Answering Kennedy’s Call
And that’s for a few reasons. First was Joe Biden becoming our President, defeating the most lawless president in history, now a convicted felon, and enabling legislation that has given more rights to Americans, rather than taking them away.
Secondly, President Biden has chosen VP Kamala Harris to succeed him in the upcoming presidential election, a former District Attorney and California Attorney General, who understands lawlessness and lawbreakers.
Who would believe events could turn so quickly, from a MAGA Trumpocracy looking backward and promising to destroy our democracy, to a Black-Asian woman who is already exciting many of the younger generation by saying we should look forward to a brighter future?
The JFK assassination on December 22, 1963, was a turning point for me—from hope in Kennedy’s New Frontier to a better future and end to the Cold War, to the hopelessness of a Vietnam War and all that followed.
It reminded me in many ways of the 1960s when there was just as much social unrest and different ideas of democracy. This was the era of McCarthyism and communist witch-hunting, right wing against left wing political views, the civil rights movement, and an unpopular war in Vietnam that was fracturing American communities.
I coped with the dysfunction and cynicism then by searching for communities that could mirror my values and ideals by working in public service organizations and as a Peace Corps Volunteer.
It’s been a long wait for the return to the optimism and can-do spirit I experienced in the 1960s. I began to understand why when I began writing about what was then called the Age of Narcissism.
Social historian Christopher Lasch was perhaps the first to broach the subject in various critiques of modern American society. This included his 1979 best-seller, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations that took “what was still mainly a narrow clinical term and used it to diagnose a pathology that seemed to have spread to all corners of American life,” per a NY Times summary of his book.
Former President Trump is a man who epitomized such narcissism and has been diagnosed by multiple mental health professionals with a Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), “using other people as instruments of gratification even while craving their love and approval,” in the words of Lasch.
Lasch saw this as a societal pathology that took individualism to its destructive extreme of ‘me first’ over any concern for others with the breakup of communities and headlong rush to a post-WWII, consumer-driven economy. The extended family was transformed into the nuclear family of a married couple with children; grandparents migrating to senior living centers; as the growing middle class moved to the suburbs and away from traditional family and community values.
“In Lasch’s definition (drawn from Freud), the narcissist, driven by repressed rage and self-hatred, escapes into a grandiose self-conception, using other people as instruments of gratification even while craving their love and approval,” said the review. “Lasch saw the echo of such qualities in “the fascination with fame and celebrity, the fear of competition, the inability to suspend disbelief, the shallowness and transitory quality of personal relations, the horror of death.”
Is this just the beginning of an end to the Age of Narcissism, a turning point away from the worship of celebrity? I believe so. And who better to turn that page than such a highly qualified woman, former Vice President, and maybe our first female president?
Harlan Green © 2024
Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen
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