Why Does Donald Trump Lie So Much?

When Donald Trump denies saying something that he has said, has he forgotten what he previously said? Has he perhaps convinced himself that he never said it? My sense is that Trump is not an amnesiac. Rather, he has an inability or unwillingness to acknowledge that he does anything wrong or says anything wrong. His psychological development is arrested at around the age of eight or nine years old — the age when the parent points out that the son has tracked dog crap into the house and the son responds like Bart Simpson, saying, “It wasn’t me.” I remember lying like that. My dread of the shame I would feel upon admitting that I tracked dog crap into the house was so great that I felt I had to lie.

Fortunately, in my case, I learned that lying actually created more personal pain and problems for me than admitting the truth did. The guilt I felt about lying was a very bad feeling and the amount of work it took to fabricate more lies in order to support the original lie was more labor than I was willing to do. I liked playing basketball, running around in the woods by Lake Michigan and riding my bike with my friends too much to spend my all my time and energy concocting falsehoods.

Telling the truth about errors I made or even bad things I knowingly did allowed me to gradually learn to feel less shame about my mistakes and foibles, about being human. In other words, I learned to screw up, admit it and not be crippled by shame. I think this is a crucial milestone in the development of a person. It can happen earlier or later in life, but it must happen or the person will remain trapped by fear of embarrassment and shame in a castle made of their own lies. And that grim castle, with the walls slowly pressing in, is where the president dwells.

Pity the child raised by a parent who suffers from perfectionism. They are made to feel that screwups and failures are not acceptable. We know from accounts of Trump’s life that Fred Trump was such a parent: a rigid and avaricious fellow who would tolerate nothing but the most superficial type of success from his ne’er do well son, Donald. Trump learned to lie early and he found it a hard habit to break. Learning to admit one’s gaffes is like learning to swim. If you do not learn it at a young age, you do not know that being in the water can be a comfortable place, even a soothing place. You must go through those early days of flailing about in the water to be able to learn to relax and ultimately find grace in your movements in the water.

I have taught immigrants English as a Second language for twenty years and more than once I’ve found myself in front of the class, at the crossroads between admitting I didn’t know something and pretending I did. A language is a living organism, always changing, morphing slightly to take in new vocabulary or alter syntax, to adjust punctuation or reconstruct grammar. Consequently, I can sometimes find myself telling my students something incorrect about the language. Inevitably when this happens, a smarty pants student (or just me) will catch the mistake and then I must admit in front of a room full of people that there are things about my native language I’m not clear about. The first time did this was excruciating; sweat pooled down my back and my voice cracked. Nineteen years later, admitting that I have told the class something stupid is practically effortless. I even enjoy it! I can joke about it with the students and experience the satisfaction that comes with learning something new.

Tragically, the president cannot enjoy such small graces. And because he lives the most public of lives, we must witness him sledgehammer the truth daily, spitting out non-sequiturs and twisting reality into absurd and grotesque forms. We have all had the opportunity to chat with a world class bullshitter perched on a bar stool, waiting beside us for a train or sitting next to us on an airplane. During such encounters, we think, “Poor guy. Doesn’t he know that he needn’t lie like that in order to have people like him?” And then we exit the bar, catch the train or plane and start to put some distance between us and the fabulist. Would that we could with the president.

William Blake Was Not a Content Provider

William Blake was not a content provider
When he flew a red kite above the London smoke
When he dreamt of windstorms pummeling factories
When he heard the sound of a wolf walking on the roof

William Blake was not a content provider
When he walked for miles beside the icy Thames
When he dreamt of a wren calling out from a slag heap
When he saw a man walking a tiger in Piccadilly Circus

