Paranoia for Breakfast By David Michael Green

[Demeter]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23806.htm


A few years ago I fell in with this circle of people – a high proportion of which are certifiably insane – who correspond by email with each other over politics. I would call it a seriously mixed blessing, except that I’d never go far enough as to use the ‘b’ word to describe the experience. I can honestly say that when I was originally baited into participating in the group I came with an open mind, and I still have not met a single person on the list. About half the correspondents are regressives, most of them from right out of central casting on the set of the movie “America Neanderthal". They rarely cease to astonish me. The level of thuggishness, hypocrisy, ignorance, proud ignorance and ad hominem insult from those quarters is staggering. More on that some other day perhaps, but there’s one additional aspect of that behavior set that floors me. It’s the capacity to simply make things up out of whole cloth, and then just have it become ‘truth’. Period.

Here’s an example. As usual, the dittoheads on the right (and how could any self-respecting person not see that term as a monstrous insult from Master Rush?) regularly trot out, in 5.1 Surround Sound chorus, the latest tropes assigned them by their marionette string-pullers. For quite some time now, those have included the silly one about how President Obama (who’s not really president, of course, since he was secretly born in Kenya) runs around the world apologizing for America...Let’s leave aside for now the inferred premise that America has never done anything wrong (for example – just choosing a period at random here – over the previous eight years), and therefore why on earth would we have anything for which to apologize? I stay reasonably up to speed with the news. I watched the president travel the world. I remember some refreshingly quasi-honest rhetoric from him every once in a while, stuff that was hardly news to anyone outside the American Insular-o-Sphere. But no apologies.

So I asked. “Could you folks who continually say that the president is apologizing for America all over the world, could you please just quote me a couple of examples? It’s not that I doubt your veracity or anything , it’s just that this claim of yours is not fitting so well with my understanding of the facts.”

Oh man, you should have seen what gyrations that little toe-dipping into empirical reality produced. One person said I should “do my own research”, even after I explained to her that I had indeed looked, to no avail, even though I always thought that one making an assertion bore the burden of proof, and even though one would assume it would be easy to present myriad examples, given the plethora of apologies supposedly tossed off by the president, like so many sets of Air Force One souvenir cufflinks. Mostly there followed an obstinate silence, or personal attacks on anyone, like me, who would dare ask for examples. But my very favorite response was the proof finally generated by one of the regressives in the group. That President Obama apologized continually to the world for America was proven by the fact that – wait for it, now: “He traveled to Europe”. You probably think I’m kidding you, but this was dead serious, and nothing I could say was capable of pointing out the absurdity of the assertion, not even mentioning that Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush (and every other modern president) “went to Europe”.

To be sure, making fun of dittoheads is like shooting elderly fish in a barrel filled to the brim with Quaalude-laced molasses and left in the fridge for a couple of days. But something profoundly unprofound is going on here, and I keep encountering it everywhere I go in Regressive World. These folks start and end any discussion with their paranoid ideas, and cannot be dislodged from them by mere evidence or logic, if they can be dislodged at all. I’m not sure a bunker buster bomb would do the trick, or even a moderately-sized nuclear device, planted close in. If a conservative government ran the country into the ditch in every conceivable way, they would still tell you how great it was. (Oops, that already happened. Never mind) If Republicans were shown to be pedophiles and closet queens, they would still support the party for its strong stand on sexual morality (Oops, that already happened. Never mind.)

How utterly frightened of some existential threat does one have to be in order to cling to sheer nonsense like the notion that going to Europe is apologizing for America? Indeed, how frightened must one be to actually seek out having such inanities delivered directly to your door, by flipping on Fox Lies?

This is much deeper than an election or even a partisan tendency across an era. We are talking here about a population somehow so traumatized that the very rationality which is utterly foundational to the Enlightenment project of democracy has been squashed down to invisibility, never again to inconveniently impede full-bore delusion. Perhaps ‘twas ever thus – I mean, one can hardly account for endless millennia of religious belief otherwise – but right-wing freaked-out reality-defying delirium has gone so mainstream these last three decades, it’s seems most times like we’ve entered some parallel and not so lovely alternative universe. Nowadays, it’s paranoia for breakfast, paranoia for lunch, and paranoia for dinner. Want a little snack before bedtime? Guess what’s on the menu...

