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rippin-r-us1 · 2 months

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The Grandiose Narcissist

Navigating the World of the Grandiose Narcissist: A Deep Dive

In the intricate tapestry of human personality, the grandiose narcissist stands out with their flamboyant confidence, charm, and a seemingly unshakable belief in their own greatness. This type of narcissist embodies the classic portrayal of narcissism in the public imagination—bold, attention-seeking, and often successful in their endeavors. This blog post aims to explore the world of the grandiose narcissist, shedding light on their characteristics, how they interact with others, and the challenges and opportunities that arise from these interactions.

Understanding Grandiose Narcissism

Grandiose narcissism is marked by an inflated sense of self-importance, a deep need for admiration, and a lack of empathy for others. Grandiose narcissists are often perceived as charismatic and are adept at first impressions, drawing people into their orbit with their confidence and assertiveness. However, beneath this veneer of self-assuredness lies a fragile ego, sensitive to criticism and dependent on external validation.

Characteristics of the Grandiose Narcissist

Dominance and Authority: They often seek positions of power and are highly competitive, believing they are destined for greatness.

Charm and Charisma: Initially, they can be highly engaging and persuasive, making them attractive to others.

Attention Seeking: They thrive on being the center of attention and may go to great lengths to maintain this status.

Lack of Empathy: While they can feign interest in others, their empathy is often superficial, primarily focused on how relationships benefit them.

Sensitivity to Criticism: Despite their outward confidence, they may react negatively to criticism, perceiving it as a personal attack.

The Double-Edged Sword of Grandiosity

The grandiose narcissist's charm and assertiveness can be advantageous, propelling them to success in various fields, especially those that reward self-confidence and public visibility. However, these traits can also lead to significant interpersonal and intrapersonal challenges. Relationships may suffer as partners and colleagues become disillusioned by the narcissist's self-centeredness and inability to form genuine, empathetic connections. Professionally, their reluctance to accept feedback can hinder growth and collaboration.

Interacting with a Grandiose Narcissist

Dealing with grandiose narcissists requires a nuanced approach. Setting clear boundaries and maintaining a level of emotional detachment can help manage interactions. It's also important to avoid direct confrontations about their narcissism, as this may lead to defensive aggression. Instead, focusing on mutual interests and framing suggestions in a way that aligns with their desires and self-image can be more effective.

Opportunities for Growth

For the grandiose narcissist, self-awareness and a willingness to engage in introspection can open the door to personal growth. Therapy and counseling can provide valuable tools for understanding and managing their narcissism, helping them build more meaningful relationships and embrace a more empathetic view of the world.

Conclusion

The grandiose narcissist's journey is fraught with contradictions—between their outward confidence and inner vulnerability, between their quest for admiration and their struggle for genuine connection. For those who orbit around them, understanding these dynamics is crucial for navigating the complex interactions that define relationships with grandiose narcissists. Whether in personal relationships, the workplace, or social settings, empathy, clear communication, and boundaries are key to fostering healthier engagements with grandiose narcissists, offering a path forward for all involved.

#Grandiose Narcissist #narcissistic personality disorder

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alexsmitposts · 3 years

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The Nasty Truth About America’s Love Affair with Narcissism and Self Pity

