Insanity or Treason?

“But the brilliance, the versatility of madness is akin to the resourcefulness of water seeping through, over and around a dike.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald

I am a great admirer of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and I believe he may well be one of the finest American prose stylists ever. I am not necessarily a huge fan of the content of his short stories or novels, at least not reading or re-reading them now in the 21st century. I do not, for example, think The Great Gatsby is the greatest American novel although it certainly was a great one. But all that aside, I love the above quotation and I believe it offers a great insight into the mechanics of insanity. It is open to a number of different interpretations, all of which I believe are helpful when it comes to questions of life and madness. For example, one thing it suggests to me is that insanity may well be an attempt to get around problems one encounters in life. This is sort of like insanity as problem solving, like trying to get around a problem, or a kind of wall encountered in your life so threatening as to have no other solution. Insanity, in this view, is a solution, a method of coping that, while extreme, makes sense, at least to the person having to employ it. No doubt Fitzgerald was led to this analogy by the madness of Zelda and the difficulties involved in such a situation.

At the moment I think it offers at least a bit of an insight into the current behavior of the Republicans, including the Tea Party branch. Confronted with the reality of the complete failure of their ideology: free-market capitalism, trickle-down economics, drown government in the bathtub, anti-union, outsource jobs, protect the wealthy and corporations, social Darwinism, cut-taxes solutions for everything, and to hell with the poor and the middle-class, what else can they do except turn to insane babbling about the current administration? Thus we now get accusations that President Obama is not a legitimate President because he was not born in the U.S. (which he was), he is a Muslim (which he is not), he’s a socialist, communist, fascist, (that he is not), he wants to take away our guns (which he doesn’t), he is secretly trying to bring in shari’a law, he is a racist that hates white people, he’s weak on national defense, afraid of the Generals, doesn’t know what he’s doing, and the whole dismal situation we are currently in is his fault. Of course the latest claim, coming from no less that the absolutely worst person in the world, Glenn Beck, that our President, the President of the United States of America no less, is “evil.”

If these accusations are not crazy enough, Republican proposals for what we should do are equally insane: do away with social security, Medicare, the recent health care laws, the Department of Education, unemployment benefits, freeze government spending, extend tax cuts for the two percent wealthiest people in the U.S., do away with abortion even in cases of rape and incest, attack Iran, engage in endless “wars,” stuff the military/industrial/political complex with more military junk they can ever use, retain don’t ask, don’t tell, oppose Gay marriage, fear Muslims and terrorist attacks, and, above all, keep insisting there is no global warming and, in spite of the facts, insist the U.S. constitution calls for a Christian nation. Oh, most importantly of all, insist that 700 billion in tax breaks for the filthy rich really doesn’t matter to the economy, doesn’t have to be paid for, and is absolutely necessary, whereas extending unemployment benefits is too expensive. Now it is doubtless true that not all Republicans believe all of these things, but it is equally true that many do believe many of them, and it is similarly true that in many cases, even though the Republican Party knows something is nonsensical they still support it (as in the case of the candidacy of Christine O’Donnell, for example). They decided immediately upon Obama’s election they would be the party of “no,” and have stuck religiously to that pledge, thus effectively keeping anything constructive from happening. Now, once again, they are threatening to shut the government down completely. Is this not an attempt to seep, under, around and over the dismal reality they themselves created? For this they expect to be rewarded by being returned to power?

I can think of no other explanation for this behavior than as a form of collective insanity. There are two possibilities here, (1) either they believe in this ridiculous nonsense, in which case they are literally insane, or (2) they know it is mostly all bullshit, in which case they are a treasonous bunch of bastards that think more of their own interests and party than our country. Take your pick.