Bernard Heydorn

Psychopathy is a personality disorder showing a lack of empathy. It is being egotistical, demonstrating uncaring behaviour, lacking in shame, guilt, or remorse. It is blaming others for events rather than oneself. It is exhibiting blatant and chronic lying. It is using others for profit or pleasure. It is being hedonistic, and having a grandiose sense of self-worth. Add to the list being impulsive, selfish, low in tolerance, and quick to anger. Psychopathy in summary, is marked by what can be described as amoral behaviour (lacking a conscience).
There are many studies and clinical evidence to back these descriptors of psychopathic personalities. Historic personages manifesting psychopathy include Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Idi Amin, Jim Jones of Guyana's Jonestown infamy, and Paul Bernardo, the sexual predator in Toronto, to name a few. It is reported that a study from the University of Oxford showed that Trump scored higher than Hitler on the Standard Psychopathic Personality Inventory.
Another personality disorder is that of conduct or character disorder. This is an antisocial type of behaviour with sociopathy as the worst manifestation. These are the criminal types who have the predisposition to actions that break the law in the extreme. A number of these perpetrators go without punishment, especially if they are wealthy with top legal support. They can be violent and sadistic as in gangland types like Al Capone or be more "respectful" and devious as in white collar crime. They may get rich quickly through shady deals and double dealing.
These folks have no ethics. They are bullies who disregard the painful and destructive consequences of their actions. They take advantage of the weak, the vulnerable, and even the justice system. They are insulting to their victims, the poor, the sick and disabled. Some have the bravado of Bonnie and Clyde, notorious American bandits and bank robbers of the past. Outwardly bold and brazen, many are inwardly cowards.
They deceive and switch regularly and cannot be trusted. They play on people's fears, insecurities, weaknesses, anger, racism, intolerance, jealousy, and ignorance. They are hypocritical and two-faced, even pretending to be religious and having people's welfare at heart. They project their own flaws onto others. They are the high stake gamblers, the shysters, the cheats, an immoral group of people that exist in many places, high and low. They are willing to make a deal with the devil and often do. Politics and gangsterism seem to be professions that attract a number of these characters!
One can make a distinction between the amorality of the psychopath and the immorality of the character disordered. It is thought that the psychopath's amorality (no clue of right or wrong) is mainly of genetic disposition while the character/conduct disorder's immorality (derailed notion of right and wrong) may be attributed to both pre-disposition and environmental factors such as family and childhood experiences.
In both the above categories, successful treatment or rehabilitation is reportedly very low or negligible. Neither medical nor psychological therapies have proven of much use to date, especially in the area of psychopathy, except perhaps for castration in the case of sexual predators. In the instance of character disorder, recidivism - returning to a life of crime - is very high in chronic offenders. In both the above categories, counselling, restraint, constraint, monitoring, and guarding are recommended for the safety and well-being of the individual and society at large. There seems to be no reset button to decency and morality in the brain, heart or soul of these individuals.
A third category of mental illness, in which Donal Trump seems to fit, is that of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). These are individuals with an inflated sense of their own importance. They have a need for attention and admiration. They have a fragile self-esteem and are vulnerable to criticism. They are conceited, boastful, pretentious, and fake. They have a sense of entitlement and are obsessed with power, wealth, and perfect appearances (the trophy wife). They are arrogant and take advantage of others. They are disrespectful, hedonistic, selfish, quick to anger, generally toxic and obnoxious. Unfortunately, this behaviour in some cases can resemble what some may describe as "the ugly American".
Donald Trump seems to show a number of the above characteristics of NPD, so much so that some lecturers in psychological clinical teaching studies have reportedly used videos of his behaviour to demonstrate Narcissistic Personality Disorder!
In terms of what can be done to curtail Trump's presidency, a number of actions can be taken. The constitution of the United States reportedly has safeguards to remove a president in office who is deemed to be unfit for office, with or without impeachment. This can be done by his party and members of congress. It may be because of illness, mental and/or physical. It can be incapacity or actions that could lead to a catastrophe. It can be erratic and irresponsible behaviour. It can be treason (there are still many questions regarding Trump's connection to Putin and the Russians), illegal business transactions, abuse of office, nepotism...the list seems endless.
The question now is what are the American people waiting for to act - an environmental global disaster, a nuclear war, another American Civil War, widespread civil unrest, uprisings against the United States and its people from countries around the world, a total economic collapse, a fall from the greatest nation on earth to a divided and devastated nation?
History is replete with demagogues and would-be dictators like Trump, whose social and political experiments have led to the decline of humanity, the death of democracy, decency, and a life worth living. The American Dream could turn into a total nightmare. Imitators of Trump's actions have been emboldened to come out of the woodwork in a number of countries including Canada, some using it for political opportunism. The cancers of radicalism, racism, and religious intolerance are spreading. Trump's diehard followers, a rabid, radicalized group seem willing to believe his lies and follow him to hell as Hitler's followers did. Men and women of good will everywhere need to take courage and act before it is too late.