Column: Society Region: USA in the World

📷There is a saying, “the crazy people have taken over the asylum.” They did that in the United States in 2016, a nation ruled by grifters, petty criminals and the delusional.The sane and decent became the “silent majority” as the not just America but the world learned that the darkness of the American soul depicted so often by Hollywood is not fiction at all and that a reality TV actor had tapped into a cesspit of sewage that has seeped into every American community.Then came 2020.By sheer luck along and, yes, the votes of 81 million Americans lucky enough to survive voter suppression and intimidation financed by a worldwide organized crime cartel, the insane are now out of power.The new “captain’’ of America’s “ship of state” may well, however, have something on his hands worse than the Titanic. The Titanic had the courtesy to actually sink while America, under this analogy, drifts lifelessly along.Extremism is big money in America, climate denialism, race hatred, social discord and civil war, hate is both a product and an addiction.It is also one of America’s biggest businesses. There would be no social media, no Google, no news organizations, no underbelly of device driven ecstasy, without fear and hate being marketed like cigarettes and CBD gummies.Roots of America’s Politics of Fear and Hate 2.0American extremism is not the result of poverty or oppression. It originates among the privileged, the “haves” who adhere to insane beliefs driven by boredom and generalized dissatisfaction at lives the rest of the word would envy, overpaid jobs, gas guzzling cars and trucks and fast food laden with fats and poisonous additives.If you asked many millions of Americans to define “reality,” their brains would grind to a halt. Reality is based, not on experience or observation but on “beliefs” and strongly held “opinions” which are invariably those scripted for them.Beliefs and opinions untested by the feedback loop of life has created a generation of Americans who are, essentially, living in a video game. This makes Qanon a AI program.Collective delusion has become the norm for many, and by “many” we mean up to 150 million lost souls, caught in an RPG game or, for some, a “first person shooter.”What does it make those who play? But then we have seen all this before, just without a population softened up to this degree by chaos theory conditioning. Some background:The Roots of Fascist AmericaIn 1940, Adolf Hitler was Time Magazine’s man of the year. The parents and grandparents of Trump’s supporters, following Huey Long, Gerald L.K. Smith, Father Coughlin and Charles Lindbergh sought to establish a “whites only” America based on the German model with carefully selected military leaders run by Wall Street pulling the strings.There is something magical, even today, about being “white folks.” That magic originated in the 18th and 19th centuries with the “Sturm and Drang” movement. Extremes of emotion and subjectivity were exalted above rationalism.Childish temper tantrums became a philosophy and eventually a political movement.The movement, which failed in Europe, found fertile ground in the United States in a society that increasingly defined itself though ritualized slavery and degradation and oppression of “coloured races.”This was a society built on the genocide that wiped out millions of indigenous peoples with the survivors now living on “reservations.”Imagine land where nothing grows, and no one could live. This is an “Indian reservation.” From time-to-time oil is found or minerals or there is a need to build a pipeline. Then even the worst land on earth is taken away.This was done in South Africa. It was done in Rhodesia. It used to be called “colonialism.”By the 20th century there were no indigenous people left to imprison. America then turned to warring against the freed slaves and millions of “undesirable” European immigrants, Catholics and Jews in particular.Curiously, this war was centered on banking issues, blocking trade unions, sustaining child labor and controlling farm prices. This created the alignments that

