Hildegarde

Every once in a while I get into these odd states where I feel as if I don’t have anything to say, but I want to write anyway. 

Except that that isn’t really it.  It’s more like I have something to say, and I don’t know if it’s very important.   Or if it relates to anything, to use the term my students favor.

Let’s take a look at this for a minute–at the primary challenger who lost to the incumbent and then claimed that the incumbent was actually dead.

I’m going to link here to a local news website for the story:

http://kfor.com/2014/06/26/congressional-candidate-feels-opponent-is-a-body-double/

You can google this thing, if you want, and get much livelier accounts of the whole mess, because the liberal and progressive websites are having a field day, as they should.

The basic facts are this:

Back during this past primary season, an Oklahoma politician named Timothy Ray Murray challenged Republican incumbent Congressman Frank Lucas for the Republican nomination for Congress in the state’s third district.

This is being consistently reported as a “Tea Party” challenge on the left liberal blogs, but that may not be true.  As it turns out, Murray ran for something during the election cycle before this one, and that time he ran as a Democrat.

Democrat or Tea Party, though, is less interesting than what came next.

First, Mr. Murry lost.

And when I say lost, I mean he was bulldozed flat.  Lucas got 82% of the vote.  Not only was it not even close, it wasn’t close enough to call not even close. 

That would probably be the end of it, except for what came next.

What came next was those two letters you can read on the link I gave you, posted on Tim Murray’s web site and stating that:

The person the voters took to be Frank Lucas and voted for because they thought he was Frank Lucas wasn’t really Frank Lucas.

The real Frank Lucas had been executed by the “international court” in the Ukraine “on or about” January 11, 2011, and then been replaced by an android replicant that looked and sounded like Lucas, but wasn’t really Lucas.

What’s more, Lucas wasn’t the only Congressperson who had been executed and replaced by a replicant.

But since Lucas wasn’t actually alive any more, and since replicants were n ot eligible for Congress under the Constitution, Lucas had actually lost the primary and Murray was the proper candidate.

Then there’s this:

This is a situation similar to the Senators’ from Kentucky situation in the 2012 election. I am contesting that this matter has happen since his election was blocked, because of the U.S. Defense Department’s use of Mr. Murray’s DNA. To my knowledge, the U.S. Defense Department has not released to the public that information, as it is their confidential information about many people. Congress is likely wanting me to state that all my DNA used will not result in benefits to people I have never had relations with of a family nature. I have been bound to protect that information unless it causes harm to The People.

If you have any idea what that is supposed to mean, you’re doing better than I am.

Now, a couple of things.

First, the left liberal web presence, on social media and off, has been predictably outraged and horrified at this, often asking why nobody has yet dragooned this man into a psych evaluation.

Every once in a while somebody who knew what it takes to coerce a psych evaluation would point out that the man wasn’t eligible (unless he decided to submit voluntarily), but I’d give the “he should see a shrink and be on medication” people a break.

It certainly does sound pretty damned crazy.

And the howling of “this is what the Tea Party gets you” isn’t entirely unfounded, either, since the Tea Party has thrown up a few distinctly odd candidates across the country.  Think of  Christine O’Donnell, Republican candidate for the US Senate from Delaware in 2010, who ran an ad telling us that she was not a witch.

I’m not joking.  That’s still up on YouTube if you want to see it.

It most certainly hurt the entire party and not just the candidate.  And the party knew it even at the time.

But I’m going to give the Republicans a pass here, too.  If you’re trying to bring in people to run for office who aren’t the usual people–not Ivy graduates, not lawyers, not members of the club–the chances are that you’re going to pull in a few nutcases. 

And, strange as it may seem, some voters on both sides of the divide may think your position on abortion or immigration or half a dozen other things is more important than the fact that you think people still worry about who might be a witch.

What I objected to wa the implication, or outright charge, that Mr. Murray’s beliefs about replicants and dead people running for office were “stupid.”

Because not only were these beliefs not stupid, they weren’t even, in the strictest sense of the word, anti-intellectual.

First, hard as this may be to believe, they’re part of an elaborate and well articulate belief system with tens of thousands of adherents around the world.

It’s the variant of another belief system, this one claiming that the world is run by nonhuman “reptilians” who are the descendants of the coupling of human beings with Satan’s demons, that has an even larger number of adherents, dates back to around the time of the American Revolutionary War, and comes in denomination that cover everything from Catholics and Protestants and Muslims to atheists and agnostics.

If you go looking, you can find web sites and organizations in the thousands not only espousing these things, but doing it articulately and logically.

Not rationally, necessarily, but logically.

Certainly there are, across the world, established religious and ideological systems that are no more or less divorced from reality than Mr. Murray’s ideas seem to be.  

We don’t react as strongly to those as to this because we’re used to them. 

Or because we don’t actually know what they say, but assume they must make sense, because so many people believe in them.

What Mr. Murray is engaging in, no matter how odd it may seem to most of us, is a form of theology.  (And all ideology is theology, so keep that in mind.)

And like all theology–Catholic, Marxist, Freudian–it’s a closed system.  Once you accept its premise, everything else follows automatically.

I am not saying here that I think we should accept Mr. Murray’s ideas as true, or even as ‘true enough to deserve respect.”

I am enormously grateful that Mr. Lucas’s constituents cast their eye over his challenger and decided they really had no interest.

I am saying that these beliefs are neither crazy nor stupid.

They’re just wrong.

And they’re just as representative as the capacity for abstract thought as the theory of relativity.