@Ticomaya,
Quote:Herman Cain's Chief of Staff Mark Block ... be sure to watch the dramatic moment at 0:41:
It's not just "at 0:41. After that he blows smoke right in your face. There's contempt in that gesture on top of the daring of puffing on a cig in a campaign ad. One wouldn't seriously expect Mr Block to be unaware of the reactions he was going to provoke.
From whence such confidence we would do well to ask. Here is one possible answer.
It is taken from Mailer's essay on narcissism in Genius and Lust: a book about Henry Miller.
Quote:So it is possible that narcissism is a true disease, a biological displacement of the impulse to develop which could bear the same relation to love that onanism bears to copulation, or cancer to the natural growth of tissue. As we come a little nearer to the recognition that the base beneath all disease, the ultimate disease, is insanity or cancer, and other illnesses may even be bulwarks against some irreversible revolt of the flesh or the mind once they have determined to grow in ways and into places flesh and mind have never grown before, so to the narcissist, there is always the unconscious terror that isolation, if unrelieved, must end in one arm or the other of the ultimate disease.
It's a position taken by Freud, by Wilhelm Reich and by Bob Dylan. The notion of the "plague".
That cancer is largely of psychological origin. It's a dynamite subject and Media is never going to cover it because Media attracts narcissists like a jam-pot attracts wasps, as does politics, and promotes narcissism both to justify itself and to sell goods. So obviously other causes of disease are highlighted by Media which, on this theory, is the greatest cause of disease ever seen on the face of the earth.
Hence Schieffer's sensitivity.
Quote:America's never seen a candidate like Herman Cain.
Maybe that is no small claim. Maybe it is not a cliche at all as most people will probably see it. It's a marker.
My extract hardly does justice to Mailer's essay so I recommend it to your reverences and worships.
BTW--narcissism is not the love of self but rather the obsession with self. A narcissist might just as easily smash the mirror as kiss it.
