The Mask Becomes Your Face

the ritual language burns into the brain, and then nothing else is left

It displaces.

Something close to a thousand people are still missing in Lahaina, and searchers are turning up bodies in family groups — huddled together against the fire, burned nearly to ash, parents dead with the children they instinctively tried to shelter with their own bodies. This is familiar stuff to Joe Biden, ‘cause he also had a fire at his house once, and it almost burned up his ‘67 Corvette, man. “But all kidding aside,” he says, standing in a place of mass death and recent agony.

Elected officials speak in a language that’s unique to their status group. If you’ve ever tried to attend a city council or school board meeting, you’ve watched them open with the onanistic portion of the thing, handing out certificates and doing grip-and-grins. “Bob, I just want to echo your wonderful comments about this amazing program.” They see themselves first, then others of their class, then they go blind. The first duty of a public official is to take a lot of selfies.

In a crisis, they recite. We’ve all watched them do this. “This is not who we are.” “Let me be clear: Hate has no home here.” You know what they’re going to say before they say it, and you know the tone before you hear it. The current mayor of Los Angeles is very fond of “our message has been very clear” and “we’re going to link arms and stand together,” so you’re not surprised to hear her respond to a question with something like, “Well, Maria, thank you for that great question. Our message has been very clear: We’re going to link arms and stand together.” Listening to elected officials speak is qualitatively different than listening to people speak. They perform the ritual behaviors of their status group.

And so Joe Biden, who has been an elected official for many decades, spending his adult lifetime reading off the cards his staff gives him, reciting the day’s lines, finds himself talking to people about tragedy and pain, and he can’t. The man lost his first wife and baby daughter to an accident, so he knows pain, but he can’t turn it into a recognition of pain in others. He has no language for others. He’s famous for this.

Hey, there’s our war dead, man

Here’s a Marine Corps combat veteran describing his bizarre and awkward visit with Joe Biden as he recovered in the hospital from a double amputation:

They become debilitated by a lifetime of ritual language. If a staffer hasn’t told them to look somber and say “I’m sorry for your loss,” they don’t know how. It isn’t a line they’ve been equipped with for the event. Hey man your kids burned to death I almost lost my Corvette once, man. All kiddin’ aside, man!

By the way, standing on Maui he joked about the ground being hot.

@skynewsPresident #Biden remarked "that's some hot ground, man" ahead of his speech on the devastating #wildfires that ravaged #Hawaii, earlier this month. The #president surveyed the #wreckage and vowed to rebuild "the way people of #Maui want to rebuild". Biden got a close up look of the wreckage in #Lahaina, a #historic town of 13,000 people that was virtually #destroyed by the flames.

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Even recognizing that the man is struggling with senility, this is an astonishing performance. Meanwhile the next person in line behind him giggles and cackles and babbles like a drunk when she speaks anywhere about anything.

They aren’t people anymore. They can’t talk like people. They don’t have normal human affect. What’s particularly interesting is that this learned inability to read human cues is recent and narrow. Bill Clinton, as much a politician as anyone who has ever lived, had a well-known ability to see people and signal his empathy, or at least to do a brilliant job of faking it. Similarly, Donald Trump is obviously very very fond of Donald Trump, who is amazing, trust me, everybody says so, but he has a normal human ability to spontaneously bullshit with the normals. Elite disconnection isn’t inevitable.

The broken personal thing behind all the broken institutional things is a loss of basic human connection and behavior. It’s a learned disconnection, and they can’t hide it.