Thank you! I am a general psychiatrist and want to do whatever I can to help. Bless you for hanging in there despite the repercussions you’ve unfairly received!
As of this writing, your episode of the Anthony Davis show has 889k views . You mentioned the conference three times and Anthony didn't amplify it. If you're on as a regular guest, is there a way to get the GoFundMe URL on screen and have him ask you more about the conference? Hosting a conference takes money. Funding WMHC takes money.
Not only is the election at stake, but the 74 million+ people who voted for Trump in 2020 and the millions who will vote for him in 2024 are in a debilitating personality cult led by a political Jim Jones. Journalists delicately like to say Trump is "A Mess," but they seem to have only a passing interest in the ill-health of his followers. If Kamala wins, these millions need intelligent, compassionate help as will the entire country if she loses. These people's personalities are being torn-apart before our eyes.
Speaking anthropologically, which means speaking from experience of studying human behavior in groups,
(“the study of human societies and cultures and their development”) our America is structured as a republic. Our constitution spells out the rules as they should hopefully function and of course that is changeable as we have seen with the present SCOTUS - 5 male Destroyers, one Handmaiden, and three brave women trying to hold the fort down - while democracy is literally in our voting hands - that's the function part. We are the functioners. This could not be a clearer job in our lifetimes than right now. Not voting is a kind of civil job failure. Understanding what to vote for and for whom has now become an exercise and a duty of care for the continuing and necessary health of this country, not to mention all the other countries that rely on us to lead in a democratic manner.
For those in doubt and fenced, the duty of care includes perhaps a more careful set of choices about information gathering and avoidance of clearly hate-based disinformation, healthier choices becoming absolutely necessary for balancing and rebalancing one’s political views. With Republicans themselves leaving the party they have been in for the reasons of their own health and the political health of the country, the choices are getting clearer. Reflect .
I can only say that there seems to be a surge on the cable news channels, CNN and MSNBC, where you hear the terms narcissism applied to trump ( as well as anti-social personality). George Conway just said it the other day. Even the correspondents are using these clinical terms ( perhaps not always accurately but the traits are talked about. I think the dam has burst.
Yes. Although some of these emphases are coming from lay people like Conway, I won't knock it. In particular, I must appreciate Conway's emphasis on how sick Trump is through Conway's mention of the DSM behavioral criteria in particular. It's important, in finally showing that change from addressing Trump as a normal candidate--as of course Dr. Lee and others in WMHC have been doing for so long now.
Thank you, Dr. Lee, for maintaining momentum toward the September Conference. No organization is better poised to write manifold chapters in mental health improvement than the World Mental Health Coalition, and from different perspectives, like a kaleidoscope of continually unfolding content, complete with neutral, warm, cool and colorful shades. This way, the WMHC is etching it's public health profile on the psychological and psychiatric landscape of society, both informally and formally, with greater vividness and continuity than less well informed organizations.
Yes. Thank you again, Dr. Lee. I won't apologize for comparing Trump and his ilk at this point to cornered carnivorous animals. I know they're actually people, but such like those are indeed dangerously reactionary, as they usually are anyway. The need to continue warning is dire. Vote Blue!
There is currently another overwhelming pathological factor in our national life besides Donald Trump.
The Biden-Harris administration has been committing genocide in Gaza since October 2023. (More accurately, it has been perpetrating a Vernichtungskrieg, genocide being one of its components.) Without the tens of billions of dollars of weaponry the US has continuously supplied it with, Israel would not have been able to execute this genocide. The US is not merely complicit in genocide, nor is it merely enabling it, as many people say it is. By supplying the material means that enable it, it has itself been committing genocide since the genocide began nearly a year ago.
The US has been committing this genocide at the sole discretion of Biden. He has conducted this American genocide autocratically, with a regal disdain for the will of the people. A majority of Americans, including 83% of Democratic-leaning voters, want an immediate and permanent ceasefire; the numbers had already started out high in 2023 and have steadily increased. Biden has spoken about his genocide with a forked tongue from the beginning. He continually says “too many Palestinians have died” (without specifying how many tens of thousands of dead Palestinians would be exactly the right number, not too many and not too few)—thus pretending he is against the genocide. At the same time, he has continued to provide the weapons with which Israel has been committing the genocide. He said in June, “I run the world.” This is the behavior of a megalomaniacal, murderous autocrat. This assessment will sound excessively harsh to most Americans. But the rest of the world, and future generations, will not be so kind. During the Mexican War, prosecuted by President Polk on false pretexts for the purpose of stealing half of Mexico (now the American Southwest), Abraham Lincoln, in a speech in the US House of Representatives, called President Polk what in modern language we would describe as a malignant, sociopathic monster drunk on the blood of human beings. It is always better to face reality head-on. Lincoln has set us an example.
But Biden’s behavior is not a personal idiosyncrasy. It is typical of the way the American national-security-military-industrial complex works and thinks. When it was observed to Donald Rumsfeld that the American people disapproved of the fiasco of the then years-old American invasion of Iraq, he replied, with an even more regal disdain than Biden exhibits, “So?” The US national security state has wantonly subjugated, exploited, and slaughtered poor people of color around the world, since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by the thousands, hundreds and thousands, and millions. The US routinely overthrows governments that do not comply with the demands of American corporate interests, and it is not always secretive about its criminal interference in the affairs of other nations. Thus the Republican Henry Kissinger said the US needed “to make the Chilean economy bleed” in order to depose Allende, its democratically-elected president, because he wanted to free Chile from American economic exploitation. Kissinger’s efforts led directly to the seventeen-year brutal dictatorship of Pinochet, who was advised during his reign by Kissinger and Milton Friedman. Similarly, the Democrat Madeleine Albright announced in the late 1990s that Hussein must be removed from power, as if the US has the right to determine the leadership of another sovereign nation. This was immediately after the US had spent nine years covertly supporting Hussein’s war of aggression against Iran, in which nearly half a million soldiers died. A few years later, the Republican George W. Bush committed the criminal invasion of Iraq and removed Hussein from office. Similarly, the Democrat Biden said a few years ago that Putin had to go, as if America’s non-existent moral purity gives it the right to determine the leadership of Russia.