exist today, the strong tie between Wall Street and homegrown extremism built of bigotry and race hatred.You see, too many of the undesirables that fled autocratic Europe found that the long hand of international banking that maintained serfdom for millions, even in supposedly advanced Western Europe, had institutionalized the same in the United States under the guise of representative democracy.Leading the way was the resurgent Ku Klux Klan.By the 1920s national membership was estimated at over 8 million. Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and a dozen other northern and western states were governed by Klan controlled politicians who used the state militias and National Guard as a private army and local police as armed enforcers.Behind it all, the banks that brought Hitler to power and the American corporations that made millions financing Nazi Germany’s war machine, General Motors, Dupont-Remington, Lockheed, Alcoa and General Motors.Even Hitler Would Cringe…The new American revolution, driven by Donald Trump and his televangelist backers, is the result of as social anthropologists note, generations being allowed to live the life of spoiled children, steeped in narcissism and self-pity.The events of January 6, 2020 and how it tied to many American religious leaders has emptied churches across the US, with millions finding themselves humiliated with having followed “false prophets” in support of hatred and tyranny. From Salon:“…these religious figures (Trump’s powerful televangelist backers) and the institutions they led (have become) hyper-political, the outward mission (has)seemed to be almost exclusively in service of oppressing others. The religious right is not nearly as interested in feeding the hungry and sheltering the homeless as much as using religion as an all-purpose excuse to abuse women and LGBTQ people. In an age of growing wealth inequalities, with more and more Americans living hand-to-mouth, many visible religious authorities were using their power to support politicians and laws to take health care access from women and fight against marriage between same-sex couples. And then Donald Trump happened.Trump was a thrice-married chronic adulterer who routinely exposed how ignorant he was of religion, and who reportedly — and let’s face it, obviously — made fun of religious leaders behind their backs. But religious right leaders did not care. They continually pumped Trump up like he was the second coming, showily praying over him and extorting their followers to have faith in a man who literally could not have better conformed to the prophecies of the Antichrist. It was comically over the top, how extensively Christian right leaders exposed themselves as motivated by power, not faith.”Jerry Falwell Jr., who introduced Donald Trump to America’s evangelical Christians, is himself an enigmatic figure.Falwell is typical of America’s religious leaders and stories such as this, from Fox News, are daily fodder for Americans:“Jerry Falwell Jr. allegedly played games with his wife Becki where they’d rank Liberty University students, they most wanted to have sex with, according to one pupil who claimed to have been intimate with Becki.The ex-student — who claims Becki initiated oral sex with him 10 years ago — told Politico that she bragged about playing the sex-ranking game while walking around the Virginia campus with her evangelical-leader husband.‘Her and Jerry would eye people down on campus,’ the former student of the conservative school told the outlet.Social Engineering Through PandemicAnyone who really lives in America will make this perfectly clear, this country has turned into a lunatic asylum. Our previous president told us COVID was a hoax, allowed over 40,000 from China enter the US while the threat of COVID was well known and turned his back while, today’s figure, 570,264 Americans died. Experts now cite that Trump was personally responsible for over 400,000 of those deaths. He is quite simply a mass murderer.Do remember that only 900 died in Australia. Canada lost 23,000. 35 died in Vietnam. 440 died in

Cuba.One might wonder how a Hitleresque figure such as Donald Trump could have millions of followers while the legal mechanisms in the US are amassing evidence for both criminal and civil prosecutions which quite probably will never come to bear.Groundhog Day, an Unending NightmareLet me tell you how I began my morning. As a journalist and intelligence briefer, I review incoming material, both open source and private intel. The big story overnight involves a revelation on a religious talk show involving theories on COVID 19 and vaccines.The show is by Jim Bakker, an important religious leader and political advisor. In 1989, Bakker was sentenced to 45 years in prison for mail and wire fraud but served on 5 of those years. He has stolen tens of million of dollars from his congregation to support a wild and lavish lifestyle of utter debauchery.In this area, he is typical of America’s evangelical Christian leaders.The guest on Bakker’s show was Steve Quayle. I know Quayle as an advisor to President George ‘W’ Bush on Middle East affairs. I know of no qualifications for this post.I do know of Quayle. After 9/11 he approached my staff in Amman, Jordan offering them generous payments to “launder” otherwise sourceless intelligence on Iraq into the Bush White House to justify an American invasion of that nation.Two million people died, maybe many more, due to fake US intelligence on Iraq. No weapons of mass destruction were ever found.Groundhog Day TwoLet us take the clock back a few years. I remember traveling to Kentucky, then and still a very backward area of the country, in 1956 to visit relatives. This was a presidential election year, and my father was working for Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic candidate that was opposing Dwight Eisenhower.Even I, at a fairly young age, was flabbergasted at the dinner table discussion that day as my “hillbilly” relatives expounded on their political opinions and version of historical fact. This is how they laid it out:We should support “Ike” because he killed Hitler personally after storming Berlin. They described a sword fight. What they described reminded me of the death of the Sheriff of Nottingham played by Basil Rathbone in the 1938 film Robin Hood starring Errol Flynn. They then went out to describe how the US beat both Russia and Germany who were at war with the US. It seems Russia did not fight Hitler at all but was actually Germany’s ally. My father, a reasonably educated person and longtime friend of Russia, found this somewhat disturbing. Next, we heard about how “godless communists” were going to take away our freedoms and destroy our standard of living. I might remind you that my relatives in Hazard, Kentucky had no electricity or plumbing. One of my cousins lived in an abandoned car parked in a slag field.During that trip, we visited my grandfather, a retired coal miner. He lived in a shack covered with tar paper along a railroad track. I loved my grandfather.Life Lessons Do not Come Over the InternetOver the next 60 plus years, I had shared tea with farmers in Vietnam, military veterans living in a small shack in the Khyber Pass and everything from heads of state to struggling farmers all over Africa and the Middle East. None would have guessed that there are Americans that live in not just utter poverty but steeped not only in delusional ignorance but far worse than that.A current obsession with American “conservatives” is the fear of being overrun with transexuals, who, according to many, represent a threat to our freedoms. I have never met a transsexual. From what I understand, up to 10,000 currently serve in America’s armed forces.Back during the 1960s when I served with a Marine combat unit in Vietnam, we probably had no transexuals, only gay or “homosexual” Marines and Navy. Absolutely nothing was thought of it as these individuals invariably served with honor and courage.They existed in significant numbers.Today aging “conservatives” who avoided military service in Vietnam continually harp about saving the rest of us from “homosexuals in the military.”Voting and

