“Were you abused verbally and/or physically when you were a kid?”
How did I come to this question? Back in the 70’s when, for reasons I’m not now sure of, I was reading a lot of psychopathology tomes, I got myself a temporary job at an NIMH research project studying the causes of childhood abuse and neglect. Among the eventual findings, one was virtually omnipresent: a parent who abuses or neglects a child was almost always abused or neglected her/himself.
(That research project picked up one perhaps unexpected aspect of an abusive family dynamic: an abusive parent often scapegoats only one child for the abuse. Maybe that child can come to a perverse belief that abusive treatment is a sign of favoritism. He’s the chosen one, so to speak, the special child, as well as the worst.)
If this happens in an undereducated family, a family without any psychological acuity (call them “un-woke”), a kid can grow up in denial, shoving the awful experiences into the nether reaches of his psyche, or re-writing the abuse as OK; after all, it’s what a good, tough parent does with an ornery kid.
The major thing a boy can do with abuse is turn into an abuser himself, become as strong and tough and punitive as his father. Because that’s the way “real men, strong men” act. And as a man he’ll admire someone like that, but someone whose big-stage notoriety is a big promise for his own future and a whitewash of his reality.
Girls might grow up to repeat the experience by falling for and worshiping abusive men. You want to get fancy, call it repetition-compulsion.
My old psychiatric dictionary says, “the experience repeated is usually a painful one…” which, I believe, is repeated subconsciously, like a fairy-tale curse which promises to free you forever — if you can figure out how to decode it. (A profoundly entertaining example of this compulsion is the great 1967 British surreal comedy, Bedazzled, in which an urbane devil is responsible both for dangling the cure and then yanking it away over and over and over.)
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A tangent that’s not tangential. Happens I’m reading a curious New Yorker article by Charles Bethea, “Beta Blockers: The alpha-male camps that promise to turn you — or your son — into a real man,” operations which draw in guys who don’t feel “alpha” enough.
I picked up this exchange between Justin, one of the “students,” and King, a founder of this particular group. Justin, “wallowing in a mud pit that the men, wallowing with him, had dug together…” blurted out, ‘My childhood was fucked…My parents used to whup the shit out of me…I watched my mom stab my dad. I watched my mom run over my dad with the car. I stabbed my mom with a needle when I caught her shooting up. I’ve been through so much pain.”
King asks him, “What do you take away from it?…What’s the gift in this for you?” Justin responds: “There’s always gonna be suffering…”
(The gift???)
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I’m thinking that since 2016 we’ve been trapped into watching a mass of people who have come from abusive families, have not reckoned with it emotionally or intellectually, and have found release in idolizing an abusive father with grotesque star power. The familial pathology is performing on a wide open stage, to the horror of the rest of us.
I shared my theory with my cousin Nancy; she pooh-pooh-ed it. “How could there be, what? 78 million voters who’ve been abused?” We continued talking, bringing up people we felt were unlikely to have been seriously abused but whose politics were attached to particular reasons. Nancy mentioned some Jewish friends, wealthy ones, who voted for the grotesque because of Israel and because of their fear of growing antisemitism and because they hate and fear Mamdani — the underlying logic of all of this is so fucked up I can’t even…(I know several people like that.)
I told her about meeting some Republican women, a small group of whom I’d once found myself lunching with at the Plaza Hotel. One of them proclaimed her single tenet of politics: “Vote your wallet,” she said smugly. “Always vote your wallet.” (The underlying logic of this is resolute ignorance, with a dash of stupidity.)
So I’ve been seriously considering everything Nancy pointed out. Could there be 78 million voters who had suffered abuse when they were children? Probably not.
Yet, after subtracting millions of resolute Wallet Republicans and perpetually defensive, wealthy Jewish voters, there could be, say, 40 million abuse victims, who would include evangelical Christians, themselves, I believe, an abusive cult.
Forty million people, thrilled to attend crazed rallies and spend their money on MAGA hats and streaked blond hair, and to vote for the hot-air balloon reification of their abusive parents. Oh, and add in cloistered Orthodox Jews who identify with the aggressor and, don’t be shocked, appeared among the numbers of abusive parents in that study I worked on…well, that’s a substantial voting bloc, isn’t it? Not 78 million but not chopped liver, either.
