The bird bath is a popular meeting place

A few days ago, it was the sparrows who were enjoying a communal bath in the birdbath in the garden. Today, it was a meeting place for many of the garden's honeybees who were eagerly drinking the water. It was a warm and dry day, so that was probably the explanation for why there were so many (at one point I counted up to sixteen bees sitting on the rim of the bath). I have never seen so many of them gathered at the 'drinking hole' before. They were buzzing to and fro, landing on the rim of the bath and then taking off again. A few of them ended up in the water, twirling about like whirligigs. If they don't get find their way out of the water quickly, they can drown. So I have helped them out a few times, offering a (gloved) finger or a stick for them to climb on. They grab on eagerly, and if they're not too waterlogged, they fly away fairly quickly, which always makes me happy. This is a video of the bees today in the garden. 

Past the halfway mark and moving toward 2021

 

Sparrows having a communal bird bath in the garden today

This is the second time I've seen the sparrows do this. The first time was about a month ago and I tried filming them but something didn't work out right and the videos I took were blank. Today I managed to shoot three short videos of them enjoying their bath, splashing around. When they're done, there are huge drops of water all over the place. They are an endless source of entertainment--I love watching them. 

Are we great yet?

Couldn't resist this, it's just so spot on. I thought Trump was supposed to be making America great again these past four years. What an epic failure that project turned out to be. Just take a look at today's America and ask yourself--are we great yet? Are we better off than we were four years ago? The answer is unequivocally NO.

Some photos from a late August garden

Some photos of the garden from this past Saturday. Enjoy!

Too Much and Never Enough--a review

I finished Mary Trump's book today; it's a quick and easy read, coming in at 211 pages. The best writing comes toward the end, in the last chapter and the epilogue. It is there you find her strongest psychological assessments of Donald Trump, and they are very interesting since she is educated as a clinical psychologist. Rather than my writing a review of the book, I encourage everyone to read it, as it is well-worth reading. I am including some quotes from the book (Fred is Donald Trump's father, Freddy is Mary's father and Donald's brother who died very young). The quotes speak for themselves.

• “The fact is, Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests that he’ll never sit for. At this point, we can’t evaluate his day-to-day functioning because he is, in the West Wing, essentially institutionalized. Donald has been institutionalized for most of his adult life, so there is no way to know how he would thrive, or even survive, on his own in the real world.”
• “Donald today is much as he was at three years old: incapable of growing, learning, or evolving, unable to regulate his emotions, moderate his responses, or take in and synthesize information.”
• “Though nothing Donald did surprised me, the speed and volume with which he started inflicting his worst impulses on the country—from lying about the crowd size at the inauguration and whining about how poorly he was treated to rolling back environmental protections, targeting the Affordable Care Act in order to take affordable health care away from millions of people, and enacting his racist Muslim ban—overwhelmed me.”
• “Donald’s need for affirmation is so great that he doesn’t seem to notice that the largest group of his supporters are people he wouldn’t condescend to be seen with outside of a rally. His deep-seated insecurities have created in him a black hole of need that constantly requires the light of compliments that disappears as soon as he’s soaked it in. Nothing is ever enough.”
• “I hope this book will end the practice of referring to Donald’s “strategies” or “agendas,” as if he operates according to any organizing principles. He doesn’t. Donald’s ego has been and is a fragile and inadequate barrier between him and the real world, which, thanks to his father’s money and power, he never had to negotiate by himself. Donald has always needed to perpetuate the fiction my grandfather started that he is strong, smart, and otherwise extraordinary, because facing the truth—that he is none of those things—is too terrifying for him to contemplate.”
• “The simple fact is that Donald is fundamentally incapable of acknowledging the suffering of others. Telling the stories of those we’ve lost would bore him. Acknowledging the victims of COVID-19 would be to associate himself with their weakness, a trait his father taught him to despise. Donald can no more advocate for the sick and dying than he could put himself between his father and Freddy. Perhaps most crucially, for Donald there is no value in empathy, no tangible upside to caring for other people. David Corn wrote, “Everything is transactional for this poor broken human being. Everything.” It is an epic tragedy of parental failure that my uncle does not understand that he or anybody else has intrinsic worth.”
• “Fred didn’t groom Donald to succeed him; when he was in his right mind, he wouldn’t trust Trump Management to anybody. Instead, he used Donald, despite his failures and poor judgment, as the public face of his own thwarted ambition. Fred kept propping up Donald’s false sense of accomplishment until the only asset Donald had was the ease with which he could be duped by more powerful men.”
• “That’s what sociopaths do: they co-opt others and use them toward their own ends—ruthlessly and efficiently, with no tolerance for dissent or resistance. Fred destroyed Donald, too, but not by snuffing him out as he did Freddy; instead, he short-circuited Donald’s ability to develop and experience the entire spectrum of human emotion. By limiting Donald’s access to his own feelings and rendering many of them unacceptable, Fred perverted his son’s perception of the world and damaged his ability to live in it. His capacity to be his own person, rather than an extension of his father’s ambitions, became severely limited.”
• “Abuse can be quiet and insidious just as often as, or even more often than, it is loud and violent. As far as I know, my grandfather wasn’t a physically violent man or even a particularly angry one. He didn’t have to be; he expected to get what he wanted and almost always did. It wasn’t his inability to fix his oldest son that infuriated him, it was the fact that Freddy simply wasn’t what he wanted him to be. Fred dismantled his oldest son by devaluing and degrading every aspect of his personality and his natural abilities until all that was left was self-recrimination and a desperate need to please a man who had no use for him.”
• “With millions of lives at stake, he takes accusations about the federal government’s failure to provide ventilators personally, threatening to withhold funding and lifesaving equipment from states whose governors don’t pay sufficient homage to him. That doesn’t surprise me. The deafening silence in response to such a blatant display of sociopathic disregard for human life or the consequences for one’s actions, on the other hand, fills me with despair and reminds me that Donald isn’t really the problem after all.”
• “Many, but by no means all of us, have been shielded until now from the worst effects of his pathologies by a stable economy and a lack of serious crises. But the out-of-control COVID-19 pandemic, the possibility of an economic depression, deepening social divides along political lines thanks to Donald’s penchant for division, and devastating uncertainty about our country’s future have created a perfect storm of catastrophes that no one is less equipped than my uncle to manage."

