A Companion Disorder for ‘X’ Derangement Syndrome

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Notes:

1) Current practice is that mental health issues are disorders, derangement is out dated terminology and its use is considered prejudicial.

2) A.I. was utilized to affix the format and style of the entry to conform it to the manner of a DSM entry.

 

DIAGNOSTIC AND STATISTICAL MANUAL OF MENTAL DISORDERS

SECTION III: PROPOSED CONDITIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY

 

300.99 (Q00.0) Partisan Oppositional Disorder

Diagnostic Criteria

  1. A persistent and clinically significant pattern of political behavior characterized by an irresistible compulsion to oppose, reject, or vote against any measure, candidate, or policy associated with an identified opposing political party (“The Rivals”), regardless of the proposal’s actual merit, underlying principles, or personal utility.
  2. The pattern of opposition is manifested by at least three (or more) of the following symptoms occurring consistently over at least one election cycle (or 6 months of active legislative sessions):
  3. Ideological Flip-Flopping: Sudden, unexplained reversal of a long-held ethical, fiscal, or personal belief immediately upon learning that the opposing party shares or has endorsed that belief.
  4. Policy Reflexivity: Immediate, reflex-like condemnation of a proposed bill or ordinance prior to reading or understanding its contents, driven solely by the party affiliation of the primary sponsor.
  5. Spite-Driven Balloting: Expressing high emotional satisfaction after voting for a candidate whose platform directly harms the individual’s own economic or social interests, provided the outcome causes distress to supporters of the opposing party (commonly referred to in clinical literature as the “Owning the Opposition” phenomenon).
  6. Affective Hyper-Fixation: Expending excessive cognitive energy, daily conversation time, or social media engagement reacting to the opposing party’s minor figures, slogans, or aesthetic choices.
  7. Double Standard Somatization: Visceral physical or emotional outrage when the opposing party engages in a specific conduct, accompanied by total apathy, cognitive dissonance, or rationalization when one’s own preferred party engages in identical conduct.
  8. Hyperbolic Demonization: A persistent and omnipresent verbal tic resulting in an inability to discuss the opposing party without characterizing them as uniquely existential, dangerous, or malicious, routinely conflating all factions of the opposition with historical totalitarian regimes based on faint or superficial political overlap.
  9. The behavior causes marked distress or clinically significant impairment in social, occupational, or interpersonal functioning (e.g., severe breakdown of family holiday gatherings, unfriending long-time neighbors, or inability to discuss local municipal park maintenance without invoking national party politics).
  10. The disturbance is not better explained by a genuine, coherent political philosophy, well-reasoned policy critique, or actual economic self-interest.
  11. The symptoms are not attributable to the direct physiological effects of consuming 24-hour cable news or outrage-driven social media algorithms (though these frequently act as exacerbating environmental triggers).

Specifiers

Specify current severity based on the degree of functional impairment:

  • Mild: The individual consistently votes against the opposing party but can still maintain civil conversations with neighbors of the opposite affiliation regarding non-political topics (e.g., lawn care, weather).
  • Moderate: The individual actively alters purchasing habits, media consumption, and sports fandom based solely on the real or perceived political alignment of corporate sponsors or athletes.
  • Severe: Total cognitive capture. The individual’s entire personal identity, daily vocabulary, and social routine are governed by reacting to the opposing party. Incapable of agreement on basic empirical facts if stated by an opponent.

Specify if: With Intra-Party Purging — Accompanied by aggressive turning against members of one’s own party who demonstrate even brief moments of bipartisan agreement, nuance, or legislative compromise.

Diagnostic Features

The essential feature of Partisan Oppositional Disorder is an externalized, purely reactionary locus of control. Individuals with POD do not evaluate ideas, candidates, or legislation based on intrinsic content, projected outcomes, or an underlying ethical framework. Rather, the party identity of the proponent serves as the sole heuristic for value judgment. If the opposing party advocates for Position X, the individual feels a compulsive necessity to adopt Position Not-X. Hyperbolic demonization (Criterion B6) frequently serves as the psychological justification for this reactivity, allowing the individual to frame mundane political disagreements as existential battles against historical evils.