“Jim Crow”Let us take another look at efforts by the Hitleresque racists and bigots to save the rest of us from ourselves, against our will of course. In Georgia, the legislature recently passed a law that makes it a felony to offer water to someone waiting in line to vote.Water is an issue because, in Georgia and many GOP (Trump’s party) run states, polling places in areas where people of color vote have been closed causing day long lines. In 2020, volunteers offered food and water to those who would otherwise have either collapsed or left without voting. Now offering food and water can lead to being executed by racist police, quite literally, or spending 5 years in prison.In 2020, voters in many key urban areas were threatened by armed neo-Nazi militias or openly threated in emails from Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, organizations deemed terrorist in Canada and now citied by the US Department of Justice as trying to overthrow the US government.In January, during a US Senate runoff election in Georgia, 364,000 voters were challenged by the GOP in Georgia as “illegal.” All of them were African American. All 364,000 were qualified to vote and their votes were eventually counted, giving Georgia two Democratic US Senators.The Federal Elections Commission is now investigating that this effort to rig the Georgia senate elections was secretly financed by illegal contributions from members of organized crime.Groundhog Day ThreeI live in a rural and primarily Republican area. I parked my car less than 30 feet from the door of a polling place, a local church, and voted in less than 3 minutes with no lines or ID check.In order to limit mail voting, Trump ordered mail sorting machines destroyed with sledgehammers and over 40,000 mailboxes picked up and junked as scrap metal. Mail service in many cities simply ended. One letter I sent to Washington DC from Michigan took 45 days to arrive.Hundreds of millions of pieces of mail, starting in late September 2020 simply disappeared, not just votes but government checks, Christmas presents and medications from pharmacies sent to Veterans.All of this was not just publicly known, things are far worse than that. Those who so many decades ago believed the United States fought Russia in World War Two, would raise children and grandchildren with no respect for human rights, no understanding of democracy, no ethical norms nor any remote understanding of right or wrong.This is the reality for those living in America, a reality that those who watch America from afar through the distorted lens of Google Corporation and the press, can never fathom.Ah, but things are so much worse than that. It is not just having spent 4 years with a president who told us you could cure covid by drinking bleach or eating flashlights. It gets worse.Groundhog Day FourA few days ago, former Trump advisor Cirsten Welcon claimed that President Biden had been paid billions of dollars by China to let them test their newest “weather weapons” on Texas. Power outages there, now attributed to corrupt backroom deals by Republican politicians, led to many deaths and considerable suffering.Little did any of us know of the role of the magic Chinese weather machines.In another vignette, it has been a years since Trump advisor and televangelist Kenneth Copeland stood before a television audience raving like a lunatic. He then pursed his lips and blew at the television camera, the “wind of god” which he claimed destroyed COVID forever.This effort by Reverend Copeland, who has millions of followers and a vast financial empire, led President Trump to announce that COVID 19 was going to disappear.ConclusionSome would like to believe that the institutionalized insanity of America’s right is restricted to the “Untermensch” substrata of rural poor whites. However, for decades now, the most radicalized and extremist elements of America’s society, the most ignorant, the most warlike yet cowardly, have gained control of the US military through service academies which espouse their conspiracy theories.With the onset of Trump, they gained much

