Hildegarde

For the past week or so, I’ve been having this weird mental hitch where I think it’s later in the week than it is.  This morning, I thought it was Wednesday, which is a day on which I have to do a whole ton of stuff I’m not really prepared to do.

I scuttled around this morning trying to gear myself up to do things I later–much later–realized couldn’t even be done before another 24 hours. 

Then I realized what I was doing and sat down to see if I couldn’t get my head to start dealing with reality.

The situation is even weirder than it seems on the surface, because it oddly connects with what I’ve been reading, and even with some of the conversations I’ve been in on FB.

What I’m reading is still Perry Miller’s Life of the Mind in America from Revolution to the Civil War, which is an account–by a New Deal liberal–of how Americans came to understand their society and the place of religion, law and government in it.

This is a very odd book to be reading these days, because, if Miller’s history can be trusted, these days are an awful lot like the ones that led from the founding to the Civil War.

The players these days are not only pretty much the same people as they ever were, but they’re pretty much ranting and railing about the same topics and in mostly the same way.

The issues are going to sound very familiar: the power of the federal government, the place of religion in American life and politics, the expanding power of experts and the use of those experts by Eastern elites to foil the will of ordinary people.

In fact, all of this is so familiar, I’d almost suspect Miller of writing a spoof.  I know he didn’t, because he died in the Fifties, when he, like most historians, thought that all these issues had been resolved.

Of course, ten or so years after Miller died, Richard Hofstadter brought out Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, so hope on the part of New Dealers that the acceptance of what we now call Big Government was complete were undoubtedly exaggerated.

That said, the issues aren’t anywhere near as easy to work out as I once thought they were, or as Hofstadter thought they were, either.

You have to give it to Perry Miller for understanding that, and being careful.

The foundational principle of this nation is that ordinary people–the mechanic in the gas station on Main Street, the lawyer in a New York highrise office, the Christian fundamentalist mother of four driving her children to a religious school, the band members of Florida Georgia Line–are fully competent to make their own decisions about their own lives and to run their own government theirselves.

This is, of course, a political fiction, and everybody knows it, but the bottom line is very simple: we must behave, politically, AS IF it were true.

We must behave that way because the alternative leads to far worse–to the imposition of an established religion (metaphorically), of the spectacle of people who think they’re morally and intellectually superior to their fellow citizens running roughshod over everybody else.

But.

And it’s a big but.

I don’t think there’s any one of us out here with an IQ over 2 who hasn’t looked at the some of the specimens of our fellow citizens and gone, “Oh, my God.”

If you’ve never done that, I’d recommend about a week of reality television.  Forget the “outrageous” stuff like Duck Dynasty (those people built and run a successful business) and go straight for the mind-numbing mindless.

Party Down South would be a good one–following the adventures of a group of people who seem to do nothing but get drunk, get pregnant and fight with each other.

I have no idea why anybody, anywhere, would want to appear on national television behaving like this, but there they are.  It’s the ultimate example of the principle that it doesn’t matter what you’re famous for, as long as you’re famous.

For me, though, the issue isn’t people like the ones on Party Down South. They don’t seem to be very bright and they’re mostly wasting their lives in ways that aren’t even interesting, but we all have the right to pursue happiness, and this is how they pursue theirs.

No, the people who get me going are the ones I always identify in my head as the ones who “ought to know better,” although I’m not sure why they ought to know anything.

The prime example of the breed is a woman named Jenny McCarthy.

Ms. McCarthy is an actress who had something of a vogue about a decade ago.  She also lived for a long time with the actor Jim Carrey, who is a truly astounding actor, and therefore probably somebody you do in fact know.

None of this matters next to the fact that the woman has spent the last fifteen or so years declaring to all and sundry that vaccines cause autism and that parents shouldn’t vaccinate your children.

Note here, that the anti-science stand is coming strictly from the Left.  Ms. McCarthy is convinced that we only vaccinate our children because we have been hoodwinked into it by Big Pharma, which is making a mint off the fears they themselves have invented.