Differential Diagnosis

Genuine Ideological Commitment: Unlike individuals with principled, deeply held political stances—who maintain consistent core values regardless of who occupies public office—individuals with POD will routinely abandon or reverse their stated core values if maintaining them would require agreeing with the opposing party.

Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD): ODD is typically diagnosed in pediatric populations and directed toward general authority figures (parents, teachers). POD occurs almost exclusively in adults and is strictly targeted at opposing political campaigns, commentators, and fellow citizens wearing conflicting political paraphernalia.

Development and Course

Onset is typically insidious, beginning with casual exposure to partisan talk radio, opinion columns, or social media commentary. Symptoms accelerate dramatically during midterm or presidential election cycles. Full remission is exceedingly rare without significant digital detoxification, algorithmic intervention, or temporary removal from family group chats.

Comorbidity

Partisan Oppositional Disorder frequently co-occurs with Doomscrolling-Induced Insomnia, Doom Posting, Excessive Yard-Sign Display Syndrome (EYDS), and Acute Social Media Agitation.

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Movie Review: Beware Boiúna

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Friday night, with a hankering to see something in the theaters to kick off this year’s spooky season, I did something I have not done in a very long time: I saw a movie knowing so little about it I had not even watched a trailer. Scanning through the AMC app on my phone, I read the bare details about Beware Boiúna: “deep in the Amazon, a medical mission spirals into a fight for survival when Boiúna, a colossal ancient predator, awakens to reclaim her domain in the jungle were nature holds absolute power, she decides who lives and who dies.”

Lionsgate Films

Okay, so Beware Boiúna was a creature feature, a monster movie, and frankly that was just the sort of shallow horror film that suited my mood. I clicked on a show time, confirmed it as one of the subscription screenings, which came at no additional cost, and after my sweetie-wife had retired for the evening, drove to Fashion Valley mall for the film. I seated myself in the nearly empty theater with quite low expectations. Monster movies along with slashers are not known for deep and engaging stories, often populated by caricatures of people rather than characters, and ones that make the most idiotic of decisions. This sub-genre can be fun in a silly, campy sort of way. (Though it is possible to be just bad enough that the movie is painful to watch without any redeeming camp value.)

Beware Boiúna surprised me.

While it clearly does not carry the heft of more celebrated recent horror films such as Obsession, Backrooms, Midsommar, or Nosferatu, this movie is smart enough and entertaining enough to be counted among the rare category of good monster movies. It possesses just enough story within its plot to have something to say about the human condition but without becoming a meditation on grief, or loss, or identity.

The plot of the film is straightforward: a team of doctors and medical students travel by chartered boat deep along the Amazon River in Colombia, delivering medical supplies and care to impoverished villages. The team comes into conflict with a commercial survey/prospecting team which rapidly spirals into violence. When both groups find themselves on an isolated tributary, they are forced to reckon with a serpent of gigantic stature, Boiúna, and it is unclear who, if anyone, will survive.

In my opinion, Beware Boiúna, while not reaching the heights of these films, carries the genetic heritage of three great films of the horror canon: Jaws, Alien, and Aliens.

Like that Spielberg classic Jaws, this film doesn’t overexpose the audience to the monster at the center of the story. Boiúna makes her appearances in the first half of the movie without fully exposing her horrific nature. Like ‘Bruce’ the shark, her presence is represented by the things she affects instead of blatant CGI. It isn’t until the final act of the film that the creature is fully seen and even then, the director, Mike P. Nelson, and the VFX teams wisely restrict these scenes to the forgiving nature of well-shot night sequences.

Alien is famous for hiding just which character is the actual protagonist of the tale. It isn’t until Dallas’ foray into the airshafts that it becomes clear that Ripley is the story’s main character. Beware Boiúna performs a similar sleight of hand, revealing its protagonist at the film’s midpoint.

The connection to Cameron’s Aliens is more tenuous but struck me as plain when our surviving protagonist battles the enormous creature with massive claw-equipped machinery, echoing Ripley’s power-loader battle with the alien queen.