more than a foothold in American politics, they now control many states “lock, stock and barrel,” and are involved in not just voter suppression but a general quashing of human rights and free speech.The door to this turn of events began well into the 19th century. Laws, still on the books, are now being employed against Donald Trump, from CNN:The Democratic chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee has filed a lawsuit against former President Donald Trump that cites a little-known federal statute that was first passed after the Civil War.The complaint, filed Tuesday by Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, accuses Trump, his attorney Rudy Giuliani, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers of violating the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act. The lawsuit accuses them of inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol riot to prevent the certification of the 2020 presidential election.These same extremist elements and calling them “extremist” insults al Qaeda and ISIS (banned in Russia) who are moderate in their beliefs and practices in comparison. These statements might sound extreme in themselves were it not for so many Americans, religious and military leaders, members of government and business leaders calling for wholesale murder of their political opponents citing their personal communication with a non-corporeal authority they said is “god.”Americans hear this all day every day, the emails are unending, TV networks like Fox, OAN or Newsmax say little else, and that message is carried not just through media but lawn signs dotting the countryside.Hundreds of thousands of American homes are festooned with paraphernalia espousing murder of public officials and their families. Americans see it every day driving to work. What they ask themselves when they see things like this is how many others hold these beliefs but keep it to themselves?What if academics wrote papers on the issues, we discuss here? What if the BBC produced a documentary? Would things get better? The problem dates back not just generations but centuries.It is not a moral problem; it is not a political problem. It is one of degeneracy. At some point we may be required to reassess our definition of sentience.

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entactagn · 5 years

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isn’t the squeeze of the irreversible, leaving our tenderest natures aside, active in the strict yet nonlinear complication of the so-called spectrum? not trying to go for any sort of take, hot or not, but i’m thinking about MOGAI and still racked with ambivalence and real confusion about the possibility of living some personas in any fiction where your body has to find its bearings while physically on the scene, in public or even just at the edges of public visibility…

my bitterest nature would say: let as many identities flower as you like but good luck getting read – though i also get the caveat that a new word can be self-descriptive without rising to a demand for recognition, or make that demand only in the company of similars averting binary sexuation -- a stratifying machine that everywhere cuts through intimacies, scripts and encloses gestures, assembles divisions of labor -- need not mean laying claim to recognition, and may even remain thin or negative as self-description... if i have to admit a hesitation to simply accept the pragmatics of the more obscure gender terms, i also have to admit that it comes with a long attraction to how narcissisms converge in and scatter out from imaginary belonging to a type -- i admire how the descriptive impulse pressing on these terms can become sharp and inviting enough to undercut the identitarian purposes from which they would seem to stem all this could just be an indulgence in that sort of imaginary anyway -- specifically vis-a-vis the terms altersex and parasex. what makes these terms both useful and difficult to inhabit is their resistance to the modesty of bids for recognition that are based in a claim on “gender identity”

altersex refers to those whose sexual morphologies shift out of binary order -- apparently coined to talk about fictional beings, but in theory also available for real live people who alter their sex chemically or surgically. parasex is another way to frame this idea but more neutral bc just about deviation from perisex, the normative absence of “nonconformities” in the sexed body. altersex and parasex are both modeled on intersex, attempting a compromise that would acknowledge potential similarities in experience without appropriating the specific positioning of intersex people w/r/t medical assignments of sexed embodiment and the resultant vulnerability to clinical intervention / biopolitical control...

