The mythical trucker: american psychopathology, lesson one million

 The immediate centrist-right wing response to the limited student loan forgiveness has been diagnostically fascinating. What Governor Rick DeSantis said about truck drivers not liking their "bosses" getting loan forgiveness sort of sums it up. Truck drivers, in this country club view, aren't like country clubbers and trust funders. The latter are so concerned with their families that they put enormous pressure on Congress to lower inheritance taxes, and have succeeded. But truckers - truckers are abstract Ayn Randian beings. Their parents have no college loan debt, their spouses have no college loan debt, their children and grandchildren don't - or maybe they do, but the proud individual, socially blank trucker (who often him or herself has college debt) doesn't care. This individual without any social ties, this immaculate conception of a trucker, cares only, egotistically, about its own self - how much it can eat, how much it can wank, how much it can shit. It is cut off from all social relations.

This actually reflects the dominant way of thinking in patriarchy. The patriarchal subject is, ideally, some trust fund frat boy who says things like "there's no free lunch", even as their very physical existence has depended on at least eighteen years of free lunches. In their delusional, testosterone stoked imaginations, they are "self-made". In a culture with a more realistic view of life, the idea of a self being self-made would be cause for laughter or concern - concern that this claim was evidence of some deep psychopathy. But in the odd tribal culture of American patriarchy, this claim becomes something heroic.

These things all tie into the psychopathology of American politics. Governed by fatally flawed myths, American politics is and has been a real threat to ... Americans. Flesh and blood Americans, Americans who love, have connections, realize throughout their lives that there is such a thing as a free lunch, a lunch they can never pay back.

So I am having a good time reading tweets, especially from the political industry of consultants, pundits and general scoundrels in DC who together form the club of Very Serious People. Their views are reflected everywhere - from the halls of the NYT to the seats of Fox News. And... they are completely unhinged.