The Mountaintop of Sixth Grade

22 Wednesday Jun 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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Arrogance, Hubris, Humanities, Intelligence, Narcissism, Public Speaking, Reggie Jackson, Sixth Grade Graduation, Straight-A Student, William H. Holmes Elementary

William H. Holmes Elementary, Mount Vernon, NY, November 23, 2006. Donald Earl Collins

Thirty-five years ago this week, I finished elementary school. Thirty-five years since I first felt that feeling of reaching the mountaintop, as if I’d accomplished something in my life. Three-and-a-half decades since the last time I was unknowingly naive and unnecessarily arrogant.

It was a finish with a flourish, though. Combined with having become a part of a bizarre religion, I had a new point of view on my life by the time graduation day on Friday, June 26 of ’81 rolled around. My family was now two months into our serving Yahweh, and I was six weeks removed from losing my best friend Starling because of this nutty religion. It was a time in which I felt overwhelmed about my present and immediate future. Yet I acted as if I’d published a book that was both a New York Times Bestseller and a Pulitzer Prize winner. I couldn’t have been more pumped up if I’d been on Walter White’s blue crystal meth from Breaking Bad.

The Sun setting behind the Statue of Liberty, New York, July 4, 2003. (http://science.nasa.gov/).

The Sun setting behind the Statue of Liberty (kind of how I saw my life back in 1981), New York, July 4, 2003. (http://science.nasa.gov/).

But I had some basis for seeing myself as great. As far as I was concerned, I was the unofficial valedictorian of my elementary school class at William H. Holmes Elementary, the ’50s structure next to the big Presbyterian church on North Columbus and East Lincoln Avenue. My teachers had chosen me out of all of my classmates to speak at our graduation ceremony. On that last Friday in June ’81, I served as the opening speaker, introducing the city councilman who served as our keynote. I even wrote the short introduction that I delivered on that wonderful day.

I firmly believed no one in the world was smarter than me. In the three years prior to graduation, I had straight A’s. Still, that paled in comparison to my performance my last year of elementary school. I figured out that I earned an A on forty-eight out of fifty-two quizzes and tests in sixth grade. The lowest grade I earned that year was an 88 on a spelling quiz. I’d won a Dental Awareness Month award for Best Poster and came in second in a city-wide writing contest that included essays from high school students. If anyone had known how big my head had grown that year, they would’ve stuck a pin in my temple just to let the air out.

It wouldn’t have been any funnier if I’d pretended I was Mr. October himself, Reggie Jackson, saying his words, “Sometimes I underestimate the magnitude of me.” I wanted so badly to see myself and to be seen by others as special that I forgot about the work it had taken to move my reading and writing skills up eight grade levels in a little more than two and a half years.

Yankees/Oakland A’s/California Angels HOF Reggie Jackson at bat, 1980, accessed June 21, 2016. (AP Photo).

It was a great day, sunny and low-eighties with cumulus clouds and low humidity. But knowing what life at 616, Mount Vernon and Humanities had in store for me over the next eight years, I should’ve smelled the ozone in the air. I should’ve looked more closely at my sky, to see the flocks of seagulls flying away from the shoreline. I should’ve sensed — and did, on a very low-frequency — the hurricane gaining strength in my life. I chose to ignore it, hoping that I could fake my way through it while resting on my laurels.

To think that it would’ve been another nine years before I felt like I could take on the world again. If someone had told me in June ’81 that I’d have to wait until my junior year at the University of Pittsburgh to have a straight-A semester, I would’ve grabbed a gun and shot myself through the temple with a Colt .45. And I would’ve made sure the bullet I used had a hollow tip. If I’d known that I’d have to wait a full decade to be comfortable with myself as myself in all of my goofiness again, I probably would’ve cried on the spot.

All I can hope these days is that my nearly teenage son can strike a balance between being cool and being cool with himself. I don’t want him spending a decade trying to figure himself out all by himself.

Everyone Needs A Ferris Bueller

16 Thursday Jun 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Alan Ruck, Chicago, Comedy, Diversity, Dramedy, Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986), Friendships, Interventions, Intolerance, John Hughes, Lily-White, Matthew Broderick, Mia Sara, Narcissism, Pitt, Teenage Angst

Mia Sara, Alan Ruck, and Matthew Broderick in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) screen shot, June 16, 2016. (http://www.playbuzz.com).

This week mark thirty years since the release of the Hollywood hit Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). The movie is mostly known for Matthew Broderick imbuing energy into the title character, taking his best friend Cameron Frye (Alan Ruck played him) and his girlfriend Sloane Peterson (Mia Sara played her) on a joy ride through North Side Chicago while embarrassing his high school principal and avoiding his parents. Going to a Cubs game, insinuating himself into a parade, and otherwise making Chicago pretty lily-White. For most watchers, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was a John Hughes comedy. Period.

