The word “psychopath” gets tossed around a lot.

So it occurred to me to check out how it’s defined in psychiatry.

I began with this piece in ‘Psychology Today,’ and went on to check out the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R) and the Psychopathic Personality Inventory (PPI).

Here are the chief 15 psychiatric symptoms, every one of which is markedly present in the Republican nominee for president of the United States:

1. Callousness

2. Absence of remorse or shame

3. Externalization of blame

4. Glibness

5. Conning others for personal profit or pleasure

6. Outlandish lying

7. Grandiose sense of self-worth

8. Boastfulness

9. Pathological egocentricity

10. Inability to modulate responses

11. Parasitic lifestyle

12. Low tolerance for frustration

13. High irritability

14. High aggressiveness

15. Indifference to plans

Here is what amazes me:  A presidential candidate displays every sign of psychopathy.  That is, of a severe and dangerous personality disorder.  Every single sign.  He is, in fact, a classic case.  And yet so far as I know, no psychiatrist has yet said this publicly.

President Obama just called Trump “unfit” to serve as president.  That’s a gentle word.  “Unfit” could mean simply unsuited, or not a good fit.  But what it really means, in  this case, is sick.

It’s rather like the emperor’s new clothes, isn’t it?  The Republican nominee shows every sign of being in dire need of psychiatric treatment.  And yet nobody says so.

What happens now that IMF director Dominique Strauss-Kahn (as of today, make that former director) has posted $1,000,000 bail while hiring the world’s most expensive defense lawyers for his rape trial?

Now the victim gets pilloried.

Her name has been published in France and on the web, where fantasies of her being a whore are rampant (apparently it’s okay to rape a prostitute).  The French gang of good ole boys (and, doubly shamefully, gals) have proclaimed themselves in shock — shock! — that a pillar of society like DSK could be treated by the NYPD like a common criminal.  So what if rape is criminal assault?   Handcuffs are fine for the lower classes, but for the privileged few?  How dare those Americans!  Can’t they see she’s just a maid?

Once again, as DSK’s lawyers dig up every detail of the victim’s life and twist it to make it appear slutty, it’ll be clear why rape is so drastically under-reported.  This woman has real courage.  Most victims simply can’t face the idea of being picked apart and violated again and again in the press and by the defense, who will do everything they can to “prove” that she is a lying, vengeful, publicity-seeking slut.  Like the mob that raped CBS reporter Lara Logan in Tahrir Square, they will do their best to pull her apart.

Could you pass the slut test?

Imagine it:  every detail of your personal and work life put on public view and twisted into leering ‘significance.’  Every date, every drink, every tittle and every tattle of gossip or innuendo, every misstep you ever made will be paraded as “proof.”  Only a hermit could pass this test.

You’ve had sex before — guilty.

You are poor — guilty.

You are black — guilty.

You are a single mother — guilty.

You have breasts and a vagina — guilty.

You are human — guilty.

How did you even dream of daring to bring such a charge against a wealthy, powerful, white man?  Who do you think you are?  You’re just a cleaning woman.  Just a nobody.  Just another lying slut.

This sentence really struck me in President Obama’s Middle East speech this morning:

We have a chance to show that the US values a street vendor in Tunisia more than the raw power of a dictator.

And now we have a chance to show that we value the dignity of an immigrant maid more than the assumed privilege and entitlement of wealth and power.  How dare they treat him like a common criminal?  Because if he is indeed found guilty — and for the NYPD to act with such alacrity in a rape case, you can be sure the evidence is very solid — then that is exactly what he is.  A criminal.  And all too common.

Since I just heard that the White House has decided to release the reportedly gruesome photos of Osama Bin Laden’s body — I hope incorrectly — I just sent this email to the White House:

URGENT:

PLEASE Mr President,

DO NOT RELEASE PHOTOS of Osama bin Laden.

