Political Dementia - An Otherwise Composed Woman Comes Apart At The Seams

The world today, despite its wars, calamities, disasters, coups, and epidemics is no worse off than it ever was.  Despite a decent start after a murderous Twentieth Century, the Twenty-first is falling into line.  Wars in Iran, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Iraq and trouble brewing with China and Russia give cold comfort to those depressed more than usual.  Not that things couldn't get any worse.  They simply won't get any better. 

There are some historians who are convinced that the world is far more peaceful that it ever was.  At least their are no genocides like Rwanda's, decimating, murderous political transformations like those of Cambodia's Pol Pot causing millions of deaths.  That's got to count for something, doesn't it?

History, however is not on these optimists' side.  Devastating wars have been happening forever, in every century, with the same bloody violence and mayhem.  When Genghis Khan came thundering out of the steppes with his 50,000 horsemen bound and determined to conquer the world, he left little standing, and the heads displayed on pikes in and out of conquered villages let the world know he meant business.  The Crusades raped and plundered their way from France to the Holy Land to rid Palestine of the infidel, and the Hundred Years War, the War of the Roses, and a thousand other internecine civil wars were common throughout Asia. 

To be sure, we live longer than we did a hundred years ago, diseases are being managed and controlled, and life is healthier and more promising; but it will only be a matter of time before some new nasty virus emerges from the poultry markets of Shanghai or the wild animals of the Congo.  Besides adding a few years to a life which is still short, brutish, and nasty isn't exactly Nirvana. 

It's all a matter of perspective - the glass half-full or half-empty.  A world with no genocides but besieged by perpetual conflict, and the rise of religion-inspired terrorism.  Physical illnesses mastered but nations drugged on Zoloft and Xanax. 

Most reasonable people take all this as a matter of course.  Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, demands a Stoic position; but Emily Barnard simply could not fiddle while Rome burned or take things as a matter of course. Like any good progressive she believed that progress towards a more peaceful, verdant, and compassionate world was indeed possible; and that the only reason it wasn't upon us was for lack of effort.  We simply have not tried hard enough. 

As passionate and committed as she was, Emily was becoming increasingly despondent.  With the accession of Donald Trump to the White House - a truly evil, misanthropic, venal, and violent man - the doomsday clock ticked closer to midnight.  He alone was responsible for overturning every progressive policy and program dedicated to human welfare, every significantly compassionate incentive.  

Worse, his demonic rule has infected the rest of the world and right wing European politicians are poised to take power in France, Germany, the UK, and the Netherlands among others.  Asia has already swung to the right with the election of an ultra-conservative leader in Japan.  Latin America always a a stronghold of socialism, has elected conservative leaders in Argentina, Colombia, Chile, El Salvador, and Ecuador. 

Each of these leaders has promised a return to harsh, punitive treatment of immigrants, and a roundup and imprisonment of criminals without due process.  Such draconian measures have only incensed and radicalized already dissenting populations, and the possibility of armed civil conflict is real. 

The world has fallen prey to the anti-scientific voices of the Right and has given climate change a pass - fake news, conservative politicians claim while opening up new pipelines, building new refineries, and rejecting any environmental sanity.  Blacks, gays, lesbians, and transgenders no sooner out of the closet and breathing fresh air, are being locked back in or deported to gulags in the far north. 

Or so Emily believed.  She was living in The End of Days, and was hurt, disconsolate, and desperate.  Her husband often found her crying for no apparent reason, a broken, defeated, unhappy woman.  'What will become of us?', she howled in the middle of the night. 

Her husband thankfully was cut from a different cloth and was able to provide solace and refuge to his wife who was becoming addled with worry and skeletal with anger and frustration.  She couldn't eat, looked out at the squirrels and rabbits in the back yard, cried over their fate, and lay for hours on the sofa looking at the ceiling. 

Meanwhile of course the legions of young people who had come to Washington with Donald Trump were having a grand old time.  The Master had flexed American muscles, had cleaned the Augean stables of woke, had slammed the borders shut, had declared American geopolitical hegemony, had untethered Wall Street and the private sector, and had told Russia and China where to go. 

The minions were delighted.  Dressed to the nines, they partied till dawn, filled luxurious resorts, and let the world know that this was The New Age, not some smarmy, depressing, vision of togetherness. 

The sight of these thirty-something, blonde, blue-eyed beauties proudly walking down Pennsylvania Avenue and walking through the guarded gates to the White House enraged Emily.  The world was on the verge of cataclysmic disaster, and these fools were acting as though the doors of Paradise were open to them. 

Emily lived in a wealthy suburb of Washington, one consistently and uniformly liberal in its political outlook, solidly for open borders, the gender spectrum, the redistribution of wealth, climate sanity, and world peace; but even these loyal progressives kept their distance when they saw Emily coming down the street. They by no means had lost their political commitment, but this woman was sadly demented.  The good fight could only be won by phalanxes of determined, purposeful, and willful soldiers, not those who had been frayed and discombobulated.  The movement wanted none of Emily's frightful dementia. 

As recondite as the neighborhood appeared, solidly progressive but logically so, there were outliers like Emily and likes attract.  It was not unusual to find Emily and an equally disturbed, dislocated comrade on a Fawley Park bench sharing their agonizing, disassembling misery. 

The denouement is not pretty.  Although for most of us cannot fathom such depths to which simple, predictable, yawningly similar episodes of history others can fall, these cases of 'Ascribed Political Dementia (APD)' have been well-documented.  There are those - usually and unexplainably women - who simply jump the rails, lose all sense of emotional and social equilibrium and are for all intents and purposes, candidates for medical internment. 

'Women are naturally febrile', said Dr. James Cutter of Johns Hopkins, forensic psychiatrist and Neo-Freudian expert on mental illness in women. 

Their natural, innate sensitivity; their hyper-tuned ability to feel, emote, and sense the feelings and intentions of others can under the right circumstances become deformed.  The Madwoman of Chaillot syndrome - the wild dementia of a politically possessed female - is not uncommon

Be that as it may, there was no coming back from the brink for Emily Barnard, and over the side she went, committed to St. Elizabeth's, not heard from since, but 'the place where she belonged' said neighbors of University Park quite happy to have her out of the way.