Not so for me. At least once I finally watched the film. Like with most movies made between ’81 and ’87, I didn’t see it when it first came out. With my high school classmates only quoting Ben Stein’s character saying “Bueller?” over and over again, or commenting on the ability of anyone to roam the streets of Chicago so easily between roughly 8 am and 6 pm in the middle of the work week, I had no interest in seeing it. I eventually caught bits and pieces of scenes from Ferris Bueller on cable, but by nearly a decade after the movie first came out, I’d seen maybe fifteen minutes of the film.

It took my eventual wife Angelia to get me to see the movie in ’96. By then, I’d seen other Matthew Broderick films, enough where I was willing to give a comedy on White teen Gen Xer angst a chance. For whatever reason, I realized for the first time Ferris Bueller really wasn’t a comedy. It had plenty of funny moments, but at best it was a dramedy. I even remember saying to Angelia after I watched it, “Are you sure this is a comedy?”

The movie’s not-so-hidden theme is friendship. In this case, how one friend in Ferris Bueller goes above and beyond as a high school senior to save his best friend from a quietly tragic future. In Cameron’s case, one in which he wouldn’t be in charge of the shape of his life. It would either be guided by his domineering father (whom we never see in the movie) or by some future domineering wife. Apparently that was the real reason behind all of Ferris Bueller’s days off from school in the final months of his senior year.

Cameron Frye (Alan Ruck) underwater in pool (literal and figurative), Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), June 16, 2016. (http://www.giphy.com).

By Bueller and his girlfriend colluding to permit Cameron his first look at a naked female body and performing an intervention through the use of Cameron’s father’s precious classic car, Cameron would somehow recognize the need to break free. That Bueller also got to thumb his nose at authority and hang out with his girlfriend was a bonus, of course. Otherwise, the movie is a zany comedy about playing hooky in the streets of Chicago on the most unlikely of school days in the middle of May.

I certainly didn’t have any Ferris Buellers in my life during my Humanities years. If there were classmates like him, they didn’t shine a light on me. Sure, there was White male angst, Black male angst, teenager angst, middle class angst, and Black and White female angst at Mount Vernon High School. I would assume now that this has been true as long as the concept of teenager and comprehensive high school has existed (about eighty years in all). But to deliberately perform an intervention on behalf of a friend to save them from themselves and their upbringing? I’m sure it happened, just not with me or any of my Humanities classmates.

This realization begs a question. Would a Ferris Bueller have emerged in my life in middle school or in high school if I were from a family of means? All issues aside, the reason why Bueller and Frye were friends probably had as much to do with location as anything else. And with residential segregation also comes income segregation. Money may not have been the reason the two teenagers were friends. Yet with both families firmly in the ranks of the affluent (not one percent, but certainly in the top 10-25 percent), their friendship is more unlikely than a Cubs game and a White ethnic pride parade on the same day. The answer to my question, of course, is no. Diversity without acknowledgement or discussion — whether by race, gender, and/or class — doesn’t exist, leaving the teenage angst that was my experience unresolved until college.

The rainbow flag waving in the wind at San Francisco’s Castro District, San Francisco, CA, August 5, 2010. (Benson Kua via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-2.0.

As for the events in Orlando in the past week, aside from the obvious implications of misogyny, homophobia, racism, and hate/terror, there is another more subtle issue. That people who grow up with angst but minus interventions can easily become disaffected adults. Obviously most of these adults don’t become mass shooters or stalkers who kill. But it does mean that in a society geared toward narcissistic individualism and winning, there are millions out of touch with themselves and lacking empathy (forget about love) for other human beings.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is a sense that we all need one friend to intervene in our lives at least one time or for one day. We need that one day, to draw perspective, or maybe even, to find out that we truly need help and healing. My Ferris Buellers didn’t intervene until college at the University of Pittsburgh. They were gay and straight, Christian and Jewish and atheist, old and young, men and women, and Black, White, Brown, and Yellow. They came into my life later than I wanted, but not too late for me.

Pitt Graduation Day, +25 Years, +25 Hard Truths

26 Tuesday Apr 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, earth, wind & fire, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon High School, music, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Bitter Truths, Bruce Anthony Jones, Commencement, Daniel P. Resnick, Disillusionment, Graduation, Hard Truths, Joe William Trotter Jr., Lessons Learned, Marc Hopkins, Mary J. Blige, Meritocracy, Michael Jackson, Narcissism, Pitt, Prince, Regis Welch, Self-Discovery, Trust, U2

Peterson Events Center (where they do all the commencements now) University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, circa 2008. (http://www.rosser.com/).

I can’t believed that I’ve lived long enough to make a quarter-century since my end to undergrad at the University of Pittsburgh! It makes me sound old, at least to the twenty-one year-old I used to be. The one who couldn’t decide between a J.D. and an M.A./Ph.D. program. The person who worried that they would have an MA before their driver’s license. The young ‘in who believed that my advanced degree choices would define my career and life more than anything else.

