Few would argue with the fact that Donald Trump is not an intelligent man-- but he is a shrewd one.   He’s not well read or well spoken, but he is cunning and strategic.   While he may not have made the fortunes he claims, and certainly has not led an ethical life, he has managed to stay out of prison and still occupies the White House. While it increasingly looks like he may not have the actual cash to back up his luxurious lifestyle, he nevertheless lives the high life that few of his supporters will ever even get a glimpse of, let alone share.  As Howard Stern, Trump’s former friend (before Stern went to therapy and changed his tune) kept emphasizing on his recent book tour: “The oddity in all this is the people Trump despises most, love him the most.” He looks down on those they call his base, Stern says, would never want them at Mar-a-Lago.

     Forty-five years ago, I reviewed some books about advertising for a magazine I worked for called State and Mind. The magazine looked at the interaction of politics and psychology  The title of one book I reviewed was Snap, Crackle and Pop: The Illusion of Free Choice in America by Jeffrey Schrank.  The reason our magazine would review such a book was because advertising strategies can be powerful molders of consciousness and behavior. Despite the decades that have passed since I read and reviewed the book, one fascinating part of its content has remained fixed in memory.  And that is the idea that so many of the advertisements that most of us find silly, childish and demeaning, are created so on purpose, so as to make viewers feel superior to the ads they are watching.  Looking down on the ad, the psychology of such advertising goes, even or especially feeling disdain for it, makes us feel good about ourselves, smarter and more discerning than something we know cost fortunes to produce-- and that translates into a positive association with the product being advertised. So that then, when we’re shopping, and see the product on the grocery shelves, for example, that good feeling is elicited and we’re likely to buy the product, even
if—or, in strategic terms, precisely because—all the while we think it was badly advertised and that we probably could have done a better job than those who made it.  Although this strategy of emotional appeal and association with positivity has many permutations in advertising, this one is particularly powerful in Trumpian terms, where many of his supporters are vulnerable to not feeling particularly good about themselves.  After the 2016 election, I read books like Hillbilly Elegy and White Trash to try to better understand the people who, to me seemed puzzlingly to both like and vote for Trump but also be likely to be most hurt by his rich -folk favoring policies.

      The psycho-sell outlined above is a powerful dynamic at play in Donald Trump’s campaign.  Trump and his handlers have, in Schrank’s words, been able to “gauge values and hidden desires of the common person.”  There are probably very few Americans who would call prisoners-of-war ‘losers’ or mock someone with a neurological condition, brag about committing unwanted sexual aggression or even mispronounce Thailand.  Seeing and hearing Trump do those things makes many of us all feel superior to him and thus “smarter than the President.”  During a time of widespread sickness and unemployment, scarcity and fear, many of us questioning our choices and/or bemoaning our fates, it can feel good to know that the President is below us in knowledge and integrity, in both common decency and common sense.  For all we’ve lost or lack, at least we know better than to do or say THAT!  And we can translate such feelings of superiority into an association with Trump that is positive, just as the strategist “advertisers’ of his campaign would have us do.   It’s curious that so many of the mask-defying, confederate flag flying and gun toting folk who call Liberals “sheep,” are themselves, with due respect to the animals they malign, the ones headed passively to literal slaughter. According to the American Prospect, “Income, even more than age, race, or ethnicity might be the most significant driver of Covid-19 deaths.”  They are not even questioning, let alone resisting, the mind-controlling methods that have them buying a product that will cost them too much, make them sick and not even taste good in the process beyond that temporary false boost of positivity the ad men designed for them to feel.

       Mental health tips about how to best emotionally cope with the COVID 19 Pandemic are as plentiful as toilet paper is rare these days. Most suggest that keeping to one’s regular schedule and routines is key to fending off psychological derailment.  Wake up at the time you usually do, they say, get dressed, put on your make-up, eat your regular breakfast, exercise, and, if you’re working from home, get as approximate a flow as you can to the workday you would have had at the office.  Similarly, if you have kids at home, have them replicate their school day as much as possible.
     Whether Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or from Advice Columnists, somehow all presume that replicating the very social structures that may have gotten us into this predicament in the first place, will also provide our solace from it.  
