The Man In The Tinfoil Hat

One day when I was an intern at the Lunatic Asylum, I sat in on a most remarkable panel interview. Present were a presiding doctor, two female nurses, two male attendants, myself, and one other student. Much like a parole board, highly placed medical professionals often questioned one inmate after another as to their health and well being, any progress (or lack thereof) toward mental stability, their level of self-confidence and self-control, their hopes and dreams, etc. It was little more than a way of checking the pulse of the Asylum to make sure that the doctors (who rarely had anything to do with the patients) kept up the appearance of a hands-on stewardship of those poor unfortunates placed under their high-priced care.

Everything was routine, quite boring, and I was pretty much nodding off, having had my fill of such inane queries as, "Is the new medication helping? Have the voices gone away? Are you optimistic about moving to the halfway house?" and "Have your dreams become more pleasant since your mother died?" But all of a sudden, a man named Pete (wearing a homemade tinfoil hat) walked in the room and sat down in front of us, his face glowing with an obvious joy. We all perked up, this threatened to be day's entertainment.

The facility Administrator jumped right in and started the ball rolling.
Dr.: "Well Pete, you seem rather chipper today. How're you feeling?"
Pete: "I feel WONDERFUL! I think my 'inner light bulb' finally went on!"
Dr.: "I'm very happy for you. What happened?"
Pete: "Don't you see it?" He pointed at the tinfoil hat, then quickly reached up and felt to make sure it was there. "Whew! For a second I thought maybe I just imagined it! No, it's real."
Dr.: What is it?"
Pete: "It's my brain-shield. It deflects the Alien Rays that have plagued me for so many years. I'm finally back to normal and ready for release."
Dr.: "What would happen if you took it off?"
Pete: "Wh ..... wh ..... why then the rays would get into my brain again. I'd hear all their communications, all their voices ..... plotting ..... plotting against us and all the other people on Earth."
Dr.: "Well, what's so troublesome about that? What are they trying to do to us? How bad could it be?"
Pete: "My God!! You don't realize how EVIL they are!! They want to live in our heads and make us do horrible, horrible things to each other, then feed on our fear and revulsion! They're psychic vampires!!"
His voice was slowly working its was up into hysteria.

The doctor looked at me, smiled, and gently gestured toward the patient, giving me a golden opportunity to continue with the unusual line of questioning. I nodded my thanks and turned to the man in the tinfoil hat.

Me: Good morning, Pete. I'm going to ask you about a few things that are a little off the beaten path, if you don't mind."
Pete: "Go ahead, shoot ....."
Me: "You live here with a lot of other patients, correct?" He nodded. "Good. Now, some of them see bizarre visions, some of them talk to themselves in several voices, others cry or rage from morning to night. What do you think of them?"
Pete: "That's easy, ..... they're crazy."
Me: "Okay, they're crazy. So, ..... if Mr. Jenkins, the man who hasn't said anything in five years, suddenly wrapped his feet in waxed paper and started talking again, explaining that subterranean robots had been shooting 'mute rays' at him so he couldn't warn the rest of us about their underground world and their plans to swarm onto the surface, but the waxed paper blocked the rays and freed him from their spell, ..... what would you think of him then?"
Pete: "No problem, he'd still be crazy. Let's face it, there's no Hollow Earth, no robots, and no 'mute rays.' And even if there were, waxed paper is no defense. I tried it. Only tinfoil works. But regardless of the tinfoil slippers, he'd still be nuts. Everything he thinks is totally wrong."
Me: "But everything you believe is right, correct?"
Pete: "Of course, I'm always right. Go ahead, ask me anything. I know it all! I'm never wrong."
Me: "Okay, ..... how about this, 'Do you think you're crazy?' 'Have you ever been crazy, let's say, in the past?' Think it through, take your time, and be honest with yourself."
He became agitated, angry.
Pete: "I don't need any time to answer that dopey nonsense. Of course I'm not crazy! I've never been crazy! Even back before I discovered my special hat, when I used to run around in circles and yelling at the top of my lungs, I wasn't crazy even then. It was the influence of the 'rays' that made me seem crazy, but I wasn't. Then when I found the secret of the hat, tinfoil, my true sane self emerged from the alien thought dimension." He pointed at me, shouting "And you better believe it, ..... you alien punk!"
His hat fell off and he looked down on the floor as it landed at his feet. He jumped up and shrieked,
Pete: "AAAAAggghhh!! Look what you did!! You're one of them, you goddamn alien bastard!! I'll KILL you!!!"
He tried to rush me, but the two burly ward attendants grabbed him by the elbows and "escorted" him out, kicking and screaming all the way.