That person was wise beyond his years, and yet stupid at the same time. He believed in the American meritocracy, in the triumph of hard work, talent, and a Christian faith over every obstacle. He believed that any costs incurred on the path to the MA — and later, the PhD — would be covered in the Bank of a Great Career. He believed, most of all, that professors as advisors and mentors would be there to guide his path every step of the way, the trustworthy individuals that most of them had proven themselves to be.

Me & Mark James (Cropped), Pan-African Graduate & Professional Student Association, University of Pittsburgh, February 27, 1993. (Lois Nembhard).

So much of that belief system was poisoned by the e. coli bacteria of academia and by the leaching lead pipes of American -isms. From my trials at Pitt to my tribulations with Joe Trotter, Dan Resnick, and Bruce Anthony Jones. The fact that my entire nineteen years of teaching, consulting, and nonprofit work has been cobbled together out of necessity and constantly changing circumstances, on which ground has rarely been solid. That after eighteen years and six months of payments, and I’m still a decade or so away from paying off student loans I began borrowing seventeen days after graduating from Mount Vernon High School in ’87.

If I had to talk to my twenty-one year-old self now, I’d say, get the MA in history, then get certified to teach at a high school somewhere. Spend the precious moments not in the classroom reaching high school-age students honing your craft as a writer. Jump headlong into putting down in words your experiences growing up, your times as a Hebrew-Israelite and in Humanities. Get that ms turned into a published work. Work hard at understanding the larger issues and contexts that make America the seething contradiction that it has always been, between racism and freedom, individualism and multiculturalism, social control and narcissism. Then, somewhere between the age of twenty-five and thirty, maybe, go back to school and earn that PhD in history, or in education, and take a few social psychology courses focused on personality disorders along the way.

That is the benefit of 20/10 hindsight (I’d say 20/20, but I still see most things at 20/15, and with warp speed at that!), of course. One big barrier I faced twenty-five years ago is a thorough and excoriating understanding of myself and the life I had to live. I remembered so much of my past that I never questioned the things that I’d forgotten. About abuse, physical and sexual. About deprivation, real and imagined. About people, the layers of yellow onions that most sheepishly are.

Unfortunately, I’d learn the most about what I’d forgotten in my forties, well after most people reconnect with the bitterest parts of their past (if any ever dare to). That I know what I know now is in the category of “better late than never.” Some things, though, I needed to know much sooner than 2014 or 2002. Like my discovery of my ambivalence toward academia. Not teaching or publishing per se. But the idea that I could only be taken seriously by publishing scholarly works that mostly would be read by a few dozen colleagues or when I assigned them to my students. I didn’t figure out how to make my ambivalence work for me until I was thirty-seven, and then, with me at mid-career, fighting to move forward.

Chris Farley facing a hard truth, being hit by a 2x4 in Tommy Boy (1995), April 26, 2016. (http://stream1.gifsoup.com/).

Chris Farley facing a hard truth, being hit by a 2×4 in Tommy Boy (1995), April 26, 2016. (http://stream1.gifsoup.com/).

The silver lining is, that if it weren’t for my time at Pitt, I simply wouldn’t be here to write these words at all. The pressures and pollutions of this world would’ve killed me. Or worse still, killed my inspirations and aspirations, rendering my imagination, my sense of what makes a just and wise world, dead. I’d be as bitter as a cup of Italian roast coffee mixed with vinegar and raw horseradish.

I’m sure that even among my more successful colleagues — and even more sure among my less successful ones — their journeys since the halcyon times of undergrad and even graduate school have been bittersweet. That is life. Especially in a nation in which others encourage us to have aspirations beyond the stars, a complete contradiction to that cracked concrete-reinforced reality that is America.

But even if all of the remaining highs in my career and life outnumber the lows by ten-to-one (who knows, right?), two truths are clear. One is that most people who experience any depth of success in their lives tend to remember the lulls and ruts more than their moments at the top of the mountains. Two is that without me having climbed that first mountain, the college degree mountain, I would have a story to tell, but would lack the words to tell it. I would still be living vicariously through the music of others, whether U2, Earth, Wind & Fire, Michael Jackson (RIP), Prince (RIP), or Mary J. Blige. And for me, at least, as genius as they are — alive and dead — I still need to tell my own story.

Prince, circa 2013 concert, April 26, 2016. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images).

Prince (1958-2016), circa 2013 concert, April 26, 2016. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images).

A Little Diddy About Madison Jack

08 Friday Apr 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, New York City, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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Academic Competition, Academic Conferences, AERA, American Educational Research Association, Burnout, CMU, Collegiality, Conferences, Harvey Kantor, Jack, Joe William Trotter Jr., Michael Fultz, Milford Plaza, Mom, Narcissism, Obsequious, Self-Awareness, Spencer Foundation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Yonkers

Jack-In-The-Box 3D model, April 5, 2016. (http://turbosquid.com).