altersex and parasex, in contrast to many of the MOGAI terms, refer not to a gender identity but to morphological difference. i should clarify though that sex in this sense is not at all limited to physical embodiment. nor is it complicit in the deceptive and controlling vagueness of a term like “biological sex.” altersex and parasex define sex to include body image and other forms of auto-affection that operate on the experience of a sexed body

maybe there is something unsavory creeping in here -- a reification of the sex/gender division such that alter- or parasexedness would, in a transmedicalist vein, assert superior proximity to the material reconstitution of sex in the “real world” and therefore consign gender identity to the merely imaginary. of course though identification and morphology cannot be so easily pulled apart. nobody really knows where their body image ends and imaginary typification begins and yet that doesn’t make it any less important to mark how the social ascription of gender can diverge from the lived experience of your body rubbing up against and changing alongside such ascriptions -- as with alterations of hormonal equilibria, for example. not always a damaging or invalidating divergence, but often a difficult one -- bc most people won’t intuitively know or bother trying to match whatever ambiguities your frame offers them with a suitable abbreviation. most people may not even know how to get their sensorium to notice ambiguities in the first place, and when they do it’s mostly just so they can wipe them away asap by initiating a calculus to squeeze your body into one of the two slots. normative protocols of scanning and casual assessment (to say nothing of the affective reticence with which etiquette smooths and clouds such encounters) are designed to put trans people at a loss to find the desire or ability or safety to interrupt the automatic confidence and awkward grasp of cis criteria not that you always need to “correct” the binary disambiguation, though -- maybe you peel away the anxiolytic film of their knowingness, maybe you choke on or cough up the niceness they stuff the air with, maybe you lock your eyes and flit past their affectations of bewilderment, seeing yourself veer inches from attack. even in the middle of a reflex misrecognition your body image still knows it’s also in the middle of a longer process. it comes up at various loci of response: fear without paranoia; erogenous acceleration or suffusion or muffling or dilation; inversions, deflections, and recompositions of aggression; awareness of the advancing or retracting contour; giddiness, lightness, impulsiveness; the suction, retention, and leakage of your metabolic cycle and the living conditions it scrubs through... none of that is quite reducible to the phrasing of a self or a persona -- because it is small and gradual enough not to know when exactly it could be assumed, a thousand little habitus transfers that streak further outward with each run through the circuit and in that curvature without telos return on the irreversible

#mogai #altersex #parasex #morphological sex #e/s machine #writing

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katrinapavela · 7 years

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#Scandal Season 6 Poster and Pre-Season Thoughts

This may be a little tardy for the party, but I had to write it anyway.Let’s get into this S6 poster. Most of what grabs me gives me hope. I’m cautiously optimistic. Much like my Fitzgerald, I live on hope (shout out to my grandmother); it’s how I cope with living in this world. I’d like to talk about three aspects of the poster and my general desires for Olivia’s character this season: the hair, the colour white, and the tag line. I’ll also address how I think Fitz fits into all this.

The Hair

As someone who prefers Liv’s hair with soft waves, her hair is getting out of control in the curl department. Girlfriend’s style-ometer seems firmly stuck between Shirley Temple and Shirley Chisolm.

#DisTewMuch

If the straight hair is going to bring back some sleekness, then praise Jehovah. From recent previews, it seems evident that Liv stays Temple curled up for at least half the season, or so. I don’t know if going back to straight hair is a ‘new year, new me’ attempt, as it seemed to be after Fitz canceled their relationship in season 2 (213). I don’t, necessarily, associate straight hair with anything good. But at this point I don’t know if I can be any more annoyed with Liv’s behaviour and style than I was in 5B. But I would never leave her at her lowest, and by god, 5B saw her in a low way.

The Colour White

Speaking of Liv’s style, boy was I happy to see her cloaked in white. The most white we’ve ever seen on the poster. It is intentionally visible in a way it has not been since the S3 poster. The difference between the two posters is, of course, Olivia’s posture.

Season 3’s poster was branded with the tagline The secret is out. Olivia seemed to be carrying the weight of the world on her back due to the outing of that secret, and the set of events triggered from it. She spent much of the season in stark contrasting colours of black, white, or a mix of the two. Her world could not accommodate the ambiguity of shades of grey and soft neutrals.

