America as a Battered Woman.

I remember this country when it was sane. That was more than 40 years ago. The end really started with John Kennedy. The minute I first heard him, I recognized there was something terribly wrong with that man. He was lying to me without shame or conscience. He did not have respect for me or for the presidency. It was the same impression I received, more strongly, upon seeing or hearing Bill Clinton. I did not like or agree with Harry Truman. Truman was somewhat misguided, naive, and had a lot more guts than brains. But he was consistent from day to day, amenable to logic, was honest about himself, and had some sort of internal standards and structure that were stable and could be relied upon. Harry Truman was always Harry Truman. Love him, or hate him, what you got on Thursday was the same as what you got on Monday was the same as what took place behind the scenes, and there was no deception. I did not receive the impression I was listening to a hard core psychopath behind a glib facade with Truman as I did when listening to Kennedy and Clinton. Harry Truman was, if nothing else, sane.

There is a story about someone seeking to ingratiate himself by making the mistake of offering Truman women on the side. An indignant Truman replied that he married his high school sweetheart and he didn’t play around on her, and she didn’t play around on him. Wouldn’t it be like dying and going to heaven to hear something like that again?

Suppose it were now 45 years ago. Suppose I were to go about the town where I lived saying I knew for certain that the President of the United States was really a madman who ran around laughing and masturbating in the Oval Office in front of naked girls. In a short time I would have been brought before a panel of psychiatrists, so as to let the court determine the competence of my mental functioning. If I persisted in my assertions during psychiatric examination I would be told I was crazy, because any sane mind would realize no such thing could possibly be happening in this country. If I further argued that it was true and I had evidence to prove it, right here in an investigation called the Starr Report, and millions of people supported the president in his endeavors, it would have been looked upon as conclusive evidence that my delusions were so highly developed as to be intractable, and that I was a possible danger to myself or society. Quite seriously, I might have wound up in a state mental hospital for the remainder of my life raving, "But it’s all true!, Here’s the evidence!" Undoubtedly the doctors, nurses, and other patients would mumble, "Sad case. He’s been in here for 40 years raving and trying to convince people that such a thing is even possible. The worst and funniest part of it is that he keeps insisting we have the wrong man institutionalized. He thinks the President of the United States is the one who should be in here while he should be let out."

This country has changed. What once would have been considered the ravings of a delusional psychotic, or the plot and visual imagery of a grotesquely surreal movie, is now reality. The president and his spokespersons such as James Carville and columnists such as Eleanor Clift mock us and say that we are crazy. But, we aren’t crazy: it’s real. The crazy part is that it is real and millions of people are defending it.

Something very important has been lost in this that will affect the future stability of the country. The unthinkable has become reality. Henceforth in this country, what would formerly be dismissed as delusional can no longer be so easily dismissed. In the past the political stability of the country has been protected by an aura of the presidency and the belief that there was some sort of purification process that weeded out the extremely unfit or irresponsible. This had the secondary effect of diminishing the credibility or acceptance of erratic or delusional elements in the country critical of the government. There was a time when grotesque or paranoid speculation about presidential or governmental action would be dismissed by faith in a sane reality. It would be dismissed by saying Eisenhower, Truman, Reagan, or whoever was president could never do something like whatever it happened to be. With the Clintons we have reached the final point where that brake on political irrationality has been destroyed. A sense of stable reality has been lost. In a distorted condition of accusations¾ or speculations and counter-accusations¾ it has become much harder to decide which side should be dismissed as being nuts. This pertains not only to matters of personal behavior, but, having elected someone who went to Moscow to protest and undermine an American war effort as a left wing student, it pertains to deeper political issues and questions about justifiable doubts regarding the basic allegiance of the president and government to this country.

I know a woman who had been in a highly abusive marriage that is instructive. Her husband would come home drunk in the middle of the night in a mindless rage, slap her around, and cut the rings off her fingers with a bolt cutter. In the morning he would demand forgiveness between stern lectures on how she provoked him and how the problem was really her (in what was really an attack upon her basic sanity). She began to question, and fight for, her mental stability after a short time in that marriage. Her entire life became too warped to be understandable or acceptable to her mind. It was like an ongoing bad irrational nightmare that she woke up to instead of having slept through. After a period of time, she did wonder whether she had gone insane.