Jack-o’-Lantern, Jack-in-the-Box, Monterey Jack, Colby Jack, and jackknife all have something in common with the Jack I’m writing about in this post. They’re all the kinds of Jacks that I’m not a fan of or outright dislike. They also tend to surprise me at precisely the wrong place and at precisely the wrong time. My Jack, the Jack who finished a doctorate in the School of Education at UWisconsin-Madison in the late-1990s, was one of the most competitive and obsequious humans I had ever met. What made my knowing him worse was that he never had to be cutthroat in the first place.

I first “met” Madison Jack the summer of ’95, via telephone and email. My favorite benefactor at the Spencer Foundation in Catherine Lacey had provided Jack my information. It made sense at the time. Both Jack’s dissertation and my own discussed the process of Black migration, White flight, and school desegregation, though his work involved Milwaukee and mine was on DC. Jack had gotten a small Spencer grant, and I had a Spencer Dissertation Fellowship.

Most importantly, Madison Jack wanted to put together a panel presentation for the April 1996 American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting in New York. The panel would involve a group of Spencer-funded folk working on various angles of school desegregation, involving community control, racial discrimination, White anti-desegregation protests, and ideas like my own on multiculturalism and diversity. Over a three-week period between mid-July and early August ’95, we put together a panel of five presenters and a moderator. The moderator was none other than Jack’s dissertation advisor Michael Fultz. Two presenters were 1995 Spencer Dissertation Fellows (including me), and two others would become Dissertation Fellows in 1996 (including Madison Jack).

It could’ve been a powerful panel under the right set of conditions. But it was to be underwhelming by default. We had at least two too many people on the panel. Our panel’s presentation date and time in New York was on the last day of the conference, Friday, April 12th, at 8:15 am, both too early and too late at the same time. With my own troubles with my HNIC advisor in Joe Trotter — not to mention a dissertation nearly complete — AERA wasn’t exactly my primary focus. Plus, visiting my home area with my family living in temporary housing in Yonkers post-616 fire didn’t exactly help with my concentration.

A five-inch folding jackknife, perfect for ingratiating back-stabbers, April 5, 2016. (http://www.lifesupportintl.com/).

But it was Madison Jack’s obsessive competition that reared its ugly head and left a raw horseradish taste in my mouth. It was that much more disgusting because I knew it would be my last conference presentation as a graduate student. Jack and I had agreed that all five of us would have twelve minutes apiece for our presentations, leaving time for audience questions. On that brisk spring morning after a rough night at the Milford Plaza, I began the panel with my talk timed for exactly twelve minutes. With my Mom having not yet arrived and only six people in the room to start, I muddled through as if I needed a cup of coffee just to know that I needed to wake up. Mom arrived five minutes into the second presentation, one by my fellow 1995 Spencer Dissertation Fellow, where she used the term “a cacophony of voices” in describing the different sides involved in the 1968 Ocean Hill-Brownsville (Queens) controversy over community control and racial inequality. Two scholars I knew well were in the audience — including one who was a one-time professor at Carnegie Mellon’s Heinz School (now Heinz College). She said to Harvey Kantor, “This presentation’s ‘caca’ all right” and they both laughed, loud enough for my sleep-deprived mind to notice.

Madison Jack was the last to present. My co-organizer broke our agreed-upon rules. He spoke for more than twenty minutes, all to garner more attention for his work over myself and the other three panelists. Jack also used a slide show, another thing that we had agreed we wouldn’t do, mostly because of the time constraints on the panel. It was a classic example of narcissistic behavior at the doctoral level. By the time Jack had finished — combined with his advisor’s ten minutes of droning commentary — there were only six minutes left for questions from an audience of nearly twenty people, most of whom had missed the first four presentations. Jack fielded all but one of the audience’s questions. If I’d been in my right frame of mind, I would’ve jammed a slide down Jack’s obsequious throat.

Fast-forward nearly a decade to the 2004 AERA conference in San Diego. It was my first time attending the conference since grad school. I decided to go to the Spencer-sponsored talk (an annual tradition), to see if any of my fellow Fellows from 1995 would also be there. A couple of them did show up, which was the good part about this gathering. But so did Madison Jack. He made a bee-line toward me. I made a point of not making eye contact until he was nearly in my face with his grizzly beard and outstretched hand. I shook it as hard as I could, feeling my right hand squeeze his knuckles into each other.

A block of Monterey Jack in all its bland whiteness, January 13, 2015. (Mitch Mandel via http://menshealth.com).

A block of Monterey Jack cheese in all its bland whiteness, January 13, 2015. (Mitch Mandel via http://menshealth.com).