All the goodwill you have engendered worldwide by ordering his killing will fade if you do this, and besides, it is pointless:

1.  The ‘deathers’ will only say it was photo-shopped, and since they do not want to be convinced, will not be.

2.  It will be seen in “the Arab world” as an affront to human dignity.

3.  I myself, as an American Jew, see it is as an affront to human dignity, to your dignity, and to the dignity of the United States.

Most sincerely — Lesley Hazleton

Please feel free to copy and paste in here — http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact — if you agree.

—————————————–

UPDATE, Wednesday May 4:  Obama just nixed release of photos.  Says “gloating is not who we are.”  Thank you, Mr President.

The movie to watch tomorrow after Obama’s speech:  James Longley’s documentary Iraq in Fragments, more timely than ever and yet timeless.

I saw it when it first came out in 2006, but maybe I was too focused then on the ‘now-ness’ of documentaries, or I was blinded by my own imagined ‘expertise’ on Iraq as I worked on After the Prophet. I  remember thinking it a good movie, but somehow it didn’t imprint itself on my over-researched brain.

But now the President’s about to declare an end to the American combat mission in Iraq – and to do it even as the violence ramps up again, despite strangely other-worldly assurances from D.C. that it‘s lessened.   Now everyone’s breathing easier because we’re “getting out” of Iraq (we aren’t, of course — we’re just rebranding some combat troops as support-and-assist troops, adding a huge number of Blackwater/Xe-type mercenaries paid by the State Department instead of the Pentagon (as though that will make all the difference), and moving other combat units out of the Iraqi frying pan into the Afghanistan fire).  So it seemed a good time to rent the DVD of Longley’s movie and take a second look.

And this time it both took my breath away and just about broke my heart.

Where was my head in 2006?  How was I not haunted as I now am by the fear and desperate hope in the eyes of Muhammad, the eleven-year-old Sunni boy living a Dickensian working life in a filthy auto-parts repair shop in Baghdad as American helicopters thunder overhead?

How did the pleas of the blindfolded and beaten men accused by Muqtada al-Sadr’s fired-up Shia followers of selling alcohol in the southern city of Nasariya not echo in my ears?

How did I blank out the elderly father dreaming of an independent Kurdistan in a small village in the north, even as his son surrenders his dreams of medical school for work at the local brick oven, shown belching huge plumes of oily smoke into a Ken-Burns-gorgeous sunset?

These are the real lives and dreams affected by America’s war in Iraq, though there’s no attempt to push that point in the three parts of this movie.  In fact there’s no omniscient narrator at all. The only voice-over narration is that of the Iraqis Longley follows with his camera, and they speak about themselves from a place deep inside.  They let him in, trusting him to not to judge, and he doesn’t.  Instead, he makes their stories both utterly of the place and yet universal.

‘Iraq in Fragments’ has been called – rightly – a documentary masterpiece (acknowledged by, among others, Sundance awards for directing, cinematography, and editing, and a nomination for best documentary at the Oscars, where the young Muhammad lost out to Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth).  But its power is all the greater by contrast with the best-known “Iraq war movie” – best-picture Oscar winner The Hurt Locker, which presented itself as a fictionalized documentary.

Trouble is, ‘The Hurt Locker’ wasn’t really about Iraq.  It was  yet another in the long series of American movies where “the meaning of war” is seen entirely through American eyes.  Iraq was all but incidental to ‘The Hurt Locker,’ as were Iraqis.   The place and the people were merely a stage on which Americans played their drama.  ‘Iraq in Fragments,’ by contrast, takes you behind the stage, and quietly and devastatingly shows the effect on those who were merely ‘The Hurt Locker’s’ scenery.

So by all means watch the President’s speech tomorrow, but then be a mensch, and watch this movie.

———————————————————

By way of a coda to both Obama’s speech and ‘Iraq in Fragments,’ you could do worse than consider what General Ray Odierno, the departing commander of American forces in Iraq, said in the NYT today:

“We came in very naïve about what the problems were in Iraq; I don’t think we understood what I call the societal devastation that occurred,” he said, citing the Iran-Iraq war, the Persian Gulf war and the international sanctions from 1990 to 2003 that wiped out the middle class. “And then we attacked to overthrow the government,” he said.