William Blake was not a content provider
When the plague returned to London
When the souls of the dead exited the coal mines
Wearing wicker masks of horses and sheep

for Leo Gonçalves

Mike Pence in The Haze

Mike Pence is the great American absence. At some point in his youth, he became some other one, someone that is not he. Now his voice issues from that other, while his face remains perplexed, in the zone between what he was and what he's become. And Mike Pence? Well, he's not there. The job of “Mike Pence” is to carry around the face and the voice so that they may broadcast a version of Mike Pence that he is not. The voice, the face and the bearer are made to lie for his boss, which he does and he doesn't even know why. There is a mercy: Reading the Bible brings a poetic ecstasy wherein the false Mike Pence fades and the real one emerges and resonates like a struck bell to the word-cadence, Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary, the devil as a roaring lion walketh about, seeking whom he may devour. But this lasts for mere seconds and then his fear of a vengeful father God hurling lightning, threatening to sacrifice sons returns and the other face and the other voice come back, leaving their bearer to a cruel limbo that plods on dumbly into the haze of days.

Meme Poem

A fat baby chuckles

A manga girl has stars in her eyes

Homer Simpson disappears into the bushes

A giant letter K dances on the beach

A man in a gorilla suit

Gives a double thumbs-up

Then stretches back on one heel

To point at you indicating

“You the man”

A broadly smiling Asian baby

Looks at you conspiratorially

Wagging his finger as if to say

“I know what you did”

A blue-eyed brunette

In red lipstick

And bluish eyeshadow

Purses her lips

And widens her eyes

In mock surprise

Friends' Records

Drive the car and get tired

Build a bridge of twine

Across the valley of your mind

Set the night on fire with your eyes

With the fuel of your wasted days

Receive the visitors from your past

The gas huffers

And tree huggers

The bereft ball hogs

And ski bum hot dogs

The necklace builders

And shell searchers

The Leonard Cohen

Midnight bedroom

Black tea bandits

And those who 

Studied French

In the lowlands

Of Baltimore

Beneath bridges

Beside freeways

For Michael Haberman

An Introduction to Radical Songs for Rough Times: Protest Songs & A Psych Ward

By February 2017, I’d completed work on a collection of songs that I was calling “Radical Songs for Rough Times.” We are living in the Anthropocene, where climate instability, fascism, police killings, abuse of immigrants and refugees, and other grave crises are our daily reality. As an artist living in such times, one feels compelled to respond: with rage, with poetry, with humor, with anything that might penetrate the lies and assert sanity and spirit.

When I decided that I wanted to write a series of songs on such dire themes, I began to research the ballad form. It seemed like a way to approach writing about tragedy in song without having to resort to vague theoretical language like “society” or journalistic language like, “abuse.” Songs from the Scottish oral tradition collected in the famous Childe Ballads book were a great teacher. From pop music, I learned a lot about how to convey resistance lyrically from the Brazilian Tropicalia and MPB songwriters, as well as from the Nueva Trova songwriters from Cuba. (I speak Portuguese and Spanish).

My compositional method in those days often resembled the following routine: I would listen to the daily episode of Democracy Now as I drank my morning coffee and then I’d walk through the winding back streets of Charles Village in Baltimore, taking in centuries-old churchyards, the stone monolith that is the Masonic Grand Temple (1866) on Charles St., and the little parks and backyards where I sometimes happened upon a hawk perched on low branches searching for prey. While out and about and perambulating, I would start to sing some lyrics and proceed to build the song from there – the rhythm of the step with the breathing and the flowing air being conducive to singing and to writing words.

The songs began to come together, grouped around themes of ecological decline, Donald Trump, fascism, capitalism, war and police killings. Grim topics, to be sure. But when they are approached in the realm of song, hope or at least energy can arise and certainly meaning can appear. I contacted Baltimore musicians who I knew would connect to the songs and help them to coalesce and ascend into compelling pieces of music. We recorded in the front living room of the house Christine and I shared on Calvin Avenue in the eclectic Waverley neighborhood. We counted on the mobile recording prowess of Anthony Staiti, while Alan Weatherhead (Sparklehorse, Daniel Johnston, Camper Van Beethoven), in Richmond, Virginia mixed the album and added some nice arrangement touches. I thought the album sounded terrific.

And then something dreadful occurred.