After I let him talk for three minutes about his professorship at some small New England liberal arts college, about his first book, and after introducing me to his wife, he wanted to know how I was doing. Or rather, if I had bested him in my career up to that point. I didn’t take the bait. Knowing that a couple of big wigs had just walked into the room, I started with small talk about my wife and newborn son. I knew. Madison Jack being Madison Jack, I knew he would walk away, with me in mid-sentence, seeking to soak wisdom and advancement out of his next unknowing victims.

With colleagues and friends like Madison Jack, who needed enemies? What made his sycophantic displays and overt attempts at dominance so pitiful was that I never cared. I was too ambivalent about my place in academia and too much in turmoil about myself as a writer to ever care. Fighting over a job or a book with a scholarly publisher? To me in 1996 and in 2004, it was a waste of time and energy.

To me in 2016, it’s also a waste of potential friendships and connections beyond the “what’s in it for me?” perspective. I know lots of folks, but few I count as friends, and only a small number of those are in academia. While much of my work is independent of others, it isn’t work I do or think about alone. Madison Jack probably knows tons of folk in high places. But with an approach to career that is me first, me foremost, and me last, I’m pretty sure that he repels more true connections in his world than he attracts. Kind of like smelling week-old Monterey Jack that’s been left out in the sun too long.

On My Own Narcissism

19 Saturday Mar 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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American Narcissism, Donald Trump, Humanities, Jean W. Twenge, Narcissism, NPD, NPI, Self-Awareness, Ted Bundy, W. Keith Campbell

You are from God, little children, and have overcome them; because greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world.

— 1 John 4:4 (New American Standard Bible)

For those who regularly read my blog, you’ve probably noticed the increased focus over the past year on the issue of American obsession with individualism and its own greatness mythology. At least, the parts of which I’ve roughly translated into a collective American narcissism, or a collective American absorption with itself. It has become the latest idea, my latest potential project, but still too early to tell what, if anything, will come out of this so far. Most Americans remain blissfully unaware of anything that doesn’t involve winners, losers, vicarious living, and America always being seen as #1 at everything (even though in most cases it isn’t).

This post, though, isn’t about how the world’s #1 nation is deeply flawed by a narcissism that runs nearly as deep as the center of a black hole. No, this post is all about me. Really, it’s about the fact that even as I recognize America’s narcissism — both historical and current — that I myself am not inoculated from that narcissism.

Expanding red giant stars will engulf too-close planets before turning into white dwarfs, August 13, 2013. (James Gitlin/STScI AVL via http://www.space.com/).

My first bout with narcissism began at the end of elementary school at William H. Holmes in Mount Vernon, New York. It was the spring of ’81. I’d just finished up three years as a straight-A student, been made into a Hebrew-Israelite, came in second for a city-wide essay contest, and been granted the honor of introducing the keynote speaker at my graduation. Even with fighting my best friend Starling, my family’s slow but steady fall into grinding poverty, and the next six years of Humanities in front of me, who wouldn’t have a head as inflated as the Sun at its red-giant stage?

As I wrote in Boy @ The Window

I firmly believed that no one in the world was smarter than me. It wouldn’t have been any funnier if I’d pretended I was Mr. October himself, Reggie Jackson, saying his words, ‘Sometimes I underestimate the magnitude of me.’

It took a year of relative mediocrity while in seventh-grade Humanities for my march toward narcissistic personality disorder to end at the cliff of disillusionment. I wasn’t the “smartest kid in the whole world.” But as I also discovered in my time in this magnet program, neither were any of my classmates.

Perhaps the biggest lesson here was that I was all of eleven and twelve years old when America’s narcissism with individual achievement had caught me in a tangled web of lies and myths. No success or failure or anything in between occurs in a vacuum. No individual’s success happens purely on her or his own, without support, context, and in many cases, an advantage of one sort or another. It took years to learn this lesson, between Humanities and graduate school, the nonprofit world and academia, to learn to give up on the bullshit that is the American meritocracy.

That’s not to say that one can eliminate selfishness (which isn’t the same as narcissism, by the way), or shouldn’t strive for success or a better life for themselves or their kids or their families. But we should always ask ourselves why, in what context, how should we measure our victories, and even if running over others to achieve those victories is the right way to live? Most Americans don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t verify, and don’t think about their lives in this way, because most of us have been taught by this culture that the empathetic lens is a loser’s way of viewing the world.

My NPI Score, done August 20, 2015. (http://personality-testing.info/tests/NPI.php).

I have taken a read — actually, several in the past year — of Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell’s book The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement (2009). Theirs is a good base to begin to view American society as one so obsessed with individualism that it renders us all anywhere between a little narcissistic to borderline Donald Trumps and Ted Bundys. The psychologists and psychiatrists in this niche have a test for narcissistic personality disorder or NPD, the Narcissistic Personality Index. It consists of 40 questions, seeking to determine whether one is low, medium, or high in narcissism within the index.