This time around, Liv in white seems purposeful, but the slightly sinister smize has me a little shook.

It’s just a feeling. After seeing meme’s of Queen Michele Obama’s face from Trump’s Infrauduration maybe Olivia’s face reflects a fed up Black woman who wants us to know she’s watching her back because there ain’t no stoppin’ her now, she’s on the move. To where? I hope it’s not to the White House with Mellie. If that look of Liv’s is one of self-protection, I get it. That sentiment, paired with a return to white has me like

, Shonda. I need this to be good!

Liv has been a kaleidoscope of colour since leaving Fitz and the White House behind. It’s been a little dizzying to get used to, frankly. I have a fondness for seeing Olivia in marigolds and mustard hues. They complement her golden undertones, and feel sumptuous and soothing my eye. BUT. I am so fucking fed up with seeing her in other primary and jewel tones, especially red. Rowan’s name literally means ‘little red one’. And since 509, Liv has become little Rowan, constantly rolling up to his red door (often wearing the colour red).

Liv has become even more of his daughter (the thing he possesses) since she left the White House. Every time I see her in blood orange, crimson or scarlet, my blood boils. I hate the association because I hate Olivia and Rowan’s relationship. The colour inspires rage, not respect or power. I felt more of Olivia’s rage in 5B than I did her power. The latter, in the back half of last season, were much like her new vibrant clothing: a façade concealing the naked truth beneath.

A return to white coats would mean Liv believes in working on the side of good again. When last we saw her in white, she was trying to help that gay Bandari translator find asylum in the US, while combating undercover fuckery that would tank her Presidential Boo’s peace accord with Bandar.

I haven’t the faintest interest in Olivia Pope as Washington’s White Knight, unless she can erect boundaries to protect the flawed person that she is (and accepts). A superhero isn’t fully human. To me, a return to white would signal that Olivia believes in something again. One of the reason’s I grew to dislike her in 5B was her rudderless navigation system. She had no compass which served to ground her, and, consequently, tripped up over herself and made desperate decisions. Many of those decisions were guided by her pursuit of the most basic ass, narcissistic interpretation of power: proving that she was a winner by propelling herself back into the Oval, by any means necessary. She would not have to contend with ‘weak’ things like love this time.

As much as I loathe them both, Jake and Rowan said two useful things that I apply to Olivia:

Jake: “Dare to be normal, Liv!” (521)

Rowan: “True power is never lost” (504)

True power is never lost because it comes from within, and then gets projected outward. It is not guided by others or the external world. In 5B, the idea of 1600 Pennsylvania avenue and power was forcefully monologued to Olivia. She associates it with access and escape from being ‘normal’, something she told us she wasn’t back in the pilot episode (101). Fear of normal in the Olitz relationship is, partly, what drove Liv from the East Wing.

Liv did no inside work after leaving the White House, opting instead for a peacock wardrobe and a new (stanker) attitude as band-aids over a gaping wound of loss. I understand the impulse. Often when people are hurt, traumatized or afraid, the impulse is to adopt a tough, take-no-prisoners attitude as a warped and basic interpretation of strength. Fear can make people scary and violent, releasing their worst instincts. (Look no further than white people channelling their fear of losing their manufactured sense of superiority by electing Donald Trump as their Hocus Potus.) So, what Olivia became was no surprise. Shonda is not gonna convince me that 5B’s Olivia was a confident woman who had come into her own.

What I saw was a lot of desperation.

However, as predicted, Liv got closer to her father after leaving Fitz. Though she’ll never be in his good grace, I think the attempt was necessary to her journey to self-hood. Olivia spent so much time denying any similarities between the two, insisting since S3 that she was nothing like Rowan (409), and that her mother’s influence had been prominent (305). But the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, poison though it may be (419). As the seasons have progressed we, as an audience, have become painfully aware of the similarities between father and daughter. I don’t think Liv is ruined, as both mother (409) and father (518) have suggested. However, a journey that allows Olivia to accept that Rowan is as much a part of her as her mother is has merit. Even if it’s difficult to watch. By 520, Liv was crying into the arms of Huck because she realized that she’s not better than Rowan after all—the very thing she had prided herself on. She’s not destined to be him either. That’s the place she needs to get to.

