1 Boring Old Man

A year and a half ago, I started writing a blog , at first at my daughter’s urging, but then on my own. She complained about my frequent political posts [boring]. So last Christmas, she gave me this one to get the political stuff isolated, and now it’s the only one I write on. It’s interesting to me that I do it, because I don’t know anything about politics. I was just so damned discouraged after Bush’s second election, I had to do something. It helped – keeping up and reading what other like-minded "keeper-uppers" were saying. But I still don’t feel like I know anything about politics. What I know now is that writing here helped me with more than just discouragement. It helped me with something I’d never had before – paranoia.

No, I didn’t hear voices or anything generalized. But for the first time in my life, I didn’t believe the news, didn’t believe what people said. The only other time was back in the Nixon Era – but back then, I was surrounded by like minded friends who didn’t believe it either. Now, I’m retired in a rural area where "like-minded" is limited to some close friends only. So, I’ve been writing about something I don’t know much about, to keep from feeling suspicious and a bit nuts when I watch the news or read the paper. And it works. There are lots of people who do understand politics that are doing the same thing, and they’re turning things a bit in this country. Very gratifying!

This morning, I want to write about something I do know about from my career as a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist – paranoia. If you wanted to raise a child to be paranoid, how would you do it? It’s a question that actually has an answer. Instead of talking to the kid directly, clearly, you’d try to change the child’s behavior by "strategizing." You would do things like withhold love or encouragement if the kid didn’t do what you wanted. You’d put the kid in double binds that forced him/her in the direction you wanted. Your message wouldn’t be in the things you said, it would be in the "metacommunications" – not the words of the song, but the music.

And if might work. You might be able to shape the child’s behavior that way. But the problem is that you’d have raised a person who didn’t look at what people said, he/she will look for the unspoken message "behind" the words – a suspicious, vaguely paranoid person. And when your child ended up in a psychotherapist’s office as an adult, they’d drive the therapist to distraction looking for the hidden meanings in every communication. If that therapist had the patience and endurance, he would focus on that suspiciousness; help your child see how it had come to be; would only communicate in very direct ways; and might be able to put a dent in what you’d done to the child with your "strategies."

That’s what this Administration has done to me us. A lot of us don’t believe a word they say. We see everything as strategic. They snuck something called "the Bush Doctrine" in on us without ever saying what they were doing. They fed "talking points" to their media to sway us. They filled us with patriotic zeal to get us in a war we wouldn’t have supported if we knew why we were waging it. They presented themselves as devout Christians to garner the votes of the pious. They "outed" a C.I.A. agent to undermine her work [which didn’t support what they had done] and discredit her husband [who was part of that work]. They allowed their worst tricksters to flourish under the guise of commited service [Delay, Foley, etc.].

So I joined the ranks of the suspicious and write about what is behind the stories too. This morning, I was reading this in the Washington Post:

Suspicion Surrounds Retreat In Gas Prices, Poll Finds

While motorists have welcomed the drop in gasoline prices, a Washington Post-ABC News poll released yesterday showed that many Americans remain suspicious about the reasons for the recent decline and skeptical about whether it will last.

Three out of 10 Americans think the recent fall in gasoline prices is a result of domestic political factors, including White House and Republican Party efforts to influence the November elections. That’s nearly as many as the 35 percent who attribute the recent price decline to market forces or supply and demand, according to the poll of 1,204 adults conducted from Thursday to Sunday.

The survey also showed that suspicions about the steep drop in gasoline prices over the past two months aren’t limited to the nation’s liberal strongholds. Sixteen percent of people who identified themselves as conservative Republicans, 26 percent of white evangelical Protestants and 29 percent of Southern residents think the plunge in prices is linked to the coming election or other political reasons.

Those beliefs may be blunting the positive impact President Bush and the GOP hoped to get from falling fuel prices. "I think the president’s party is lowering the gas prices until the people think the economy is settling down, and then they will raise the price again, blaming it on the Arabs for raising the price on barrels of oil," one respondent said.

You know, that’s what I think. I think the lower gas prices are part of Karl Rove’s advertised "october surprise" [see my recent post]. When I was reading this article, I thought, "I don’t know if that’s really true, that these lower prices are part of a manipulation or not." I’m glad about having that thought. It means that I’m not only paranoid, I can still question my own conclusions. And, to be honest, it doesn’t matter. I now know that I don’t trust this Administration because they’re just not trustworthy. That’s all that matters. It’s not me, it’s what they’ve done to my thinking. I don’t need to pore through the blogs and PDF’s and Wikipedia to prove that their words aren’t to be believed, I know it.

So, this blog has done its job, and I may be headed for the ranks of people who can watch the news and read the papers without having to spend time looking for the tricks. I’m not there yet, but I’m pleased that I now see getting there as a genuine possibility. I look forward to the day when I read the news, and don’t have to go look at what everyone says about it, and don’t have to write about what’s behind it.

In "crazy" families that do a lot of strategizing, there’s often a kid who breaks the rules. That kid is always making the metacommunications in the family public. Such kids are always in trouble and leave home as soon as possible. They’re called "truthsayers" by family therapists, and spend their lives exposing background motives, often to their own detriment. In their therapies, they have to learn when to keep their mouths shut. I hope I can learn that in the "post-Bush" era.

But mostly. I hope there is a "post-Bush" era!