Well-directed by Mike P. Nelson and well-scripted by writer Alan B. McElroy, Beware Boiúna is a rare thing, a rather decent creature feature that doesn’t try for too much or overstay its welcome with a slim 104-minute running time. Cinematographer Nick Junkersfeld shot the film well; there are no overly showy flourishes of photography but rather a simple and direct style that helps ground the fantastic premise.

Overall, I found this film worth my time, and while it is not getting as wide a release as it deserves and will be overshadowed by films such as Obsession, Beware Boiúna is a film that horror fans should see, and if possible, in a theater.

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They Live Is Overrated

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They Live (1988) was the 11th feature film from celebrated writer/director John Carpenter, and, in my contested opinion, halfway through the movie it becomes evident that Carpenter’s talent had fled, never to return. (Do NOT try to argue that In the Mouth of Madness is a great or even good film. A story where a shotgun-armed angry mob of men are chased off by mere dogs is stupid and expects its audience to be stupid.) I will be spoiling an already spoiled story.

Universal Pictures

A conspiratorial mess, the story follows Nada (Roddy Piper), an unnamed and unhoused itinerant worker who has come to Los Angeles and is drawn into a vast alien plot to subjugate humanity and transform the planet to an environment more suitable to their lifeforms. Nada and another displaced worker, Frank (Keith David), join up with a resistance group and eventually destroy the single satellite transmitter that has hypnotized humanity in a walking sleep that has prevented anyone from perceiving the aliens or their subliminal manipulation.

The first half or so of They Live is actually quite good, subtle, with a growing unease that creates an uncanny valley as the audience remains as ignorant of the reality of the story as the protagonist. However, once the vast conspiracy is revealed, all semblance of intelligence flees the pages of the script, replaced with overly extended fight sequences and action movie tropes that, even by 1988, had become tired, worn out, and cliché. The descent into formula is further degraded by the ham-handed nature of Carpenter’s political preaching. Meant as a commentary on Conservatism as Reagan’s second term drew to a close, They Live delivers its message with all of the subtlety of a cocaine-addled bull elephant. Compounding this clumsy critique is a level of world building that cannot stand even a moment’s analysis and consideration.

The unnamed alien race has come to Earth to extract wealth and convert the planet’s climate to their own by way of industrial pollution. Okay, a metaphor for capitalism: it’s not particularly original, but it’s serviceable enough that Carpenter is not the only storyteller to have stumbled upon it. I will even accept the hand-waving over exactly how that wealth is being extracted, as, one, a film has no time to delve into interstellar economics and, two, we have no clue how such an economy would function anyway. The idea that aliens are covertly manipulating humanity is hardly original; too many people already accept it as a true thing, but it can be made to work.

But not in this movie.

The aliens have covered incomprehensible distances to come to Earth, but after that terrible expenditure of resources, what do they do? They become beat cops in Los Angeles. Oh, sure, they are presented at the very top of society and government, with one shot meant to imply that Reagan is one of them, but so, so many are walking about as working-class and lower-upper-class individuals. This is patently ridiculous. Yes, you might make the argument that this echoes humanity’s own action as European nations colonized much of the world, but colonization is not Carpenter’s metaphor. He is explicitly playing on the secret forces that really control society, using aliens as a metaphor for capitalism, but that idea doesn’t work if the secret masters of the economy are also the ones driving the patrol cars. This is the reason that, while he had aimed his satire at capitalism, the metaphor was handled so clumsily that Nazis took the aliens as a stand-in for Jews. Carpenter warred with them online about this reading, but he left that door open with his slipshod world building. Of course, if Carpenter had reserved his aliens for the ones pulling the strings from secret positions high above the common rabble, then he couldn’t have had his glorious scenes of Nada gunning down aliens in public, scenes that have become only more and more disquieting as America experiences an endless horrid parade of mass shooter events.

Even if you accept the concept that aliens have come across light-years to hold down street-level jobs, They Live is still a deeply flawed mess of a story.