LARGE CUT HERE--SEE LINK FOR THE COMPLETE RANT


Ah truth. Pesky, annoying, truth. That’s it! That’s what’s missing from these unfortunate right-wing rendezvous with reality. A little truth...
The great irony, of course, is that they’ve got themselves all whipped up about Barack Obama, of all people. If there was ever a guy in the White House who was more innocuous, less offensive, and more happy-faced than Pleasant Obama, I can’t imagine it. If regressives today are this freaked out by the Kumbaya Kid, what would they do if they had a pugnacious liberal like Harry Truman or Lyndon Johnson to deal with?

I, for one, would sure like to find out. And not only for the spectacle it would surely be.

Let’s face it, nobody wears psychopathologies on their sleeves more proudly than the regressive right. And nobody’s politics are more completely driven by their sense of wounded social status than these very same clowns. They’ve been freaked out for decades, a epoch of epic paranoia occasionally interspersed with the ecstasy of witnessing a Reagan or a Bush beat up on one group of brown people or another in their name. But now they’re so far gone they’ve taken to simply making up perceived insults out of whole cloth, and clinging to them with a ferocity usually reserved for parachutes at about 300 feet.

Unreal. (Literally.) Next thing you know they’ll be saying that the president is a secret Muslim trying to convert the country to Islam!
Oh, wait. Never mind..


David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (mailto:[e-mail]), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net. You can contact David at [e-mail].

[creeksneakers2]

1. Great desciption!

And really funny too!

[annabanana]

2. This is a great article!

And "regressives" is an excellent characterization!

[thucythucy]

3. I've run into the same phenomenon

though seemingly on a smaller scale.

In my experience there seem to be two ways that zealots--and I mean the more fringe types such as you're describing--handle the question of "proof."

One is, they simply make stuff up. Most of my on-line encounters come in the YouTube threads. As an example, on more than one occasion obvious conservative zealots will lie about their military service. The weird, and perhaps sad thing is they're generally not smart enough to alter their user profile when they do so. So some Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rush/Hannity groupie will wax poetic on his two decades of service in the military, and fighting in Gulf War I and Iraq, but leave the fact that he is 23 years old posted in his profile. Obviously a fabricated story. This extends to broader political issues as well. Sometimes it isn't an out and out lie, only a huge distortion. During the 06 campaign one of these folks posted a story all over the site about "Democrat liberals laughing" at the news that casualties were up in Iraq. As always in these cases, I asked for some proof. Of course none was forthcoming, not at first anyway, and when I pressed the point I was directed to a video that showed, in fact, quite the opposite: that no one was laughing, but that a Republican candidate who supported the war was being pressed to cite how many Americans were dying each month in the war that he supported. His final guestimate was far less than the actual figure. Somehow, according to this zealot, we were supposed to see this as proof that Democrats were "laughing" at the thought of dead American soldiers.

The second category of people honestly don't know what constitutes actual proof, or how to do research on a topic beyond visiting a right wing website or listening to a right wing program with which they are utterly comfortable. So, on a recent YouTube thread of a video calling Michael Steele out on his lies about health care reform, a GOP defender wrote words to the effect, "I've researched this, and everything Michael Steele says is true. It's the Democrats who are lying." So I picked one of the boners Steele was shown saying -- that a VA manual asks veterans to question "whether they are of use to the community" (those may not be exact words, but close) and that the Obama administration is encouraging veterans to commit suicide (!). So I asked the guy, since you say you've done "the research" please give me the page number and exact quote for these assertions--tell me where in the VA manual vets are encouraged to question their worth and then commit suicide. Crickets. In other cases the zealot will quote an obviously biased source, and will seem genuinely confused when asked for a PRIMARY source--don't tell me what somebody else says it says, show me the original document (in this case give me a page number so I can down load the document and check it myself).

What's weird then is how exacting these same folks become about an issue like Obama's birth certificate. In that instance, no amount of verification, sourcing, citation, will do. It's all a huge liberal conspiracy, and that settles it.

Anyway, great post. Best of luck with your efforts. If you get one of these fringe types to take a step back, you'll be doing all of us a service.