I took the NPI last August, and scored a 9 out of 40. It meant that I have some narcissistic tendencies, but only scored higher than 35 percent of those who’ve taken the NPI. I wasn’t even close to being an average American narcissist! Not really a surprise, as those seeking to take such an index are likely less narcissistic than their navel-gazing neighbors.

So, I am in this world and mostly of it, if only because it’s hard to divorce one’s existence from the world in which they live. But I am self-aware enough to know my own narcissism, and empathetic enough to see the narcissism in others.

Great. It still means that as a nation, our narcissism goes as far back as the mind can imagine. It still means that in a couple of centuries, historians will lament about the America that was. Those historians will see a country and a people so busy in building themselves up that they stomped on the oppressed and crushed the downtrodden in the process. A US with so many myths and ideals, but so few attempts at making any of them true.

A Narcissist’s Dream

14 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion

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Beauty, Bigotry, Christopher Lasch, Donald Trump, Drumpf, John Oliver, Kim K., Kim Kardashian, Last Week Tonight, Mob, Mob Violence, Narcissism, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, NPD, Obsessive Individualism, Racism, Rev. Al Sharpton, Self-Love

Spinning coin (can’t make heads or tails of it), March 12, 2016. (http://bestanimations.com).

We’re a nation of narcissists, this is true. Christopher Lasch wrote as much in his bestseller The Culture of Narcissism in 1979. But he was only examining American culture between the end of World War II and the 1970s, the “Me Decade.” Lasch wasn’t looking at obsessive individualism as a unique and historical American trait, one with roots as far back as Jamestown and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Paul Revere’s Ride” (1860). He was looking at how the American obsession with self had evolved into “self-love” and a constant need for either attention or navel-gazing, as evidenced by the rise of pop psychology in the 1960s and 1970s.

Too bad Lasch isn’t around in 2016 to see how far down the rabbit hole America has gone. Between Kim Kardashian-West (at least for the moment) and 2016 GOP presidential candidate Donald J. Trump, it is obvious that we have a national crisis of narcissism on our hands. The two of them are the same side of a two-headed coin. One has traded on their family and beauty in exchange for millions of fans and tens of millions of dollars. The other has built an empire based on his father’s fortune and his brand of self-love. Both have taken advantage of White privilege and class privilege to drive their constant need for fame and attention. And since game knows game, they have both earned themselves an audience of millions who themselves are obsessed with themselves. Or at least, with seeing themselves as successful by living vicariously through the likes of Kim K and The Donald.

The New Material Girl

Kardashian “broke the Internet” again this past week, this time with a tweet that included a “naked” picture of her posing in front of a full-length mirror. I say “naked” only because she redacted her breast and privates, so that while she was naked when taking the picture, it’s not really a naked picture. Obviously Kardashian can do whatever she wants. Anyone with an objective eye can see that Kardashian has as much beauty as genetics and plastic surgery can muster. Anyone who objects to her taking photos of herself in the nude on moralistic grounds is either a prude or a hypocrite, given the number of people who pay attention to her and her brand.

Donald Trump posing with Kim Kardashian at Celebrity Apprentice event, New York, 2010. (Mathew Imaging/WireImage via http://eonline.com).

Kardashian is a narcissist, and those millions of folks who follow her on Twitter, watch her shows on E!, buy her products and/or jack off to her are narcissists as well. Not because she has maintained a slamming body despite pregnancy, reaching her mid-thirties, or her five-three frame. Kardashian is a narcissist because she embodies most of the clinical symptoms it. According to The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-V), narcissistic personality disorder (under the code 301.81) is “a persistent manner of grandiosity, a continuous desire for admiration, along with a lack of empathy.” In order to determine if a patient may have narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), a psychiatrist must determine if that patient meets at least any five (5) of the nine (9) standards below:

1. A grandiose logic of self-importance (✓)
2. A fixation with fantasies of unlimited success, control, brilliance, beauty, or idyllic love (definitely ✓)
3. A credence that he or she is extraordinary and exceptional and can only be understood by, or should connect with, other extraordinary or important people or institutions (see her collection of friends, lovers: ✓)
4. A desire for unwarranted admiration (✓)
5. A sense of entitlement (✓)
6. Interpersonally oppressive behavior
7. No form of empathy
8. Resentment of others or a conviction that others are resentful of him or her
9. A display of egotistical and conceited behaviors or attitudes (✓)
(American Psychiatric Association, 2013).

It would be hard to know for sure where Kardashian would stand on 6., 7., and 8. without some serious time on a couch or knowing her beyond her public displays of all things herself. Still, it was easy enough to get to six standards without the need for a PhD in psychology or a psychiatric license.

