When One Hysteria Replaces Another - Trump Derangement Syndrome In, Climate Armageddon Out

It had been almost four months since the Trump inauguration, and there were no signs of the revolution letting up.  Piece by piece the progressive agenda was being dismantled, dismissed, and left on the curb.  

DEI, the centerpiece of its platform, the sine qua non spiritual fulcrum around which all other policy initiatives revolved, was on the run, a scattered, discredited, shambles; and black-this-black-that, gayness, Palestine Forever, transgenderism, open borders were finished, detritus, flotsam and jetsam floating on the tide. 

'This cannot stand', shouted Bob Muzelle to a small but enthusiastic claque of supporters gathered in Lafayette Park across from the White House.  Bob was surprised that there was no police line, no SWAT team, no sawhorse barriers, no yellow tape - the last straw, a sign of the diminishing returns of a proud progressive legacy.  

At least one mounted Secret Service agent would do, a sign that Bob and his friends meant business, but no, only a few tourists in Washington for a glimpse of the White House, distracted by the whoops and hollers coming from Bob's corner of the park.  

Undaunted, in fact fired up by this desultory environment, by this mildest of all possible attentions, and by this message of indifference sent by the man across the street, Bob raised his voice to a fevered pitch.  More tourists gathered to watch.  Bob was a whirling dervish, a madman, one possessed, something to be videoed and sent back to Chillicothe. 

The group cheering Bob was not the diverse one he had hoped - one raggedy keffiyeh, a gay man, and a mulatto dressed to the nines was all the diversity present, and for the most part the gathering was dismally white and old-looking, mainly Bob's civil rights friends who had come down with him from Bethesda to show support, one last hurrah before packing it in and heading for condos in Sarasota.  

Finally the DC police came and shooed them away. 'Time to move on, folks', the officer said, a young man, probably new on the beat with no bullhorn, billy club or taser.  A few old women, veterans of the Sixties, shouted 'Pig' at him, but no one joined in.  He looked like their sons; and so it was that the tourists and the demonstrators drifted off leaving Bob with microphone in hand, disconsolate, looking for shelter, disassembled, and wondering what to do next. 

Yet in other quarters hatred for Trump seethed.  Every day that he signed an executive order reversing years of social reform, the angrier they got. By the time he closed the southern border, wiped out every last trace of DEI, started digging on the North Slope, unleashed the private sector, restored every Confederate statue and every slaveholder street name, virtually unplugged every electric vehicle, and let loose millions of tons of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere, they were knackered.  They expected some blowback on their most progressive initiatives but not this yard sale. 

All that was left was pure, unadulterated hatred for the man - a bitter, deep-seated, bilious vileness that was full-blown, indivisible, and white hot.  There was still time for Americans to know whom they elected, what villainous evil they had unleashed on the world.

Individual issues melted in the incendiary ferocity of their hatred.  They must transform themselves from political opponents to latter day prophets.  The must go out into the land.  The time for parsing and deconstructing was over, and nothing less that Biblical rage and injunction would do.  In a feverish St. Vitus' dance, they blazed with righteous anger and holy purpose. 

 

Now that their goody bag of good ideas was empty, and the road to a more verdant, compassionate, and considerate future blocked, they were stymied. The tide was turning from righteousness to villainy as lengths of pipeline, volumes of particulate coal-fired emissions, number of deportations, and predatory Wall Street buyouts increased. Individual protests were of no use, only distractions, diversions from the central truth.  The madman must be stopped, and that was that. 

Fergie Lampo had been one of the first to sound the alarm about climate change, and with the first millimeter of loss from the Antarctic ice shelf onwards, he was on the front lines.  It was not just global warming he said, but climate change.  An irreversible, devastating, existential crisis putting the human race within seconds to midnight on the doomsday clock.

 

He was indefatigable and unstoppable.  With every fluctuation in bird migration, bee population, sea currents, and weather patterns, he was on the air, on every stage that would have him, and in the news.  He had found a home in the Biden administration, a minor player in the White House Office for Climate Affairs but an important one nonetheless.  There among likeminded passionate advocates, he could be himself, feeling good about doing good and making a difference. 

Then, all of sudden Biden was on the street, the Trump juggernaut was in Washington, and climate change was no more than a footnote.  The hatred for the new President and everything he stood for had completely erased any trace of concern for the changing patterns of the world's climate.  Armageddon was as close as it had every been, but no one was paying attention.  What gives? Fergie asked. 

Social psychologist Abraham Silberstein, resident scholar at the Maastricht Institute Of Social Sciences, had this to say about collective hysteria:

The origins of hysteria are well known - a combination of genetic, social, and environmental factors which produce an initial intellectual febrility which quickly becomes an inchoate distortion of reality.  The hysteric, in the popular lexicon, has lost the ability to know what's what. 

The literature amply shows that such hysteria is also a feature of groups and societies at large - majorities who incorporate the most aberrant, unbelievable notions into their psyches and turn them into universal expressions of uncontrollable angst. 

What one observes in America now and what has been popularly but aptly called Trump Derangement Syndrome is occurring.  The bilious, fulminating, inchoate hatred for the man is what scientists call Psychic Universality, a state of mind where all normal, cognitive functions are shut down, and the medulla oblongata, the seat of primitive emotions takes over. 

There is no stopping the transformation once it has started and like rabies it inevitably kills its victims; but before it does, the feral hysteria jumps from one imagined issue to another like a three-legged squirrel... (Maastricht Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 22, 22-100) 

Not that this was any consolation to Fergie who had simply and practically been lost in the shuffle; but at least it explained why his progressive colleagues had gone from diffident to distracted to dismissive about his continued plaints and demands.  If this continued, he knew, climate disaster would be a forgotten issue consigned to the style section of the Washington Post ('Gardeners - Prepare Your Sprinklers for Summer').  

As it was, Trump himself had debunked the issue, saying from a balcony overlooking the White House South lawn on a unexpectedly balmy April day, 'If this is global warming, I'll take it'.  The demission of the issue had already started; but that, Fergie treasonously thought as he too enjoyed a particularly delightful day of early Spring, might not be a bad thing.