I May Have Gone Insane - Democratic Underground

WilliamPitt

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Wed Sep-19-07 04:10 PM
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I May Have Gone Insane

I May Have Gone Insane
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Columnist

Wednesday 19 September 2007

We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

- Robert Frost, "The Secret Sits"

It is a legitimately demented phenomenon, all the more so because it all started with a joke. Not even a funny joke, either, but a sad and threadbare thing I told only to myself, and no one else. When the clustered elements of our collective national burden erupted in masterfully synchronized bedlam, as they so often seem to, I had that joke to tell myself, and it may not have helped much, but it was there.

Every time another cacophony of freshly minted lunacy was unleashed - lunacy regarding Iraq, the NSA domestic surveillance program, White House defiance of subpoenas, timorously flaccid performances by the Congressional majority, or merely when enduring the repeated "nukyalur"-ized butchery of public political rhetoric was required by my employers, all of which emphatically pegged the needle on my Pandemoni-O-Meter - I had that joke to tell myself.

The joke is spherically terrible, i.e. bad in every possible direction in three dimensions and across 360 rounded degrees. It isn't even a joke, really, which may be why it went so abruptly and bewilderingly sideways on me months ago. The joke, to be embarrassingly honest, is more like some half-bright mantra than anything else. As I came to discover, however, it managed to settle my mind when the needle was in the red. Perhaps the thing is best described as my self-generated Zen koan; though it did not actually stop my mind in proper koan fashion, it kept me from putting my head through the wall, and that made it valuable indeed.

The joke: people say Bush and his people want to raze the core nature of the country itself by wrecking the Constitution, and they're correct. People say Bush and his people are enriching their friends beyond dreams of avarice at our actual expense, by way of war-inflated oil prices; war-captured Iraqi oil infrastructure; the orgiastic plunder of Treasury money through calamitously unsound tax cuts for Bush's pals; and through an Iraq war profiteering scam so unutterably corrupt that it bends the very light. That, and more besides, is what people say, and they're correct.

But all that, along with everything else the Bush crew has done, just isn't enough for them. What Bush and his people really seek, at bottom, is to destroy the basic definition and literal existence of reality itself. They want to destroy reality, rebuild it according to their own blueprint, so the sum and substance of this new reality will accept as axiomatic the idea that lying, stealing and wholesale carnage are badges of integrity and moral clarity. In other words, our comprehensively understood reality today would be replaced by whatever madcap anti-reality currently exists within the walls of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

I warned you.

As bad as that chaotically crossbred joke/rant/mantra thing is, it wasn't meant to be anything other than a harmless sliver of wordplay, something that settled my nerves and gave me a private little chuckle - that alone, and nothing more.

Things are different now. It isn't a joke anymore, at least not to me. The premise that the Bush administration has literally been trying to shatter elemental reality on planet Earth has steadily gained traction in my mind. It started as that sort-of joke, then it became an idea, and then it became an actual hypothesis, a working theory requiring research and evidence and argument so that, someday, I can prove it to be an unassailable bone-basic truth.

And yes, the fact that I'm quite serious about this has me quietly yet legitimately concerned for my own mental health. What worries me the most, however, is a freshly minted suspicion that it is already over, that the deal already went down, but almost nobody actually noticed when it happened. I think these Bush folks may have successfully pulled it off right in front of our noses over the course of this past August. I think they may have actually broken reality, cobbling together a chaotic replacement, and I think I can back up that supposition all the way down the block and back again.

Bear with me...

More: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/091907R.shtml