PERFORMATIVE BELIEF: What does it mean to be mentally ill?

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2020

Trump/Krug and the end of the world: What does it mean to be mentally ill? 

As laypersons, we can't quite answer your question. Mental illness is a fairly nebulous concept. Some people even say that it doesn't exist. 

We can't explain what mental illness "is," but we know what it looks like. Today, we provide two examples. 

Our first example involves some conduct by Donald J. Trump. In this morning's Washington Post, Philip Rucker's discussion of Bob Woodward's book includes this comical, pitiful passage: 

RUCKER (9/10/20): “I don’t think Obama’s smart,” Trump told Woodward. “I think he’s highly overrated. And I don’t think he’s a great speaker.” Trump added that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un thought Obama was “an asshole.” 

[Woodward's book] includes the first reported excerpts of letters Trump exchanged with Kim, and quotes Trump in his interviews with Woodward using expletives to defend their pen-pal relationship.

[...]

Trump was taken with Kim’s flattery, Woodward writes, telling the author pridefully that Kim had addressed him as “Excellency.” Trump remarked that he was awestruck meeting Kim for the first time in 2018 in Singapore, thinking to himself, “Holy shit,” and finding Kim to be “far beyond smart.” Trump also boasted to Woodward that Kim “tells me everything,” including a graphic account of Kim having his uncle killed. 

Trump did not share his letters to Kim—“Those are so top secret,” the president said—but Woodward obtained them independently. He writes that Trump sent Kim a copy of the New York Times featuring a picture of the two men on the front page. “Chairman, great picture of you, big time,” Trump wrote on the paper in marker. (Trump falsely boasted to Woodward: “He never smiled before. I’m the only one he smiles with.”)

Kim Jong Un had "never smiled before"—and he thinks Obama's an asshole. It's always possible that the quoted remark was tongue in cheek, but the overall lunacy seems clear. 

The lunacy seems clear. For further elucidation, you'd have to speak with a (carefully selected) medical specialist. You'd have to speak with someone prepared to discuss the world of the sociopath without defaulting, in this case, to a political slant. 

We don't know much about mental illness, but we know it when we see it! Unfortunately, the modern upper-end mainstream press has agreed that the commander's apparent mental illness simply cannot be discussed. 

We're left with a perpetual "cable news" Groundhog Day. We're left with the sputtering, angry pseudo-discussions which unfolded for the ten millionth time on last night's Anderson Cooper program. 

At CNN, it had fallen to Jamie Gangel to read Woodward's book and report its contents. At 8:21 PM Eastern, she assessed Trump's behavior in the standard way: 

"It's inexplicable," Gangel said, to her sputtering colleagues. 

Gangel said that Trump's behavior has been inexplicable. No one suggested that the explanation for the commander's remarkable conduct may lie in the realm of mental illness. Such rumination is not allowed within the tents of this guild. 

The commander in chief may be "mentally ill," but our upper-end press corps has long been "rationally impaired." They refuse to speak to medical specialists about their commander's very strange conduct. They prefer to be newly shocked each day while saying it can't be explained. 

Just a guess! The commander's behavior makes perfect sense if we assume that he's some version of a "sociopath," as some people are. That said, someone else who seems to be mentally ill emerged on the scene last week. 

This second person is, or was, a mere professor. But her unfortunate case strikes us as highly instructive. 

We refer to the unfortunate case of Jessica Krug, who has resigned from her tenured position as an associate professor of history at George Washington University. 

Krug's resignation followed the uproar over her recent essay at Medium. The leading authority on this matter offers this capsule account:

Jessica A. Krug, a former associate professor of history at George Washington University lived for years under an assumed race and ethnicity until she disclosed the truth in a September 3, 2020, essay on the blog website Medium. Krug's having assumed identities such as that of a Bronx-bred Afro-"boricua" (Afro-Puerto Rican) with the "salsa" name "La Bombalera", she confessed within a blog post entitled "The Truth, and the Anti-Black Violence of My Lies": "I have eschewed my lived experience as a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City under various assumed identities within a Blackness that I had no right to claim: first North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness."

Is Krug some version of "mentally ill?" If you watch this pitiable videotape, in which she speaks to the New York City Council in her La Bombalera persona, we'll suggest that the question may seem to answer itself. 

That said, do modern Americans really believe that some people are "mentally ill?" Widespread reactions to people like Trump and Krug suggest that we secretly don't. 

On the one hand, the modern journalistic elite has agreed that they mustn't discuss the possibility that Trump is mentally ill.  In the case of Krug, her bizarre behavior has been met with anger more often than with some form of sympathy concerning the existence of some type of personal illness. 