Contrary to the so far overwhelmingly successful US propaganda, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was anything but “unprovoked.” The US, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, has worked through four decades to provoke Russia with the imperialistic expansion of NATO, which it pretends is a defensive organization. NATO lost its defensive raison d’etre in 1991 when the USSR collapsed, and NATO should therefore have then been dissolved, as was its eastern counterpart, the Warsaw Pact. But NATO is not really a defensive organization, so dissolving it was never considered. NATO means “North Atlantic Treaty Organization,” but it has conducted bombing campaigns in Afghanistan and elsewhere far from the North Atlantic, and is now conducting military operations off the coast of China, 5,000 miles from the North Atlantic. In reality NATO is the offensive military alliance of the American empire. Nations applying for NATO membership do not apply to NATO headquarters in Brussels; they apply to Washington. The Secretary General of NATO is not appointed by the collective agreement of the NATO nations; candidates fly to Washington for a job interview with the US president. NATO not only serves American and European global domination, it keeps Europe as the crown jewel of the American empire. As the first Secretary General of NATO famously said in 1952, its purpose is to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and Germany down” (Germany being the most powerful nation in Europe). Since the 1990s, virtually every informed American and European observer, beginning with George F. Kennan, the so-called architect of the Cold War containment policy, strongly warned American administrations against expanding NATO eastward, because doing so would inevitably provoke a military response from Russia. A series of American diplomats solemnly promised Russia that America would not expand NATO “one inch” to the east. Former Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany adamantly opposed Ukrainian membership in NATO when the war-monger George W. Bush proposed it in 2008, because, she said, Russia “would regard it as an act of war.” There was no conceivable defensive reason for the US to promote Ukrainian membership in NATO; the US has no conceivable need for an American “sphere of influence” that extends 5,000 miles to the border of Russia, where the US wants to plant nuclear missiles ten minutes from Moscow, any more than NATO has any rational reason for conducting military operations off the coast of China. Trying to create such a sphere of influence could only be understood by Russia, as Merkel urgently warned, as a massive act of aggression, just as Kennedy regarded Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba as an unacceptable act of aggression and was ready to start WWIII over them. Beginning in the early 1990s, Russian leaders tried to get the US to cooperate in creating a peaceful alliance from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The US always categorically refused. A couple of weeks before the 2022 invasion, Putin was still trying to get a promise from Biden that Ukraine would not obtain NATO membership. Biden refused. A month after the invasion of Ukraine, third-party countries had almost succeeded in negotiating a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine. In response, Biden sent the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to Kyiv to sabotage the negotiations, which he successfully did. The US promoted Ukrainian membership in NATO not for any rational reason, but because the US national-security state requires both enemies and wars. Our chief current designated enemies are Russia, China, Iran, and the Palestinian people. Enemies are created by the steady drip of paranoid propaganda. Every newly designated enemy, from Ho Chi Minh through Saddam Hussein to Xi and Putin, becomes the new Hitler in the propaganda of the US national-security state. US policy, in contrast, is always motivated by the noblest, most altruistic intentions. We are always the good guy, and our designated enemy is always the bad guy.
The US military has long operated a facility in Georgia (the Western Hemisphere Institute of Security Cooperation, formerly the School of the Americas) dedicated to training Latin American security forces in the arts of the torture and mass murder. Those security forces have repeatedly put their training into effect against dissidents and rebels against American economic interests and their local puppets. The CIA operates black sites in Eastern Europe for the rendition, torture and extra-judicial detention of undesirable people whom it disappears. The national-security state is able to commit the crimes it does because it has an annual budget of more than a trillion dollars, larger than the GDP of all but about fifteen nations in the world, and operates in a shroud of secrecy, with little or no public accountability. You cannot vote against the trillion dollar plus national security budget, or against any part of it, no matter how senseless or wasteful or evil it is. You cannot vote against torture or extra-judicial detention committed in your name, or vote against criminal drone assassinations ordered by the president, even though they are literally based on guesswork; kill more civilians than “enemies”; and are as counter-productive as a child would know they would be, creating instead of eliminating enemies. Obama is reported to have “joked” to his aides, “I’m really good at killing people.” You cannot get your representatives to conduct public investigations of any of these evils. The powerful Senator Dianne Feinstein of California was outraged by torture committed by the CIA and tried to investigate it, but was successfully stonewalled by the national-security state. Gina Haspel was in charge of particularly repugnant torture by the CIA that was revealed to the public; her punishment was being appointed to be the Director of the CIA. All of this constitutes essentially the same situation as in totalitarian countries, except that it is conducted in a style suitable for a “democracy.” The American people do not understand how their own empire actually works, not because the evidence is not in front of them in plain sight, but because they do not want to understand it. The US-supported genocide in Gaza is entirely in character for the US national-security state. Though inextricable from the tortured history of Zionism, the genocide is just one more abominable episode in the bloody history of the American empire. The same old movie, with different actors and a different configuration of dramatic elements. And the victims of the American empire are not only foreigners, but Americans themselves.
The people of nations such as South Africa, which have experienced settler-colonialism or other forms of colonialism, recognize the genocide of people of color committed by powerful white people for what it is without needing to conduct research or analysis. Biden is now widely known in Ireland as “Genocide Joe,” after having been celebrated as recently as a couple of years ago as their native son. Major political figures in other nations have identified Israel’s actions as genocide. The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has requested criminal arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The International Court of Justice has ruled, in response to South Africa’s suit, later joined by other nations, that it is plausible that Israel’s actions in Gaza are war crimes. At least 145 of the 193 nations in the United Nations recognize the State of Palestine as a sovereign nation, and the number has been increasing. Netanyahu and Israeli cabinet members, out-Naziing the Nazis, publicly and exultantly use the same kind of language, expressing the same kinds of intentions, that Nazi mass-murderers and torturers used only in private. The reports of Israeli actions in Gaza, and of their treatment of Arabs in Israel, exhibit their gleeful, sadistic joy in torturing and killing Palestinians and Arabs in as many and various and inventive ways as they can think of. No one has any excuse for not recognizing the genocide in Gaza as what it is, except the excuse of being afflicted with mass psychosis, as is the whole of the Israeli Jewish population, which almost unanimously supports the genocide. Decades of living and participating in a settler-colonial project have destroyed the mental health of Jewish Israelis. A great many US Jews recognize that the actions of Israel in Palestine are in reality a betrayal of the authentic values of Judaism. The sociopathic monsters in the Netanyahu government who are conducting the genocide are the worst antisemites in the world, though the call anyone who opposes their policies antisemitic. Jamie Raskin, the US Representative from Maryland, who is Jewish, said that Netanyahu is the worst Jewish leader in more than two thousand years. Israel is destroying not only the Palestinians; it is destroying Israel itself, and defiling the reputation and self-regard of a justly proud people.