Sorry.  I get REALLY sick and tired of people telling me that one side is “pro-science” and the other is “anti,” when both sides deny science as soon as it gets in the way of their ideology.

At any rate, Miss McCarthy.

The first time I heard about Jenny McCarthy’s anti-vaxx campaign, the first thing I thought of was that she was obviously much younger than I am.

I was a little over 2 during the last great polio epidemic to hit the US.  It’s one of my earliest and definitely one of my strongest memories: being forced to stay in the house all the time, listening to my parents discussing what had happened to a boy down the block that I played with all the time and would never play with again.

If you think vaccinations are nothing but a plot by Big Pharma to make a bunch of money, you’re a very lucky person.  You’re too young to remember when not being vaccinated meant dying at the age of 5 or spending the rest of a short life in an iron lung or paralyzed from the waist down.

There are lots of things out there like this, things that ought to be no-brainers.  There’s the fluorescent light bulb thing. I think it was wrong of the US government to institute a ban on incandescent bulbs. 

On the other hand, if you’re still using incandescent bulbs, you’re an idiot.  The fluorescents last long, use less power, and–in spite of a higher initial cost–end up costing you less money.

Things like the anti-vaxx crusade are a type of stupidity that seems to have its own natural history.

This type of stupidity always comes accompanied by high levels of paranoia–Hofstadter also wrote a book called The Paranoid Style in American Politics–and the paranoia always seems to come wrapped in a conviction that the world is being run by secret forces with absolute power conspiring against the rest of us.

In other words, it’s the paranoia of what we ordinarily think of as true nutcases. David Icke. The Reptilian people.  The Illuminati.

I’m not saying Jenny McCarthy natters on about the Illuminati.  She doesn’t.  It’s just that her theories about the Big Pharma plot to trick us into giving our children vaccines they don’t need and that will cause them autism is that kind of paranoia.

Big Pharma is all powerful.  In can operate in complete secrecy without ever being detected, or even–in outright contradiction to all human nature everywhere–losing one of its conspiracy members to book deals and whistleblower fame.

Some of the Christian versions of this kind of thing come right out and blame the devil for what’s going on, and that at least makes a certain kind of sense, since the Devil is supernatural.  The chairman of Glaxxo-Klein, on the other hand, is most likely a middle aged functionary who has enough trouble trying to stay ahead of international tax codes.

I think what I’m trying to say here is that this way of looking at the world seems to be a standard variant of the way our brains work. 

All of us do a little of it, and some of us do a lot of it.

Right now, one of the groups of people doing a lot of it is running around the American West shooting police officers and declaring that we’re about to see “the revolution.”

One of the police officers working on the mess out in Nevada yesterday helpfully explained to CNN that the perpetrators hadn’t left the swastika because they were neo Nazis.  They’d left the swastika because they thought the POLICE were Nazis.

Which was helpful as a distinction, but I’d already figured it out.

Rachel Maddow spent last night asking the question that’s now a favorite all over the Internet–are these guys being egged on by Republicans who write books and produce radio shows talking about how awful the government is?

It’s cute, but it doesn’t even begin to address the issue.

The US has always had a large and vocal segment of its population that is anti-government to the point of anarchy.  It was here in 1776, in 1828, in 1861 and yes, now, and it will always be with us.

What’s actually egging these people on at the moment is the fact that this government no longer seems sure enough of itself to provide a credible threat.

It was the Obama Administration, not the Republicans, that backed down during the Cliven Bundy mess, and did it on international media.

And that is the point, and it’s a big one.

Those people know the Republicans are more-or-less with them.  They now think the Democrats don’t have the will to successfully oppose them.

I think it’s going to turn out to be the worst mistake any American government has made in 100 years.

The Jenny McCarthys in our midst, though, will earnestly and stridently tell us that the whole thing is being orchestrated by Big Pharma.

Or Big Oil. Or Big Tobacco.  Or—