I was dealing with chronic pain in the form of sciatica, while on the emotional/interpersonal front, Christine (my partner) and I were confronting the presence of a serial abuser of women being present and in a position of power in the Baltimore theater community. This ordeal ended up shattering much of the DIY arts scene in the city and we lost our closest friend and closest collaborator as a result of it. I was having trouble sleeping and an acquaintance of Christine’s had prepared some tinctures to aid in our relaxation. Not being able to sleep one evening, I had a portion of the tincture and went to bed. Upon awaking, I found myself in a state of near psychosis. I was feeling paranoid; I was having intense stomach issues; I was shaking and my heart was galloping at a very high rate. I called my psychiatrist and he explained that I was likely experiencing serotonin syndrome – a state that occurs when there is an excess of the neurochemical serotonin in the system. The tincture I took contained St. John’s Wort, which apparently works as a serotonin enhancer, and it combined with Lexapro (a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor or SSRI that I was taking for OCD) to create the serotonin syndrome. I could not sleep nor relax nor focus and I was experiencing thoughts that I could only describe as galloping horrors. After three days, the symptoms subsided and I resumed taking my Lexapro. However, one night a week later, I couldn’t sleep again and I took an antihistamine to relax and I experienced, once again, all the same punishing symptoms as in the first serotonin syndrome. Antihistamines do not normally counter-indicate with SSRIs; however, there were evidently some residual issues from the first serotonin syndrome still present that made this second incident possible.

It was terrifying and I became dreadfully afraid of ever having serotonin syndrome again. I tried to resume the Lexapro, the medication I’ve been taking at a relatively high dose for 12 years, and I experienced heart palpitations. I was unable to contact my psychiatrist and decided to take myself off of the Lexapro in attempt to avoid any possible future serotonin syndromes. This turned out to be a near fatal decision. I saw a doctor who sent me to a psychiatric day hospital, but a depression wherein the world was emptied of all meaning and all pleasure, was taking hold of me. I had to quit work. And ultimately, after eight months of flailing around in an abject suicidal state between Baltimoe and my parents' house in Milwaukee, the fourth doctor I had consulted mandated that I check into the Mood Disorders wing at Johns Hopkins Hospital on the East Side of Baltimore. After five weeks of treatment there, I was deemed well enough to leave in early May 2018 and by December, 2018, I was feeling like my old self. I felt good, optimistic, social and creative.

It is probably not surprising that I was unable to do any shows to support the "Radical Songs for Rough Times" (currently up on Bandcamp) album in 2017. But now, two years and some change later, I feel well. I have moved to Chicago and I feel it is never too late to send out into the world the music that one creates. I will be performing in support of the album and sending it out to all manner of music websites and journals. I will also be writing a reflection about each of the songs on the album and sharing that on Facebook and on my blog, which brings us to…"Oh, Civilazation," the song which opens the album. After reading Bill McKibben’s book Eaarth [sic], which lays out the climate-fueled ecological collapse problem pretty clearly, I found myself getting acquainted with the work of an anarcho-primitivist/anti-civilization authors Derrick Jensen and John Zerzan. In their work, they describe how agricultural and industrial civilizations remove themselves from the larger web of life on the planet, degrading both the health of the earth and the human condition in the process. Those are some of the ideas that I was thinking about as I composed this song walking through the alleys of Charles Village in Baltimore in 2016.

Book Idea

Science-fiction novel in which a parallel world is born out of all the lies Donald Trump tells. The force of his lies generates this other place. In some cases, the new reality is superior to our present one. For example, global warming now really is a Chinese hoax! Others are more ominous: Trump really did have the largest inauguration crowd in US history. While others are bizarre and fantastical: Tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants somehow manage to vote in the 2016 election, despite voter registration and ID laws and the fear these immigrants have of being arrested and deported. How this happens, I cannot say; the novel would have to puzzle it out. Or how about this one: On the afternoon of 9/11/2001, thousands of Muslim Americans amass in Jersey City to cheer Bin Laden and his mass murder in Manhattan. This one is quite macabre in its paranoiac grandeur. It is, but it is just one crooked square on the jagged quilt that is the reality of this new world based upon the outlandish, the fevered and the deranged. What a world would be born.