     Even the venerated trauma specialist, Dr. Bessel Van de Kolk suggests that returning as closely as possible to our pre-pandemic routines can be our way of taking control of something –what trauma survivors generally need--while around us uncertainty reigns supreme.  
       Coming from a background of progressive politics and alternative mental health paradigms, I wonder if a more liberating perspective might be to use this time for getting in better touch with our authentic selves, our natural rhythms, our creative inclinations and true desires. In doing so, might we then  be able to re-create the systems that are breaking down into ones that can better meet our interdependent needs in mutually sustaining ways for the health and betterment of all.  The radical psychology organization I was a part of in the 1970s (The Radical Therapist/ Rough Times/ State and Mind magazine)  had a slogan that went: Therapy Means Change Not Adjustment.
     For so many of us, work and school, are not just how we spend 6 or 8 ( now for many, 10 and 12 hours a day), but they are what we go to sleep to get up in time for, or shop on the weekends to be appropriately dressed for,  or exercise to be healthy enough to keep on doing.  As social animals, we try to fit in, are influenced by the cultures of the workplaces, often wind up spending social time  outside of work with our coworkers. Those aren’t necessarily all bad things, but they can limit the range of possible life choices we could make if not for having them be the center of our lives.
     Surely, there are those among us, so unsettled by the chaotic dangerousness of the times  in which we are living, who need some sense of structure to fend off the panic that might ensue without it. But there are also those among us, who have for far too long adjusted ourselves to the exigencies of institutions, workplaces and schools, that never had our well being in mind in the first place.  For those of us with a more creative bent and courageous streak, why not use the extra time many of us have now available to loosen the grip of the structures that bound us, and discover how we might better arrange our work and recreational lives to more healhtfully and happily suit us.
     The routines, to which many of us have become tethered, can be traced to the Industrial Revolution, when according to historian Alun Davies “coordination was essential to bring together supplies of raw materials, to organize workers, and distribute their output. No point in having workers turn up any old time, hoping that someone had brought the cotton or wool to be processed, or hoping that someone had cleared yesterday’s output.”
     Schools, in turn, aimed originally to turn out obedient workers, trained to respond to the ringing of the bell, to taking direction from authority, to producing acceptable output.
      Sure it might be unworkable to have everyone turn up at work according to their wants, but we are finding now that a lot was possible outside of the regular structure that we never would have imagined to be so.  Flex time is great for reducing traffic and lines at restaurants.  Ah,,, remember restaurants!
     So here we are, Sheltered In Place, most of us working or schooling at home, some out of work altogether, some having to work in essential service to the common good.  All around the planet Earth, life as we knew it has stopped. Business is not as usual. Just a couple of months ago, it looked like the US was too afraid to deliberately choose what many considered the earth shattering changes in health care and economics proposed by candidates like Bernie Sanders, Eliabeth Warren,  Andrew Yang and Marianne Williamson.    But the earth got shattered anyway… probably by the karmic inevitabilities of doing business as usual.  And much of what then seemed unrealistic (i.e. healthcare for all) seems now a critical social necessity.
       There’s a cute meme going around that says something like we’re being asked to save the world by sitting on our couches. Don’t mess it up.
       Beyond that, maybe we can recreate a better world by not necessarily even trying to conduct business as usual in our now more circumscribed daily lives. What if we delved more deeply into ourselves and our creativity, whether by sleeping in or in different configurations of time, wearing what we please, moving in new ways as we see fit..  I went out to do what I’ll call street dancing one day, with my phone set to 1960s music, just moving as pleased me in the park, and realized that while it seems to be socially normal to run in a straight line with a pained look on your face, to be lightly jumping about willy nilly, with a smile, safely distant from others, was a weird thing to do….. Why?  Those are the kinds of endeavors I intend to pursue.  And I’ll tip my mental health practitioner hat to you trying your version of that too.