Reflections on “Everything’s great. Right, Toots? You just have to think positive"

I am reading Mary Trump's book Too Much and Never Enough. I can't say that it's an enjoyable book to read, that would be lying, but it is interesting in its own way--the tale of a dysfunctional family that created the man who is currently the 45th president of the USA. What strikes me about the Trump family is that lying about nearly everything plays a major role in their interactions with each other. Or if not directly lying, a blatant and total disregard for the truth staring them right in the face. It's hard to know where to start, and since I haven't yet finished the book, I'll wait until I do before posting a review. However, there are some things I can comment about already.

Mary Trump says her uncle Donald fits all of the criteria for the diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder. If you have never had any contact with a true narcissist, consider yourself lucky. For those of you who have had the bad fortune to know one in your personal life, you have my sincere sympathy. I wrote a post about narcissistic personality disorder in October 2019; you can access it here:   https://paulamdeangelis.blogspot.com/2019/10/learning-about-narcissistic-personality.html

Narcissists are walking cyclones that will destroy your life if you let them (in). As I wrote in October 2019, "......steer clear of these types of people if you want your life to be in any way peaceful or happy, or if you want to prevent the destruction of your own life. Let the professionals deal with them. It is not worth the heartache involved to try and care about these people". 

I have not changed my mind, and Mary Trump's book merely reinforces my statement. How do you know you are in the presence of a narcissist? They lie. Even when confronted with the naked horrible truth about themselves or their life situations, they lie. They promote themselves shamelessly. They are all about self-aggrandizement. They think the world of themselves and very little of others (others are often stupid, lazy or cowards for not taking the risks they take). Conversations with them are all about them, never about you or your life. They demand loyalty but don't give it in return. When they are done with you, they will cut you out of their lives without a moment's notice. They are delusional for the most part, with some rare few moments of insight, that give you hope that they will perhaps seek help and get better. But they don't. They promise that they will though, but they don't. They may even work as therapists, which terrifies me even more. Because the operative word is terrified; they are scary people, cyclones as I said. Steer clear of them. When you are in their presence, all good fresh healthy air is sucked out of the room and replaced by an air of suffocation. An hour with a narcissist is more than enough for a lifetime. They live in their own worlds of insanity and drag you in and along for the wild ride, if you let them. Many of them are whip-smart and charming, and that's how they hook you. And once hooked, trust me, getting yourself unhooked will require a courage and a willpower that you never knew you had. My advice to anyone who is living with or has interactions with a narcissist--get out and get away.

The title of my post is “Everything’s great. Right, Toots? You just have to think positive.” That's what Donald Trump's father used to say all the time, especially to his wife who was often in ill health. How comforting that must have been to hear. Essentially you say to another person, your illness is your fault because you didn't think positively enough. Imagine saying that to someone with cancer or any other terminal illness. I know younger people with cancer, and a few that have recently died of cancer. Not a one of them wished their illness on themselves. None of them is a negative person; in fact, the one person who died recently from brain cancer was a cheerful upbeat person with many friends who respected him highly. If 'thinking positively' had any real merit, the world would not be drowning in painkillers and addictions to painkillers that are killing thousands of people. It would not be drowning in the abuse of anti-depressants. 'Thinking positively' does not lead to sobriety, it is the humble willingness to admit that you have a problem and that you need help that lead to sobriety. You have to want to change your life. The Serenity Prayer says it best "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. The Serenity Prayer is the complete opposite of narcissism. Narcissists never really admit that they need help; you may think that they're asking for help, but ultimately you have misunderstood the situation. Because a few days later, everything's fine again, and your conversation with them about all that was 'wrong' has been forgotten, or perhaps never took place. “Everything’s great. Right, Toots? You just have to think positive.” 

What a strange world we live in, a world that adulates and rewards the shallow thinkers, the con-men, the narcissists, the ruthless capitalists, the criminals, the 'do as I say, not as I do' people. Whenever one of them gets caught for his or her crimes, I rejoice. It's a start toward dismantling the hold that narcissists have on our society. Because if you think about it, the message of 'think positive' has morphed into 'think only of yourself'. Too much emphasis on self can only lead to the mess that surrounds us in the world. Too much emphasis on self has destroyed personal lives and relationships. I applaud Mary Trump; it probably took all of her courage to write the book. It must have been extremely hard to write about a family that probably terrifies her. She exposes the 'people of the lie'. And in that context, I can recommend M. Scott Peck's excellent book People of the Lie, if you want to learn more about how Peck defines evil and his confrontations with pathological liars and narcissists in his therapy practice. You gain valuable information, but not without a cost. That cost is the fear that you feel when you read about them, and the true fear when you know you have to deal with them.