The Madman Theory

(1/2) History will speak to the cult; how easily they were gaslit; how they embraced the most flawed cult leader ever; rallied around his grievance; railed against their own interest; relied on an obvious con. But the true disaster is and was widespread normalization of a madman.

— The Shallow State (@OurShallowState) May 14, 2023

Nixon’s theory of nuclear deterrence was to convince the USSR that he was mad enough to start a nuclear war. I think basically he wanted them to know Curtis LeMay had reached the Oval and that Goldwater was right: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!” Nixon may have even had in mind that “Daisy ad,” and wanted Moscow to know that guy LBJ warned about now controlled the nukes.

Tell me again about the “normalization of a madman.”

Dr. King was not highly regarded or universally canonized until after his assassination.  Maybe that's because his movement was about class as much as it was about race (his "I have a dream" speech was given at a march for economic justice.  Nobody likes to talk about that, still.)

The critics of the civil rights movement in America said much the same thing. Yet pre-eminent oral historian Studs Terkel, for his epic book RACE, interviewed dozens of African Americans for this seminal work, and suggested this ragtag element was one of the underpinning strengths of the civil rights movements. In fact, as one protester said, it really wasn't about 'blackness' or being allowed to sit in the bus or use the same toilets, it was about poverty and about class. " They play off one race against the other. That white kid on the picket line got the same problems as that black kid who don't have a job. He's on strike because his wages aren't what they supposed to be," said Union steel worker, Joseph Robinson.

And says Little Dovie Thurman, heavily involved in the civil rights struggle: "At first I couldn't understand why they hated Dr King so much. Then I began to see he wasn't just working with poor black and white. He was talking at unionizing, and against the war, all kinds of issues. That gave him a force of power that they didn't want him to have. They had to get him. He know that black power, white power, wasn't going to work. As long as he (King) was saying, "Let the black eat at the counter, let them go to the washroom," that was fine. But that didn't get at IT."

Little Dovie realised, as Martin Luther King did, that the struggle and the civil rights movement wasn't just about race, but rather a far bigger issue of understanding power and class distinction.

Yeah, we lose a lot of nuance, and a lot of history, when we only remember the bits that make us feel good now because "we aren't like that anymore."  Sure we aren't.

And Dr. King lost supporters, most famously the Washington Post, because he turned against the war in Vietnam.  It's probably hard to believe now that being against that war was the position of madness and insanity, even as those against the war saw the war itself as madness and insanity being enacted as governent policy.

Tell me again about the "normalization of a madman."

Civil rights workers were killed in the South; churches were bombed; people were beaten in the streets; and finally, finally, after a decade of effort, that madness began to change.  What was "normal" was no longer "normalized."  Except where it was, like the resistance to school desegregation in Boston; which, again, was as much a fight over class as it was over race.  Rich white people in Boston sent their children to private schools.  Poor whites got told what they were going to accept.  It was a recipe for animosity and anger; and it was a class struggle.  Funny, that.

"Madness" has always been "normalized" in America.  Slavery was madness.  It was a wholly unsustainable economic system that was bound to collapse, and was only held together by sheer brutality of the kind we still don't face, whether we are legislators in Florida or just ordinary people congratulating ourselves on "how far" black people have come; thanks to us.  Our class system that we won't even admit exists, is madness.  Our denial of equality over and over and over again, is madness.  We "normalize" it everyday, when we pass the homeless and the "invisible" poor and "There is your sister or brother, naked, crying! And you stand confused over the choice of an attractive floor covering."  But we don't even notice.

What is the correct definition of madness to apply?  And who is properly identified as the madman?

What is my interest in keeping some people poor so I can live comfortably?  What is the difference between my world and the world of Omelas, except that in that fictional world the inhabitants are honest about the price paid for their happiness?  They recognize the root of their sin; we find someone to blame and, having trimmed a branch or a few twigs, think we have uprooted the evil among us.

Tell me again about the "normalization of a madman."

In his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams included a psychiatrist who had built a room into which he could retreat and declare that space sane.  It was the world, the psychiatrist said, that was the habitation of the insane. He was closer to the truth than worrying about Donald Trump's influence on the American electorate is.

Trump is insane.  But eliminating his insanity is not the cure for our national and cultural madness.  The scapegoat theory won't really get us out of this one.