       

    With the cooling off of summer heat focused on the death of Michael Brown by police misconduct in Ferguson, Missouri, a fall court case is transpiring in Oakland concerning the shooting to death by police officers of a young, mixed-race man in SF's Park Merced apartment complex eight years ago. Asa Sullivan was a member of my extended family who I never met, but whose death by unnecessary police armed fire brings the reality of how widespread are such matters and often more dangerously close to home than one realizes.  I've come to know Asa's  immediate family better since his death and to learn the story of his  life's tragic end from one of his immediate survivors: his mother Kat Espinosa, the biological aunt of my adopted, now adult children.
      Like  many others who wind up dead by police gunfire, Asa was not a complete innocent, legally. In fact, he was either squatting, visiting squatters  or involved somehow in the use or purchase of  drugs, or companionship to those doing so,  in the vacant apartment where police were called to investigate on 6/6/06. But like other young men killed in the act of either petty crime or being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Asa still deserved to grow up and hopefully out of his youthful, mischievious  behavior. Clearly 13 year old Santa Rosan Andy Lopez should have had an orange tip on his toy gun when police say they mistook it for the real thing and killed Andy on his way to the park, but death is a pretty extreme consequence for non-violent, youthful indiscretion.
       I've been to the courtroom where Asa's mother's civil case against the SFPD is transpiring a couple of times these past weeks, to support Kat and to observe the questioning of witnesses in the case. It  didn't take long to learn that Asa was a scared young man hiding from the police in an attic like crawl space above the apartment's bathroom, and that he was trying to avoid a parole violation related to a marijuana charge on his record. According to his mother, he'd been generally getting his life on a more constructive track since becoming a parent the  year before. It was also clear that the police who arrived at the call of a neighbor concerned, not about violence but about 'activity' in what was supposed to be a vacant apartment, went way overboard every step along the way, from how they entered the premises (without a key they could easily have obtained from management), to shooting Asa as he tried to exit the attic/crawlspace unarmed and without belligerence.
       The police officers involved in these cases always say they felt threatened. Though Asa had no weapon, he did have an eyeglass case in his hand or pocket, that police say they suspected was a possible gun.
As a therapist, I'm deeply concerned that more and more, police officers will feel threatened when in the presence of black youth, because they can reasonably suspect, based on past and pervasive police misconduct, that such youth are genuinely --and understandably--hostile to them.  More and more such  situations snowball, and the police escalate their violence in response to their perception of threat, based not on the behavior of the suspect, but rather  on their collective guilt about all the horrific, unnecessary killings their colleagues have perpetrated.
      On Facebook yesterday, I saw a video of a police officer shooting at a young man outside his car in a gas station,  simply because the "accused" had turned back toward the car to look for his wallet when the cop asked him for his  ID. It didn't sound like that act resulted in death, but the young man was hurt and the officer, while calling for an ambulance, was clearly not apologetic or remorseful. In face, he seemed annoyed at the victim for being in pain from his bullet wounds.
         No amount of money that Kat might collect, should the jury (with not one African American among them!)  agree that the police were unjustified to shoot at Asa 6 times, can replace the son she lost that day.
But a verdict in her favor (and she's in this with Asa's former partner and son), might help to send the message to all the police officers out there that it is encumbent upon them (and their superiors, their trainers) to learn how to deal with their feeling of fear and confusion, their guilt, their triggers, and to stop shooting prematurely, killing so many  boys  and young men, and making all our lives less safe as a result. 
        I wanted to write this to be a part of all the recordings, visual, auditory and in print, that will hopefully help spring us all to take action to encourage the police to live up to their mandate to protect and serve us all.
      

     Psychiatrist Dr. Lance Dodes, while promoting a book and program he's developed as an alternative to Alcoholics Anonymous, has been denegrading 12 step programs unfairly. Sure, he's entitiled to his opinion, and  to advertise his undoubtedly quite costly alternative treatment for addiction. And certainly, AA doesn't work for  everyone. But Dr. Dodes' criticisms, widely circulated now among the learned folk of National Public Radio, deserve a rebuttal, because, as both a psychotherapist and person in recovery myself, I experience AA and the 12 step world as such a useful  and accessible resource, replete with such wisdom of the ages that I often feel it informs the helpfulness of my practice as much as and sometimes more than has my professional training.  And, especially since AA meetings are so many and so available for no cost whatsoever (save  for a requested voluntary donation of a dollar or two from those who can spare it), I hate to think of people in need being put off  from being embraced by the care available in AA's rooms by Dodes' arguments.
