Anomie of the State
Wandering through the haze of America's mass hallucination, one can only wonder: What's happening to us?
 

January 31 2005
Counterbias.com
Steve Horowitz
 

Something's ... not right.

There's a surrealistic quality to the news lately -- a sense that correspondents are barely maintaining a straight face as they report on life in Bush's America. Like the noxious cloud from a derailed chemical car, a feeling of through-the-looking-glass illogic has settled over the country. And the scary part is that, even though we know the harm it's causing, we don't mind the smell.

In a way, some of it seems trivial, even laughable. Like the newly confirmed Secretary of Education, in her first official act, writing a letter complaining about Buster Baxter. A cartoon.

Buster travels around the country on adventures he shares with his young TV audience; unfortunately, he recently visited Vermont, home of civil unions, where he had the misfortune to learn syrup-making skills from a girl with two mommies.

"Many parents would not want their young children exposed to the life-styles portrayed in this episode," Secretary Spelling griped to PBS, and it wasn't the sap-collecting that irked her. PBS promptly pulled the show, saying it had already planned to.

This comes on on the heels of Focus on the Family's James Dobson exposing the conspiracy by SpongeBob SquarePants, Elmo, Jimmy Neutron and Big Bird to promote the gay agenda to unwitting tykes.

Under ordinary circumstances, we might chuckle and shake our heads at the cartoonish concerns of loons like Spelling and Dobson, the way we did in 1999, when Jerry Falwell outed Tinky Winky. (Of course, that needed to be done; as noted on the Teletubbie website, "Tinky
Winky loves big hugs." So there you go.)

But things don't seem so ordinary lately. I can't quite put my finger on why; was it Bush's inauguration speech? It seemed to make quite an impression, partly because fully half the words of the text were either "liberty" or "freedom", but also because Bush couldn't bring himself to say the word "Iraq."

That was odd. Did he forget? Did he not want to spoil the vibe with thoughts of a foreign policy catastrophe for which no one -- no one -- has been held accountable?

This feeling of drifting, of purposelessness; has it come from Bush saying -- two weeks after Newsweek described him as "a restless man who masters details and reads avidly, who chews over his mistakes and the
failings of those around him" -- that he knew nothing about his administration paying at least three journalists to promote his policies?

Is it from Newsweek reporting something as patently unbelievable as Bush mastering details and reading avidly?

Is it from Bush telling blacks that privatizing Social Security works to their advantage because they die sooner than whites? You'd think that a President of the United States, especially one with a mastery of
details, might find it more efficacious to address the root causes of the differing lifespans -- by improving health care, for example. But no. The better idea is to suggest -- with no reason to believe it -- that at least they'll get a few more bucks a month during their fewer
years on Social Security. Thus evening things out.

It's all so ... bizarre. But, in truth, I can't say it's entirely Bush's fault. No, the blame lies primarily with the nearly 60 million who gave him a second term knowing that his belligerence and arrogance have shattered our moral standing; that he's responsible for the pointless deaths of more than 1,400 servicemen and women; that he's leaving it to our children to deal with his crushing deficits and a ruined environment.

We are staggering through a mass hallucination of our own creation. We think that the next signpost we stumble on in our aimless journey -- the elections in Iraq, Social Security "reform," a nipple-free Superbowl --
will restore clarity and purpose and meaning to the American experiment in democracy. It won't. Because a coalition of the intellectually lazy, morally weak and bitterly hateful put a very small man in charge of a country with very big ideals. And those ideals are growing harder and harder to make out in the haze.

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