Probably one once thought that a nation’s ability to restrain itself from committing genocide was a baseline for being considered a civilized nation. If a nation is unable to restrain itself from committing genocide, how is it any better than Nazi Germany? One would probably have thought that perpetrators of genocide would be considered to be monsters, as Adolph Hitler is. But now in 2024, the US under the Biden-Harris administration has normalized genocide. It projects its guilt onto people who oppose genocide by condemning and politically ostracizing them for “antisemitism,” which was never a major issue in public discourse until it was required as the Israeli lobby’s first rhetorical line of defense of Israel’s genocide. The pro-genocide propagandists reverse the roles of perpetrators and victims by calling Israel’s mass murder of Palestinians “self-defense.” With their propaganda they try to gaslight the world into thinking it does not see what it sees. But the world is not deceived.
We continue to learn more and more about the totalitarian propaganda methods of the Israeli lobby, secretly conducted in connivance with the Israeli government, and in flagrant violation of the American law against unregistered foreign agents. No nation interferes in American elections and domestic politics more than Israel does. Its propaganda methods started more than a century ago. Their totalitarian purpose is to make it impossible to criticize the policies of the Israeli government, by pretending that the propagandists are really fighting antisemitism, not trying to silence honest criticism. One of their methods is to groom American politicians from the time they first enter politics, by giving them large donations, on which they become dependent, and smearing their electoral opponents. These US politicians soon learn that if they deviate from Israeli government policy even slightly, they themselves will be smeared, and the donations will stop and will go to their opponents instead. Witness the recent defeat of two members of the Squad by means of deploying the fantastic sum of twenty or twenty-five millions dollars for two House races, donated by the Israeli lobby. What politician is going to risk being the target of such treatment? Hence the recent invitation and rapturous reception of the war criminal Netanyahu by the venal members of the US Congress. Question: which American politician has received more campaign donations from the Israeli lobby than any other American politician over the course of their career? Answer: Joe Biden. More than four millions dollars. If someone had contributed more than four millions dollars to advance your career, might you think you owed them something? Particularly if you knew that if you deviated from their instructions, they would retaliate by destroying your career?
A serving member of the US Air Force self-immolated in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington in protest against the American role in the genocide. Many administration officials have resigned as a matter of conscience over it. Kamala Harris, who until July 21 could not have expected to rise to a position of higher authority than the vice-presidency until 2028, could have resigned as well, and made herself the world’s chief spokesperson against the genocide. She would have become a world-historical hero if she had done so. Instead, in her acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention, she effusively defended Israel’s “right to defend itself” by perpetrating mass murder of the population of the territory it has been illegally occupying for more than half a century and is legally obligated to protect. She offered Palestinians nothing more than a verbal scrap, mumbling something about how they deserve “self-determination”—which is Israeli-propaganda code meaning that unlike Jews, Palestinians will never be allowed to have their own nation. Harris even refused to allow any Palestinian delegate a brief speaking slot at the convention. We’re all equal in Harris’s America, but all the rest of us are more equal than Palestinians. Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff spoke a good deal about his signature issue, antisemitism, but if he ever even mentioned the word “Palestinians,” I can’t remember his doing so. Palestinians are being massively and sadistically tortured and annihilated in the tens of thousands by the Israelis, but the real problem in the world is newly-discovered isolated instances of antisemitism.
Harris vehemently declared that the US must remain the militarily most powerful nation in the world, meaning that less than 5% of the world’s population should always spend more than a trillion dollars a year so it can kill and destroy any of the other 95% of the world’s population on the largest industrial scale and with the greatest efficiency possible, and be able to destroy all life on the planet in the next ten or twenty minutes, if the occupant of the White House should decide to do so. Because everyone knows that violence is the best way to spread democracy, peace, prosperity, and happiness throughout the world. Even though the US national-security state has been spreading massive violence throughout the world for three-quarters of a century and more, and its methods still haven’t succeeded in spreading democracy, peace, prosperity, and happiness throughout the world. Because the rest of the world is so evil and incorrigible that the US must continue to spend more than a trillion dollars a year spreading violence throughout the world in order to spread democracy, peace, prosperity, and happiness throughout the world.
This raises a serious question for us. It is all very well to celebrate the “joy, peace, and exuberance” many feel about the Democratic Convention. But for all we know, future generations looking back over the decades and centuries will regard Biden as the evil president, not Trump. Notwithstanding all the evil Trump did as president, he nevertheless was not guilty of genocide. How do you wash out the stain of having committed genocide? And Harris’s silence on the genocide looks like complicity in it. She certainly committed herself fully, as all presidents do, both to Israeli government policy, whatever it happens to be at the moment, and to the US national-security-military-industrial complex, with its insatiable appetite for the evils of imperial domination and warfare.
For the rest of us, in order to celebrate the sanity of the Democrats it would be necessary to psychologically dissociate their sanity from their insanity. Dissociation, or splitting, is one of the differentiae of pathological narcissism. Repression is the chief defense mechanism of the healthy personality; splitting is the chief defense mechanism of the pathological narcissist. This dilemma is an immediate existential issue in 2024 for hundreds of thousands or millions of Americans. Since I live in a blue state, I have the luxury of not voting for the genocidal Democrats, and I will not. But if I lived in a swing state, I honestly don’t know what I would do. I might well feel compelled to vote for the Democratic ticket in order to prevent Trump from imposing fascism on America for generations. But where would I find “joy, peace, and exuberance” as I continued to be confronted every day with photographs of dead Palestinian children, of Palestinian children whose legs had to be amputated without anesthetics, of Palestinian children orphaned by the munitions the Biden-Harris administration continues to send to Israel, because, as Biden said last October, “We’re not doing a damn thing except supporting Israel”?