      For example, Dr. Dodes claims that AA sees relapses as failures and asks for the return of  its celebratory chips commemorating  recovery time  (30 days, one year, etc.) when relapses occur.  He said on All things Considered that, in his view, to have gone six months without drinking, even if one has a beer at the end of said time, is applaudable and certainly a better  course of action than having had a beer every day during those six months.  Well, not only is everything that happens in AA voluntary, including who gets a chip and for what, and never, in my near 30 years of involvement have I seen a chip returned or anyone asked to do so, but, if AA members express concern about relapse, it's because, in our collective experience, rarely, dare I say never, have we seen anyone have that one beer every six months and go on to incorporate into  a happy, balanced, normal life such a manner of  drinking. For an alcoholic or addict, one drink typically leads to another, and just as typically leads back into a life of active and destructive use and abuse. It most often begins a slide back into the depths from which most of us in AA don't want to return. It happened to me once, after 6 years of sobriety and not enough traction in the AA program, that I tried having a single glass of wine at a dinner with a cousin who was visiting from out of town and who I did not want to know I was self-defining as alcoholic. I can hardly imagine now why I cared.  It took some months before I didn't refuse a neighbor pouring me a holiday drink into a silver goblet and a few more before I poured myself a glass to have with a sandwich at lunch by myself.  Before long I was both drinking and smoking pot daily, using pain pills (instead of the more effective swimming and yoga) for my back problems, and getting beta blockers prescribed for for those difficult moments of professional test taking and public speaking. And it didn't take long before before the trials of daily life became my tests, and socializing at parties a form of public speaking. The fact is, as the majority of us who attend  AA meetings can attest--and good/lucky for you if this doesn't apply--we can't have a single beer without disasterous -in the long term --results.
       Dr. Dodes is correct when he says that statistics proving AA success are not available. That's precisely because AA is an association of the anonymous and is not professionally led or affilliated. Still, the sheer volume of AA meetings worldwide and the large regular attendance at so many of them, says something important about AA effectiveness and popularity. Of course, AA is not effective for everyone. The "God" thing has kept many away. I did me for a long time. Of course, AA makes clear that God can be defined however one feels comfortable doing so, and there is an active and growing segment of AA for Agnostics and Freethinkers of which I am a enthusiastic participant and supporter.  The first international Agnostic and Freethinker convention is set to take place in Santa Monica this coming November (2014).
         In another criticism, Dr. Dodes complains  that AA unjustifiably blames the alcoholic when its program doesn't work for someone. And while my experience is that compassion is far more prevalent in AA than is blame, we do come to be wary when someone stops going to meetings, or stops meeting with or being a sponsor, or stops in whatever individualized  way s/he has been  working the 12 steps, because, this is often the beginning of a slide back into active addiction.  Similarly, any health practitioner  would be concerned if a patient stopped taking prescribed medications, or went off a recommended diet or refused the physical therapy that was needed for a specific condition. That concern, too, could be called blaming the patient for his or her return to active disease, but there is only so much a practitioner, or a program can do without the active involvement  of the person using it.  How many doctor's would say to a treatment refusing patient, "perhaps you should seek out another doctor who might not suggest the things I have promoted as integral to your health and well-being."  Besides, being non professional and anonymous, there really isn't anyone in AA to give that kind of advice. Therapists and rehab counselors do that. I do that.  I have seem lots of clients who I hoped could/would benefit from AA, but when some won't or can't deal with their addictions that way, I recommend other ways, never losing hope that they might find their way back in to the rooms where, in my anecdotal experience, the most effective results take place.
         The late humorist George Carlin often joked that the best answer to the problem of substance abuse would be a better reality.  And while alcoholism, being a condition of both genetic and social origins is not necessarily created by adverse life circumstances, it strikes me that a lot of what is so useful about AA is that it does change reality for its members.  Where once most alcoholics felt isolated, in AA they/we have supportive accepting and compassionatecommunity, where many felt morally bankrupt, in AA they/we  find  purpose and an ethical compass. And this is something no new program, developed  by an individual fee-charging doctor can offer.