There is a growing mountain of inconceivable inconceivable-ness irritatingly getting in the way of me telling a story to myself I grew quite fond of after decades of it working just fine: I am in control of my life.
The past was so simple. Hungry? Scour a grocery store, rummage in a fridge, flap hands near a pan: I am eating. Unemployed? Get degrees, write resumes, fill out applications: I am working. Politically disgusted? Grab a ballot, fill in the circle for the other guy, grab a sticker: I am changing power.
At least the food has kept on having happy endings (thank you, eggs). My working and electoral life are different stories.
I am going on two and a half years of being unable to land a full-time job. In the USA, that can trigger all kinds of stimulating and inter-related developments: the collapse of your health, social ostracization, illness-proliferating loneliness, declining access to the joys of life, and the sudden availability of an inordinate amount of time to become informed about the terrible things a notably corrupt, deranged, and hateful human is wreaking on the country you put into that story bucket called “home.”
Stories about the broken boyclown defiling the American presidency, nation, and world have turned into something like a swarm of piranhas that shows up every time I go for a dip into the question, “What’s happening in the world today?”
They eat at everything: my mood, my hopes, my resting heart rate, and my afternoon plans to ride my 1987 Miyata Ridge Runner (a truly beautiful bicycle) to a cafe for a coffee and pastry.
They make me feel out of control. This … orange creature over there … makes me feel out of control right here. Okay, that’s too simple and overdramatic. I realize Trump is just one person, but it’s the objects of his violence that end up upending me: He is leading a movement intent on destroying all of the institutions, norms, decency, and ideas that I recently discovered were the foundation upon which I built my little story of control in the first place. Sigh, interdependence is a tough lesson when you’re raised in a culture of hyper-independence.
Not all is lost. The human desire for control, and my desire to enjoy a Tuesday, are like a very bouncy ball. When whacked, that energy doesn’t disappear, it becomes the fuel blasting my pesky psychological needs in other directions. Sometimes the assault is so violent and lamentable, and sometimes my current sense of disconnection and despair is so pronounced, it sends me straight into the arms of something else that takes seconds to convert unrequited struggle into a tidy sense of control: large language models, which the bubble-fied industry would really like you to call AI.
If there is one thing an LLM can do besides destroy our diminishing fresh water supplies, render millions of people’s skills obsolete, ruin the internet, make everyone stupid, drive people to suicide, or steal centuries of human creativity, it is to make up total bullshit that sounds legit.
Fight fire with fire, fight bullshit with bullshit. I grabbed this LLM deathline/lifeline and used it to do the one thing that can organize a society’s immune system response faster than cyclosporiasis: give it a name.
Give the diseased antics of this hateful human a name. Give the sordid emptiness at his center a name. Give his reveling in revulsion a name. My goodness, just stop him from hiding inside labels like “president,” “elected politician,” and “Republican.”
Gemini, proceed:
Malignant Megalomanic Profanatory-Perseverative Syndrome (MMPPS): A catastrophic, highly functional personality consolidation rooted in a profound internal void of identity. The syndrome is structurally driven by an absolute megalomanic conviction of divine or messianic supremacy, which serves as a shield against unadmitted, severe self-disgust. To sustain this delusion and experience a simulated sense of existence, the individual relies on malignant moral and sexual sadism—compulsively profaning the sacred, defiling the innocent, and aggressively turning their environment into a state of corruption to normalize their own internal decay. The clinical presentation is explicitly anchored by a rigid, perseverative speech deficit: communication is restricted to simplistic, highly repetitive thematic loops, characterized by an unnatural elongation of vowels that terminates in a sibilant air leak, representing a continuous somatic venting of predatory contempt.
What stands out most about these words snatched from the online gifts of who knows how many people is that I did not write them. Maybe they’ll still hold — MMPPS may be total bullshit, but that doesn’t mean it’s incorrect.
There is a sick person leading us into oblivion. He sits in the president’s chair; he is not a president. He is a decaying patient. An infected cell. Our ending, if we keep on giving him room to operate with the freedom of identities he has nothing to do with.
Name him for what he is so we can fight it. He is an 80-year-old man with MMPPS who cannot care about anything beyond his own disease. He is our culture’s illness. He is an opportunity for us to heal. Or at least to tell a story about it.
Originally published on Substack.