Welcome to the National Asylum
Beat the Devil
By Alexander Cockburn
The Nation: October 5, 2009 edition
Was there ever a society so saturated with lunacy as ours? 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 on September 12 in
Washington by tens of thousands were the sans-culottes screaming for fiscal
propriety as though channeling the ruinous orthodoxies of Montagu Norman or
Andrew Mellon. Many among these Glenn Beck legions were surely one stroke or
tumor away from financial ruin yet were still ready to tear any advocates of
publicly funded health insurance into tiny pieces as though they were
hawking The Communist Manifesto at a revival meeting. Inspiring, was it not,
to see such self-abnegation on the part of so many people prepared to die in
the name of free enterprise!
Many of the Glenn Beckers are "birthers" too, making delusional forays into
the supposedly dubious documentation of Barack Obama's delivery in a
hospital in Hawaii. Sometimes I think the White House should knock 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 air base in Louisiana--the very same air base
where George Bush briefly touched down in his erratic flight from Florida on
September 11, 2001. George Bush then personally executed the captives.
It was a satirical sally. But I swiftly received serious letters from people
vexed 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 remains 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 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.
Now move from the nuttiness of his detractors to the madness of Great Ones,
in this case President Obama. His rhetoric is decorous, but the delusions
are just as ripe and far more lethal than those of the Glenn Beck
demonstrators under his window. 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 testimonies?
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
disheveled mental condition and that 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 on September 9 that his healthcare 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 in faraway 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."
This 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.
The 1970s 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 '60s and of the
Vietnam War and elected politicians who passed some admirable laws. It
seemed America might totter into the warm sunlight of sanity. It was Ronald
Reagan who truly credentialed 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 and watch them babble and throw
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 '30s; trying to pass
off as healthcare "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. Doesn't that make you crazy too?
About Alexander Cockburn
Alexander Cockburn has been The Nation's "Beat the Devil" columnist since
1984. He is the author or co-author of several books, including the
best-selling collection of essays Corruptions of Empire (1987), and a
contributor to many publications, from The New York Review of Books,
Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly and the Wall Street Journal to
alternative publications such as In These Times and the Anderson Valley
Advertiser. With Jeffrey St. Clair, he edits the newsletter and radical
website CounterPunch, which have a substantial world audience. more...
***
From: steve seal <steveseal@msn.com>
Date: Nov 26, 2009 11:04 AM
Hello all,
There will be a march for World Peace on Wednesday, Dec. 2, starting at
MacArthur Park at Alvarado and Wilshire at 6:00 PM--marching down Wilshire
Bl to the Immanuel Presbyterian Church for an event (across from the UTLA
building) at 7:00 PM. It is supported by many really great people worldwide
and is the LA portion of the world march that started a few weeks ago.
Please send out the info to anyone you may think would be interested, and
come on down to the park after school
Thanks
Steve
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Go to the PEAC web site at www.progressiveeducators.org
--
Linda Sutton
Los Angeles, CA 818-992-5187
cell 818-419-7560 when NOT
at home number only
What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless,
whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or
the holy name of liberty or democracy?
Mahatma Gandhi, "Non-Violence in Peace and War"
PDLA mailing list
PDLA@svpal.org
http://mailman.svpal.org/mailman/listinfo/pdla
***
From: <winogradcoach@aol.com>
Please join me and other members of Progressive Democrats of America as
we stand with the National Lawyers Guild to protest President Obama's
expected escalation in Afghanistan. I'll see you at the Federal
Building in Westwood. Details below. Peace, Marcy Winograd
From: National Lawyers Guild LA Chapter
Subject: L.A. PEACE GROUPS ANNOUNCE PROTEST OF OBAMA'S NEW PLAN FOR
AFGHANISTAN!
Date: Wednesday, December 2, 5:00 p.m.
Where: The Westwood Federal Building
Various peace groups around L.A. have called for a protest at 5:00 p.m.
at the Westwood Federal Building on the day following Obama's
announcement, likely to take place next Tuesday evening...in which case
the protest would be at 5:00 p.m. next Wednesday.
All Guild members who oppose the war in Afghanistan and/or Obama's
expected call for 34,000 more trooops for Afghanistan, are urged to
attend this protest as a participant, or as a legal observer.
National Lawyers Guild LA Chapter | 8124 West 3rd Street Suite 101 |
Los Angeles | CA | 90048
PDLA mailing list
PDLA@svpal.org
http://mailman.svpal.org/mailman/listinfo/pdla
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