My Bizarro Barometer

For the most part, life is boring. It’s much like a seismograph. It generally shows a flat line, but every so often, a blip appears. Rarely, there are a few small spikes. We experience this as unpleasantness, something between mild depression and vague discomfort. The medicine for this “illness” — yes, we’re all slightly ill — is distraction. We must heap it on our malady to make life manageable.

Many a fortune has been built on this phenomenon. The entire fashion industry depends on it, as does the music industry. It explains why car makers offer so many models and design changes every year. It explains why Baskin-Robbins has 31 ice cream flavors. (Actually, it’s 1,300 since they opened their doors.) It explains why Chanel offers 127 perfumes. These are manufactured distractions. They work because they directly stimulate our senses. They take their cue from nature, which offers peacocks and roses and honey and salt licks and pheromones.

There are also distractions that stimulate our minds rather than our senses. For example, if I told you a fatal disease had broken out in China, I’d probably get your attention. Or if I reported that astronomers have found evidence of a giant asteroid heading right at us, that would work too. But what if I were lying about the asteroid? If you thought I was a credible person, the result would be the same. You’d be uneasy. Maybe you’d say, “C’mon, really? I’ve got to check this out.” Either way, I put a blip on your seismograph.

Before I go on in this vein, I have to reveal something about myself. Like you, there is a range of distractions that jostles my mind. One that often rattles me is the occurrence of bizarre behavior by members of my species. Sometimes I think I must possess a special organ that pulsates like a pinball machine whenever something crazy makes headlines. I call this organ my Bizarro Barometer. Where does it reside? I like to think it lingers near the islets of Langerhans.

I even have a fairly good idea what it looks like. It’s graduated like a thermometer. Its apex represents unblemished thought; its nadir, pure madness. At any point in time, the level of the liquid inside — fortified grape juice? — indicates the level of sanity in the world. As you see, humanity is currently well below the midline, labeled Putatively Sane. Alarmingly, through the first half of this year, the level has moved lower and now rests at Spacey.

To whom or what can we attribute this drop? To that trio of sneaky devils, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un? Giving free rein to cyber criminals is indeed a crazy thing to do. It’s a case of the neurotically mischievous coddling the neurotically mischievous, despite the high risk of retaliation. These goodfellas explain the drop in part, but only a small part.

The largest part belongs to America. It wears the mantle of Chief Purveyor of Madness in the world. If you doubt my judgment, review how our nation has lowered the barometer in recent months:

• Americans have made the struggle against the Covid pandemic political. That’s astonishing. It’s crazier than making chicken soup political. 47% of Republicans say they aren’t likely to get vaccinated. Only 6% of Democrats say that. Where do these death-wish Republicans live? Largely in the same states Trump carried in last year’s presidential election. And they’re paying for it. The Delta variant of the disease, the most contagious and lethal to date, is surging among them. When in history have whole populations taken a stand against science they were willing to die for?
  
  
• Trump’s Big Lie refuses to die. In fact, quite the opposite has happened. Conservatives across the country have erected adamantine fantasies with walls that deflect truth. Last April in Arizona, the Republican-led senate authorized the third recount of the ballots cast in Maricopa County, the most populous in the state. The work, done by a dubious firm called Cyber Ninja, is still unfinished. Counting is easy, but fabricating credible results is next to impossible.
  
  In Oklahoma, where Trump won 65.4% of the vote last November, Republicans in the state legislature want a “forensic” audit because nevertheless they distrust the outcome. Similarly, Republican lawmakers in Pennsylvania and North Carolina are calling for investigations of November’s voting. Even though there’s no evidence of election irregularities, they have a gnawing feeling that something was amiss. Better extra extra safe than sorry, I guess.
  
  
• Demonstrations against teaching Critical Race Theory (CRT) have been going on since last October. Most of them occurred just last month. CRT, simply put, is the idea that racial discrimination has always been embedded in American life, that it has manifested itself in our legal system, housing practices, medical care, education, employment, voting rights, criminal justice, and police brutality. In fact, this is no “theory” but simple truth.
  