Nada, shortly after learning the truth and going on his spree of murdering aliens that to everyone around him look as human as anyone else, takes a hostage, Holly (Meg Foster), to escape downtown Los Angeles. In her expensive hillside home, Holly puts Nada at ease and then, shattering a champagne bottle across his skull, ejects him from the structure and down the steep embankment.

Later, when Nada and Frank attend their first resistance meeting, Holly is there, presumably because she has had her eyes literally opened by the magic sunglasses left behind after Nada was thrown from her home. She is all doe-eyed and sympathetic to Nada, despite her only interaction with the man having been as his hostage at gunpoint.

The evil controlling forces show up, some deus ex machina shit goes down, transporting Nada and Frank to the local cable station that manages the vast interstellar conspiracy. They regroup with Holly, last seen at the resistance meeting in a bad section of town and now present without explanation, and hustle to the roof where the final plot coupon, the transmitter, waits. In the stairwell Holly wordlessly murders Frank, but on the roof she, with more doe eyes, pleads with Nada, while holding him at gunpoint, not to destroy the transmitter. Apparently, in addition to selling out humanity, she has a very specific kink about being kidnapped and held at gunpoint. Nada destroys the transmitter and dies, but exposes the entire global plot because aliens smart enough to not only traverse light-years but manage a decades-long cultural conspiracy are too stupid to avoid a single-point-of-failure system.

I cannot for the life of me understand why this film is held in such high regard. I found it trite, preachy, and stupid when I first saw it in ’88, and that opinion has only grown with the decades.

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“Why Didn’t You Take the Train?”

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Last Friday I made the drive from San Diego to Los Angeles to visit the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. The trip up took about two hours and a little change, frankly faster than I had expected, and was well worth it.

The exhibit The Horror Show is broken up into sub-genres that each have their own room: Religious, Scientific, Gothic, Psychological, Ghost, and Slasher horrors. As you wander from room to room, you are presented with artifacts and history of some of the principal films from that category. (Though I found it a miss in the Slasher section that there was no mention of Italian giallo, which clearly was a predecessor to the slashers of the ’80s and onward.)

Some of the exhibits are quite old, such as the cape worn by Bela Lugosi in Dracula (1931) or the original mask from Creature from the Black Lagoon, while others come from very recent horror films such as the lovely flower gown from Midsommar.

Chatting with a couple of ladies who were also visiting, I mentioned that I had driven two hours to see this little preview (the exhibit officially opened the next day), and one asked, “Why didn’t you take the train?”

I have to confess that it simply had not occurred to me, and perhaps it would have been better if it had. True, I would have had to pay for all-day parking at the station, but even with public transit at the L.A. end, it may very well have saved me time. The drive home proved to be much more of an endurance test than the drive up, as it took me about four hours to make the return trip.

Still, it was a fun day: I have a couple of new tee shirts that I got from the museum store, and it was good to get away and be pretty much in my head for a day.

 Here is a model fo the creaure from the film The Host.

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End of Summer Movie Tally

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September is drawing to a close with October coming later this week, bringing with it spooky season and the busiest period for the next several months at my day job, a perfect time to reflect on my summer movies.

In April, I posted about some of the movies coming out this summer that I planned to see in their theatrical release.

  • Over Your Dead Body
  • Hokum
  • The Sheep Detectives
  • In the Grey
  • Obsession
  • Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu
  • Backrooms
  • Pressure
  • Disclosure Day
  • Hungry
  • The Odyssey
  • Spider-Man: Brand New Day
  • Coyote vs. Acme

For various reasons, running time vs. showtimes, brief or non-existent theatrical releases in my area, or other factors, I missed Disclosure Day, Pressure, and Hungry in theaters, but I made all the rest. I must say that with the except of the Star Wars entry on the list, not one of these films felt like a waste of my time and energy. Most proved quite the opposite, well worth the voyage out to the local multiplex, with Obsession being the standout feature. I have given that horror film more thought, consideration, and public writing than any other this summer and possibly this year.