Like Trump, Krug is aggressively scolded for her absurd behavior. Little thought is given to the possibility that she seems to be "ill" in some way. Little thought is given to the question of what "mental illness" means. 

Donald J. Trump could destroy the world. By way of contrast, Jessica Krug was merely a (highly-regarded) history professor. 

Krug didn't hold the nuclear codes. But her craziness, and her academic success, may teach us about the end of the world, which experts say is approaching. 

If Krug is crazy, she has been crazy in the general area of "race." Perhaps for that reason, her elite employers couldn't discern that she was crazy, and the elite guild to which she belonged was crazy about her book: 

[Krug] is the author of the well-reviewed work of Columbian, Brazilian, and West African histories Fugitive Modernities: Kisama and the Politics of Freedom, which treats the Quiçama people, at home in Angola and within diaspora, especially in Brazil. The book was a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Prize and the Harriet Tubman Prize. Krug's additional studies focus on African American history and Latin America. 

"Fugitive Modernities?" Yes, that's the name of the (highly-praised) book! Because Duke is always involved in these matters, the book was published by the Duke University Press, by whom it's described as follows: 

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS: During the early seventeenth century, Kisama emerged in West Central Africa (present-day Angola) as communities and an identity for those fleeing expanding states and the violence of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The fugitives mounted effective resistance to European colonialism despite—or because of—the absence of centralized authority or a common language. 

In Fugitive Modernities, Jessica A. Krug offers a continent- and century-spanning narrative exploring Kisama's intellectual, political, and social histories. Those who became Kisama forged a transnational reputation for resistance, and by refusing to organize their society around warrior identities, they created viable social and political lives beyond the bounds of states and the ruthless market economy of slavery. 

Krug follows the idea of Kisama to the Americas, where fugitives in the New Kingdom of Grenada (present-day Colombia) and Brazil used it as a means of articulating politics in fugitive slave communities. By tracing the movement of African ideas, rather than African bodies, Krug models new methods for grappling with politics and the past, while showing how the history of Kisama and its legacy as a global symbol of resistance that has evaded state capture offers essential lessons for those working to build new and just societies. 

 Question: "By tracing the movement of African ideas, rather than African bodies," does Krug really "model new methods for grappling with politics and the past, while showing how the history of Kisama and its legacy as a global symbol of resistance that has evaded state capture offers essential lessons for those working to build new and just societies?" 

In theory, everything's possible! That said, we'll sign on as skeptics. For one thing, we've read the book's very first passage, in which Graf seems to be pretending that she grew up in a barrio. 

We've also read her Acknowledgements, which begin as shown and end by listing the elite financial contributors who bought into the overall con: 

KRUG: For years, I told everyone who knew I was writing a book that my entire acknowledgments section would be cribbed from Biggie: “This book is dedicated to all the teachers who told me I’d never amount to nothing . . ." And while there is no small part of me that is still tempted to leave it there, to stunt on every institution and person who has ever stood in my way, by framing my work or Biggie’s like this, we reinforce the pernicious idea that amounting to something can be measured by the metrics that I inherently reject. 

Whatever. We've also read her Notes on Cartography, the pompous section in which she explains why "the maps in this book depart from convention. They do not center the Atlantic Ocean. They do not orient north." 

All in all, this book is pure pose from before Chapter One.  Scholarly elites gulped it whole.

Conceivably, a disordered person could write an outstanding book. Our main thought here is this: 

Until the revolution occurs, nothing will ever be gained from this crazy person's ruminations on Kiasma and the racism of maps which orient north. But even as major foundations shoveled money into this project, we've almost never seen a serious journalistic discussion of our nation's low-income schools, or of the good, decent kids who attend them.

As we've often noted, no one cares about the kids who attend those schools; few things could be more clear. Meanwhile, a serious crackpot is being funded by elite institutions as she writes the latest useless book from inside the one percent of the fewer than one percent. 

We also think of the endless, grotesque report on the front page of Tuesday's Washington Post. If Trump is the craziness of the right, race is the craziness now being worshiped by our own failing tribe. 

There's nothing our tribe won't rush to accept as long as it seems to support the received wisdom of our new tulip craze. Newspapers which never cared a whit about race now pretend to care about nothing else. 

More on that to follow.

As November's election approaches, we seem to be observing the end of the world—the end of "the American experiment." The rewards had simply become too damn high, and new technologies gave every lunatic in the nation a chance to affect what gets said and believed.

Tomorrow (and later today), we'll continue on from here. But our capsule account would be this: 

Donald J. Trump is almost surely mentally ill, but our "elites" are rationally impaired.  

This reflects the way our species has always been wired, despondent anthropologists have said.

Tomorrow: Herbstreit wept