The sociopath next door... or inside
Thus tweets conservative commentator Bethany Mandel, finally saying right out loud what Trumpworld has been hinting at through all the weeks of COVID denialism and minimalization since the lockdown began. The overwhelming majority of Americans, thank God, disagree with her. But it's good to have the Trumpophile cards all out on the table.
#Grandma Killer became-excuse the expression- a viral thread on Twitter shortly after she posted that chilling, though remarkable, tweet. You can read the responses she got here,
My two favorites: "'Sociopath' is shorter."
A little harsh. I'm reluctant to call Ms. Mandel a sociopath. I've never met the lady. But her tweet sure makes her sound like one.
The other is from one inclined to indulge in a probably-futile exercise in logic with a person who seems to utterly lack a moral compass:
You're a grandma killer yes. But you're also a nurse killer, a doctor killer, a cop killer, a grocery clerk killer, a student killer, a 5 year old killer, a bus driver killer, a father killer who just had a child killer, a family killer. Good people take care of their community.
The thing that really frosts my cake about folks like this is that they probably consider themselves Christians, and more than likely describe themselves as "pro-life" with absolutely no sense of shame or irony. I've never understood people who think that they can consistently be disciples of both Jesus Christ and Ayn Rand, but they seem to be rather common. It seems self-evident that selfishness and Christianity are mutually exclusive, and this level of selfishness seems off the charts. But many who claim to be Christians seem to think the same way Ms. Mandel does. And here we have a woman who is willing to come straight out and say that she is willing to sacrifice somebody else's life if necessary to preserve her freedom to go to the dentist, go to the zoo, or go out for dinner.
Sociopathic is the only word that fits. Except, perhaps- in the case of professed Christians who take such an attitude- hypocritical,
No doubt the election of our first crackpot, blowhard, conspiracy theorist president was a signal for every despicable alt-right nut job in America to see his or her own personal psychosis as acceptable, respectable, ready for prime-time and fully acceptable in decent company. The outbreak of ignorance and fanaticism that has washed over the land since it became clear that Donald Trump was going to be the Republican nominee back in 2016 has contaminated an already unhealthy political culture in America and only added to our division and tribalization. The corresponding craziness on the left hasn't helped, either- and left-wing fanatics are not characterized by more compassion or common sense than right-wing ones when we stop talking about "the poor" or "the 98%" or "women" or "the LBGTQ community" and similar abstractions and start dealing with actual, concrete people. The same self-righteous, mean-spirited poison pollutes the stream of our political discourse from both directions.
But this is a moment at which the deluge is coming from the crazy right. Of course, we can't stay locked down forever. Nobody has suggested that. We need to re-open things just as soon as the experts tell us that it's feasible to do so safely- and not a moment sooner. That remains the position of the overwhelming majority of the very people who are suffering from the economic dislocations caused by the crisis. And human lives are no more disposable to bring closer an illusory day when killing Grandma might actually help the economy than because they ease an economic hardship ta potential mother faces. Either innocent human lives are of infinite worth, or they're not. Last time I looked, the commandment "You shall not murder" is not accompanied by a footnote granting an exemption in case of economic hardship.
If there's any good that comes out of its nonsense, it's that maybe people like the Grandma Killer can help pro-choice folks see how they look to others and rebuild a little common ground in the ongoing debate about abortion.
In any event, the Grandma Killer helps point up a real spiritual crisis. Christians and religious people generally tend to think that ethical living is a good idea. That causes then to strongly disapprove of people who do not live in what they see as an ethical way. Insofar as the disapproval is limited to behavior and no attempt is made to go beyond the requirements of public order and well-being in seeking to enforce them, fine. But all too often, underlying them is a tendency toward selfishness, narrowness, mean-spiritedness, and judgementalism that is as much the dark side of conservatism as naive idealism, impracticality, emotional reasoning, and a lack of regard for the wisdom of the past are the dark side of liberalism (excuse me- "progressivism").
Neither the extreme right nor the extreme left has a monopoly on stupid, selfish, insensitive cruelty. But Donald Trump and people like the Grandma Killer are both poster children for it, and the time has long passed to let it hide behind a facade of false piety and rectitude and expose it for what it is.
COVID denialism and all of its manifestations are lapses by what often are fundamentally decent people into the realm of sociopathy, and they need to be called out.
ADDENDUM: And they are being called out. Certainly, Ms. Mandel is.
The Independent has a useful term for the phenomenon on the right of which Ms. Mandel's tweet is an example "- the mirror opposite of the left's often obnoxious "virtue signaling."
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