Of the 13 movies listed, three I still have not seen, one bored me so intensely I still harbor ill will towards it, and one assaulted my eardrums with such ferocity I find it difficult to remember anything else about the experience of seeing it. That leaves eight that I enjoyed watching from a rear-row seat at the theater. That’s a final score of 80 percent, discounting the ones I missed, because I may have loved one or more of those, giving this summer’s movies a B.

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“It’s Not a Romance; It’s a Love Story.”

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Nikki says this to Bear in the short window during the film Obsession when we, the audience, get to meet Nikki before she is replaced by the power of the wish by Freaky Nikki. Bear responds that he is unable to discern the difference between the genres.

This is an interesting observation with some commenting that the film from which the quote originates is itself a love story and not a romance. I think a strong argument both for and against that thesis is possible, but for me the deciding factor that this is not a love story is Bear’s utterly selfish disregard for the torment Nikki suffers as he continues to pursue his own base desires. With that said, I think it is interesting to investigate further the dichotomy between a romance and a love story.

The romance genre in both film and in print is a vast engine producing seemingly endless content that on the surface appears to adhere to a simplistic formula. So much so that one doesn’t need to specify the rules of the genre in order to satirize them. All you need to know is that you have a high-powered businesswoman, a trip to a small town, and a ruggedly handsome man in flannel, and you just know how the plot is going to work out. To be fair, there is a lot more to the romance genre than that oversimplification. Romance stretches from those Hallmark holiday movies to quite inventive fantasy fiction that sells quite well and pushes the boundaries beyond the heteronormative definitions most people expect. What is expected and violated only most rarely is that a romance story ends with some variation of ‘happily ever after’ while a love story is not so constrained.

I can think of two films, which as love stories, defy the happy ending trope of romance tales to quite powerful ends.

1970’s Love Story is an example that is burned into the minds of Baby Boomers with its box office success spurring imitators and satirization. With its dramatic, tragic ending eliminating the possibility of a happy ending the film is practically the platonic ideal of the concept that a love story is distinct from a romance.

The second example in both print and film is The Remains of the Day. Both the novel by British writer and knighthood recipient Sir Kazuo Ishiguro and the Merchant/Ivory film explore more than the romantic relationship of their lead characters with meditations on service and to whom we give, often unquestioningly, that service.

Both the novel and the film are presented from the point of view of Mr. Stevens, the butler and head of the household staff to a British lord in the period leading up to World War II. While Lord Darlington, seeking to avoid another disastrous war, flirts with fascism, Stevens manages the large manor while suppressing his deep emotional feelings for the newly hired housekeeper Miss Kenton, second only to Stevens himself in the hierarchy of servants. Stevens’s devotion to his duty to his lord, even as the poisonous nature of Darlington’s politics becomes evident, causes the man to miss the love life he might have shared with Miss Kenton. The story is deeply romantic but is very much not a romance.

I think one of the vectors on which we can determine the difference between a romance and a love story is that a romance is inherently optimistic while love stories may be optimistic, but often have a darker streak running through them.

While Obsession, which ends as far from ‘happily ever after’ as seemingly possible, is appropriately dark for a horror film, it is not a love story because unlike poor, self-deluded Mr. Stevens, Bear’s interests end at his own desires.

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Road Trip Tomorrow

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Tomorrow, September 25, 2026, I will take the day off from my full-time job, bundle myself into my Kia Soul in the morning, and embark on the two-to-three-hour drive from home to the dream place, Hollywood, California. There I will visit the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures to get a sneak preview of the exhibit The Horror Show, a history of horror cinema, before returning to my car for the lengthy and undoubtedly traffic-congested drive back home.

It has been nearly two years since I last made a foray to the heart of cinema, Hollywood, when I drove to see Quatermass and the Pit at the New Beverly Cinema, but this exhibit at the museum feels worth the drive.

I visited the Academy Museum once before, and I learned quite a bit, such as how African American cinema invented the music video well before the advent of cable television, and I got to see many fine items and memorabilia from over a century of filmmaking. The Horror Show, in addition to having items such as the original cape worn by Bela Lugosi in Dracula and the production mask from Creature from the Black Lagoon (one of my favorite movies of the original Universal horror cycle), will also explore the impact of horror films on culture and on the culture that these movies comment upon.

