Quick post late in the day, mostly just copying a public Facebook post from Adam-Troy Castro, who writes novels (see pic above) but seems to be better known for his short fiction (see his sfadb.com page), and is apparently even better known to many people on Facebook (he has 4.6K friends) for his comments there. He’s a resident polemicist.
Here’s a post of his from yesterday. which I’ll quote in its entirety.
Do I bloody have to do this?
“Half this country has gone insane.”
Half this country has always been insane.
Half this country thought it was just terrific to keep a population of millions in chains.
Half this country used to pose for lynching postcards.
Half this country thought anybody who was against Hitler was a communist.
Half this country thought it was a great thing to beat up people for having long hair.
Half the country thinks that if a ten-year-old girl is raped, the little whore should shut up and have the baby.
Half the country thinks the rapist should get visitation.
Half the country thinks that the moon landing was a hoax.
You can argue that the percentage is closer to 27%, or whatever, that it only seems like half because of all those who simply have no opinion about anything deeper than what host of THE PRICE IS RIGHT is best.
But Trump didn’t make so much of the country insane. Fox didn’t. Even OAN and Sinclair and Alex Jones didn’t.
You know what these people are?
They are marketers.
They find the demographic and they go after it.
The demographic exists and the demographic is eager to lap up more craziness, more insanity, which is why the Overton Window has shifted from the forms of idiocy we had in some past decades to craziness about lizard people and child-trafficking pizza parlors and Jewish space lasers.
This is the country that once had a bunch of people who were proud, PROUD I tell you, PROUD, to band together as what they unabashedly called “The Know-Nothing Party.” Because this was who they wanted to be and they thought that they were labeling a virtue.
And you want to know what?
You want to know what?
The Khmer Rouge thought it was a good idea for a civilized country to slaughter all its doctors and schoolteachers and force everybody else into slave labor.
This country is not special.
The “half this country” complaint? Is true about the human race, in general. Ten percent of all human beings are sociopaths, and another few tens of percent will always listen to those who achieve power because they do not know the difference.
Trump did not do it.
He just stirred a pot that was already keeping warm on the stove.
(Yes, there really was a Know-Nothing Party. Precursor to modern Republicans, always upset about education.) Castro’s screed aligns with a number of ideas I’ve floated in this blog. The anti-intellectualism of American life. The shifting Overton Window. And the big ideas about the “moral foundations theory” of Jonathan Haidt and other, in which conservatives are especially sensitive to threat and fear, concerned about purity and authority. The broad point being, there have always been such people, and always will. The problem is when these people get control of the government, and try to enforce their scruples on everyone else. File this under: failures of government.
