One could make a pretty good case that the United States is a basket case. Admittedly, the Middle East is having its own psychic trauma, but certain external conditions obtain there, which go some distance toward explaining the near-pandemic psychosis that has seized entire populations.
No such conditions exist in the United States, though we, too, have our peculiar kinds of madness. But as of yet no ISIS is creating unshirted hell in the streets. Why, then, are we unhinged in the ways we are?
Politics, ever an arena of spite and accusation, has turned into one of those old late-night black-and-white televised wrestling programs with gorilla-sized men snorting and grimacing as they break wooden stools over the heads of their opponents before pitching them into the laps of the braying crowds at ringside.
A quarter of a century ago, it was said that politics in Washington, D.C., had become a blood sport. Now it is an out-and-out melee with no clear end in sight and no evident purpose other than to crush the other guy because, well, that's how we roll.
The audiences devoted, for example, to the blowhard screeds of Rush Limbaugh, the snide parries and ripostes of Laura Ingraham or the vicious verbal sneers of Ann Coulter are being entertained, not informed. Yet for the most part they seem not to know it.
They cleave to their prophets of choice and hang upon their every word in much the same fashion that a hard-shell Baptist amens his preacher's Sunday stem-winders -- the more hellfire and damnation the better.
Hillary Clinton -- a frequent target of the frenzied Right -- does not always do herself the best good in what she is wont to say or write, but neither is she the Wicked Witch of the West nor Medusa redivivus. She served honorably in the United States Senate, twice elected by the voters of New York state. She brought good repute and dedication to the Department of State as its secretary.
Is she culpable in the alleged deceit and obfuscation in the Benghazi matter? It seems to the objective viewer only in the sense that she was secretary of state at the time during which somewhere down the ranks in the system there occurred miscommunication at the least and, at the worst, poor judgment by subordinates. Also, she did not kill Vincent Foster.
Elsewhere in the asylum is a former vice president of the United States named Cheney who, conveniently putting out of his mind how it was the nation got itself into Iraq in the first place, is in a fit of barely concealed hysteria, now openly blaming President Obama for the chaos and old night that has descended on what's left of that country.
The truth of the matter is so far from the Cheney accusations that the man borders on psychosis, i.e. disconnection from reality. Cheney may not be psychotic, but he is by any objective measure a bald-faced liar masquerading as a world statesman. Perhaps a kind of psychosis in its own right?
Why do we put up with this? Why do we suffer the radio and cable television to be abused by liars and the otherwise deranged? Can it be that the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech extends so far as to protect what is, in effect, slander? If so, we have become a nation that has traded raving in public for civil discourse.
Therefore, it seems to me that the country needs collectively to lie supine on a psychiatrist's couch and submit to analysis. It needs to take the psychotropic medicines prescribed and cooperate in their treatment with the goal of getting back in touch with reality and being willing to depart the netherworld of bizarre half-truths and out-and-out prevarication.
The Bible is often cited as the source of divine truth. As one who has spent half a century engaged in research of its texts, I could not support such an idea. But the late First Century CE sage who came up with the following proposition must have understood how those captive to such lunacy as has become de rigueur in what passes in our time for civil discourse can be redeemed and set straight:
And ye shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free.
It is worth noting that the English word "truth" as used here is translated from the Greek αληθεια. The word means the veritable essence of a matter that has been unveiled to reveal what it actually is.
Truth, then, is the drug of choice for our psychosis-ridden nation. Let us seek it amidst the welter of falsehoods that clog the publicly owned airwaves and infect such networks as Fox News with malicious untruths that do not set free but shackle democracy.