Gathering his papers, the doctor stood up and announced, "Okay people, that's lunch. We're done. Thank you all for your time." Then he left the room.

As I was heading toward the door, a nurse stopped me and said, "I'm going to give you the best advice you'll ever get for survival in this field. Here it is: Never ask the lunatic if he's crazy. I repeat, never ask the lunatic if he's crazy. Of course he's going to say 'NO.' What do you expect? You're always going to get a self-serving, agenda-driven answer. People are 'crazy' because they can't, and don't, see the lunacy that drives their lives. Never ask the lunatic if his illusions are real. Of course he's going to say 'YES.' If his problems aren't real, then he's crazy. But since he's not crazy, the delusions are real. In a nutshell (no pun intended): the more absurd the belief, the more deeply it must be held, the more aggressively it must be promoted and angrily defended if the patient is to see himself as right and sane. Get it?"

I nodded Yes, I did get it. And that one single lesson has served me well, down through the following four decades to this very day, because it's the secret mechanism behind the "how and why" of what Democrats and Liberals think and believe. The fact is, they're crazy. Just plain and simply nuts. Think about it, you can't ask Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson (or Jesse Jackson Jr. for that matter) if the days of American racial oppression and White Supremacy are over. Of course they'll say "NO!" And if you press them to prove that opinion, they'll use any number of absurd, unreal, or abstract notions like "Micro Racism," "Environmental Racism," "Systemic Racism," or the "Inequality of Quality" to insist that their race-baiting, profiteering, and shakedown scams are not the criminal acts of race-mad lunatics but the noble acts of dedicated racial heroes. They will wind up yelling, screaming, accusing and rhyming, hiding their racial paranoia under a loud bluster of rage designed primarily to keep the ugly psychological truth from themselves.

In the same vein, you dare not ask Patricia Ireland or Kim Gandy (both leaders of the N.O.W.) if women in America have good lives. Of course they'll say, "NO!" When you demand an explanation, they'll cite the "Gender-Based Difference in Pay between men and women," or the "Super Bowl Sunday Domestic Violence Syndrome," or even "The Vast Organized Republican Assault on A Woman's Right To Choose" (foolish and disproved notions all), then claim that the National Organization for Women isn't just a few thousand neurotic lesbian man-hating activists but a third of a million female heroes who represent the real sentiments of all women everywhere. Again, the illusions are merely for their own benefit, thin and obvious to the rest of us as the hallucinatory mists of madness.

We have to understand that when Democrats and Liberals say and claim things that are utterly outlandish and offensive to reason, they're not lying. Though they're certainly not telling the truth either, they're just reinforcing their long term manias by retelling the absurdities that keep the lunacy alive.

Remember, if the world isn't filled with all the weird unnatural threats that the Democrats say it is, then they're crazy.

The single best example of this principle is their enduring objection Florida's Presidential Election of 2000. Among the many laughable assertions made then, and still made now (almost a year later), are:

1. The sample ballots did not match the actual ballot, which clearly reveals a conspiracy to fool Democratic voters into making the wrong choice.
2. Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris manipulated hundreds of events to make sure that George Bush won the state. They moved the polling places without telling the Liberal voters. They set the police against people in predominantly Democratic precincts to turn back the vote. They stopped the vote-counting when it became obvious that Al Gore would win. They imposed an arbitrary and impossible deadline for ending the recounts.
3. The black voters were "disenfranchised" and denied the right to vote, or their votes "didn't count."
4. The Right-Wingers on the Federal Supreme Court hijacked the election, then "selected" and illegally installed George Bush as President.
There are quite a few more, but these four will do.

