Author: Fragile Dignity
Essayist, critic, psychotherapist and free range academic. Whelped and whipped in Texas, but now living in the forests of Northern California. Fragile Dignity is a workshop of critical theory in the service of social and ecological liberation.
Post-Truth President / Post-Truth World: Trump and Life in the Upside Down
The heel is the antagonist who breaks the rules, cheats, sabotages, and nastily takes advantage of his opponents outside the ring. In lucha libre wrestling, heels (rudo) are brawlers fighting with brute forces, often dressing up like devils or tricksters. Trump wears the same suite and tie every day, like portraying this character he invented. And he gets his crowd to boo, hiss, cheer and jeer, to chant “build the wall!” or “lock her up!” and carries on about “Lyin’ Ted” and “Crooked Hillary,” he turns his political opponents into wrestling characters, and brings what might have been reasoned debate to the level of vulgar theater. His opponents were caught flat footed while he stirred the nationalist id. They either never understood what was going on or were not prepared to meet him on the mat.
Psychiatry’s Recusal from the Mad World (Part II)
More important than the mere act of pathologizing Trump is to understand the social psychology that prepares a culture for Trumpism. This move not only sidesteps the Goldwater Rule, but points us toward a more interesting project of a systematic critical social and psychological introspection in a world of increasing shallowness and hateful reactivity. Wherever there is a post-truth president, there shall we find the post-truth world.
Psychiatry’s Recusal from the Mad World: Deconstructing the Goldwater Rule
More and more, both arm chair diagnosticians and mental health professionals alike are questioning the mental stability of President Trump. They’re asking what’s the matter what this guy? What’s his malfunction? What the hell is […]
Future Hotel Civilization: The Starship Eden of “Passengers”
It’s a futuristic Titanic with some features of Robinson Crusoe with a dash of The Shining. It’s a fun movie, but begins to unravel at the slightest scrutiny. But it is one of those rare cases where the film’s criticism, instead of wilting under this kind of picking of nits, begins to make the film more interesting. In other words, the reason the film doesn’t work is the reason that it works. I read Passengers as an exemplary demonstration of the American Self that reveals something about the tradition of the myth of the American hero, its vulnerabilities, and its projection into a future space to indulge the American settler mythology that is an ideological cornerstone of American society.
(Un)Techsplaining the Body
Something struck me when seeing the new commercials for the Apple watch, you know, the ones promoting the device as an exercise monitoring, vitals taking, step counting and personal motivating all-in-one super device. Much like […]
Fearless Girl and the False Prophets of Wall Street
Given this context, Fearless Girl has an even more insidious, surreal quality. It’s like when Mercedes Benz appropriated Che Guevara at an auto show to promote their new cars as revolutionary. Or like when the Washington DC Martin Luther King Memorial is unveiled as a white statue. This is a function of capitalism as a political ideology, however, to absorb all dissent, to obfuscate criticism, sanitize history and flatten social space with a halo of social and political amnesia.
A Fragile Dignity 