This from our pal Peter, who’s feeling the heat for harping about the narcissistic tendencies of local children.

Some
bloggers have become annoyed with me because I appear to be harping on
concerns about narcissism being inculcated in our young due to
overly-indulgent/overly enmeshed parenting.

My reason for persisting in
trying to illuminate this problem, however, is not simple pettiness (or
narcissism) on my part. I am adamant about this issue because the
effects of narcissism go far beyond irritating behavior in restaurants
or coffee shops or bookstores. As Paul Krugman points out in his column
in today’s NY Times, narcissists wreak havoc on our society and world
because of their self-centered lack of empathy for the needs and
feelings of others.

One difficulty in facing up to this epidemic is that the origins of a
narcissistic disorder can seem benign in childhood because narcissists
are generally not created from harsh, abusive parents, broken homes or
any number of early traumas. Narcissists are created from parents who
give their offspring a false sense of entitlement, parents who try to
prevent their kids from having to experience the natural frustration
that comes from living in a social environment where the needs of
others may conflict with their immediate desires and impulses.

Here’s Mr. Krugman on some of the damaging effects on a macro scale:

"It has long been clear that President Bush doesn’t feel other people’s
pain. His self-centeredness shines through whenever he makes
off-the-cuff, unscripted remarks, from his jocular obliviousness in the
aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to the joke he made last year in San
Antonio when visiting the Brooke Army Medical Center, which treats the
severely wounded: ‘As you can possibly see, I have an injury myself —
not here at the hospital, but in combat with a cedar. I eventually won.
The cedar gave me a little scratch’…

Arguably, the current state of
the Republican Party is such that only extreme narcissists have a
chance of getting nominated…We shouldn’t be surprised, then, to learn
that these men are monstrously self-centered…All of which leaves us
with a political question. Most voters are thoroughly fed up with the
current narcissist in chief. Are they really ready to elect another?"