What is worrisome about both Kardashian and Trump, though, is their endless legions of fans and supporters. Kardashian has been peddling herself as Whiteness personified, an entitled upper-class Beverly Hills daughter of O.J. Simpson friend and defense lawyer Robert Kardashian (of Armenian descent) and Kris Houghton-Kardashian-Jenner. Despite the ethnic contradictions, Kardashian’s success has been based in the idea of the glamorous life, the ability to be ostentatious, to rub shoulders, elbows, and other anatomical parts with the rich and famous and the up-and-comers. Between the sex tape with Ray J. that made its way to the Internet and the start of Keeping Up With The Kardashians (both in 2007), her brand of narcissistic Whiteness has been on display now for a full decade. There’s no way that someone whose only job prior to reality TV was as a stylist would be doing this well without the blind support of millions of Americans who have the narcissism, but lack the funds to fuel it.

Damien Meets The Donald

The same is true of GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump. He would not be in the position to run against either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders were it not for his four decades in the public eye. Between his casinos, his business ventures (which include numerous failures and five Chapter 11 filings), his immense number of interviews, his three marriages and extramarital affairs, and his NBC TV show The Apprentice (2003-15), Trump’s name is legend. At least for 1990s rap artists and generations of Whites who have bought his books on entrepreneurship in the millions.

Trump, or to go back to the original (thank you, John Oliver), Drumpf, would fulfill all nine standards for narcissistic personality disorder. His constant expressions of misogyny, his equating of Mexicans with rape and criminality, his belief that all protesters need to “get a job,” his insistence that the world is divided between winners and “losers.” All while Trump believes that his very name equals success, no matter the amount of evidence that contradicts his inverted reality. On the 40-point-scale of the Narcissistic Personality Index, Drumpf would likely score between a 38 and a 40, a perfect or near-perfect score. A score, by the way, that no one other than a narcissist would be proud of.

Damien TV series poster, A&E, accessed March 13, 2016. (http://imdb.com).

Drumpf, though, is a snake-oil salesman who benefited from his father’s slum-lording ways, inheriting a company in 1971 and part of Fred Trump’s $200 million upon the latter’s death in 1999. If Bill Gates isn’t a self-made billionaire, then Drumpf was born two marathons ahead of Gates in the human race for wealth. Yet Trump has presented himself for years as the epitome of Horatio Alger, and to the detriment of millions of Whites who actually believe that Trump’s life is a rags-to-riches story. The bankruptcies don’t matter. The failures of Trump Shuttle, Trump University, Trump Entertainment Resorts, none of that has mattered. All that matters, apparently, is that Trump is a billionaire (no one really knows how much he’s worth; could be anywhere between $250 million and $3.9 billion), and that he promises to “Make America Great Again.”

Unlike Kardahshian, Trump openly attacks anyone who contradicts his narcissistic image of himself and his world. He has for years. The so-called Central Park Five wrongly convicted in the 1989 wilding gang rape case — Yusef Salaam Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, and Korey Wise — can attest to the impact of Trump’s money, one-page ad calling for the death penalty, and narcissism on their lives. Even after the courts overturned their convictions in 2002 and they finally settled their lawsuits against the city for $41 million in 2014, Trump still blamed the five for a crime that they obviously did not commit. “Speak to the detectives on the case and try listening to the facts. These young men do not exactly have the pasts of angels,” Trump wrote in an op-ed for the New York Daily News in June 2014. Apparently, a narcissist who always sees people of color in the worst possible light can never be wrong.

Even with his so-called friends, Trump’s narcissism is beyond the pale. When supposed friend Rev. Al Sharpton disagreed with Trump’s law-and-order stance on Ferguson in 2014, Trump responded with a personal attack during an interview with Fox News. actually addressed their relationship during a Fox News hit last December. “Al’s a con man. He knows it. I know it. Don King knows it, his friend, who I go to with fights with — with Al. And they all know it,” Trump said. He added, Sharpton’s a “professional con man” who has “gotten away with murder.”

We Are The #1s

Should we ever wonder why Trump’s rallies are a who’s who of White supremacy and privilege attracting every form of bigotry, like a nuclear missile fully fueled and ready for launch? Should anyone be surprised that whenever Drumpf blows his dog whistles to his mobs about immigration, the US-Mexico border, yells at a protester, “get them outta here” like a drunk-ass White supremacist, calls President Barack Obama “a disaster,” his audience responds with angry delight? This isn’t just racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, or misogyny at work. No, this is also a collective obsession with the self, a self that yearns to be like Drumpf in interviews, and on stage at rallies, and in proclaiming the self to be richer, greater, more successful, and more right than every other self.

Donald Trump greets supporters after a rally, Mobile, Alabama, August 27, 2015. (Mark Wallheiser/Getty via http://www.telegraph.co.uk/).

It isn’t the fault of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision (2010) that Trump is on a glide path toward the GOP nomination this summer. Nor is it the fault of Obama, or Black Lives Matter, or even The Donald himself. No, it is the fault of millions of narcissistic Americans whose billionaire and celebrity worship has trumped all sense of reality.