These issues go far beyond the genocide in Gaza. Trump did not create the America that made him president. This America was created by the American national-security-military-industrial complex, the American plutocracy, and the American political oligarchy. The American political oligarchy is conveniently configured as a so-called two-party system, which is really a one-party system with two wings, one right (now fascist) wing, and one center-right wing. Almost all Congressional legislation has been passed on a bipartisan basis. A recent, well-publicized academic study found that if you belong to the upper .1% on the economic ladder (the plutocracy), you almost always get the legislation you want from the US Congress. If you belong to the next 10% or 20% or so (the professional-administrative class), you sometimes get the legislation you want. If you belong to the lower 80% or so, you never get the legislation you want. How does this magic happen? Competition between the two parties is a charade. The two parties are not real parties, representing people from the ground up, as the Progressive Party in the nineteenth century was. The two parties are niche corporations, whose business model is, first, collecting campaign funds from plutocrats, together with the legislation the plutocrats want, written by their lobbyists and lawyers, often introduced and passed verbatim; second, recruiting candidates who are willing to repeat their party’s propaganda while actually voting for the plutocrats’ agenda. Thus Hillary Clinton told her donors at one of her quarter-million dollar private speeches in 2016, a politician must have two sets of policies. She needs to advocate one set of policies to the people when she campaigns; and tell her real policies to her donors in private. Grass-roots activists who try to work within the Democratic Party locally find that they are neutralized or excluded by those who are financed by the national party. The real political opponents of the two parties are not each other, but everybody else, who are shut out of the political process by their political duopoly. The real function of the Democratic Party oligarchs is to shut down progressive, i.e., non-corporate and non-national-security state politicians in their own party. Thus Nancy Pelosi devoted most of her energy to fighting not the Republicans, but the progressives in her own party. The Democratic Party, the party of the people, no longer represents the people, whom it began to abandon in the 1970s under Carter and completely abandoned in the 1990s under Clinton. That is why working people do not vote for Democrats any more, though the corporate mainstream media frames their desertion as a problem with Democratic “messaging.” Democrats in office have not prevented America from descending into its present condition. The current impoverishment and cultural devastation of America was produced by long, hard work by both the Democratic and the Republican Parties, and is what created the conditions that gave rise to Trump. There are of course differences between the two parties that are important in many respects for many people, but from a larger historical perspective there is little or no difference between the two parties. Biden was one of the major architects of the prison-industrial complex; of the militarization of the police; of the legislation enabling the financial industry to extract every last penny from financially desperate Americans; of the legislation enabling the financial industry nearly to destroy the world economy, and to destroy the lives of millions of Americans with its criminal activity, and then to be rewarded with trillions of dollars of taxpayer money; and of the criminal invasion of Iraq in 2003—among other abominations. One of the great benefits of the two-party charade for the plutocrats, oligarchs, and war machine is that it perpetuates a never-ending game of divide-and-conquer. The people devote themselves to fighting for one party against the other, and never look up to realize that their real enemies are the plutocracy, the oligarchy, and the imperial fascist state-within-a-state of the military-industrial complex. Our current choice between the genocidal Democratic Party and the fascist Republican Party is a perfect example of the divide-and-conquer power of the duopoly. Again and again, it is “heads we win, tails you lose.”
Perhaps, rather than looking at the two parties as constituting a dichotomy, as they pretend to be, it would be more realistic and helpful to look at them as representing different aspects or phases of a single, ongoing historical process. The last conservative president was Eisenhower; the current Republican Party is a fascist party. But can anyone really believe that a healthy future of “joy, peace, and exuberance” lies with the genocidal Democratic Party? If Trump is elected, things will almost certainly be even worse for the Palestinians than if Harris is elected. But how does one advocate for the relative “health” of the lesser of two evils without succumbing to the pathology of dissociation and the mass psychosis that afflicted Americans before Trump ever appeared? Trump must be defeated, and the Trump mass psychosis must be healed. But how is it possible for the American people not to be infected themselves by the mass psychosis of the genocide they are perpetrating? We are currently pretending that genocide is merely another policy issue, and that it can be postponed until 2025 in order to defeat Trump, while we nurse nebulous hopes that the policy will then somehow be rescinded by the national-security state. This is magical thinking, and magical thinking inevitably leads to a scene like the one in which a cartoon character finds himself treading air after he walks off a cliff.
Alexander Chimes, I found it interesting and intellectually edifying to read all of your impassioned, conceptually rigorous comments, including your concerns about duopoly. Maximally traumatic issues such as war crimes and genocide tend to proceed to their legal conclusions regardless of who is in power.
Thank you, Mr. Tumpkin. I had not known I had all that bottled up inside me until I looked up when I finished and saw what time it was. I think that since 2016 we’ve all been getting an involuntary education at the University of Doomscrolling. I’ve been appalled and frustrated during these last eight years about the amount of time I’ve been spending reading the news nearly every day. My field of interest is not history, and I had never wanted to learn as much about strongmen and fascism, or the politics of Israel and Palestine, among other things, as we’ve been forced to learn. But writing out my thoughts makes me realize I haven’t just been doomscrolling, helplessly riding a roller-coaster of hopes and fears about things I could not understand or control. I’ve actually been learning something. And we are fortunate we have people like Dr. Lee to help us clarify the chaos. Being an American before 2016 meant (for most of us) that we could live “outside history”—or so we naively assumed. It was nice while it lasted. We do not live outside history, and never did. The unhappy things we’ve been learning about are part of the shape and fabric of our world and our lives. We just hadn’t realized it. Childhood’s end, you might say.
Reading can weary the eyes or exercise the eyes, and driving through devices requires patience and commitment. Actually, we may all go through new, eye-opening experiences, including myself in my 57th year, and this may have a renewing effect over time, physically, mentally, socially and spiritually. Reading, rightly directed, may balance our vision and perspective, showing that left may be right and right may be left, but wrong will be wrong and right will be be right. Frequently, physical and emotional trauma are impactful expressions of life's trends and conditions, with potential to make us better and stronger in various ways. May God bless your intellectual journey, Mr. Chimes, to the end that you may continue to be a source of enlightenment to individuals and communities! Brain and balance may accomplish what bone and bat cannot do, and spirituality enhances all faculties and capabilities.
Thank you! I am a general psychiatrist and want to do whatever I can to help. Bless you for hanging in there despite the repercussions you’ve unfairly received!