Many of the people I have talked to or have written me have asked the same question that woman asked herself. Am I nuts, or are the inmates running the asylum?

An experienced law officer will tell you, the most difficult or dangerous call to answer is a domestic violence situation. The most dangerous person in that situation is often the woman who has been beaten and abused because, in the warped inverted mentality she develops to adapt to the irrational condition of her marriage, she will often turn against the police officer in defense of the husband who is killing her.

The typical abused woman is in the position of being helpless and having to deal with an irrationality she can neither confront nor reason with. She swallows it at the cost of her own sanity. As she becomes more ground down she loses the will, the self confidence, and the mental acuity to extract herself from her situation.

Bill Clinton and the radical left are much like the husband in an abusive marriage, and produce the same effect. The next morning Bill engages in twisted denial combined with demands for forgiveness, and angry finger-shaking assertions of being provoked or imposed upon by having to answer questions no person should ever be asked. The idea that those questions are the legitimate result of his behavior that nobody in reasonable mental condition would become involved in is declared not to be an allowable consideration. No one is to question Bill Clinton, the authoritarian head of the household and the nation. Furthermore, it’s all other people’s fault. If we ask what kind of man running for the presidency would have a strange woman dragged into a hotel room so he could stick his penis in her face, we are the ones with the mental problem and are accused of being right-wing extremists. There is a vast lunatic right-wing conspiracy that is declared the real problem and the source of provocation by asking what, 45 years ago, would have been considered absolutely reasonable questions. Even if the corroborating evidence turns out to be true to the point where a thinly veiled admission is extracted, the people who made the original legitimate observations are still labeled as being crazy and conspirators. Bill Clinton’s direction is to attempt to undermine the basic sanity of anyone who questions his actions.

In the staged one-way system of communication that we now have in this country, the Clintons can impose their opinion on us through a TV screen while there is no way of confronting them back. Like an abused woman, you can’t get in a word to say about anything. Furthermore, the Clinton arguments are so filled with lies and irrationality that there is no way of dealing with them though any rational process. It’s a little like having a husband who comes in at four in the morning smeared with lipstick, smelling of strange perfume and sex, and who then accuses you of being paranoid if you ask what he’s been doing. Rational processes are not applicable. Today we face someone who denies knowing what the definitions of "is" or "sex" are. For there to be any discussion of anything there must be sincerity, maturity, personal integrity, and recognition of basic reality. None of those are present in Clinton’s case.

To call the law for help in this case is to be betrayed and turned over the abusive husband. The police officer who shows up is a corrupt Judge who is one of the husband’s former students. If there is a trial, there is a judge and jury composed of corrupt and incompetent Senate members. To appeal to public opinion or outrage is to appeal to a synthetic, nearly unanimous stage production by supporters on authoritative network news shows, sitcoms, and talk shows. There is no place to go to find support for basic sanity.

The Clintons have worked within a corrupted system with the support of a corrupt generational radicalism to draw an entire nation into their insanity. The entire nation is tied up in arguments over things that are so obvious that no mentally healthy adults should have doubts about them. Like the husband of an abused woman, the Clintons and their supporters have succeeded in grinding down the mental health, the self-respect, and the spirit of this nation.

There is doubt in my mind as to whether the mental health of this nation can survive the Clintons’ insane level of denial and distortion. Clearly, there is no way any intelligent person in decent mental health could believe anything the Clintons say in the way of explanation. I believe what has happened is that the worst of 60s generational pathology, in which members have not been able to live successfully with each other, has been moved into the White House. It may be coming to a choice between the undermining craziness of the Clintons’ mental condition or the mental health of the nation. That is my absolute belief. Much as that woman had to divorce her husband to protect and restore her basic sanity, this country must obtain a divorce from Bill and Hillary Clinton. On the other hand, the Clintons and their allies must destroy the mental health of the nation to stay in power because no healthy population would tolerate them.

