So all the money, all the giving up our rights "to be safe", all the acceptance of torture and cruelty have only brought about a country sadly divorced from reality and facing some real threats our so-called leader can’t even imagine solving without demanding more police power and more tax breaks for the rich. And to think we still have more than a year of this jinx’s administration to endure (373 days to be precise). The saddest thing of all, Tom doesn’t see any possibility that a new administration will undo the paranoia and misspent billions that have become the norm for our country under the dark spell of Bush’s obsession.
They’re pointing to a well known aspect of paranoid thinking that, at first seems paradoxical. Actually there are several paradoxes in Paranoia:
• It would seem that finding concrete reassurances that the paranoid person’s fears and suspicions are unjustified would comfort them. That is rarely the case. They’re usually disappointed and almost seem driven to find other things to be paranoid about. It turns out that paranoia is not the disease, it’s the cure. The central problem in paranoia is an intolerance of the subtlties and emotional nuances of life. Given an emotionally ambiguous issue, the paranoid person simplifies things into Victim/Persecutor Superior/Inferior terms – things they understand. Without their paranoid thoughts, they’re in a fog.
• In spite of their constant vigilance that they’re being taken advantage of, paranoid people are very suseptible to being taken in by con men and other opportunistic people. Since they’re suspicious of everyone, they constantly look for reassurance. The only people who will tell them what they need to hear are unscrupulous people. So paradoxically, they only believe liars.
• Paranoid people are notoriously unaware of the real issues of their lives, being so preoccupied with their own paranoid productions. Missing the subtle cues that the rest of us use for emotional navigation, they spend their days locked into quaisi-imaginary power struggles with their perceived enemies, and miss the real music of life. This is the paradox Mary and Tom are referring to – the paradox of Don Quixote.
But I disagree with Mary and Tom on two subtle points. First, it’s not Bush. He’s an empty shell playing President. The dark spell comes from Dick Cheney – a classic paranoid case. But, secondly, I’m much less gloomy about the post-Bush/Cheney aura than Tom is. Paranoid and other low order characters do, indeed, cast an evil spell on everyone around them. But it disappears when the spellbinders are gone, miraculously. It’s like the stuff of fairy tales – the spell is broken. I’m not naively suggesting that what comes next will be easy. I write almost daily about how hard it’s going to be. What will be hard will be the rebuilding after eight years of destructive, incompetent, paranoid government, and the mis-spent billions are lost for all times. But the transmitted paranoia will lift. It’s like the relief a woman feels when she gets free from an abusive marriage. She refinds her spirit, long lost in the craziness of her former spouse. Her biggest danger is in hooking up with another similarly afflicted man for the same reasons she found the first one. That’s our biggest danger too. It’s the reason we can’t sweep the horror of these dark times under the rug. We desperately need to learn our lesson from this insanity – the one we didn’t learn after The Gulf of Tonkin, or Watergate, or Iran-Contra [speaking of The Gulf of Tonkin, check out NoQuarter].
Parenthetically, Tom Engelhardt does offer an insight that we all need to hear. The Global War on Terror is a paranoid notion, by definition, and a waste of time. While Don Quixote and Sancho chase around fignting windmills, everything else goes unattended. But it’s mis-named. It should be called the War on Global Fears. Pervasive [Global] fears are what drive paranoid thinking. Paranoid people are consumed by their War on Global Fears – including Vice President Dick Cheney…
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