[wvns] I May Have Gone Insane
I May Have Gone Insane
By William Rivers Pitt
Wednesday 19 September 2007
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/091907R.shtml
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.
The process began in earnest more than a year ago with a publicity
campaign that deliberately made no sense whatsoever. Day after day,
statements and declarations came from all manner of White House
officials that were little more than bags of over-the-moon nonsense -
all patently inaccurate to nine decimals, yet spoken shamelessly into
cameras with bare faces hanging out.
With this, the Bush folks laid the mental foundation of the new
reality to come; that foundation had to transmute lies into facts
while still stuck in the old reality, but they had an edge that may
have proven decisive: trust. If the American people hear the White
House repeatedly claim that water is not wet and Godzilla is real,
many of those Americans will believe it after a fashion.
The rumored totality of America's cynical scorn for politics and
leaders notwithstanding, this country has many citizens who still
believe, even after what has happened, that if the president of the
United States says it, then it must be true. This isn't a conscious
thing; it happens way back in the slushy part of the brain, where
unpleasant facts or disquieting fears are submerged and drowned like
rats in an applesauce vat. Bush and his crew counted on that, using TV
news messaging to furrow the field in preparation for seeding time,
and their trust in the trust of Americans was shown to be well-placed.
When the serious push came, it came fast and furious. Dick Cheney
declared that the Vice President's office no longer existed within the
legislative branch because he didn't want to give any of his documents
to the National Archives as is required by law, and actually went on
to defend the legitimacy of his astonishing, arrogant, galactically
mistaken declaration, and he got away with it.
Bush's lawyers put forth a claim of Executive Privilege that was
the very living essence of overheated hubris run amok - a claim that
for all intents and purposes declared Bush and his people to be fully
and completely above the rule of law, and he got away with it.
Subpoenas issued by Congress were either utterly ignored or smugly
slapped aside, and the lawyers got away with it.
Another piece of draconian surveillance legislation aimed at
shattering our remaining rights arrived in Congress, so the Bush folks
brazenly bullied the majority into passing it by threatening to blame
them for the next terrorist attack to come, whereupon the majority
instantly wilted like orchids in a snowbank, the bill passed with room
to spare, and once again they got away with it.
Cheney's chief of staff was convicted for lying about lying about
lying about outing a deep-cover CIA agent and sentenced to federal
prison, initiating the single most observably crooked bag-job in
modern political history: Libby took the bullet for his boss, got
rewarded for his service with a presidential get-out-of-jail-free
card, and they all got away with it.
All of this was deployed in rapid succession, presenting the
American people with a sudden feast of gibberish that has redefined
incoherence across the board: the VP is not in the executive branch,
and the executive branch is above the law, and the majority in
Congress is actually the minority, and obstructing justice to protect
Cheney from being prosecuted for annihilating a CIA operative isn't
anything to get in a snit about. If that is not prima facie evidence
that a new reality has been imposed upon us, then I don't know what is.
After all that came August, and if I'm right, the process was
brought to a successful conclusion. In a way, this was the greatest
challenge for Bush and his people, because they all had to argue time
and again that Iraq was doing fine, that the whole thing was about
freedom, that there was no civil war, that the "surge" worked, that
the American people truly supported the whole bloody carnivorous
process, and be damned with poll numbers and pundits and contradictory
facts. General Petraeus was rolled out on cue, he hummed his bars and
faked it at the same time, and as far as the mainstream press was
concerned, the White House won the argument and that's that.
Think about it. The weapons of mass destruction were not there,
connections to 9/11 and Osama bin Laden were not there, the hearts and
flowers were not there, thousands upon thousands have been killed,
billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars have been translated into
the bank accounts of administration allies, a civil war is raging
beyond any semblance of control there, Iraq's much-ballyhooed
democracy is almost as chaotic as the streets outside Parliament, and
the entire disaster has become a Quantico training ground for scores
of bomb-makers looking to ply their trade in the wider world beyond.
And they got away with it. If that is reality, I want no part of it.
It must be clearly understood, however, that I do not discount the
very real possibility that I have, finally and for all time, gone
insane because of all this. My theory is not proven beyond doubt; my
suspicions grow stronger by the hour, but I could simply be this
barking madman no longer able to recognize reality even when it is
staring me in the eye. I'm pretty sure of my footing, but the truth is
that if I did go over the high side somewhere along the line, I'd be
the last person to figure that out.
Therefore, I'm going to wrap myself in the words of F. Scott
Fitzgerald, if only to replace what once was my comforting little joke
before the metamorphosis flipped everything upside down on me. "The
test of a first-rate intelligence," said Fitzgerald, "is the ability
to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still
retain the ability to function."
I make no claim to any sort of first-rate intelligence, but I'm
going to try to hold these two thoughts in my mind for as long as
possible. One thought says reality itself has been detonated with
calculated premeditation by Bush and his people. The other thought
remembers what it was like before anything like the first thought was
even remotely conceived of. Each thought, I think, will nurture and
protect the other once the three of us are all settled in, and I will
continue to retain the ability to function.
Meh. Reality is overrated anyway.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally
bestselling author of two books: "War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't
Want You to Know" and "The Greatest Sedition Is Silence." His newest
book, "House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America's
Ravaged Reputation," is now available from PoliPointPress.
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