It is now being publicly alleged by a woman who says she was the victim, that Bill Clinton raped her. In terms of his past lack of conscience regarding lying or anything else; in terms of his long-term pattern of a lack of behavioral limits or lack of inhibition governed by conscience; in terms of a series of other aggressive acts against women which closely approached rape, but fell just short of rape; in terms of his arrogant feeling of immunity from any possibility of accountability; in terms of his lack of personal class, integrity, or stature; in terms of all these, if I had to bet my life on the truth or non-truth of the woman’s statements, it would be that she is telling the truth. This isn’t Harry Truman we are dealing with. Through a long process, the Clintons have earned not only suspicion of themselves, but an absolutely reasonable presumption of guilt. We are at the point where anything is just more of, or a small extension of, what we’ve seen. What the woman described is pure callused psychopathic Bill Clinton. If I had to state one single demonstrated factor in the Clinton personality or history that would prohibit Bill Clinton from doing what he is accused of, I honestly could not do so if my life depended on it.

Re-read that last sentence. I defy anyone else, including the would-be big name psychologists who follow me around, to show such an operative factor in the Clinton personality. Bill Clinton’s behavioral pattern and personality more closely approximates that of serial woman killer Ted Bundy than that of a light-hearted Casanova. Either way, Ted Bundy or immature Casanova, it is unfortunate that such characterizations arise as applicable to the President of the United States.

If I may use an unpretentious analogy, the entire process of liberalism in the last nearly four decades, including the affair with the Clintons, bears a close resemblance to World Championship Wrestling on TV. The bad guy wrestler has soap hidden in his wristband and is sticking it in the good wrestler’s eyes. The referee pretends he can’t see it even though the crowd points it out. The bad guy’s manager wraps the good guy wrestler’s foot in the ropes and kicks him when the referee has his back turned and is conveniently distracted by lecturing the bad guy about a minor rule infraction. The threats of disqualification by the referee are perfunctory and never acted upon. When the good guy finally loses his temper, he’s warned by the referee in earnest that he will be disqualified. The entire crowd is livid with rage because they can see the soap in the wristband being stuck in the other wrestler’s eyes while the referee does nothing about it. It’s an ongoing morality play that goes on week after week before angry crowds who are enraged because the bad guys never admit what they are doing and never get caught, even though it’s obvious to the infuriated crowd. The crowd keeps coming back every week hoping to receive a moral satisfaction that never comes.

Bill Clinton is like that dirty wrestler. What he is doing is obvious to any sane adult. His wrestling manager is James Carville. The referee is Judge Wright with support of the media who are in collusion with Clinton. Enraged people keep returning to the argument hoping for an admission of what is obvious, but it never comes. People in the crowd yell, "Hey judge, can’t you see Clinton is lying and ridiculing the court and the people of this country?" No, she pretends not to see the obvious. The next round is a tag team match in which Clinton and his lawyers debate the entire U. S. Senate employing sophisms a child could see through. In the entire Senate there isn’t a single person able to state the obvious or essentials for rebuttal. The Senate is unable to come to the simple valid conclusion that would be obvious to any kindergarten class—that the Clintons are without conscience, nuts, dangerous, and shouldn’t be in the White House. So, a bunch of trash who properly should be laid over a barrel and whipped until they nearly bleed to death has instead lied with amusement until they have worn down the country’s capacity for outrage. But this isn’t a staged wrestling exhibition that we leave after three hours. When it’s over, the country is stuck with two dangerous psychopaths in the White House who look upon the people of this country with contempt and ridicule while cultivating a growing sense of their own megalomaniacal omnipotence. It’s destruction of this country.

Bill Clinton is not the real issue. Sex, particular lies, and even rape, are not the most important threats in this situation. What emerges is an overall pattern of infantile destructiveness of which the Clinton phenomenon is but a part. The Clintons are the test or attacking focal point in a systematic pathological attack upon the institutions and basic mental health of this country since the 60s.

