As many of you know, before I left the academic wars for the joys of making pottery and selling it on street corners, I was a Cognitive Psychologist. Not, I hasten to say, a clinical practitioner who is qualified to diagnose and treat mental illness, but one of those strange people obsessed with how the brain processes and organizes information.
The results of my training has produced a passionate observer of human beings, with an eye to their various foibles in understanding the real world which they inhabit.
I have watched the development of the pathology that is current US politicial thinking, with horror. The emergence of the "two truths" system, fostered by a corporate media gone haywire, has allowed anyone to take the stage and proclaim any damned thing that strikes their fancy, without any test for a rational alignment with reality.
Yesterday, Blue Texan provided an excellent example, once again, of the kind of thinking that ignores fact in favor of ideology.
You can also see examples over at the Washington Note or on any TV broadcast, major newspaper or Pundit Show, from NPR and the News Hour, to Fox.
Psychologists have always recognized that a failure to identify the facts in your immediate environment and to react appropriately to those facts, as a serious defect in cognitive processing. Whether you are so wrapped up in your version of what is correct that you ignore all evidence to the contrary, or whether you are so convinced that you know and understand things that other mortals can not, disengagement from reality is a form of mental illness. To date, every act initiated by the Bush Administration and the US Congress has given evidence of this type of cognitive failure.
"Surging" in Iraq, continued back channel discussions of attacking Iran and Syria, the latest EPA decisions to recast the process by which National Forests are evaluated and opened for commercial use, the continual denial of the need to address the petrochemical strangle-hold on our foreign policy, and the resulting global warming immediately, all signal to the trained observer a refusal to deal with facts.
There are some things for which there are not two sides. There are some things for which a healthy society can not tolerate a quirky little difference of opinion. There are times when that difference marks the boundry between sanity and insanity.
Much of this nonsense can be laid directly at the feet of the multi-cultural, politically correct afficianidos who shaped political discourse in the 1970's. We wanted to open the door to all. We wanted to give everyone a place at the table. We wanted no one to be left out, because we had been so skillfully excluded from the national dialogue during the Viet Nam War. Now we are reaping the harvest of giving value to every opinion that can find a chair.
Some ideas are stupid. Some ideas are dangerous. And, some ideas are just plain crazy. It is time we called the Neo-Con foreign policy what it is. Insane.
We must individually, and collectively step up and "Call Crazy" everytime one of these poor misguided souls gets their hands on a microphone. Everytime George Bush stand up and delivers another one of his distorted views of the world situation, we must point out the insanity he is displaying. Everytime you hear a neighbor, or co-worker, or friend repeat these distortions, or failures to recognize reality, we must, individually and collectively say, "That's just crazy". Say it softly, with sadness, and finality. And then just walk away.
Call crazy, on crazy - that politically incorrect term that carries more clout than all of the diagnosis in the DSM.