The Tagline

This season’s tagline is The balance of power is about to shift. The obvious connection here is the result of the election, and impending change of POTUS in the Scandalverse. Let’s be real, when it comes to Olivia’s character, the balance of power needs to shift. The poor girl has had a lot of knocks, and neglected to give herself the time or care she needs to rebound from all that trauma. What I saw in 5B was a woman who behaved like an addict, using familiar people as substances to manage her pain, instead of confronting it. Let’s look at her circle of influence:

Rowan—the man who has tilted Liv’s balance of power since season 2B. The man responsible for Liv’s pursuit of masculinist power in 5B. The man whose narcissism failed his daughter’s emotional development, and, instead, infected her further with his sickness: “chaos stokes our fire” (512). Narcissists and addicts thrive on chaos for different reasons.

Jake—A man who, instead of working on his own past and present pain, goes back to Olivia so they can wallow in the muck like two addicts. A man who resumed his role as a psychosexual extension of Olivia’s father, complete with the same gaslighting techniques and disregard for her feelings (514, 518). A man who is dependent on Olivia in a way she can’t resist: perpetual victim.

Mellie—A woman whose envy of patriarchal power that put her on a quest that aligned with the same one Rowan put his daughter on. A woman who claims to be friends with Olivia, but wouldn’t put up $5,000 (from the grip she got from the divorce) toward protecting Liv from Andrew (518). There’s too much to say about their past for me to believe this is a friendship that will outlast their usefulness to each other. From what I see, Kimberlé Crenshaw and Audre Lorde would look at this relationship and just

Olivia isn’t better than any of these people, and they don’t challenge her to be better. All three of them have been too manipulative in the past, actively perpetuating harm against her. I’m sorry, but I can’t see her decision to surround herself with them as a woman coming into her power. I see it as a woman who is afraid to reconcile her desires with emotional barriers that keep her from a life she wants. Or, maybe she’s a woman who doesn’t know what she wants, but knows what she’s good at—no matter how much it harms her.

I want the balance of power to shift in Liv’s direction. Part of that entails her excavating that emotional scar tissue to access the power she needs. She needs and intervention. She needs a therapist. She needs a good friend without a penis, who can be truthful. She needs a black woman. She needs her mama.

A balance of power that sifts to an internally defined sense of power is what Audre Lorde (1984) calls ‘the erotic’. It comes from a deeply feminine place. This would contrast with the more masculinist power we see Liv chase in 5B.

But what about Fitz?

Fitz, for me, has always been a reflection of something inside of Olivia that she seeks. He’s a key part of her journey, not as some male accessory she needs to collect to feel complete as a woman, but as a reflection of herself. In the absence of her mother, he represents a maternal source of love—one that is unconditional, renewable, never ending, compassionate, protective. I left Fitz out of the ‘need’ category because I want Liv to be ready to want Fitz. She thought he was going to make her happy when she ran to him in 422. But she wasn’t ready to do the work, still dependent on drama in their relationship. I have wanted them to cultivate a friendship since S4. I hope to get my wish this season, especially after Fitz leaves the White House. Perhaps after Liv loses the presidential race (I can’t see Mellie winning), perhaps she and Fitz can work together on their shared political ideologies to produce some much needed good in the world. They don’t need to be in the White House for that. Sure is pure fire together, but a big contributor to that heat is how great they work together as a team. I miss that.

Fitz is in a good place. He did the work after the break up in 509. He erected boundaries and listened to criticism. I want Liv to get to that place in a way that serves her well. If Liv cannot deal with the spectre of her past, she can’t truly own her power.

#Scandal #Season 6 #Olivia Pope #Fitzgerald Grant #Olitz

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