For 35 years I have been trying to come up with a pinpointing phrase to describe the political and social movement that is destroying this country. Sadistic oppositional defiance is the closest I have been to come to it. Oppositional defiance is technically a diagnostic term referring to a mental disorder of childhood and early adolescence in which, as the name implies, there is a defiant opposition to, and rebellion against, everything. Regardless of the technical usage, I can find no better words to describe the personality I see in left-wing adults. There is a defiant opposition to all rationality. No matter how correct or obvious something is, it is rejected with argument and denial. Concurrently, there is an ultimate destructive twist to everything this personality advocates, which seems to be a source of personal amusement, adherence to fashion, and feeling of personal cleverness. It seems as though this personality engages in a defiant destructiveness that it defies or dares other people to accept the challenge to do something about. It seems to practice a constant torment on immobilized individual victims and an immobilized society. The techniques of immobilization run the spectrum from employing improperly extended and misapplied moral principles in such a way as to produce, and then prey upon, people’s guilt (e.g. emphasis upon the unconditional forgiveness of Christianity exclusive of the recognition of religious discipline or the qualification of serious remorse¾ or accusations of hatred), to strategy as simple as demand for gun control to render victims helpless. In line with this is often the preaching of a social philosophy of passive non-violence which enables practitioners to practice subtle indirect forms of exquisite sadism while immobilizing angry retribution from victims.

The workings of this personality are sometimes part of a game played by fops who live for little else than party amusement. There is a component of negative attention seeking in which people¾ who would otherwise have nothing going for them¾ synthesize a personality for themselves and attain importance by being the center of aggravation. There is also a facet of demonstrating one’s intellectual prowess or superiority by victoriously arguing people into helplessly accepting the ridiculous or destructive. But the people who conduct such arguments don’t do so with true intellect, but with denial which they (in their primitive mental state) think is intellect. We have come to the dangerous point in this country where if you say there will be a full moon sometime this month, someone will say "no" and believe it makes them a certified intellectual while you stammer in exasperation. (In a foppish world where inane complexly circular denial to the point of mental disorder is considered a cute form of intellectual creativity, it’s easier to have a realistic conversation with an uneducated process schizophrenic than to have one with somebody at the master’s degree level or higher from a liberal college.) These are people who often displace the dissatisfaction from empty or dysfunctional personal lives into obsessive dissatisfaction with, or anger toward, society expressed through indirect intellectualized channels. There is a complex system of motivation here. There are also other aspects which are too complex to explain at this length.

What exists is a group of people, indeed an entire sadistic coalition and sociopolitical movement, determined to undermine, rip, and tear this nation apart. It is the foundation of liberalism. They have been very successful at it.

For 35 years we have lived in a progressively destructive lunatic swill. It’s in the churches, in the content of our nightly news, on TV sitcoms, in the schools and universities, and it is the de facto platform and agenda of the Democratic party. One third of children are born out of wedlock; educational systems have become politically correct training camps producing mental and educational incompetents; the country is overrun by drugs; the churches preach a liberation theology allowing one third of clergy to engage in sexual affairs with congregation members. Our social services are overwhelmed by people demanding to live irresponsible living patterns looked upon as a political and social right. There is irrational demand for redistribution of income without demand for participation in sound effort and responsibility. It has all been underwritten by endless defiant intellectual argumentation.

If you look at the supposedly unsolvable problems that we have today, from out of wedlock birth rates, to drug problems, to non-functional educational systems, to most anything; none of these problems were seriously widespread problems 50 years ago when levels of affluence were not as high as they were 20 years later. If the problems did not exist then, how can it be argued that they are inherent in the society and unsolvable now? The problem with today’s problems is that the problems are not the problems. The problems are the consequence of the real problem. If one looks closely, most of the problems facing today’s society are the secondary consequence of twisted oppositional defiant arguments rationalizing and imposing support for irrationality and destructiveness. With the advent of Kennedy’s New Frontier, and overwhelmingly during Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, reality-based reason became vilified while oppositional-defiant intellectuals were given credibility and license to employ twisted logic to impose twisted solutions that made initial problems much worse. In each case, the unreasonable behavior and thought at the basis of a problem was subtly excused, justified, and sold. The result has been a massive personal and cultural implosion combined with a triumph of authoritarian twisted oppositional-defiant insanity.

