It’s not just Glenn Beck: why America’s gone nuts
From 9/11 ‘Truthers’ on the left to ‘Birthers’ on the right, the United States has gone mad because those in power refuse to listen to voters
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. 
Filed under: Glenn Beck, United States, Politics, Barack Obama
About the author
Alexander Cockburn coedits the political newsletter and website www.counterpunch.org and is a regular columnist for the Nation, also for... MORE
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It's the conundrum of democracy, the worst system of government except for all the others, which allows the ignorant, the deranged, the deluded and the plain wicked an equal vote. This would be serious enough in a civilised society but in amerika, where corporations have more legal rights than human beings, act as if they're aliens farming the lumpen and pay virtually no tax, how can one expect anything approaching rational behaviour? Decency doesn't get a look in.
Posted by allan kessing at 1:42pm on September 18, 2009
Hardly surprising in a nation composed initially of all the religious nutjobs expelled from Europe, born out of genocide of the original inhabitants and run on slavery for decades, and since stocked with 'refugees' from every other country. People who think the BBC is left wing and that universal health care is a communist plot. America, with its vast nuclear arsenal scares me a lot more than Iran without one, or North Korea with perhaps just one. I've spent my life watching America threaten, bully, invade, torture and kill, as well as fund the most repressive right wing death squads in S.America, subvert fair, democratic elections and install compliant dictators. Yes, crazy, but also evil, deranged and scary, as well as being the largest polluter and destroyer of the planet with its out of control military-industrial capitalism.
Posted by Peter Simmons at 2:13pm on September 18, 2009
On a recent trip abroad (Europe and Africa) to say that people were dismayed about what is going on in America is to wildly understate it. Of particular puzzlement was the uncivilsed reaction of the citizens, who are so scathing in their condemnation of others globally, to any rational debate on health care and their scare mongering about socialists' and communists' plots. Is there really such abysmal ignorance in so many minds in this great land? Truly alarming, and of much more concern than Iran or N. Korea to many worldwide.
Posted by Yolande Agble at 5:14pm on September 18, 2009
The scariest thing about America is that no-one is actually in control of what goes on. The whole shebang totters forward on a series of compromises between the politicians, the military and the people with the money. As Peter Simmonds points out in his comment, this has led to America supporting acts of barbarism that would have given pause to monsters like Stalin or Hitler. Maybe we don't need the sort of Free World that America has been marketing since 1945?
Posted by Mark Hale at 6:51pm on September 18, 2009
Um, I rather like America.
Posted by Fred Smith at 9:24pm on September 18, 2009
The writer just does not get it. He is busy patronizing the average American, he only recognizes the rich, the so-called celebrities, and those who attended ivy league universities; the others are just too stupid to express their opinions. Politicians work for the people who elected them, and it is full time they realize it. Government has no money except what is extorted from the people who pay taxes and they should be careful about spending it. Please read the reports in the British newspapers about their health care, why would any country aspire to such conditions? I thought most countries have a system where they accept majority rule, but this writer thinks the majority should be ignored in favour of the few. You do not throw out the baby with the bathwater, you try to fix what is wrong. In aviation there is a saying "if it works don't fix it", and that is good advice. Many people go after the shadow rather than the real thing; and to a lot of people the grass is greener on the other side of the fence until they get to the other side.
Posted by myrna smith at 1:33am on September 19, 2009
Peter Simmons.. Nicely put...precise and to the point..A nation of sheep herded by the likes of AIPAC.... What absolutely amazes me is that the avearge Joe will work three jobs to make ends meet but thinks he is doing justice to himself by being royally shafted by the cunning, conniving and heartless elites that tinker with his little brain as if it was full of nails. Actually, to come to think of it, the majority seem to have nails where there should be some grey matter.
Posted by mashoud janjua at 3:47am on September 19, 2009
Could you stop giving space to Alexander Cockburn. It is blatantly obvious this person is your average anti-American public school boy educated Britisher masquerading as left wing critique. Can we have insight on what is going on in America and not middle class schadenfreude?!
Posted by Joker777 at 10:17pm on September 20, 2009
The "nutty aplomb" is considered by some as the outcome of an enormous intelligence.
Posted by mukeshnana at 2:52pm on September 21, 2009
Who ever wrote this article is a nut job. You don't live in America and have no clue. The people who marched on Washington were peaceful citizens from almost every state. They came there on their own and not as any organization or group. Some were part of groups, many were not. Not all of the people listen to Glenn Beck-I don't even know when his show is on. As for the Birthers being made fun of, Obamarama has never proven he is Constitutionally eligible to be in the Oval Office. This needs to be addressed, and release his school records to show he was not accepted as a foreign student. Why would he want to hide this information from the people he claims to want to serve. He has been a media invention since he came on the scene, with the initial help of Henry Kissinger hiring him to groom him for whatever purpose-we know now!!! The Bilderbergs agenda!! In America we run the government, In England/Britain the government runs you!!! As for the truth about 9/11, JP fuel would never have been able to take down two 100+ story buildings. There were explosives in place to assist the sensationalism of the sight of two jets flying into the buildings. tower 7 was also a controled demolition, whereas the towers were left to free fall. The Pentagon was bombed, nothing left of a jet is a lie, and an insult to ones intelligence. We will never know the truth of who really did this, any more than why was JFK shot. Was JFK shot because he wanted to get rid of the Federal Reserve and have America's money backed by gold as our forefathers warned us about, Jefferson and Jackson, even Lincoln. Woodrow Wilson as he left office, apologized for being duped into creating the Fed. Considering we can track someone from satellite, it is a reasonable assumption we know where Bin Laden is. The question is how could one man do all this unless he had assistance from a higher organization-$$$$$$$ Always follow the money. We are over in Iraq and Afghanistan for other reasons. Remember the sixites tunes? "Bring the boys back" "make love not war" where are the true protestors???
Posted by Carrie at 7:20pm on September 21, 2009
Just a seldom recognized fact: a university degree and/or a high I.Q does NOT necessarily equal *wisdom*. Think about it if you can manage to cut through the pseudo-intellectual, holier-than-thou garbage so many of you rely upon for your social status.
Posted by Zhivago at 7:48pm on September 21, 2009
Most of the free world wishes the best for Obama, it is only the racist right wing fanatics in Amerikkka that are trying to tear him down.
Posted by jvporter@gmail.com at 11:06am on September 22, 2009
Conspiracies will alway be there but there are some strange anomolies about 9/11 for sure, a lot of what happened just doesn't add up. A little truth would not go amiss.
Posted by John Jolley at 2:33pm on September 25, 2009
Obama promised change - the kind of change he has destroys everything that past generations have worked for. His genius for change is the same genius as Castro, Marx, and Hiltler.
Posted by John Harden at 4:13am on September 28, 2009
Myrna Smith: Which British neewspapers do you get your information about our health system from exactly? Living here all my life, I KNOW our NHS is superb and the envy of most other countries, certainly vastly superior to the American system if you're poor. Here we don't ask if people are insured before giving them medical assistance, and don't bancrupt them with a bill they can't pay. Do you 8understand the 'care' part of healthcare? Carrie: I find it amazing that a country that prides itself on taking in immigrants from across the world for the whole of its history can have people like you who, in an attempt to diss the properly elected president [unlike Bush who got in with proven electoral fraud] by doubting his birthright. It's all innuendo and rumour, the tools of the extreme right, because truth was never the friend of fascists.
Posted by Peter Simmons at 12:46pm on September 29, 2009
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