WHERE HAVE I BEEN?

Monday, April 28, 2025

It has been some time since I last did my newsletter. Surprisingly, I have been repeatedly asked if I have retired or just plain given up. None of the above, so please read on.

I want to tell you about a 19th century character who wrote under the pen name Stendhal. A French bon vivant who fought with Napoleon, he was an appointed diplomat and then became a man about Europe often writing about his travel. While visiting Florence, Italy, he was wiped out by a strange phenomenon. He went on to write about this experience thus coining the term "Stendhal Syndrome" — a psychosomatic condition involving rapid heartbeat, confusion, hallucinations and fainting which occur when people become over-exposed to objects, artworks, or phenomena.

Psychologists have long debated whether Stendhal Syndrome really exists. It has yet to make its appearance in psychologist's Bible — the DSM-5. Believers have labeled the condition a transient psychosomatic response characterized by intense physiological and emotional reactions (tachycardia, vertigo, hyperventilation or crying) triggered by exposure to scientific concepts, discoveries or representations that challenge cognitive paradigms or evoke a perception of intellectual sublimity. Dacher Keltner's studies (published in the UC Berkely Letters and Science Journal 2023) proposed that the Stendhal phenomenon emerges from the dissonance between the finite (individual) and the infinite (cosmos) thus activating evolutionary responses of "tonic immobility" to stimuli that exceed adaptive processing capacity.

So how does all of this explain my disappearance? I think I have suffered from Stendhal Syndrome. While I try to avoid talking about my own health and the health of others, since Trump's electoral victory I have been ailing.

I break from my malaise to write here. This rant feels good. Simply put: the Trump infinite cosmos, beginning on January 20th and his form of leadership since then, has created a significant dissonance within me which I believe has exceeded my modest, adaptive processing capability.

The Trump cosmos has been staffed with unqualified, incompetent people whose sole qualification seems to be a loyalty to Trump. To improve the government and its efficiency, he has hired a gang of unelected, unvetted vigilante henchman to take a chainsaw to government, displacing thousands of workers, terminating an unknown number of beneficial programs all to the detriment of our people. He has altered the role of the United States on the global stage and blown up the economic world order of Pax Americana in place since WWII. I have no doubt that there is waste in the government, that we have been taken advantage of by some countries, and that we domestically suffer from over regulation, but I do not believe you fix things by throwing out the baby with the dirty bathwater.

The cast of unqualified, incompetent, sycophantic, people will have destroyed the important role America has played on the global stage since WWII. We may have been taken advantage of, but we have also prospered as no nation has before. The stock market influences the rest of the world. Our economy in general is currently number one in the world. Our unemployment rate is the envy of the world. Finally, our treasury instruments remain the world's safe haven and the dollar is the most widely used currency. The Trump wrecking ball has knocked down the superstructure, and I am afraid it has unalterably damaged the foundation of our country. The re-imposition of tariffs from a 19th century concept heralded by an isolationist, and by all accounts an unsuccessful President McKinley, to a 21st century world dependent on globalization is buffoonery. Up until now, America has exported services, technology and medical advances more than manufactured products. Trump wants us to go back to manufacturing spatulas and tee-shirts from non-existent factories long ago abandoned by American entrepreneurs searching for cheap labor. In order to bring back manufacturing, we need factories and a trained labor pool in automation to effectively compete with countries that have spent years constructing factories to produce cheap goods. It will take decades to accomplish a competitive manufacturing base while the rest of the world, with a dramatic head start, speeds further ahead.

In my opinion, and maybe mine only, the rule of law hangs by a very thin thread. The domino effect of major law firms yielding to Trump's extortion significantly contributes to the disappearance of the rule of law. Attacks on the judiciary cause public skepticism of our system of justice. The low esteem in which the Supreme Court is now held is a fatal blow to the citizenry confidence in our justice system.

Holding academia hostage by threatening and withholding funding over cultural disagreements as opposed to doing a careful audit of what funds are being used for is another example of government by chainsaw analysis.

Eliminating offices which are designed as a check and balance system of Presidential authority, administrative agency authority as well as Congressional authority, leads us to an untrammeled government with no guardrails.

While some of my dissonance surrounding policy might be debatable, I do not think that my observation of Trump's acts of retribution, revenge and meanness can be debated. Trump knows no bounds when he attacks groups on the societal margins, the powerful of Wall Street and the rest of the populace by making impossible promises.

I have previously written about revenge, victimhood and my internal presence of a good wolf and a bad wolf. I am mightily striving to feed the good wolf to fight what I think will be a long fight. To quote a couple of songs I grew up with, Bob Dylan sang: "... if you don't start swimming you'll sink like a stone as the times they are a'changing." Tools I am using to help combat my malaise are: remembering to breath, shunning news whether on the internet or popular media, walking with my wonder dog Lena and loving up my wife. I think back to the chorus of the Burt Bachrach song: "What the world, needs now, is love, sweet love. It's the only thing that there's just too little of. No, not just for some but for everyone."

Be well my friends, find your personal tools and join me overcoming the dreaded "Stendhal Syndrome."