misjudged the situation and relied on sanguine appraisals from the Bank and the French Foreign Ministry.  The US Embassy and the CIA had seen something else and were preparing for an imminent evacuation.  The World Bank, affiliated with the UN did not routinely consult American sources, and so his trip had been approved. 

The young woman standing next to him at the reception desk looked afraid, lost, and desperate.  The hotel did not have her reservation and all rooms were spoken for.  The air conditioning was not working, the small fans fitfully moving the increasingly stale, humid air made little difference, and the young woman's blouse was drenched with sweat.  'Perhaps I can help you', Peter said, and a look of absolute relief crossed her face. 

The Bank always assured its official staff suites of rooms at this, the best hotel in town, and there would be ample room for the young woman to make herself comfortable until she was able to sort things out in the morning.  Benchley assured her that she would be no burden and her privacy would be respected. 

That is how the affair started, as most do - convenient circumstances, the immediate camaraderie of foreigners in a desperately foreign place, and the trust assured between European visitors.  They had a simple dinner together and an early breakfast and parted company for the day. 

It was only that evening after they both had come home from work that the gunfire erupted, convoys of tanks shook the foundations and rattled the ironwork of the buildings along their route, and the sky over the capital was thick with black smoke. 

The city went dark, the hotel was without power, and the few guests who had not been evacuated sat on the poolside terrace.  The employees of the hotel had all abandoned ship, and guests were on their own.  The most enterprising found the kitchen and brought out cases of beer still cold.  Talk was only of rescue - how long would they be isolated in the hotel before their embassies could manage to bring them out?

The only source of news was the BBC World Service short wave, intermittent and indistinct, but clear enough to state that full scale war had broken out and that France had not yet decided whether or not to intervene. 

The young woman was Danish, sent by her national development agency to work at the capital's general hospital as a management consultant to help rationalize the inventory and supply chain system, woefully inadequate and inefficient.  It was her first trip to Africa, and she was afraid. 

An outsider - one who has never been either in Africa or in these situations, might well think that romance would be the last thing on anyone's minds; but nothing could be further from the truth.  There is something unifying about being strangers in a strange land and even more so in times like these.  Intimacy, whatever the level, is the emotional balm, the anodyne, the tranquilizer to give some reality to a world which seems hopelessly lost. 

Suddenly the firing ceased and the grinding of tank tracks on the rutted streets was heard no longer.  With no electricity and no traffic in the streets, all that could be heard from the dark terrace were the sounds of the surrounding jungle.  No one knew which was worse, the awful sound of mortars and cannonade or the primitive sounds from the darkness beyond the perimeter. 

It was at this moment that Benchley and the Danish woman went to their suite, undressed, opened the windows, and lay together under the canopied, netted bed. 

The silence of the thousands of miles of jungle with only animal and wild bird sounds in the distance or a roll of thunder was stifling and frightening.  The sound of gunfire was almost a relief - at least that meant civilization, or at least a consort of human activity - but as it increased in intensity, they wished for the quiet and peace of the forest. 

They were both married, but time, distance, danger, and circumstances make such ordinariness remote. Affairs in the jungle are always about unalloyed irresponsibility.  Home, family, children disappear; and then reappear as though nothing had happened. 

Affairs in wartime are even more unique as Ondaatje wrote in The English Patient: 'Betrayals during war are childlike compared with betrayals during peace.  New lovers are nervous and tender, but smash everything, for the heart is an organ of fire'. 

 

Graham Greene set his The End of the Affair in wartime London, and the affair between Bendrix and Sarah Miles lives and dies under the blitzkrieg of London. 

A temporary pause in military action brokered by France and Great Britain allowed for the evacuation of foreign nationals, and Benchley and Birthe said their goodbyes on the tarmac.  As for Bendrix and Sarah it was the end of their affair, but as all those lived in foreign places, they would never be forgotten. 

The heart of darkness - that primal, savage place so well understood by Conrad is the scene for the most human of all events.  When Kurtz says on his deathbed, 'the horror...the horror', he has understood that his  unholy, barbaric tribal world was simply an unfettered and untethered expression of human nature. 

It was within that world that affairs begin and end.  There is something unique, frightening, and irresistibly exciting about the jungle

I'm Sorry, Who Are You Again? - The Selectiveness Of Memory, Filtering Out Irrelevant People

Hanna Barbera couldn't believe it.  Her husband who had sat at the dinner table with Joan Perkins, eaten a three course meal, and laughed about the Grand Canyon, could remember neither Joan nor the dinner. 

 

When his wife had reconstructed her friend - her origins, profession, looks, attitude - and Arthur still couldn't remember, she shook her head and said, 'You're impossible'. 

Of course he couldn't remember Joan Perkins.  Why should he?  She was one of a long list of incidental guests invited by his wife to fill Saturday evenings.  There were some he remembered for a while - the Barkers, for example, a nasty, dissatisfied couple who picked at each other all evening; Helen Redding, a tarty member of the DAR who kept talking about George Washington; or Martha Overton, a grizzled woman with a barking laugh - but that was only like an irritated stomach lining, reflux at bad moments.  As far as the rest who ate his wife's pot roast and flan, nothing. 