As of this writing, your episode of the Anthony Davis show has 889k views . You mentioned the conference three times and Anthony didn't amplify it. If you're on as a regular guest, is there a way to get the GoFundMe URL on screen and have him ask you more about the conference? Hosting a conference takes money. Funding WMHC takes money.
Not only is the election at stake, but the 74 million+ people who voted for Trump in 2020 and the millions who will vote for him in 2024 are in a debilitating personality cult led by a political Jim Jones. Journalists delicately like to say Trump is "A Mess," but they seem to have only a passing interest in the ill-health of his followers. If Kamala wins, these millions need intelligent, compassionate help as will the entire country if she loses. These people's personalities are being torn-apart before our eyes.
Speaking anthropologically, which means speaking from experience of studying human behavior in groups,
(“the study of human societies and cultures and their development”) our America is structured as a republic. Our constitution spells out the rules as they should hopefully function and of course that is changeable as we have seen with the present SCOTUS - 5 male Destroyers, one Handmaiden, and three brave women trying to hold the fort down - while democracy is literally in our voting hands - that's the function part. We are the functioners. This could not be a clearer job in our lifetimes than right now. Not voting is a kind of civil job failure. Understanding what to vote for and for whom has now become an exercise and a duty of care for the continuing and necessary health of this country, not to mention all the other countries that rely on us to lead in a democratic manner.
For those in doubt and fenced, the duty of care includes perhaps a more careful set of choices about information gathering and avoidance of clearly hate-based disinformation, healthier choices becoming absolutely necessary for balancing and rebalancing one’s political views. With Republicans themselves leaving the party they have been in for the reasons of their own health and the political health of the country, the choices are getting clearer. Reflect .
I can only say that there seems to be a surge on the cable news channels, CNN and MSNBC, where you hear the terms narcissism applied to trump ( as well as anti-social personality). George Conway just said it the other day. Even the correspondents are using these clinical terms ( perhaps not always accurately but the traits are talked about. I think the dam has burst.
Yes. Although some of these emphases are coming from lay people like Conway, I won't knock it. In particular, I must appreciate Conway's emphasis on how sick Trump is through Conway's mention of the DSM behavioral criteria in particular. It's important, in finally showing that change from addressing Trump as a normal candidate--as of course Dr. Lee and others in WMHC have been doing for so long now.
Great interview/discussion with Anthony, Bandy! And congrats on future ones. Feels like opportunity time for you and your message too. Mil gracias...
What does it cost to attend the conference?
Thank you, Dr. Lee, for maintaining momentum toward the September Conference. No organization is better poised to write manifold chapters in mental health improvement than the World Mental Health Coalition, and from different perspectives, like a kaleidoscope of continually unfolding content, complete with neutral, warm, cool and colorful shades. This way, the WMHC is etching it's public health profile on the psychological and psychiatric landscape of society, both informally and formally, with greater vividness and continuity than less well informed organizations.
Yes. Thank you again, Dr. Lee. I won't apologize for comparing Trump and his ilk at this point to cornered carnivorous animals. I know they're actually people, but such like those are indeed dangerously reactionary, as they usually are anyway. The need to continue warning is dire. Vote Blue!
Part 1
There is currently another overwhelming pathological factor in our national life besides Donald Trump.
The Biden-Harris administration has been committing genocide in Gaza since October 2023. (More accurately, it has been perpetrating a Vernichtungskrieg, genocide being one of its components.) Without the tens of billions of dollars of weaponry the US has continuously supplied it with, Israel would not have been able to execute this genocide. The US is not merely complicit in genocide, nor is it merely enabling it, as many people say it is. By supplying the material means that enable it, it has itself been committing genocide since the genocide began nearly a year ago.
The US has been committing this genocide at the sole discretion of Biden. He has conducted this American genocide autocratically, with a regal disdain for the will of the people. A majority of Americans, including 83% of Democratic-leaning voters, want an immediate and permanent ceasefire; the numbers had already started out high in 2023 and have steadily increased. Biden has spoken about his genocide with a forked tongue from the beginning. He continually says “too many Palestinians have died” (without specifying how many tens of thousands of dead Palestinians would be exactly the right number, not too many and not too few)—thus pretending he is against the genocide. At the same time, he has continued to provide the weapons with which Israel has been committing the genocide. He said in June, “I run the world.” This is the behavior of a megalomaniacal, murderous autocrat. This assessment will sound excessively harsh to most Americans. But the rest of the world, and future generations, will not be so kind. During the Mexican War, prosecuted by President Polk on false pretexts for the purpose of stealing half of Mexico (now the American Southwest), Abraham Lincoln, in a speech in the US House of Representatives, called President Polk what in modern language we would describe as a malignant, sociopathic monster drunk on the blood of human beings. It is always better to face reality head-on. Lincoln has set us an example.
But Biden’s behavior is not a personal idiosyncrasy. It is typical of the way the American national-security-military-industrial complex works and thinks. When it was observed to Donald Rumsfeld that the American people disapproved of the fiasco of the then years-old American invasion of Iraq, he replied, with an even more regal disdain than Biden exhibits, “So?” The US national security state has wantonly subjugated, exploited, and slaughtered poor people of color around the world, since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by the thousands, hundreds and thousands, and millions. The US routinely overthrows governments that do not comply with the demands of American corporate interests, and it is not always secretive about its criminal interference in the affairs of other nations. Thus the Republican Henry Kissinger said the US needed “to make the Chilean economy bleed” in order to depose Allende, its democratically-elected president, because he wanted to free Chile from American economic exploitation. Kissinger’s efforts led directly to the seventeen-year brutal dictatorship of Pinochet, who was advised during his reign by Kissinger and Milton Friedman. Similarly, the Democrat Madeleine Albright announced in the late 1990s that Hussein must be removed from power, as if the US has the right to determine the leadership of another sovereign nation. This was immediately after the US had spent nine years covertly supporting Hussein’s war of aggression against Iran, in which nearly half a million soldiers died. A few years later, the Republican George W. Bush committed the criminal invasion of Iraq and removed Hussein from office. Similarly, the Democrat Biden said a few years ago that Putin had to go, as if America’s non-existent moral purity gives it the right to determine the leadership of Russia.