Day after day, on the C-SPAN call-in shows, on radio call-in shows, on a myriad of news channels, on our nightly news and daily homemaker chit-chat shows like "The View" or "Rosie O'Donnell," the Liberal party faithful (rank and file Democrats, blacks, women, gays, a host of influential pundits, and magazine editors like Katrina VanDen Heuval of The Nation) lead every conversation back to these outlandish claims and charges, just to keep the rage enflamed, to keep the madness boiling.

1. The fact that Florida law mandates that sample ballots be different from the actual voting machine ballot (a law that was written and passed by Florida Democrats);
2. The fact that every person in voting districts affected by school (and other public) constructions were notified by Democratically mandated mail that their polling places had been moved; that the Police, in the performance of their routine traffic safety checks, stopped well more whites than blacks (and only the blacks complained); that the Democratically legislated time limit stopped the counting, not the Governor or Katherine Harris; that all the suspicious, objectionable, racist activities took place in Democratic controlled and operated precincts;
3. Or that every single legal black voter, no matter how much trouble they caused for themselves, came away from the election with his or her voting rights intact. No one was "disenfranchised" in any way;
4. Or that finally, the Federal Supreme Court stopped the Liberals on the Florida Supreme Court from deliberately breaking federal election laws to benefit the Democrats and throw the election to Al Gore.

Despite all the plain, true and sane realities of the election, and despite the fact that the people of America spent more than a month watching Democratic shysters do everything in their power to steal the election for Al Gore, the Democratic faithful still insist that those evil Florida Republicans actually "stole the election for George Bush."

Why? Why this devotion to these absurd, unreal, embarrassing and humiliating ideas that no one in their right mind would believe? The question answers itself:
If George Bush didn't steal the election, then the Democrats are crazy.

If they have to believe in impossible political conspiracies, racially paranoid delusions, and in a Federal Supreme Court that acts out of partisan caprice, just to account for a turn of events that they deliberately can't understand or accept, then they really are as insane as the man in the tinfoil hat.

And yet, most of the mass media news agencies continue to ask these poor, wretched mad-folk for their opinions across the whole spectrum of current events, then accept the deluded, self-serving, agenda-driven answers as if they were accurate, or true.

This is how and why our political information-pool is so polluted with Democratic myth and legend. Nothing they ever say is accurate, or true, but people pay attention to them as if they weren't crazy, as if they weren't just telling us the way they need the world to be so their madness will seem normal and sane. And their foolishness spreads like paint on water until millions of people's attitudes and beliefs are hopelessly contaminated with the psychotic fictions of the Liberal Lunatics.

From now on, whenever you're watching the news or an opinion program and you hear the likes of Marc Shields, Margaret Carlson, Alan Colmes, Ellen Ratner, Ellis Henican, Julianne Malveaux, Alan Dershowitz, Judy Woodruff, and the rest (you know who they are) saying stupid, outlandish, and ignorant things that couldn't possibly be true, just picture a homemade tinfoil hat on their head and have a good laugh at their expense. If everyone in America laughed at them, their influence would evaporate.

We need to learn to stop eating our own.

But our own are so tender and tasty. Liberals are stringy and tough even if they are flame broiled and no amount of beer will wash away the aftertaste.

a.cricket

Ah ha!!!

Al Gore Quotes:

"If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure."

"Welcome to President Clinton, Mrs. Clinton, and my fellow astronauts."

"Mars is essentially in the same orbit... Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, & water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe."

"The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history. I mean in this century's history. But we all lived in this century. I didn't live in this century."

"I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy - but that could change."

"One word sums up probably the responsibility of any vice president, & that one word is 'to be prepared'."

"Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things."

Great post.

"And yet, most of the mass media news agencies continue to ask these poor, wretched mad-folk for their opinions across the whole spectrum of current events, then accept the deluded, self-serving, agenda-driven answers as if they were accurate, or true."

So are the so-called journalists crazy too, or just psychic voyeurs?

Communists can't seem to eat enough of them, which they do on a regular basis.

Yes. But it is a well know fact that Communist have no taste and will eat anything.

a.cricket

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