We're All Crazy Now

I hope a time comes before my own death, in which people come to understand that many of the "crazies" in USA society are not just sick or "evil" aberrations - nor do they spring out of nothingness.

First we need to realize that there are many kinds of “crazy” in the USA.

There are the people with various mental illnesses, clinically describable.

In the USA, only people with money tend to receive a clinical diagnosis and an ongoing regimen of care which might include medications, treatments, therapies, and social supports.

A daughter of wealthy parents (with a summer house in The Hamptons) experiencing an eating disorder and a substance abuse problem might be sent away to a residential rehabilitation ranch in the mountains out west.

Polite society <mostly> no longer refers to such people as “crazy”.

People without money, though?

They just suffer. Their families suffer. Many find it impossible to hold down a job, and many end up living and sleeping rough.

Polite society becomes less polite when referring to these kind of people.

“I was accosted by some crazy dude outside Starbuck’s this morning.”

Whether the victim is rich or poor, we tend to agree that some types of mental unwellness are severe enough that some form of intervention is either necessary or desirable - for example, when someone poses a clear danger to themselves or others.

These people might be called the “unacceptably crazy”.

Then there are the “acceptably crazy” - the people left to get on in life the best they can, because they pose no apparent danger to anyone.

It is among this “acceptably crazy” cohort where money and class are the biggest predictors and modifiers of public perception.

By any reasonable metric, the current president of the USA is barking mad.

Bonkers. Unwell. Stark raving.

In fact, between his inability to speak without gross distortion, exaggeration, or barefaced lying, his rollbacks of environmental protections, cruel attacks on healthcare, interference in women’s reproductive rights, history of sexual molestation (and probably far worse), arming of genocidal regimes, assaults on Black voting rights, outright racism, summary executions of fishermen and US protestors, and the wanton bombing of innocent children in Iran - all of the foregoing should force any reasonable human to conclude that the only alternative to Trump being a mentally ill sociopath is that he is simply EVIL.

The US president is not even close to being “acceptably crazy”.

Yet one in three US voters are still on board.

Which means that by any measure, one in three US voters are also crazy, or so diminished in education, common sense, intellectual faculties, or moral judgement that being led by a dangerous lunatic is just fine by them…

*****

On the Fourth of July, as high winds blew stands and tables across the empty expanse of grass at Trump’s “Freedom 250” fiasco like tumbleweeds through a deserted town, presenters on “Fox News” continued to comment on the non-existent crowds, like courtiers marveling at The Emperor’s New Clothes.

One MAGA diehard spoke to camera, opining that “some liberals” over at the National Weather Service had “got up to something” in an effort to sabotage Trump’s Big Day.

Back in 1976 (as his “Jonestown” project was taking shape during America’s bicentennial year), I doubt even the Reverend Jim Jones believed that one in three Americans were so ready to drink the Koolaid.

And because American culture has always equivalated wealth and power with worth and ability, no one is prepared to invoke the 25th Amendment, no one is prepared to say that Americans elected a crazy man to lead them.

And meanwhile, many of the people we do see as “crazy”, are only labelled as such to protect us from seeing ourselves reflected in their eyes.

What if many so-called "crazies" in America are the entirely expected human outfall from centuries of:

interpersonal and institutional violence,

duplicity,

religious extremism,

racism,

misogyny,

homophobia,

environmental pillage,

greed and consumerism as national ideology, and

the incessant lies, lies, lies used to cover-up, justify, and obfuscate the almost ceaseless hypocrisy of The American Myth?

Take Ryan Wesley Routh, an American "weirdo", who wanted to dispose of another American "weirdo" in West Palm Beach, Florida back in 2024.

The only substantive difference between Routh and his target?

One comes from the American underclasses, the other from the world of inherited wealth built upon underclass exploitation.

One wanted to commit violence out of a misguided? sense of social justice.

The other is a catalyst for violence internationally, vandalizes constitutional law, and evades justice in order to preserve and extend his wealth, power, and privilege.

Two crazies.

The rich one spews hatred against immigrants, even though his own mother was an immigrant and his father's father was also an immigrant.