Contrary to the so far overwhelmingly successful US propaganda, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was anything but “unprovoked.” The US, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, has worked through four decades to provoke Russia with the imperialistic expansion of NATO, which it pretends is a defensive organization. NATO lost its defensive raison d’etre in 1991 when the USSR collapsed, and NATO should therefore have then been dissolved, as was its eastern counterpart, the Warsaw Pact. But NATO is not really a defensive organization, so dissolving it was never considered. NATO means “North Atlantic Treaty Organization,” but it has conducted bombing campaigns in Afghanistan and elsewhere far from the North Atlantic, and is now conducting military operations off the coast of China, 5,000 miles from the North Atlantic. In reality NATO is the offensive military alliance of the American empire. Nations applying for NATO membership do not apply to NATO headquarters in Brussels; they apply to Washington. The Secretary General of NATO is not appointed by the collective agreement of the NATO nations; candidates fly to Washington for a job interview with the US president. NATO not only serves American and European global domination, it keeps Europe as the crown jewel of the American empire. As the first Secretary General of NATO famously said in 1952, its purpose is to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and Germany down” (Germany being the most powerful nation in Europe). Since the 1990s, virtually every informed American and European observer, beginning with George F. Kennan, the so-called architect of the Cold War containment policy, strongly warned American administrations against expanding NATO eastward, because doing so would inevitably provoke a military response from Russia. A series of American diplomats solemnly promised Russia that America would not expand NATO “one inch” to the east. Former Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany adamantly opposed Ukrainian membership in NATO when the war-monger George W. Bush proposed it in 2008, because, she said, Russia “would regard it as an act of war.” There was no conceivable defensive reason for the US to promote Ukrainian membership in NATO; the US has no conceivable need for an American “sphere of influence” that extends 5,000 miles to the border of Russia, where the US wants to plant nuclear missiles ten minutes from Moscow, any more than NATO has any rational reason for conducting military operations off the coast of China. Trying to create such a sphere of influence could only be understood by Russia, as Merkel urgently warned, as a massive act of aggression, just as Kennedy regarded Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba as an unacceptable act of aggression and was ready to start WWIII over them. Beginning in the early 1990s, Russian leaders tried to get the US to cooperate in creating a peaceful alliance from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The US always categorically refused. A couple of weeks before the 2022 invasion, Putin was still trying to get a promise from Biden that Ukraine would not obtain NATO membership. Biden refused. A month after the invasion of Ukraine, third-party countries had almost succeeded in negotiating a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine. In response, Biden sent the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to Kyiv to sabotage the negotiations, which he successfully did. The US promoted Ukrainian membership in NATO not for any rational reason, but because the US national-security state requires both enemies and wars. Our chief current designated enemies are Russia, China, Iran, and the Palestinian people. Enemies are created by the steady drip of paranoid propaganda. Every newly designated enemy, from Ho Chi Minh through Saddam Hussein to Xi and Putin, becomes the new Hitler in the propaganda of the US national-security state. US policy, in contrast, is always motivated by the noblest, most altruistic intentions. We are always the good guy, and our designated enemy is always the bad guy.
Part 2
The US military has long operated a facility in Georgia (the Western Hemisphere Institute of Security Cooperation, formerly the School of the Americas) dedicated to training Latin American security forces in the arts of the torture and mass murder. Those security forces have repeatedly put their training into effect against dissidents and rebels against American economic interests and their local puppets. The CIA operates black sites in Eastern Europe for the rendition, torture and extra-judicial detention of undesirable people whom it disappears. The national-security state is able to commit the crimes it does because it has an annual budget of more than a trillion dollars, larger than the GDP of all but about fifteen nations in the world, and operates in a shroud of secrecy, with little or no public accountability. You cannot vote against the trillion dollar plus national security budget, or against any part of it, no matter how senseless or wasteful or evil it is. You cannot vote against torture or extra-judicial detention committed in your name, or vote against criminal drone assassinations ordered by the president, even though they are literally based on guesswork; kill more civilians than “enemies”; and are as counter-productive as a child would know they would be, creating instead of eliminating enemies. Obama is reported to have “joked” to his aides, “I’m really good at killing people.” You cannot get your representatives to conduct public investigations of any of these evils. The powerful Senator Dianne Feinstein of California was outraged by torture committed by the CIA and tried to investigate it, but was successfully stonewalled by the national-security state. Gina Haspel was in charge of particularly repugnant torture by the CIA that was revealed to the public; her punishment was being appointed to be the Director of the CIA. All of this constitutes essentially the same situation as in totalitarian countries, except that it is conducted in a style suitable for a “democracy.” The American people do not understand how their own empire actually works, not because the evidence is not in front of them in plain sight, but because they do not want to understand it. The US-supported genocide in Gaza is entirely in character for the US national-security state. Though inextricable from the tortured history of Zionism, the genocide is just one more abominable episode in the bloody history of the American empire. The same old movie, with different actors and a different configuration of dramatic elements. And the victims of the American empire are not only foreigners, but Americans themselves.
The people of nations such as South Africa, which have experienced settler-colonialism or other forms of colonialism, recognize the genocide of people of color committed by powerful white people for what it is without needing to conduct research or analysis. Biden is now widely known in Ireland as “Genocide Joe,” after having been celebrated as recently as a couple of years ago as their native son. Major political figures in other nations have identified Israel’s actions as genocide. The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has requested criminal arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The International Court of Justice has ruled, in response to South Africa’s suit, later joined by other nations, that it is plausible that Israel’s actions in Gaza are war crimes. At least 145 of the 193 nations in the United Nations recognize the State of Palestine as a sovereign nation, and the number has been increasing. Netanyahu and Israeli cabinet members, out-Naziing the Nazis, publicly and exultantly use the same kind of language, expressing the same kinds of intentions, that Nazi mass-murderers and torturers used only in private. The reports of Israeli actions in Gaza, and of their treatment of Arabs in Israel, exhibit their gleeful, sadistic joy in torturing and killing Palestinians and Arabs in as many and various and inventive ways as they can think of. No one has any excuse for not recognizing the genocide in Gaza as what it is, except the excuse of being afflicted with mass psychosis, as is the whole of the Israeli Jewish population, which almost unanimously supports the genocide. Decades of living and participating in a settler-colonial project have destroyed the mental health of Jewish Israelis. A great many US Jews recognize that the actions of Israel in Palestine are in reality a betrayal of the authentic values of Judaism. The sociopathic monsters in the Netanyahu government who are conducting the genocide are the worst antisemites in the world, though the call anyone who opposes their policies antisemitic. Jamie Raskin, the US Representative from Maryland, who is Jewish, said that Netanyahu is the worst Jewish leader in more than two thousand years. Israel is destroying not only the Palestinians; it is destroying Israel itself, and defiling the reputation and self-regard of a justly proud people.