I will have lunch in Hollywood, probably not at the museum’s cafe, since my meal there last time was less than satisfying, and then return home, hopefully before dinnertime, to spend the evening with my sweetie-wife. It will be a long day of driving, but one that I hope will be worth the investment of time.

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Why “Conservative” Entertainment Fails

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With the release and scathing reviews of Run Hide Fight: Infidels and the expanding slate of productions from Angel Studios, explicitly conservative entertainment is once again in the air. As with previous attempts at “right-wing” entertainment media, these releases are not finding tremendous commercial or critical success.

Some attribute these failures to the fact that they are conservative, but that is far too simplistic an answer, in my opinion. The Passion of the Christ, which presented the biblical story in a decidedly conservative (some would argue antisemitic) manner as a two-hour subtitled film, took in over half a billion dollars at the box office: hardly a failure. Outspoken and larger-than-life writer and filmmaker John Milius, he of the original Red Dawn, has never shied away from his conservative beliefs, and his notions of honor, masculinity, and living by a code infuse his writings. While Milius never found the outsized success of some of his friends, such as Lucas and Spielberg, he remained an active and vital filmmaker until he was sidelined by health issues.

No, productions like Run Hide Fight: Infidels, its predecessor, Run Hide Fight, or the ill-fated The 1/2 Hour News Hour, a poor attempt to replicate the success of The Daily Show, fail because they prioritize their political hits over any sense of what is actually entertaining.

Some may think that this is an unfair judgment because, after all, The Daily Show is unabashedly liberal, its targets are overwhelmingly conservative, and in the era of MAGA and the Trump personality cult this has only intensified. That judgment is almost correct. The Daily Show is deeply colored by the liberal worldview of its writers and performers just as Red Dawn was deeply influenced by the worldview of its creator. A piece of creative art is stamped, sometimes blatantly, sometimes subtly, by the worldview of its creator. When they sit down to pen something that is funny, thrilling, or just interesting to them, it will reflect, to a greater or lesser degree, the manner in which they see and interpret the world. When the writers of The Daily Show look upon the absurdity of the world, they are by nature predisposed to satirize and ridicule the right, but that is a predisposition and not a commandment from on high.

In 2009, during the first few months of Obama’s first term and nearly eight years after the horrific attacks of 9/11, a low-flying jumbo jet provoked low-grade panic in New York City. The Daily Show performed a bit wondering what sort of brain-damaged nut would do such a thing to the traumatized city, and then revealed, through a doctored image, Vice President Joe Biden at the controls of the aircraft. At the time, the defining image of Biden was one of a person who tended to say and do things that caused the administration public-relations troubles, and so the skit exaggerated this for comedic effect, even though the vice president was on “their side.” The 1/2 Hour News Hour never ever skewered anyone on the right, because its mandate was to deliver conservative talking points. It was never comedy produced by a conservative mind, such as the films of John Hughes; it was a terrible attempt to use comedy to propagandize for conservatism.

The very same things are true of The Daily Wire’s and Angel Studios’ productions and releases. Whether it is George Washington converting Native Americans into joyously celebrating Christ, or a very attractive young woman and her guns emerging victorious over school shooters, or a hardened combat veteran saving a feckless and impotent police force and a university from Islamic terrorists, the ideology comes first rather than emerging organically from a creative who is writing and talking about the world as they see it. That is the very heart of the trouble with most “conservative” entertainment: it is a polemic first and often only.

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The Chaos of Migraine Triggers

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Anyone who suffers from migraines knows that they have a set of stimuli that can, but not always, ignite a dreaded migraine. These triggers can be visual, flashing lights or patterns, taste, consuming the wrong sort of food, tactile, a sensation that sparks the terrible pain, olfactory, a powerful scent can trigger one for some people (marijuana prompts one for me), or auditory, a particular sound, set of sounds, or sometimes sounds in the just wrong frequency.

