First a confession. I enjoy the spectacle of a slow motion Republican Party meltdown almost as much as I love watching Monty Python's Cheese Shop sketch.
But beneath the surface nuttiness and sketch comedy incoherence of the birther/tea bagger movement, there lies useful intelligence on what this part of America is thinking and feeling.
Without full consciousness of their motives and actions, the birthers are actually engaged in a form of mass talk or narrative therapy that is helping individual birthers deal with the intense personal trauma brought on by a rapdily changing external world.
Follow me over for a discussion on how the birther movement is actually a good thing for the collective emotional and psychological health of the nation ...
Warning: I will be making certain generalizations about a movement that has many, perhaps millions, of adherents. There will of course be some birthers who do not fit these charaterizations.
To understand the kind of personal turmoil birthers and tea baggers are experiencing at the pyscho-emotional level, we must first understand who they are - whiter, more rural, less educated, more religious (Christian), and less affluent then the general US population.
These charteristics leave them more exposed to the dislocating impacts and challenges brought on by globalization, urbanization, expanded civil rights, inflation of educational requirements, the internet/tech/communications revolutions, and the concomminant fragementation and reformation of family, work, health (physical and mental), community, and life.
Of course these are changes we all have to deal with, but the more tools in the kit, the more we can successfully address the challenges.
My contention is that birthers are both under more pressure from externally driven change (less educated, more rural, less affluent, etc.) and less able to deal with that changes because of personal outlook, political ideology, a schlerotic set of social norms, and a strong disinclination to seek or openly embrace therapeutic models to address their problems.
If you read or listen to birthers they often sound lost or confused or depressed or helpless in the same or similar way that PTSD sufferers do.
They sound less frightening than frightened. More
scared than scary. Less coherent than confused.
From these observations I see the collective birther / tea bagger phenonmenon as individual journeys of recovery rather than mass political movement.
Where they are now is early stage pre-acceptance of the underlying issues ... President Obama is just the convenient object of their anger/fear/depression/guilt.
Would we all be better off if they dealt with their personal issues directly through established therapuetic models?
Probably.
Is that going to happen?
Unlikely.
However, my guess is that the movement will continue to grow and morph as people seek the cure ... and that it will be many months or years before this initial phase of the self treatment moves on to more effective work as they progress down the road to recovery.