Probably one once thought that a nation’s ability to restrain itself from committing genocide was a baseline for being considered a civilized nation. If a nation is unable to restrain itself from committing genocide, how is it any better than Nazi Germany? One would probably have thought that perpetrators of genocide would be considered to be monsters, as Adolph Hitler is. But now in 2024, the US under the Biden-Harris administration has normalized genocide. It projects its guilt onto people who oppose genocide by condemning and politically ostracizing them for “antisemitism,” which was never a major issue in public discourse until it was required as the Israeli lobby’s first rhetorical line of defense of Israel’s genocide. The pro-genocide propagandists reverse the roles of perpetrators and victims by calling Israel’s mass murder of Palestinians “self-defense.” With their propaganda they try to gaslight the world into thinking it does not see what it sees. But the world is not deceived.
We continue to learn more and more about the totalitarian propaganda methods of the Israeli lobby, secretly conducted in connivance with the Israeli government, and in flagrant violation of the American law against unregistered foreign agents. No nation interferes in American elections and domestic politics more than Israel does. Its propaganda methods started more than a century ago. Their totalitarian purpose is to make it impossible to criticize the policies of the Israeli government, by pretending that the propagandists are really fighting antisemitism, not trying to silence honest criticism. One of their methods is to groom American politicians from the time they first enter politics, by giving them large donations, on which they become dependent, and smearing their electoral opponents. These US politicians soon learn that if they deviate from Israeli government policy even slightly, they themselves will be smeared, and the donations will stop and will go to their opponents instead. Witness the recent defeat of two members of the Squad by means of deploying the fantastic sum of twenty or twenty-five millions dollars for two House races, donated by the Israeli lobby. What politician is going to risk being the target of such treatment? Hence the recent invitation and rapturous reception of the war criminal Netanyahu by the venal members of the US Congress. Question: which American politician has received more campaign donations from the Israeli lobby than any other American politician over the course of their career? Answer: Joe Biden. More than four millions dollars. If someone had contributed more than four millions dollars to advance your career, might you think you owed them something? Particularly if you knew that if you deviated from their instructions, they would retaliate by destroying your career?
A serving member of the US Air Force self-immolated in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington in protest against the American role in the genocide. Many administration officials have resigned as a matter of conscience over it. Kamala Harris, who until July 21 could not have expected to rise to a position of higher authority than the vice-presidency until 2028, could have resigned as well, and made herself the world’s chief spokesperson against the genocide. She would have become a world-historical hero if she had done so. Instead, in her acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention, she effusively defended Israel’s “right to defend itself” by perpetrating mass murder of the population of the territory it has been illegally occupying for more than half a century and is legally obligated to protect. She offered Palestinians nothing more than a verbal scrap, mumbling something about how they deserve “self-determination”—which is Israeli-propaganda code meaning that unlike Jews, Palestinians will never be allowed to have their own nation. Harris even refused to allow any Palestinian delegate a brief speaking slot at the convention. We’re all equal in Harris’s America, but all the rest of us are more equal than Palestinians. Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff spoke a good deal about his signature issue, antisemitism, but if he ever even mentioned the word “Palestinians,” I can’t remember his doing so. Palestinians are being massively and sadistically tortured and annihilated in the tens of thousands by the Israelis, but the real problem in the world is newly-discovered isolated instances of antisemitism.
Part 3
Harris vehemently declared that the US must remain the militarily most powerful nation in the world, meaning that less than 5% of the world’s population should always spend more than a trillion dollars a year so it can kill and destroy any of the other 95% of the world’s population on the largest industrial scale and with the greatest efficiency possible, and be able to destroy all life on the planet in the next ten or twenty minutes, if the occupant of the White House should decide to do so. Because everyone knows that violence is the best way to spread democracy, peace, prosperity, and happiness throughout the world. Even though the US national-security state has been spreading massive violence throughout the world for three-quarters of a century and more, and its methods still haven’t succeeded in spreading democracy, peace, prosperity, and happiness throughout the world. Because the rest of the world is so evil and incorrigible that the US must continue to spend more than a trillion dollars a year spreading violence throughout the world in order to spread democracy, peace, prosperity, and happiness throughout the world.
This raises a serious question for us. It is all very well to celebrate the “joy, peace, and exuberance” many feel about the Democratic Convention. But for all we know, future generations looking back over the decades and centuries will regard Biden as the evil president, not Trump. Notwithstanding all the evil Trump did as president, he nevertheless was not guilty of genocide. How do you wash out the stain of having committed genocide? And Harris’s silence on the genocide looks like complicity in it. She certainly committed herself fully, as all presidents do, both to Israeli government policy, whatever it happens to be at the moment, and to the US national-security-military-industrial complex, with its insatiable appetite for the evils of imperial domination and warfare.
For the rest of us, in order to celebrate the sanity of the Democrats it would be necessary to psychologically dissociate their sanity from their insanity. Dissociation, or splitting, is one of the differentiae of pathological narcissism. Repression is the chief defense mechanism of the healthy personality; splitting is the chief defense mechanism of the pathological narcissist. This dilemma is an immediate existential issue in 2024 for hundreds of thousands or millions of Americans. Since I live in a blue state, I have the luxury of not voting for the genocidal Democrats, and I will not. But if I lived in a swing state, I honestly don’t know what I would do. I might well feel compelled to vote for the Democratic ticket in order to prevent Trump from imposing fascism on America for generations. But where would I find “joy, peace, and exuberance” as I continued to be confronted every day with photographs of dead Palestinian children, of Palestinian children whose legs had to be amputated without anesthetics, of Palestinian children orphaned by the munitions the Biden-Harris administration continues to send to Israel, because, as Biden said last October, “We’re not doing a damn thing except supporting Israel”?