By Romeo Kaseram

Victor Stafford Reid was born in Kingston, Jamaica, on May 1, 1913. He was the son of Alexander and Margaret Reid. Father, Alexander, worked in the shipping business in the US. The young man grew up with two brothers and a sister, attended school and graduated from the Kingston Technical High School in 1929. Before writing, Reid was a journalist, editor, worked in the book trade, in advertising, and farming.
His first book, New Day (1949) takes a political look at the history of Jamaica. It is narrated by the 87-year-old John Campbell, from his childhood days to 1944, when Jamaica gained internal self-government from Britain. Woven into the novel are episodes of this nation’s history along with incidents involving members of Campbell’s family. For this narrative, Reid created a distinct and commercial, literary variant in the reinvention of language that combined elements of Standard English and the Jamaican dialect. His motivation to write this book was fuelled by discontentment over how leaders of the rebellion, George William Gordon and Paul Bogle, were depicted in the foreign press, reworking their negative portrayal as rebels in order to make positive what he considered an unfair representation of history.
In a talk during the Caribbean Seminar Series of the Faculty of Arts at the Mona Campus of the University of the West Indies, given on his birthday, May 1, 1986, Reid gave some background into why he set out, and what he did, to write this well-received book.
Said Reid: “… I write best when I'm angry – and New Day came out of a very angry feeling because I had been told that Bogle and Gordon were criminals, etc. And so I began doing my own research.
“In those days it was difficult to get any research done in that kind of material, but I discovered the Reference Library in the Institute which was a treasure trove. All sorts of reports, committee reports and so on, done in beautiful flowing handscript. And so I began going there and just reading day after day after day, till finally I took myself off to Morant Bay, St Thomas, where all these events occurred. There again I did what I eventually did with all the books – I decided to walk the terrain, to see the place, to talk to the people. So I spent a whole day there in this real bush …because in those days, you can imagine, Stony Gut, which is where Bogle had his headquarters, was nothing but bush and a few little huts and so on. But I went all over the place and talked with people and then I got a feeling of the thing and decided that the book was worth it, with one idea in mind: that I must discover, somehow, that these people were not the criminals they were thought to be, or they were said to be. And so the reconstruction began, using all the available materials from the Institute, reading up on everything, going to bed at nights and saying to myself, ‘Look you must get up and dream about it, you must understand that you have to write a book that will grab people by their throats!’
“In those days, the only Jamaican writer around was H. G. DeLisser who was then Editor of The Daily Gleaner newspaper. One of the old fashioned brown imperialists who thought that people should be kept in their places; and his books were all about slavery, obeah, and putting people in the worst light possible – very sort of, as things were in those days. And so I thought that the thing to do would be to write a book in the dialect, in the Jamaican vernacular.”
It is this struggle to speak with a distinct post-colonial voice that puts Reid into the literary canon of the writers of his time. What Reid was attempting was writing back to the Empire by instilling a new awareness in not only his Jamaican people, but throughout the wider Caribbean. His motivation was to write to the righting of wrongs in what was then unfair legacies and misappropriated traditions imposed by foreign and hegemonic interpretations.
Following New Day, Reid wrote The Leopard (1958). This was a novel inspired by the Mau Rebellion in Kenya, and an attempt to relate this situation to the Jamaican uprising narrated in his first book, New Day. Following this, Reid published Sixty-Five (1960). He also wrote novels for school children, among them The Young Warriors (1967), dealing with the runaway slaves known as maroons. Peter of Mount Ephraim (1971) dates back to the 1831 Samuel Sharpe slave uprising. He then wrote The Jamaicans (1976), to commemorate the life of the Juan de Bolas, a pre-Maroon band leader during the English and Spanish quest for supremacy in Jamaica during the mid-17th century. Nanny Town (1983) portrays Jamaica’s original Queen Mother who led the Jamaican Maroons to independence from the English, and was his last published novel.
His final work was a biography of Jamaican national hero Norman Manley, The Horses of the Morning (1985). According to Reid, Manley died shortly after they began talking about this biography. Speaking at the Caribbean Seminar Series in 1986, Reid said: “What I wanted to do was to get inside the man, discover who this great person that this country had produced, out of a quality in our ruins, because of the quality that came out of our ruins, because we were a ruined people and out of those ruins came people like him, came people like [Alexander] Bustamante, came people like [Marcus] Garvey, came people like Bogle. And I decided to write on Norman Manley, not overpraising him by any means... (because I showed up all his weaknesses as far as I knew them, and I’m glad that the friends and antagonists have said that the book is a fair treatment, because I treated Busta as fairly in the book when it touched his part of it, because I know of no saint in life and every great man should accept the fact that the ‘great’ should be put in quotation marks, because they all have their weaknesses, they all have their flaws).
“Anyway, I decided to do it this way, I went into the man and went along with him, flowed with him, got the rhythms of his life, and wrote this book and tried to make it a kind of historical review of the country as well as his own life.”
Reid married wife Monica in 1935, and the couple had four children. He received the Silver (1950) and Gold (1976) Musgrave Medals, the Order of Jamaica (1980), and the Norman Manley Award for Excellence in Literature in 1981. He died on August 25, 1987.

(Sources for this exploration are:
http://www.jrank.org/literature/pages/5530/Victor-Reid.html; http://.jstor.org – The Writer & His Work: V.S. Reid, Journal of West Indian Literature, Vol. 2, No. 1 (December, 1987); and Wikipedia.)

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