It occurred to me today that our new President does not have a dog. Consistent, I suppose, with the germophobia that keeps his spigot out of the golden shower game, but there's more to it than that, I think.
I had to dig back to the nineteenth century to find a gap in White House canine residency, before Teddy Roosevelt and his big stick. With no disrespect to non-dog owners -- I never had one until I was well into adulthood, though it wasn't for a lack of annual birthday begging -- I think dog ownership can sometimes tell us something about a person.
In just a few days, I have been brought to a gasp twice by heartbreaking dog news. One friend had to put a faithful companion down, another is now trying to figure out why his young pal has suddenly gone blank. It's the kind of news that shocks me out of my lingering despair over the state of our nation, at least for a moment, and conjures up memories of this most unique sort of grief. There are far more unimaginable tragedies, to be sure; indeed, those of us who choose to bring dogs into our lives do so with full awareness that they will probably leave before we do.
Our new President does not have a dog. In fact, he does not have any family members living with him in his new D.C. digs, human or otherwise, who might depend on him for love or expect him to turn a blind eye to their messes. It makes sense that a person who is so bent on creating messes would have neither the time nor the inclination to clean up somebody else's.
Back in the day, my fledgling divorce proceedings inspired me to blog. I called it "A Narcissist's Tale" -- a shout out to my ex-husband's attorney's marketing strategy of handing out books about narcissism to her male clients and highlighting portions that proved the diagnosis applied to their soon to be ex-wives. This was before I realized that garden variety narcissism could apply to everyone -- cockiness, manipulativeness, selfishness, the traits that help even some of the nicest people survive -- as opposed to narcissistic personality disorder, which is an official diagnosis with a number and everything and usually involves much darker traits.
So I took this attorney's sight-unseen diagnosis of me with a healthy combination of indignation and humor, given her inflated hourly rates and her habit of wearing short cocktail style dresses to court. And there are no professional ethical guidelines that prohibit attorneys from floating psychiatric diagnoses, even though psychiatrists themselves do so at risk of severe sanctions. But finally, a prominent psychiatrist gave the old Freudian slip to the so-called Goldwater Rule and diagnosed our new travesty-in-chief: malignant narcissist. Malignant. By itself, a word that inspires in all of us the worst fears, leads even the loudest among us to start whispering Cancer.
A malignant narcissist who doesn't even have a dog. A spewer of all varieties of hate who nevertheless rises to the presidency while hapless folks in the entertainment business make a single unfortunate misstep and lose their jobs. This is our new normal, our new "business as usual."
Somebody get this man something or somebody to care about -- if there is such an animal -- before he makes even more of a mess.
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