The Horror

Stephen Miller is the weirdest Jew ever. He looks to me like all the nazis (spelling intentional) put together, but bears a doppelganger resemblance to Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda. The same dark eye sockets, the same sallow complexion, the same demonic torquing in his face. If he ever smiled in a genuinely friendly way, you get the feeling that his lips would crack. I’m convinced he was featured in Raiders of the Lost Ark, when the eyeballs of the nazis melt down their cheeks.

By report, he is joined at the hip to Drumpf, the one cabinet minister who will never be fired. He seems to have no direct responsibility for a department, but serves as the Chief Minister for Human Evil. If an immigrant child has to be used as bait, Miller is the one standing behind the kid. If a paraplegic grandfather needs to be pushed from a balcony, Miller is the one who uncouples the brakes. His defense of Drumpf’s plan to seize Greenland by force was a set piece of hysterical, twisted delirium. All Jake Tapper could do was the shake his head in disbelief.

When a demonic figure makes his appearance on the stage, we are required to ask how he got that way. Did he actually make a pact with the Devil? Did he escape from a painting by Hieronymus Bosch? The tale of his upbringing has been told and retold: a “regular” childhood in a Jewish neighborhood in Los Angeles, Hebrew School at Beth Shir Shalom. And then (and then!) a sudden conversion to conservativism, where all the native weirdness of his character was channeled into a politics of confrontation. He was the debate kid who bit down and never released, reveling in his notorious, repellent differentness.

I knew kids like this, but none so extreme. Most are coaxed away from the margin and learn how to function in normal community. But Miller appears to have gone a step further. He seems to have felt his differentness so acutely that he chose to identify with still more powerful aggressors. It’s what happens when you are threatened by your own perceived weakness, when others marginalize you for your hopeless oddity. Instead of allowing yourself to be ground down, you choose the irresistible power of those around you and become what feels most dangerous and threatening. In Miller’s case, it would seem to be theatrical race supremacism.

There is something poignant in Miller’s life story, his profound discomfort with minority status in a psyche that craved privilege and prerogative. It’s a little bit like the Hitler saga, a man who craved status as an artist, and made others pay for his professional failure. But understanding Miller does not mean indulging his aggression. The rule about pathology is that it has to be opposed.

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The foregoing article is my personal opinion and not that of any other organization or person.