IN A CRAZED SOCIETY, WHO IS SANE?

Chris Hayes  Special "All In" is at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVbMKVbwbUk

Who ever guessed that a news show would have more guts and eloquence than the entire Republican party?  Chris Hayes' 

"A-block" essay at the beginning of this show combines the history and explanation in a way customary to his friend Maddow's show.  It hits me particularly hard because in Canada, just over the border to the north of me, the same investigations are going on in Alberta where the same organizations that formed at the end of the American Civil War found a refuge.  Many Texans up there. 

Our history has hit them, too, even without slavery or Vietnam.  Lethbridge was one of my shopping towns (only 130 miles north) until a passport was required.  (Mine has expired.)  "The Medicine Line" has been a game element in many contexts: Prohibition whiskey smuggling preceded drugs.  If my diabetes gets worse to the point that I need insulin, I can probably justify paying to renew my passport in order to get my drugs there. Disgusted as they get with Trudeau, he is not a madman.  Things are still relatively stable.

This is from Twitter:

"Duty To Warn

@duty2warn

All of us know narcissists. But Malignant Narcissism is different - narcissistic disorder with sociopathy, paranoia, and sadism. The malignant narcissist nestles between sanity and insanity. It's a cause of the most vicious inhumanity in history. They rarely go down alone."

One of the most effective ploys for old folks slipping into dementia but denying it is to project their own situation on everyone around them.  One of the most dangerous and easily weaponized dimensions of this is insanity.  As Hayes pointed out, this is one condition that justifies incarceration, as it was used by Stalin, involuntarily.  The political is identified as a mental matter -- unless you are the president.  But even George III was forced off his throne.

We are at a point of ambiguity in the relationship of the individual to the society as a whole.  If a powerful person can convince society that dissension is really mental illness, then one joins a long list of martyrs.  Being insane occupies a place between the medical and the military, between confrontation and heresy.  In some times we have burned such individuals at the stake.  Today we put them in endless solitary confinement and prevent their incarceration from ever ending.  We justify forcing them to take medications of unproven efficacy and possible inappropriateness.  We have had demented presidents before.  None of them have been like this.

There are two forces in play at the moment.  One is the gradual realization of how crazy Trump really is, the possibility that he may die in front of our eyes -- maybe not physically right away, but mentally already.  He is a zombie.  But we are so afraid of calling him crazy that we let him shred our claims of law and order.

The other force is that of criminalizing dissension expressed in violent force.  The far right empowering mass shootings and prompting a constant stream of violence reminiscent of the Old South -- as well as the state-encouraged violence at our borders -- means that we are well into using criminalization to authorize political vengeance.  Family destruction, formal court trials for toddlers, solitary confinement are CAUSING mental trauma, precursors to madness.  Very clever gamesmanship when the idea later will be to stigmatize them as crazy.  Lock 'em up.

That the insanity and criminality of the president is directly connected to the domestic terrorism of incels and redneck law enforcement should not surprise us as much as it does.  The only explanation is denial.  The two meanings of the word "mad" are confusing each other.  Trump hides his insanity behind tirades of rage. Some compare Reagan who was also demented, but always calm and pleasant. It's terrifying that a mind can slip away.

I'm generally at the thin end of the Bell curve when it comes to crazy.  One illustration was in a UU congregation when I was a member in the '70's attending a workshop about the importance of "letting all out," expressing one's emotions.  The very nice civilized couple who were running the event offered a paper instrument, multiple choice, meant to reveal whether you were repressed.  At the end of the meeting, they pulled me aside to say they were worried because I scored as having so much fury.  They were afraid that I might burst out with some --ulp -- antisocial act.

They had no idea.  I was recently divorced after ten extreme years.  They didn't know that I was working at animal control where every day leaving work I passed a pile of dead pets no one wanted and every day during work knocked on doors opened by people knee-deep in debris and filth, people who were barely coping and were held together by love of their dogs or cats.  Until more recently, people were totally unaware of all this because society kept it secret to avoid uproar.  I survived despair by using rage.  I thanked them and denied them.

The other incident was admission to seminary.  Shortly after, we ambitiously formed a women-only group for sharing and support. One of the women who had been on the admissions committee disclosed that I'd been accepted only because my minister was so powerful, and that my response had been so emotional that they worried I was crazy. They hoped they hadn't made a mistake.  It was a time and place where only cool rationality was intelligent. I've never gotten over that.  It was a little seed that grew.  So now I'm withdrawing the denial and letting it out.  Was I crazier then or now?  

Crazy in terms of self-management in the face of stress is one thing.  Senile dementia, the loss of the use of one's brain, is something else.  One can learn to handle a lot of things, but organic derangement is final.  When I was ward clerk in a nursing home with Alzheimer's patients, I learned first hand.  One woman had been the kindest, most understanding of all the nursing aides, but when her mind failed, she sat and cursed so violently and obscenely that she had to be wheeled to a private room.  Then she began to wail and scream with no letup until she was sedated and finally died.  People say about lesser cases, "He's just not the same person."  I'm sure some people feel that way about our president.