Those Whom the Gods Would Destroy

 

It's an ancient proverb. Those whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad.  It's commonly attributed to Euripedes in the 4th century BC.

I think most observers, at least those north of the 49th Parallel, would recognize a madness sweeping our neighbour.

Oscar Zambrano, writing in Counterpunch, calls it "The Wave of Crazy."

The wave of cultural crazy is breaking on a debilitated United States. The country is still a super power very rich but also very sick. It’s acting out like the world’s palooka, swinging haymakers right and left in its imperial stupor of blind might.

I’m shocked by the fall of American civility, and by the quickening loss of the partial democracy we’ve had since the Founding. Partial democracy is all we’ve ever had but even that has been far better than anarchy and totalitarianism, tyrannies and kleptocracies.

Time was when America had a strong mixed economy and did wonders with it. From about 1945 to 1970, the country had a functioning government actually interested in governing and also in maximizing the effectiveness of private enterprise. The collaboration of shared public and private interests is unthinkable today. Back then we governed ourselves better than we do now.

So long as American power and wealth remain fixated on short-term private profits, and on immediate political gain our society will regress  day by day to the dark end of incivility and brutishness. Too few people are thinking seriously about the future. They remain a statistically-insignificant minority.

History shows that power eventually stops being the means to do the good and becomes an end in itself. And when that happens it turns into the dark thing that has brought down every empire: that’s when lies, stupidity and violence crowd out the light of reason and the light of day.

In the Congress the wave of crazy is generating trolls like Congressman Paul Gosar who did a video cartoon assassinating Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; and Congress Woman Marjorie Taylor Greene who said having to wear a mask at Walmart reminded her of the Jews in the Holocaust having to wear a star; and gun-obsessed Congresswoman Lauren Boebert’s islamophobic rant against Representative Ilhan Omar, calling her a terrorist with a black heart and suggesting her backpack could be a suicide bomb. Jihad, yeah!

This is the swill that passes for political discourse in American politics today, and the chilling part is that it’s working extremely well for tens of millions of Americans who celebrate it. Let’s face it: Law enforcement is absolutely not capable of dealing with millions of armed Americans should they rise against our system of government.

The author sees an Attorney General, Merrick Garland, gripped with fear.

In these feverish times of the wave of crazy, Attorney General Merrick Garland and his Department of Justice are proving too scared to bring Trump and his fifth-column treasonous minions to justice. For an entire year now the DOJ has been busy catching the mice of the January 6 insurrection while studiously staying away from the wild boars who planned it and continue to run free demolishing the future of our democracy.

What worries me is the emergence of tribalism. There is the Big Lie tribe, the loonies who choose to believe that the Democrats stole the election that Trump actually won.  There are the believers and then there are Congressional Republicans who cater to the lunatics for their own political benefit.

Then there's the other group, the slim majority who don't believe the Big Lie. Herein is found the big worry. The Believers are energized, drawn together like moths to an open flame. They are nourished with a steady diet of nonsense spewed by a bellows effect of  the Tucker Carlsons and Sean Hannitys of FOX and other media outlets. 

As for the other side, well there isn't one. Recent accounts suggest that there's a lot of indifference among those who know Biden won the election. They're fatigued with the nonsense but they're not motivated to push back. They just want to be left alone. They want their country to somehow snap out of it. Perhaps they never saw "The Shining."

Zambrano contends that the madness that now has gripped America is the end result of a process that began in the late 70s and gained traction under the Reagan presidency. As such he expects it will likewise take decades to restore America's sanity if the Republic can last that long.