It’s not just Glenn Beck: why America’s gone nuts

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 peopleIt 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. ·