Of course, being Johnny-Come-Latelys in terms of American history doesn't matter - the main thing is that they were such very "white" Scottish and German immigrants, and they got their hands on some money through unscrupulous and immoral business dealings.

Money and whiteness have always been at the core of "The American Dream".

*****

Don't be fooled by Ryan Wesley Routh's gaunt, Northern European-looking hangdog appearance and sandy hair.

Routh is in fact part of a confusing mish-mash of people who have been ethnically intermixing in the eastern part of the USA for generations - long, long before the USA even existed.

Without comprehensive DNA testing, these peoples from the Carolina Piedmont and Southern Appalachia proper are often impossible to tease into clear familial threads.

Some come from families of large slaveholders, while others come from relatively poor farmers and tradespeople who held only one or two slaves.

Many in fact descend from the PROGENY of these slaveholders - whether big and small - children of the women abused, raped, or kept on the side as "consorts", separate from their "official families".

Subsistence farmers too poor to keep slaves were often those most likely to marry the "mulatto" women born within this deep and wide cauldron of wickedness.

This "not quite white" American underclass has existed literally for centuries - long before certain Drumpfs and MacLeods arrived in the USA, shiny and white on the outside, ruthless, dark and bigoted on the inside...

It has never been easy for members of this mixed-ethnic American laborer underclass to get ahead.

And before they could even imagine "social mobility", they had to achieve "racial mobility".

The minute some of them managed to achieve "racial mobility", they were often still too poor to resist the onslaught of the land barons, railway barons, coal barons...

This is one of the greatest untold secrets in US history - how a "brown" underclass spent generations on the outside peering-in at "The American Dream".

Trying to be "white" enough to be part of "White Christian Nationalism".

"White" enough to serve as actual soldiers in the military, rather than as cooks, janitors, or supply workers.

"White" enough to gain access to a good apprenticeship or a decent education.

"White" enough to eventually gain access to middle-class jobs.

Such an intergenerational struggle is not easy to keep on a steel-rail track leading to eventual success and achievement of The American Dream...

Many fall by the wayside.

*****

Self-loathing caused by centuries-old class and racial caste systems can often lead to profound social sicknesses like domestic violence and substance abuse.

Even those who did manage to reach the "white" side of the color bar - but without becoming skilled or educated - were often left clinging to little more than their "whiteness", their Christianity, and birthright "American-ness" as markers of their self-worth.

This underclass represents much of the cannon fodder sent to places like Vietnam or Iraq - all while proudly proclaiming "I come from a military family" and telling themselves that they are "protecting American freedoms".

Many of these people forgot, or were never told about their true socio-ethnic roots.

Unaware of the actual reasons their family had been locked-out of social advancement for generations, they eventually came to resent nebulous groups like "Welfare Queens", "Non-Christians", "Experts" or "Elites" or "The Deep State".

And they are also the ones most easily fooled by fascist propaganda and rhetoric which plays upon their various insecurities and resentments.

Too proud to see themselves as victims, they would rather align themselves with the rich and powerful, however unlikely it is that they will ever sit at the same table.

But some, a very particular subset of the disempowered, don't want to sit at the table of the rich and powerful.

They just want to have some goddamn AGENCY in this life.

Any kind of agency.

Like the agency to take-out some of the rich, corrupt, and powerful.

Most of these currently enraged members of the underclasses are perfectly sane.

Some are misguided, some aren’t, in where they choose to apportion blame.

AND WHY WOULDN’T MEMBERS OF THE AMERICAN UNDERCLASSES OFTEN BE MISGUIDED? THEIR LEADERS AND THE CORPORATE MEDIA ARE LIARS.

Many of the rich and powerful are also perfectly sane, just infinitely selfish, ruthless, dishonest, and greedy.

Many are utter sociopaths.

A few are batshit crazy.

Ryan Wesley Routh.

Donald John Trump.

You tell me who is crazier.

I know which one I'd sooner offer a spare bed in my house if either knocked on my door on a stormy night...

Image: Ryan Wesley Routh and some of his forebears