[Peace-discuss] Why America’s gone nuts

[C. G. Estabrook]

	It’s not just Glenn Beck: why America’s gone nuts
	From 9/11 ‘Truthers’ on the left to ‘Birthers’ on the right,
	the US has gone mad because those in power refuse to listen to voters
	BY ALEXANDER COCKBURN - SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

Was there ever a society so saturated with lunacy as ours, here in America? One 
expects theatrical lunacy from the radio and TV tub-thumpers like Glenn Beck or 
Rush Limbaugh or Michael Savage - front men for all the usual right-wing causes.

Indeed one expects modulated nuttiness from the better element, particularly 
those inhabiting the corporate and legislative spheres, but these days insanity 
is pervasive, spreading through all classes and walks of life.

For years, we have been treated to pinstriped fugitives from the asylum like 
Pete Peterson urging the nation into ruin by slashing the deficit, but there, in 
Washington, DC, in their tens of thousands were the sans culottes (pictured 
above) screaming for fiscal propriety as though they were channelling the 
ruinous orthodoxies of Montague Norman or Andrew Mellon.

~Obama’s delusions are far more lethal than those of Glenn Beck’s followers~

Among these Glenn Beck legions a solid fraction were surely one stroke or tumour 
away from financial ruin, yet are still ready to tear to tiny pieces any 
advocates of publicly funded health insurance as though they were hawking the 
Communist Manifesto at a Christian revival meeting.

Many of the Beckspawn are 'Birthers' too, making delusional forays into the 
supposedly dubious documentation of Barack Obama's delivery in a hospital in 
Hawaii. Sometimes I think that the White House should knock all these surmises 
on the head by releasing all relevant documents and testimonies. But, of course, 
this would merely throw napalm on the flames.

Once, when writing some caustic remarks about the occupants of another ward in 
the national asylum, the 9/11 Truthers, I suggested that the "missing people" on 
the plane that hit the Pentagon had been kidnapped at an earlier stage in the 
operation, and flown to an airbase in Louisiana - the very self-same airbase 
where George Bush briefly touched down in his erratic flight from Florida on 
11/9/2001. George Bush, I wrote, then personally executed the captives.

~The Republican Party is now entirely populated by mad people~

It was a satirical sally. But I swiftly received serious letters from people 
outraged by the lack of detail. Where had Bush shot them? With what type of 
weapon? A summary burst from a machine gun, or a .22 bullet behind the ear?

For all too many on the left, the so-called 9/11 conspiracy is still the magic 
key. If it can be turned, then history at its present impasse will be unlocked 
and we can move on. For those on the racist right, aghast at the reality of a 
black man (actually a half-white, half-black) in the White House, the magic key 
to reversing this unpleasing development is Obama's allegedly fake Hawaiian 
birth certificate.

Their suppositions and claims shift, but the essence is always the same: he's 
alien. He has no right to be president. And, as with the Truthers, the provision 
of evidence rebutting their claims is merely fuel piled on the bonfire of their 
insanity. Between Truthers and Birthers there's considerable psychic and 
forensic overlap.

 From the nuttiness of the little people to the madness of Great Ones. President 
Obama's rhetoric is decorous, but the delusions are just as ripe and far more 
lethal than those of the Glenn Beck demonstrators under his window.

~Obama advances ridiculous propositions with nutty aplomb~

How is one supposed to rate the rationality of a person who wins the White House 
in large measure because of popular outrage at the disastrous war in Iraq and 
who, then, instantly ratchets up another war in Afghanistan - an enterprise for 
whose utter futility history both ancient and modern offers copious testimony.

 From time to time, one meets a madman in a shopping mall or at a bus stop who 
approaches one with discreet confidences about his mother the Queen of England, 
or about the messages beamed through the fillings in his teeth that warn him of 
CIA surveillance from the plane flying 30,000 feet above his head.

It's an effort of will to remind oneself that this is a person in dishevelled 
mental condition, and it would be unwise to be drawn into protracted discussion 
of royal lineage tracked through the Almanach de Gotha or to peer into jaws 
suddenly opened for one's inspection.

Similarly, with Obama, he advances ridiculous propositions with nutty aplomb, as 
when he claimed in his speech to Congress last week that his plan was deficit 
neutral. Why does he expose himself thus to well-merited derision? Is it that 
Obama simply cannot bear to displease anyone - unless they are far away in 
places like Afghanistan?

Indeed, the president reached the apex of lunatic effrontery when he caused the 
assembled legislators to leap to their feet in stormy applause by pledging that 
"I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits." These is the same 
president, these are the same legislators, who are committing billions in red 
ink for the war in Afghanistan and the continued US presence in Iraq.

True, he's made a twitch into sanity with his cancellation of Bush's commitment 
for a 'missile defense shield' for the Czech Republic and Poland. But it's a 
measure of the collective national sanity that right-wingers are seriously 
criticising this as somehow compromising the security of these two nations, 
whereas of course 'missile defence' has always been a total fantasy ever since 
Ronald Reagan put up the Strategic Defence Initiative back in the Eighties - an 
utterly insane project which now takes up 18 per cent of all US military spending.

The Seventies are back, or so claims People magazine. I can see why. It's 
nostalgia for the last sane decade in American political life, when people 
assayed the state of the nation amid the embers of the Sixties and of the 
Vietnam War and elected politicians who passed some admirable laws.

It seemed America was tottering into the warm sunlight of sanity. It was Reagan 
who truly credentialled nutdom, setting the national thermostat at max degrees F 
for fantasy. The Republican Party is now entirely populated by mad people. Walk 
through the Congress, watch them babble and throw their excrement at the walls. 
Then survey the 'good' inmates mustered in the Democratic aisles, led by a 
president who, at least once in the last campaign, invoked Reagan as a positive 
force. They're less rambunctious but just as lethal, perhaps more so, in their 
depredations.

People start to go collectively crazy when they know that all the exits from our 
present state into the world of constructive reason are locked. Just think - a 
president elected on a huge wave of popular hope, unable to twist a single arm 
in his own party, unlikely even to pass financial reform amid the greatest wave 
of public hatred of Wall Street since the 1930s, trying to pass off as health 
'reform' a gift to the insurance industry of 30 million new customers, to be 
required by law to pony up insurance premiums and then be cheated. No wonder 
people are crazy.

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/53662,news,its-not-just-glenn-beck-why-americas-gone-nuts-politics-usa-tea-party-obama