These issues go far beyond the genocide in Gaza. Trump did not create the America that made him president. This America was created by the American national-security-military-industrial complex, the American plutocracy, and the American political oligarchy. The American political oligarchy is conveniently configured as a so-called two-party system, which is really a one-party system with two wings, one right (now fascist) wing, and one center-right wing. Almost all Congressional legislation has been passed on a bipartisan basis. A recent, well-publicized academic study found that if you belong to the upper .1% on the economic ladder (the plutocracy), you almost always get the legislation you want from the US Congress. If you belong to the next 10% or 20% or so (the professional-administrative class), you sometimes get the legislation you want. If you belong to the lower 80% or so, you never get the legislation you want. How does this magic happen? Competition between the two parties is a charade. The two parties are not real parties, representing people from the ground up, as the Progressive Party in the nineteenth century was. The two parties are niche corporations, whose business model is, first, collecting campaign funds from plutocrats, together with the legislation the plutocrats want, written by their lobbyists and lawyers, often introduced and passed verbatim; second, recruiting candidates who are willing to repeat their party’s propaganda while actually voting for the plutocrats’ agenda. Thus Hillary Clinton told her donors at one of her quarter-million dollar private speeches in 2016, a politician must have two sets of policies. She needs to advocate one set of policies to the people when she campaigns; and tell her real policies to her donors in private. Grass-roots activists who try to work within the Democratic Party locally find that they are neutralized or excluded by those who are financed by the national party. The real political opponents of the two parties are not each other, but everybody else, who are shut out of the political process by their political duopoly. The real function of the Democratic Party oligarchs is to shut down progressive, i.e., non-corporate and non-national-security state politicians in their own party. Thus Nancy Pelosi devoted most of her energy to fighting not the Republicans, but the progressives in her own party. The Democratic Party, the party of the people, no longer represents the people, whom it began to abandon in the 1970s under Carter and completely abandoned in the 1990s under Clinton. That is why working people do not vote for Democrats any more, though the corporate mainstream media frames their desertion as a problem with Democratic “messaging.” Democrats in office have not prevented America from descending into its present condition. The current impoverishment and cultural devastation of America was produced by long, hard work by both the Democratic and the Republican Parties, and is what created the conditions that gave rise to Trump. There are of course differences between the two parties that are important in many respects for many people, but from a larger historical perspective there is little or no difference between the two parties. Biden was one of the major architects of the prison-industrial complex; of the militarization of the police; of the legislation enabling the financial industry to extract every last penny from financially desperate Americans; of the legislation enabling the financial industry nearly to destroy the world economy, and to destroy the lives of millions of Americans with its criminal activity, and then to be rewarded with trillions of dollars of taxpayer money; and of the criminal invasion of Iraq in 2003—among other abominations. One of the great benefits of the two-party charade for the plutocrats, oligarchs, and war machine is that it perpetuates a never-ending game of divide-and-conquer. The people devote themselves to fighting for one party against the other, and never look up to realize that their real enemies are the plutocracy, the oligarchy, and the imperial fascist state-within-a-state of the military-industrial complex. Our current choice between the genocidal Democratic Party and the fascist Republican Party is a perfect example of the divide-and-conquer power of the duopoly. Again and again, it is “heads we win, tails you lose.”
Perhaps, rather than looking at the two parties as constituting a dichotomy, as they pretend to be, it would be more realistic and helpful to look at them as representing different aspects or phases of a single, ongoing historical process. The last conservative president was Eisenhower; the current Republican Party is a fascist party. But can anyone really believe that a healthy future of “joy, peace, and exuberance” lies with the genocidal Democratic Party? If Trump is elected, things will almost certainly be even worse for the Palestinians than if Harris is elected. But how does one advocate for the relative “health” of the lesser of two evils without succumbing to the pathology of dissociation and the mass psychosis that afflicted Americans before Trump ever appeared? Trump must be defeated, and the Trump mass psychosis must be healed. But how is it possible for the American people not to be infected themselves by the mass psychosis of the genocide they are perpetrating? We are currently pretending that genocide is merely another policy issue, and that it can be postponed until 2025 in order to defeat Trump, while we nurse nebulous hopes that the policy will then somehow be rescinded by the national-security state. This is magical thinking, and magical thinking inevitably leads to a scene like the one in which a cartoon character finds himself treading air after he walks off a cliff.
Alexander Chimes, I found it interesting and intellectually edifying to read all of your impassioned, conceptually rigorous comments, including your concerns about duopoly. Maximally traumatic issues such as war crimes and genocide tend to proceed to their legal conclusions regardless of who is in power.
Thank you, Mr. Tumpkin. I had not known I had all that bottled up inside me until I looked up when I finished and saw what time it was. I think that since 2016 we’ve all been getting an involuntary education at the University of Doomscrolling. I’ve been appalled and frustrated during these last eight years about the amount of time I’ve been spending reading the news nearly every day. My field of interest is not history, and I had never wanted to learn as much about strongmen and fascism, or the politics of Israel and Palestine, among other things, as we’ve been forced to learn. But writing out my thoughts makes me realize I haven’t just been doomscrolling, helplessly riding a roller-coaster of hopes and fears about things I could not understand or control. I’ve actually been learning something. And we are fortunate we have people like Dr. Lee to help us clarify the chaos. Being an American before 2016 meant (for most of us) that we could live “outside history”—or so we naively assumed. It was nice while it lasted. We do not live outside history, and never did. The unhappy things we’ve been learning about are part of the shape and fabric of our world and our lives. We just hadn’t realized it. Childhood’s end, you might say.
Reading can weary the eyes or exercise the eyes, and driving through devices requires patience and commitment. Actually, we may all go through new, eye-opening experiences, including myself in my 57th year, and this may have a renewing effect over time, physically, mentally, socially and spiritually. Reading, rightly directed, may balance our vision and perspective, showing that left may be right and right may be left, but wrong will be wrong and right will be be right. Frequently, physical and emotional trauma are impactful expressions of life's trends and conditions, with potential to make us better and stronger in various ways. May God bless your intellectual journey, Mr. Chimes, to the end that you may continue to be a source of enlightenment to individuals and communities! Brain and balance may accomplish what bone and bat cannot do, and spirituality enhances all faculties and capabilities.
Thank you for your encouraging, kind words, and God bless you too, Mr. Tumpkin.
I must respond with "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good."