As psychology professors Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell noted in their recent book The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement (2009), millions of Americans live in the “land of grandiose fantasy,” with potentially disastrous results (pp. 3-4), like the rise of Trump. Given that March Madness 2016 begins in earnest this week, would anyone really notice if Trump decided to make Kim K. his vice-presidential running mate? She turns thirty-five this October, after all.

Starting Boy @ The Window, 10 Years Later

09 Wednesday Mar 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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Academy for Educational Development, AED, Friendships, Harold I. Meltzer, Interviews, Lumina Foundation, Memoir, Narcissism, Partnerships for College Access and Success, Sacramento CA, Salutatorian, Sam, Vanity, Vanity Project

Full-length vanity mirror, accessed March 9, 2016. (http://etsy.com).

On this week a decade ago, I began work on Boy @ The Window as a memoir. That sentence sounds so definitive and simple. The fact was, I’d been writing the book in my head for nearly three years, and had been doing interviews and other iterations of what would become Boy @ The Window off and on since the fall of ’89. But the first full week in ’06 marked a clear delineation between all of the hemming and hawing over writing the book and the actual process of interviewing former teachers and classmates. For some, though, I was devoting serious time and resources to what they called a vanity project.

I had already interviewed my late former teacher Harold Meltzer twice in ’02, and had done some reaching out off and on between the spring of ’03 and March ’06. It took a work trip to Indianapolis and then Sacramento for me to actually begin the process for real. The trip was about convincing Lumina Foundation for Education to continue funding the college access and retention initiative I was deputy director of after the end of ’06, as well as for me to take oversight over a grantee’s work in Sacramento. It just so happened that about two weeks before the trip, I learned that one of my former classmates, the salutatorian Sam, lived in Northern California. Despite my qualms, I decided to reach out and see if he’d want to meet up and catch up.

Why qualms? Short of a high school reunion, most folks who were outcasts or (really, in my case) misfits aren’t exactly jumping for joy to see people who helped make them feel that way. Sam for me was someone who made me feel as if I had no business being smart, Black, and male. Whether he meant for me to feel that way or not was irrelevant at the time.

The Sacramento skyline, as seen from The Ziggurat in West Sacramento, California (never looked like this in my 3 visits there), October 16, 2008. (J. Smith via Wikipedia). Released via CC-SA-3.0.

The irony was that by the time I’d last seen Sam — the fourth Friday of June ’89 — I no longer saw him as an arbiter of anything, much less someone to aspire to imitate. I realized from a short three-minute conversation that Sam may have had more identity issues than even I had faced in the previous eight years. That it was also the last time that I’d see nearly all of my classmates (I bumped into Wendy ten minutes earlier on this particular walk) prior to working on Boy @ The Window was also interesting, if not ironic.

That and the large amount of work that a book about myself and the worlds I inhabited — in my own mind, in reality at home, with family, with classmates, and throughout Mount Vernon and New York — was on my mind all week long. This was going to be a daunting task, diving deep into my mindset and my past. Dredging up old feelings and conjuring up old conversations that otherwise would best be forgotten.

And of course, meeting up with folks who were never “friends” or “girlfriends” or even often just friendly to me. There was a reason why I only called them “my classmates” or “acquaintances” when talking with family and my actual friends in the years since high school and Humanities. They had been larger-than-life characters in a very stretched out nightmare of a Harry Potter book.

Even with that, I also knew that I needed to meet up with and interview these folks. If only to provide some catharsis or to put myself in a mindset I had abandoned with the last year of the Reagan era. So when Sam said he was okay with meeting up, I didn’t hesitate, and I didn’t kvetch over it.

We ended up talking for nearly three hours, about much more than Humanities or Mount Vernon High School. It was a pleasant conversation. Mostly because I allowed Sam to do what most people do in those situations. I allowed him the opportunity to spin his story, to put his best foot forward about his experiences and his life in the present. I made a point to only press him with questions on the stuff that was most important to me and to Boy @ The Window. After all, between Meltzer, other interviews I had planned, and my own steel-trap memories, I could note glaring contradictions when it came time to write.

Kim Kardashian, another boring vanity project, March 7, 2016. (http://twitter.com).

Still, Sam didn’t answer a key question, at least not directly for me. After I answered his question, “What do you think I thought of you?,” I asked him if wanted to correct or add anything to my answer. Sam was the only one I interviewed who dodged the question. That deflection to the burdens of Humanities and high school told me everything I needed to know. It told me that in Sam’s mind, I had been irrelevant, that his occasional put-downs were in fact deliberate.

There are some who have read Boy @ The Window since I put it out in 2013 who’ve said that they found the Humanities and high school parts of the memoir “boring.” I concede that point. Even with interviews and with Facebook, some of my classmates remain either an enigma to me, or more often, there wasn’t much exciting about them as people beyond grinding for A’s to begin with. Ten years ago, I was only beginning to learn this truth.