Hanna on the other hand remembered everyone who had ever crossed her path.  'You remember my second cousin, Rachel...you know, the sister of my Aunt Betty's husband Dick...' and, 'We should go back to Rehoboth, we had such a good time with Bea and Penny...'

She could recall each and everyone of her mother's cousins, what they wore at birthday parties, how stringy the chicken was at Uncle Harold's birthday party, what Granddad had worn with his starched collars and boutonniere - a string of incidental, random memories stored for unknown reasons and recalled for reasons equally unknown.

Arthur Barbera didn't have the heart to tell his wife that the reason he couldn't remember any of these remote relatives or passing acquaintances was because they meant nothing to him. There was nothing about the litany of Alice Lipton recited by his wife that vaguely interested him.  Her interest in bears, or her delight at finding spotted spurge on the prairie, or her grandson Dick, the only pharmacist in Lone Lake who compounded drugs. 

As for everything else in the human experience there is a spectrum.  Some people have a catch-all, indiscriminate memory - everything seems to stay put once archived - and others have a very selective memory. Why clog the pipes with unnecessary drainage? 

Vladimir Nabokov called himself a 'memorist'.  From a very young age, he had an instinctive sense of the importance of the events he was living, and deliberately, carefully, and painstakingly committed to memory people, places, and events he suspected would be seminal. Summers at the family dacha in Russia or at their villa in Cannes; the dresses his first love Elena wore on Sundays; the color of the water off St. Tropez.  

Nabokov never explained in his memoir, Speak, Memory, how he knew what would be important for future recall, but suggested it was a preternatural sense of belonging to a time and place.  As child of ten, he could have none of his later philosophical constructions of time ('The present is but a matter of milliseconds, the future only a possibility, but the past, lived, experienced and remembered is the only reality') but he could sense importance like a feral animal.

Most people's memory without the disciplined reconstruction of Nabokov is more fiction than fact.  When all the Barbera relatives ate Easter dinner at Aunt Leona's, no one could agree on what Lou Lehman did or didn't do to the Lincoln or why Aunt Tilly ran off, or the color of the Ponte's first house on Whalley Avenue. 

Eyewitness accounts never tally.  In a recently publicized criminal case three people witnessing a drive-by shooting saw completely different things.  The driver was either black or white.  The car was either a Ford or a Chrysler.  They either wore ghoulish masks or no masks at all. 

Robert Browning, Lawrence Durrell, and Akira Kurosawa all wrote about how different people see and remember different things depending on their past, their character, personality, and what they ate for breakfast that day. 

So it should not have been surprising to Hanna that Arthur did not remember what she did, but she had the niggling suspicion that his feeble memory had something to do with her.  She, despite their long marriage, might have been peripheral to his vision. 

She was right, of course. There was no one in the parade of friends, acquaintances, and colleagues invited to 71 Lincoln Street of the slightest interest to her husband.  Out of courtesy and respect for longevity, he showed some interest no matter how desultory - a balm, an unguent for suspicion. 

Of course she was just as dismissive of his sharp recall as he was of hers.  His life was being led abstractly, disinterestedly, hypothetically - what else could his collation of verses from abstruse poetry be? His life was largely fictional, novelistic, impressionistic with no grounding in reality.  He was indifferent to things as they were, only interested in how someone else saw them and confected them into poetry or drama. 

This 'faulty hinge' as his wife called it was troublesome only once.  When he worked at one of Washington's international banks, a woman called him up and wondered if, after so long, he would like to have lunch.  He had no recollection whatsoever of ever meeting the woman let alone knowing her, but since her greeting was so warm and familiar, he agreed. Besides, once he saw her in the lobby, he would recognize her and everything would come back. 

On the day of the lunch, he waited for her call and took the elevator to the lobby, but he could recognize no one in the group of people milling about.  'Arthur!', an attractive woman in her mid-fifties exclaimed when she saw him, and putting her arms around him and giving him a kiss on both cheeks, said, 'My, but it has been a long time.'

It would come to him, he reasoned, as the lunch went on.  He nibbled around the edges, indirect questions about her work, her travels, her colleagues, but nothing conclusive.  He was as lost as he was before the lunch.

Their meal was enjoyable, lots of talk about books, movies, and restaurants; and they left promising to 'do this again soon'; but Arthur still had no idea who she was. 

What did that mean? he wondered.  The other people who passed unnoticed and unremembered in his life were strangers or minor acquaintances. This woman and he had obviously had more than that.  How was it that he had not even recorded it at all? All the more perplexing because he actually liked the woman. 

'I had lunch with a woman who knew me but whom I couldn't remember', he told his wife. 

'Not surprising', his wife replied, an old sore reopened. 

Because Nabokov was right - the past is relevant and intimately personal - people are destined to lead separate lives and attempts to coincide will always fail. Communication is based only on the present and the future - plans, programs, anticipations - but can never touch the reaches of the past that are the only levers to open consciousness. 

'And don't forget', she concluded, a familiar dig, 'we're having dinner with the Roberts tonight'. 

'Who?', he replied.