Sounds are my bane; for me the noise created by chewing or speaking with one’s mouth open can start a migraine. As a child, without a diagnosis for my condition, one of my criteria for true wealth was having a place to eat where I never would hear anyone else chewing. Along with the food noises, sounds at the high frequencies can also be trouble for me.

The trouble with migraine triggers, or at least mine, is that they are terribly inconsistent in causing the headaches. What might set one off on Monday is utterly benign on Tuesday. I can say that sounds at the treble end of the stereo might start a migraine but that is not always the case. Which means while avoiding the triggers is preferable, even when I can’t, that doesn’t mean exposure is a pain sentence.

Last Friday I got some more experience in that department.

At the day job we were having our ‘All Hands’ meeting on Zoom where achievements were celebrated and the plans for the next very busy quarter were disclosed to everyone in the Medicare department. These large meetings can span two and a half hours or more, but having them on Zoom has been much better than the pre-pandemic routine of crowding into a massive hall for them. So, there I was, at my desk, headset on listening to the presentations when a new presenter came on and BOOM, migraine trigger.

This presenter’s mic clipped to just the wrong part of the treble frequencies. My head began pounding almost immediately.  Their presentation wasn’t very long but the length no longer mattered. I held on for another 30 minutes or so, hoping, vainly, that once the trigger passed, I might slowly wind down from the migraine, but the inflammation in my brain refused to cooperate. I did not last to the end of the meeting before I had to crawl back home, double dose on my prescription medication, and suffer for another eight and a half hours before the cycle broke.

It is the inconsistency of the trigger that I find so maddening. If it always caused a headache, I could always avoid or take steps, such as taking my meds ahead of time, to stay safe. This works sometimes and sometimes it doesn’t. Still, I know I can count myself as more fortunate than many. My migraine do not come with visual distortions or powerful waves of nausea that many suffer, but still, the sensation of having my head split open and lava poured in is a less than pleasant one.

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Trump and The Kennedy Center

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Named for the murdered president, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, constructed of unique materials donated from nations around the world to honor the fallen man for whom it is named, may soon be nothing more than a pile of rubble, destroyed to slake the thirst for aggrandizement of a weak and vain buffoon.

Shortly after assuming the office of President of the United States, Trump, among the numerous illegal actions he has taken, renamed the Kennedy Center, adding his own name to sully and spoil the memorial to a president whose popularity burned so brightly that the narcissistic idiot found such injuries intolerable. The Center’s name, however, is set by law (not that the law has ever restrained this administration), and his illegal renaming was challenged. The courts, in an unusual move for this administration, upheld the law and ordered the offending text removed. Perhaps it was removed, perhaps it wasn’t; we shan’t know, because, with a toddler’s tantrum, a scaffold and blind were erected hiding the name from view.

Now talk has turned to the Center being in “terrible” shape and in dire need of massive restoration, restoration that requires Trump’s name to be permanently affixed to the Center as its savior. It is a move that the courts have again said he has no legal authority to make, and the administration has responded with not-very-veiled threats that the Center is in such a condition that, if not restored, it would require its destruction. As with the East Wing of the White House, Trump is likely to move fast and have the deed done before anyone could use the glacially slow wheels of the legal system to stop him.

In response to this, some voices from the resistance who hold Kennedy and the Center in quite high regard are advising us to let the petulant child have his way, to put the fool’s name on the Center, and to take it back off once he has been consigned to the trash heap of history. They implore us to do this to save the Center.

NO.

I have reasons why I think that this would be a terrible mistake. First, if you pay a blackmailer, you will always pay. Giving in only empowers him, and that must not be done. Second, if it is a bluff, then calling it forces him to reveal the bluff, which wounds him politically. Third, if it is not a bluff and he does destroy the beloved memorial to a slain president, then you hang that shit around the neck of every Republican for a generation. It becomes one more tool in de-Trumpifying the GOP, and one that would accelerate the process.

Stand firm. Either he backs down and sabotages his own standing in doing so, or he mortally wounds the GOP with his actions. In either case standing on principle ultimately accrues to the benefit of democracy.

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