impeachment

[Patrick McEvoy-Halston]

For those that would like the reminder, Clio took on the Clinton impeachment in its December 1988 issue. I enjoyed going back and revisiting the writings of those who contributed. 

Lloyd DeMause did as well in his article The Phallic Presidency. Lloyd's take is that the public's supporting the impeachment wasn't what it was presumed to be. He thought of Clinton almost as Bion apparently understood the therapist, as someone whom would contain and digest what the analysand was projecting onto him. Not quite discussed in his essay, but it seems apparent that what they were projecting onto Clinton was all their own "sins," everything these baby boomers could imagine their own parents castigating them over as reason to deny their legitimacy in taking full ownership of societal leadership, that would serve almost as overlay of all the literal accusations that were being launched at Clinton by the press and Republicans in House and Senate. 

If the same dynamic is at work now, then expect the increasing number of Americans who are for impeachment are really communicating that they like the idea of Trump being staged so that he will serve as a container into which they will project anything they feel guilty about into. Once they feel he has sufficiently processed them for them, as with Clinton, they'll show their appreciation by upping support of him to 70%. If Lloyd is right, expect democracy to officially end for ten yrs, as soon as impeachment is "settled." The only good that will come out of impeachment, is simply that of spending more time with very decent people like Adam Schiff and Pelosi. Not nothing, but not much.

Personally what I think the American public feels guilty about is that they are getting set to righteously rage at an elite owing to how it has abused them (I think they desired to be abused to alleviate themselves a sense of punishment that was accumulating owing to getting more than the nature of their childhoods would permit for them, but this is another matter), but at some level register that before they can do this they have to have all the activities they have partaken in that their own mommies would shame them over--like, for example, porn watching, drug use, associating with the neighbourhood's crowd of bad boys: entering into the devil's den--manifested into an external sacrificial person, and for him to show they somehow yet remain much more morally pure than their antagonists, and even, that this "bad" was actually in sum a strong moral good in disguise: Trump coming to claim that all the dictators in the world that he associated with, are actually those who were resisting the corrupt global order and sticking up for their own nations again. 

This they will feel, for they are preparing to subsume themselves... subsume their conscious independence within a projected mother-figure--the Mother Nation, and they'll know that when they did that for their own parents in childhood, surrendered to them, their rage at them DID subside some, and even lead to a gift of some love... even though for them it was a colossal sacrifice, for they were just coming to know how good it felt to exist freely of them.