  These days, high schools in blue states teach a large part of this truth. Most Conservatives became aware of CRT only after Trump labeled it as “the left’s vile new theory.” He accused its teachers of propagating the idea that the U.S. is “systemically evil,” instead of “helping young people discover that America is the greatest, most tolerant, and most generous nation in history.” He and his millions want American history to be a course of happy lies. This is completely consistent with his conduct as a public figure.
  
  
• Earlier this month, CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, disseminated a plan for returning Trump to the presidency. It begins with a dramatic loss of confidence in Pelosi. Who knows why, but it causes her to lose her speakership to a Republican. The new speaker reveals evidence of all the election racketeering that went on last November. Naturally, the Dems are crushed in the 2022 midterms. Next, the House drafts articles of impeachment against Biden and Harris and elects Trump to be its speaker. (Supposedly you don’t have to be an actual member of the House to be speaker!) This piece of legerdemain puts Trump in the line of presidential succession. Finally, Biden and Harris are impeached and convicted and Trump’s second coming is complete. Anyone who put their signature to this plan should have to tell a judge why they should not be summarily committed to an asylum.
  
  
• The traveling public’s need to bear or be near weapons now amounts to a mania. At airports, passengers by law must declare their unloaded firearms when they check in. However, in the first six months of this year, TSA officers found almost 3,000 undeclared firearms at boarding checkpoints. In the last non-Covid year, 2019, they found 4,432 undeclared guns over the entire year. Over just the past July Fourth weekend, they discovered 70 guns at checkpoints, and 62 were loaded! They also turned up brass knuckles, a hatchet, and a loaded gun among passengers’ carry-on items.
  
  
• On the same weekend, 150 to 200 members of “Patriot Front,” a white nationalist hate group, arrived in Philadelphia in rented trucks and began a march during the night. They were masked and carried flags, shields, and banners. The banners proclaimed THE ELECTION WAS STOLEN and RECLAIM AMERICA. According to the police, onlookers “engaged members of the group verbally.” Eventually, the marchers reached their targets, Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were debated and adopted, and City Hall. They left after making a promotional video and taking pictures at a rallying point.
  
  
• Again on the July Fourth weekend — Holy Focal Point, Batman — 11 heavily armed members of the “Rise of the Moors” militia were arrested near Boston after an overnight standoff that shut down a major U.S. Interstate. The group doesn’t recognize American laws, but claims to be peaceful, their numerous weapons notwithstanding. Their leader told police that the men were traveling from Rhode Island to Maine for some “training.”
  
  
• The post-Trump Republican Senate hasn’t relented a bit in its opposition to affordable health care, voting rights, or infrastructure renewal. Every Republican senator voted against the COVID-19 Stimulus Package, a bill that sustained the fight against Covid by distributing $1.9 trillion among public health agencies, schools, states, cities, tribes, families with children, people with modest incomes, and the jobless. Every Republican senator voted against the For the People Act; 60 votes were needed for passage. The act would have established a myriad of federal protections against the hardships on minority voters that racist state legislatures are enacting. Every Republican senator voted against moving Biden’s infrastructure plan toward a final vote. The plan called for the first phase of an eventual $4 trillion-plus package for roads, bridges, child care, family tax breaks, education, and an expansion of Medicare for seniors.
  
  Biden, in the angriest speech of his presidency, called Republicans selfish. That’s the wrong word, a weak label for their behavior. The correct word is sociopathic. Their leader’s narcissistic personality disorder has rubbed off on them. They’ve become cruel and callous. They’ve turned inward to focus exclusively on continued power, no matter what harm befalls their constituents.

Let’s return now to the subject of distractions … Say I developed a powerful interest in collecting stamps. I’d have a great many people to keep me company in this distraction. No doubt that would add to my delight. However, I have no interest whatever in philately. Instead, I’m watchful for upticks and downticks in the world’s sanity — mainly American sanity because it is hugely consequential for the future. I’m afraid I have little company in this distraction. From what I can tell, most people think the events of the past five years are mere undulations in the flow of history. Nothing to worry about — stay calm and watch the ocean swells with equanimity. But I view these events grimly, as harbingers of a disjuncture in history. If only more people had the same premonitions.