Paranoid is back in style

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters by Goya.

In 1964, historian Richard Hofstadter published an influential essay in Harper’s Magazine titled “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” I’ve been thinking about it lately in lieu of the more extreme versions of the hysteria and hyperbole that has arisen during the current health care debate. It fits the moment pretty well.

Hofstadter opened by observing that “American politics has often been an arena for angry minds.” Off and on throughout the nation’s history he found a style of mind that was paranoid not necessarily in the clinical sense but was nevertheless characterized by a “sense of heated exaggeration, auspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy…”

Holy granny-whacking, Batman! This same style of mind has shown itself to be alive and well in the current debate over heatlh care reform, with bizarre rumors of death panels, mandatory abortions, euthanasia, government takeovers, Sovietized health care, etc.—sometimes seasoned with a dash or two of speculations about the Kenyan birth of a certain elected official.

I'll be taking a look at Hofstadter's insights into political paranoia this week. Stay tuned--same bat time, same bat channel.

THEN AND NOW. Here's the latest from Paul Krugman, including a bit of Nixonian nostalgia.

AN OUNCE OF PREVENTION. Here are some suggestions for keeping the nation from spinning out of control.

URGENT EYELESS FANGED CRUSTACEAN UPDATE here.

MICRO-LENDING is one kind of banking that survived the credit meltdown.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Lately it occurs to me

While glancing at a calendar recently, El Cabrero had a sudden realization. It was 20 years ago this month that I started working on economic justice issues for the American Friends Service Committee. Talk about a long strange trip...

There have been a lot of bizarre twists and turns along the way, but the strangest one was that it happened at all.

First of all, it doesn't often happen that one finds the job of one's dreams reading the local want ads from a WV paper--but that's exactly how I heard about it. The want ad was looking for someone with an understanding of Appalachian culture to work on poverty and other economic justice issues.

As it turned out economic justice issues and Appalachia (the two are inescapably entwined) were the main subjects of my not infrequent rants. When I showed it to some people who knew me (some of whom occasionally read this blog), they just laughed.

Still, jobs like that, as rare as they were then (and now), didn't usually go to people like me. For one thing, it has often happened that people from outside the area get hired to work in places like WV--don't even get me started on that one. For another, such rare jobs usually go to people who are well connected.

I was anything but that, having spent most of the 1980s being poor. Those who have never experienced poverty might be surprised to find that living in it is a very time consuming thing. Although I followed current events and read and wrote a lot about issues related to social justice, the only social movement I knew first hand was the constant scramble to make ends meet.

Also, I was and remain basically a small town hick, uncomfortable in cities, even in the small ones that pass for big ones in WV. I didn't know any of the proverbial movers and shakers (although I had a friend who had been watching and keeping score over the years--you know who you are!) and they didn't know me.

But, as the eminent philosopher Tom Petty once noted, "even the losers get lucky sometimes."

CHEW ON THIS. The food revolution is going mainstream. You know something is up when even the karmically challenged city of Huntington, WV is planning community gardens.

SCAVENGING is also alive and well these days.

CEO BLUES. Here's a rant on CEO pay by a friend of mine from Sunday's Gazette-Mail.

URGENT ANCIENT CRUSTACEAN PREDATOR UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED