The Stewart and Colbert Purity Crusade

Many of you probably watched the famous Jon Stewart "smackdown" of -- in particular -- Tucker Carlson on Crossfire. I knew then that the primary crime Tucker was guilty of was possessing too much personality (his punchy bow-tie, pink shirts, buoyant, boyish hair), self-determination / initiative (he is famous for being the ostensible conservative who did the non-permissable, the treasonous, in accurately reporting the extent of Bush's "potty-mouth.") at a time when Stewart's accrued fame and true power had accumulated to the point where his maternal alter would hereafter determine his course, telling him to activate to suppress / destroy those who most closely represent his own desire for full autonomy / actualization and satisfaction.

Stewart and Colbert still now strike me as the type liberals will look to to ensure a guilt-free purity crusade. Ostensibly, what they champion is sanity, reasoned discourse, but what they are against is uncurbed personality, individuation, show that you still respect / value (are reluctant to denigrate) that part of you that still aims to make your own particular mark on the world (Colbert's "I AM AMERICA"): they want denatured, reasoned neuters reporting both sides of the news, becalmed not from being reasonable but for being in denial of agitating emotions, for being wholly in sync with the needs of the purity crusade -- for the pervasiveness of this type, and its successful idealization, will show Mother that the kind of self-attendance (mother-neglect) that leads to personality has been throughly repudiated from the public scene.

The following DeMause quotes are playing on my mind (taken from "War as Righteous Rape"). From them, I am alert to think of non-pejorative forms of our desires that people like Stewart and Colbert are blasting in their call for sanity. Along with genuine lack of reasoning (as we see every time Stewart showcases any of the genuinely always-unreasoning FOX News types), we will see grouped its actual opposite: the impassioned fight to resist obfuscation, curtailment of truth, flight from sanity toward group disassociation, we consistently find with the likes of Joan Walsh and Chris Matthews (two liberals who have showcased as insane -- or at least as talking insanely -- by Stewart). As I have suggested elsewhere, I have no doubt that Krugman will be targeted by liberal "reasonables" as amongst the clearly unreasonable. They have to (go after him), for he has too strong a claim on being reasonable right now himself -- on defining what it is to be reasonable in our current era -- and yet so strongly and genuinely opposes the sort of personality-killing depression / suppression most liberals are increasingly drawn to near openly insist upon. It's risky, because disposing him (considerably) arouses the spectre of undeniable guilt -- of feeling impure, fraudulent, intrinsically hypocritical. So when they close in on him, psychohistorians have to be prepared to remind them throughout their efforts of deposition that the only way HE could now be the one they 
target is if THEY are in fact the ones behaving irrationally, crazily -- scrutiny-worthy. That is, their upcoming attack on Krugman will in my judgment be our best means of playing to the part of liberals that may yet resist this strong pull towards ensuring the depressive end to this historical cycle (of seeing huge crimes against people). It can ¨be used to draw some back to sanity, and keep some part of our age still innovation-prone, genuinely aspiring and happy, despite the clawing, claiming efforts of the regressive-prone.

Patrick

DeMause quotes:

1) If there ever were a society where parents really helped their children to individuate, it would be a society without growth panics, without engulfment fears and without delusional enemies. The enemy is a poison container for groups failing to grapple with the problems of an emerging self. The enemy therefore inherits the imagery of their growth panic, so the enemy is usually described in terms of our childhood desires for growth. "They" (for instance, Jews) are imagined to be guilty of the pejorative form of every one of our desires: "greed" (all our wants); "lust" (our sexual desire); "pushiness" (our striving) and so on. It isn't even necessary that the enemy really exist. Simple societies imagine that witches, ancestors and spirits are relentlessly persecuting enemies, and some nations-including Japan today-can even imagine Jews as bloodsucking national enemies when there are virtually no Jews in their country.

2) In fact, nations enter into depressions because they feel persecuted for their prosperity and individuation by what Jungians have termed the "Dragon Mother"--the needy, "devouring mother of infancy...who cannot let her children go because she needs them for her own psychic survival." Weston has found anorexics in particular are dominated by fantasies of persecution by the Dragon Mother, who gives her child the impossible task of filling her ‘limitless void''' so the child fears being "eaten alive." To prevent this, when these children grow up and try to individuate, they refuse to eat so they won't have any flesh on them for the Dragon Mother to devour. Economic depressions evidence similar group-fantasies of devouring mommies; they are "economic anorexias" where nations inflict economic wounds upon themselves to limit consumption, become "all bones" and not tempt the devouring Dragon Mother. Banks, in particular, are often pictured as greedy dragons. For instance, President Jackson imagined the Bank of the United States was what he called the "Mother Bank" that by issuing paper money was a "bad mother dominating her children" who had to be stopped before the nation was eaten up, and so conducted a "kill the Great Monster" campaign that would "strangle the many-headed hydra" and kill it. Needless to say, his success in "crushing the Mother Bank dragon" led to an economic downturn.

Link: The Stewart and Colbert Purity Crusade (realpsychohistory)