The State Of The Union And The Unhinged Hysteria Of Caged Wolverines

'It is what it is' goes the viral meme; a bit of existential pop wisdom, accommodating to the common man inundated with AI, the screeching harridans of Congress, a bevy of incomprehensible medical options, a short, dreary life, and hectoring wife. Better to let go, to recline in the chaise longue, take life easy because the alternative is nothing but headaches. 

Of course Epictetus and the Stoics came to the same conclusion, but framed their opinions in tightly-woven philosophical treatises having to do with free will, cognition, control, and emotional equilibrium.

The revaluation of external objects brings with it a tremendous sense of confidence and inner peace. Grief, fear, envy, desire, and every form of anxiety, result from the incorrect supposition that happiness is to be found outside oneself. Like earlier Stoics, Epictetus rejects the supposition that such emotions are imposed on us by circumstances or internal forces and are largely beyond our control. Our feelings, as well as our behavior, are an expression of what seems right to us, conditioned by our judgments of value.  If we correct our judgments, our feelings will be corrected as well. 

 

The idea of philosophical resignation predates the Greeks.  The Aryans, settled at Mohenjo-Daro after a long journey from the steppes, and extending their influence throughout the Indian subcontinent, preached the same doctrine.  The caste system, a social organization designed to limit secular, worldly expectations and free the mind for more spiritual endeavors, has been central to Hinduism for millennia.

Although often criticized by Western observers who see the system as a limiting, exploitative mechanism of elite control, the caste system is fundamental to Hinduism's core belief in spiritual evolution.  Right, disciplined behavior according to well-defined rules is not incarcerating but liberating.  The world is maya, illusion, and tempted by it will only lead to continued penance and inability to achieve spiritual enlightenment. 

There is nothing more antithetical to this philosophy than today's American progressivism, no better on display than at President Trump's recent State of the Union address when two members of the far Left, unhinged, wild, and bellowing like caged animals, tried to shout him down.  They yelled and howled, called him names, shook like St. Vitus' dancers, spat insults and threats. Politics for them had gone beyond the pale.  With Trump in office, the world was a place seething with hate, animus, and terrible ambitious lust.  They had gone overboard, crossed into a devilish, Satanic world of demons and dark, horrible figures. 

Vicki Adams had been brought up properly in a world of decorum, respect, tradition, and legacy; and would never devolve into such screeching, intemperate, crazed behavior.  Her father had been a judge and her mother a professor, both professions which rely on thoughtfulness, careful analysis and exegesis, and rational results.  They had been progressives of the old school, raised with the conviction that the poor, the marginalized, and the forgotten had a place in America; and that social and economic reform was the way to righting the wrongs of capitalism.  

So it was with a grimace and a shameful recognition that these two harridans were spokespersons for her party.  They were advocates for inclusivity and diversity and resented Donald Trump's insensate and violent attacks on their people - the brown and black newcomers to America who had an automatic, unquestioned right to remain. 

While everyone has a right to question the use and extent of Executive power, these women had, thanks to their ugliness, become caricatures.  Images of their outbursts at the State of the Union speech went viral and images of them as howling baboons, fat, rooting pigs, hyenas, wolverines and sideshow freaks, half-woman, half-banshee were on every social media platform. 

Yet Vicki could not deny the sentiments behind the women's outbursts. The President had indeed gone beyond the bounds of decency and responsible governance.  His ICE agents were nothing but SS storm troopers, latter-day Gestapo, Stasi thugs, rounding up and herding legitimate asylees into cattle cars and shipping them off to concentration camps, gas chambers and ovens. 

She looked at herself in the mirror, a trembling, shaking wreck of a woman, hair in straggles, eyes wide and feverish, face contorted and twisted; and took a deep breath. 'I am going off the deep end', she said. 'I must recalibrate'. 

The infection, however, had become systemic.  There was no room in her remade organism for quiet reflection and temperance.  The man in the White House had descended upon America from some desperately evil place, a Miltonian Devil, a horrific Satanic creature.  These were not ordinary times, and as such demanded extraordinary action. 

While she watched clips of the bellowing cows, Tlaib and Omar, again and again; and each time wished that they did not look so simian and ugly, she couldn't deny their passion - her passion.  If Trump were not stopped, democracy itself would falter, and America would turn into an autocratic dictatorship. 

Vicki took a deep breath, fixed her hair, put a dash of rouge on her cheeks, touched up her lipstick, adjusted her dress, and left for tea. 

She tried temperance for a while - crafting editorials, speeches at garden parties, calm resolution and logical insistence - but it never took.  She felt bottled up, strangled, speechless.  While that man, that...

And here as always words failed her as the bile rose in her throat, as that old familiar feverishness returned, and as her venomous, irrepressible hatred came front and center.  That evil presence that demon...and her voice became loud, ferocious, and insistent, a wild Cassandra, a wolf howling at the moon.  She had been transformed, irrevocably changed.  The hinges had not only come loose, they were undone, and...and....'The Crusade is waiting'. 

Brown University Professor Emeritus Harrison Levitt Perkins had this to say about what he called 'the febrile infection of political hysteria. Writing in The American Journal of Forensic Psychology, he said:

The Haitian descendants of Dahomey practice voodoo in which hysteria is a sign of demonic exorcism.  Possession is normal in a world filled with evil spirits, and few souls have the will, resources, and psychological barriers to resist.  Without these wild, untamed outbursts, howled to the sound of tribal drums and eviscerated fowl, the demons would have congenial homes from which they would continue to pervert and destroy. 

Political hysteria is no different.  Although the possessions of secular reformists might be thought rational, secular, and justified given the state of world affairs, it is as tribal, demonic, and irrational as the voodoo ceremonies in the hills above Kenscoff. What Americans witnessed at the  President's State of the Union speech was no different than tribal primitivism at its most primeval.  

 

If Vicki could have been so transformed from proper Main Line Philadelphia debutante, Vassar graduate, and serious professional, then one can only imagine the epidemic proportions of this 'febrile infection'. 

'Nutcases' was how one observer saw the display of Omar and Tlaib.  He had no truck with Epictetus, theories of intellectual virality, or political parsing but knew what he saw.  Unkind perhaps, but not without merit.