The same went for the country’s ethnic and sectarian divisions, he said: “We just didn’t understand it.”

To advocates of the counterinsurgency strategy that General Odierno has, in part, come to symbolize, the learning curve might highlight the military’s adaptiveness. Critics of a conflict that killed an estimated 100,000 Iraqis, perhaps far more, and more than 4,400 American soldiers might see the acknowledgment as evidence of the war’s folly.

Asked if the United States had made the country’s divisions worse, General Odierno said, “I don’t know.”

“There’s all these issues that we didn’t understand and that we had to work our way through,” he said. “And did maybe that cause it to get worse? Maybe.”

What’s it like  to become a pawn of foreign policy?  The three American hikers being held in Tehran’s Evin prison have now had a full year to ponder this nightmare.

Shane Bauer, Sarah Shourd, and Josh Fattal could be you.   Okay, a tad more adventurous, perhaps.  They were hiking toward a famed waterfall in Iraqi Kurdistan, near the border with Iran, when they either inadvertently crossed the unmarked border or, as reported in The Nation, were grabbed and taken across by Iranian soldiers spotting likely targets, and accused of being spies.

In fact what the three stumbled into was not just Iran itself, but the absurd stand-off that is US-Iran ‘relations.’   There was never any issue of Iran really thinking they were spies.  As the Free The Hikers website notes, the three have “a documented record as advocates of social and environmental justice.  They admire and respect different cultures and religions, and share a love of travel that has taken them to many countries.  That is why they went to Kurdistan, not because they wanted to enter Iran.”

Their crime was not that they went hiking near the border with Iran;  it was that they went hiking there just as the US began taking an increasingly hard line toward Iran — one that inevitably involved victimizing the three hikers once they were taken captive.

At least they have now been formally charged — with illegal border crossing, a penalty demanding a cash fine under Iranian law, not over a year in prison.  In that year, their families have been allowed to see them precisely once;  they have had no access to their Iranian lawyer;   and — particularly cruel and unusual punishment — Sarah Shourd has been kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day.   All three are essentially being held hostage to America’s increasingly hardline policy toward Iran, which now includes more severe economic sanctions.

This coming weekend, there’ll be ‘Free the Hikers’ events — rallies and hikes — all over the United States.   But who will the rallyers be appealing to?   Ahmadinejad and Grand Ayatollah Khamenei,  of course, since releasing the hikers is theirs to do.   But this nightmare took two countries to create, and will take two countries to end.

Ransoming prisoners  has been a feature of Middle East politics for as long as historical records exist.  Right now, the Israeli government is giving in to public pressure and finally negotiating through third parties with its sworn enemy Hamas in Gaza to release Israeli soldier Gilead Shalit from years of captivity.  (Last I heard, they were willing to release 100 prisoners for Shalit, but were stalled over the hundred and first:  Marwan Barghouti, the one man who stands a chance of being an effective Palestinian leader who could lead his people toward a two-state solution).   I suspect — and certainly hope — that similar negotiations are going on behind the scenes between the United States and Iran.   But I also suspect that a successful resolution to the hikers’ nightmare is being held up by just one or two ‘high-value’ Iranian prisoners whom the United States refuses to release.

‘High value’ indeed.   The United States has done plenty of prisoner exchanges before.  Are the White House and State Department saying that Shane Bauer, Sarah Shourd, and Josh Fattal aren’t worth it?

It’s unclear that Iran ever wanted this whole situation any more than did the United States (The Nation reported that the officer in charge of the unit that took the hikers prisoner may since have been tried and executed.)   But now Iran needs to save face.  Of course it should release Shane, Sarah, and Josh no matter what, but between ‘should’ and ‘will’ is the realm not of justice, but of foreign policy.   If Iran needs to find a face-saving way to free the hikers, that’s fine by me.   The United States should flex its mind instead of its muscle and do its damnedest to provide one.