Everybody is inducted into the Bag of Crazy on their individual merits. However, once inside, crazy interacts with crazy, causing whole new levels of organized insanity to emerge.
It starts with what chaos theorists call a "strange attractor." No, that's not the last person you dated (as apt as the description might seem in retrospect); it's a point in a chaotic system around which order appears to crystallize. And, attractors don't get any stranger than Donald Trump...
It takes a very special kind of self-absorbed lack of empathy to turn a grieving mother's desire not to speak on national television into a veiled (get it? Veiled? I slay me!) attack on her religion. It also takes somebody with really (to the power of five) poor impulse control to attack the parents of an American soldier killed in combat, given that the right worships the military almost as much as they do Jesus, and often more vocally.
Living outside the Bag of Crazy, you might assume that the Republican establishment would repudiate this position. You would only be partially correct. Consider the response of Republican Senator John McCain, a war veteran himself:
On the one hand, McCain wants to stand with a fallen soldier; on the other hand, he wants to stand with the Presidential nominee of his party. Difficult. Psychiatrists refer to this as "cognitive dissonance," the act of believing contradictory positions to have equal validity. Literary theorists refer to this condition as "doublethink."
Now, if you were a reasonable person who needed the Republican establishment's support to win the presidency, you might respectfully disagree with McCain while accepting his endorsement (however begrudging). If you were, on the other hand, a raging narcissist who cannot tolerate criticism or dissent, you would probably respond to his statements like this:
Diplomacy is for losers. So, apparently, is tact.
Of course, since Trump won the nomination, the Republican Party could have been renamed the Cognitive Dissonance Party. Another example is Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, who is on record as having said:
POP QUIZ: was this Paul Ryan endorsing Donald Trump or disagreeing with Donald Trump? POP ANSWER: Both. The end result of cognitive dissonance is a kind of verbal mush where the actual information value of a speech act approaches zero (or, it can be argued, a negative value, inasmuch as the speech act can cause confusion where before there had been clarity).
Republican politicians are not the only ones to succumb to the cognitive dissonance. Consider this gem from billionaire investor Carl Icahn:
Critical Carl is talking about the $100 million he lost when he took ownership of the Trump Taj Mahal. Did he feel bad about being screwed by his friend? Wouldn't you? Even if $100 million is chump change to a billionaire, it can't feel good being the chump. And, yet, there Naive Carl is, talking about Trump being the champion of the middle class, which knows that it's getting screwed.
When experience collides with political expediency, the smart money's on cognitive dissonance.
Oh, and, since when was Archie Bunker middle class? In the 1970s, he was considered working class. Wooooorrrrkiiiiiing class. It seems like the harder people have to work just to keep their heads above water, the less political elites want to talk about people working. Unfortunately, retconning can only take you so far when DVDs and video on demand are there to remind people of how things really were.
It should be made clear that cognitive dissonance only affects those who still have a shred of a conscience. Those who support Trump wholeheartedly without feeling any sense of contradiction have much more secure positions in the Bag of Crazy. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani is a case in point:
Really? Thiiiiiiiink, Rudy. Thiiiiiiiink. Cast your mind back to not that long ago. Didn't people used to describe everything you said as "A noun, a verb and [a date]?" Remember what the date was? It's not that hard – it was boiled down to two numbers involving three digits. Anything coming to you? Anything at all?
Here's a clue: 9/11.
The man who made his reputation on the biggest radical Islamic terrorist attack inside the United States, an attack which happened in the eight years before Obama came along, is now claiming that it didn't happen. Maybe Archie Bunker accidentally conked him on the head and gave him the worst case of amnesia since 1970s sitcoms. Or, he could just be delusional.
Folks, this is your brain on modern Republicanism.
The only positive thing to note about this phenomenon is that strange attractors are not permanent, although assumptions that this one will fade away on its best before date of November 8th may be premature. But, even in the unlikely event that it does, its effects will likely be felt in the Bag of Crazy for years to come...