There was, and always has been, a difficult period in teenage sexuality. This is one of the principle life areas that must be addressed in resolving the growth conflicts of adolescence. The oppositional-defiant approach was to impose a particular form of sex education. It was values-free, argued as necessary to avoid offending elements of pluralistic life-styles. Marriage and monogamy were de-emphasized under the hyper-extended excuse of separation of church and state. So the kids are for practical purposes taught that sexual experimentation is nothing more serious than trying out various options freely practiced elsewhere. This has the effect of subtly intensifying conflict between impulse and rational prohibition against permissive sex by weakening the prohibition side of things. Kids are being desensitized to the idea of exceeding what are presented as artificial boundaries. (This is coordinate with a similar atmosphere on TV and in movies. Any good oppositional defiant will not object to sexual content in those areas. Violence is not to be welcomed, however, because kids mysteriously pick up those values immediately. Kids only pick up what oppositional defiant minds say they pick up.) When it’s all over kids will have been told it’s all right to engage in sex, here’s your condoms, and we’ll be waiting with an abortion for which no parental permission or knowledge is necessary. (This last part is being litigated.) If the family and church upbringing is strong enough, all this will have no effect—and neither will a nuclear bomb. The parents who stammer, "You have taken over our children and are desensitizing them as well as brainwashing them into irresponsible and meaningless sexuality," which happens to be the truth, are labeled right-wing primitives determined to promote sexual ignorance and impose their values upon the world. When the lifestyle left imposes their version of sex education, it is somehow not determination to impose their values on the world.

The result was close to 50 percent of teenaged girls sexually active in their 16th year. Forty-eight percent of conceptions in this country have been aborted or eventually born out of wedlock in a hypersexual mess that would scarcely have been imagined in science fiction 50 years ago. The specifics will be reserved for another time. The point is: was it predictable from the oppositional-defiant agenda being pushed? Of course. Is it terribly abrasive to point out that one source of possible motivation for all this is that the sooner a girl is sexually active and has had an abortion, the sooner she is compromised into not challenging the values and lives of older liberated women who are helping to push all this?

In May of ‘97, a group known as the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy attended a White House reception by Hillary Clinton. The center of triumph seemed to be that teenagers were now using more birth control. The barely concealed message was celebration over the fact kids were engaged in activity necessitating birth control. Has anyone ever heard Hillary go beyond statements about the inconvenience of pregnancy and make a strongly defined statement regarding any of the other values involved? Given the importance of the problem, would some consideration of sexual morality not be a reasonable consideration? Has Hillary ever made a definitive moral statement? She won’t because it would stick in her angry oppositional-defiant throat. Any semblance of traditional morality is what she and Bill have been defiantly opposing all their lives. This critical omission establishes the context of a values-free society devoid of emotional depth. It is subtle promotion. It is part of a deep twist in liberalism. It is the loudest message from the Clinton White House. Regardless of any other actions or statements, it has been the principle direction charted from the Clinton White house. Anything else is window dressing to make it palatable. (The temptation here is to mutter, "But look at what she’s married to, and the kind of life the Clintons lead. What the hell do you expect? She’s selling her own pathology." But we don’t do that here.)

That is part of the real Clinton oppositional-defiant political/social platform. The Clintons are superb exponents of an undermining vicious oppositional-defiant attack upon sanity, morality, and this society. That’s what all this is really about.

Forty-five or 50 years ago virtually every high school graduate could read or calculate to reasonable extent. The oppositional revolution of the 60s licensed imposition of the "new math." And the new reading, the new social studies, the new touchy-feely feel-good curricula, and the new ignorance. The arguments for all of it were vague left-wing psychobabble. When this was imposed, it was difficult not to believe that serious constructive content and mental discipline was being purposely deleted from the nation’s classroom. As a foreseeable consequence, our high schools are now graduating people at half the educational level of graduates 45 years ago. We now rank lowest in educational achievement of any industrialized nation. To pursue this direction nationally for five or 10 years can be looked upon as a mistake. To pursue such direction for more than 35 years is stupidity, blind fanaticism, deliberate intent, or a combination of all three.

And so it is with many aspects of American culture and institutions. Like a battered woman we are confronting something, or surrounded with something that feels crazy and is crazy. When we look around for support, we are told we are the ones who are crazy, and that compounds our lack of confidence and lack of assertiveness. And, again, the most common questions I receive are parallel to what that woman asked herself in her lunatic marriage. "Am I crazy, or has the entire country gone crazy?" "Is there something wrong with me, or something wrong with everything I’m seeing and waking up to every morning?" The good news is, if you don’t wonder if there is something seriously wrong with what you see going on around you, then there is something seriously wrong with you. The bad news is, if you feel like someone’s systematically trying to drive you crazy, it’s because they are, and they are dangerous. Years ago, a generation of oppositional-defiant radical children embarked upon a crusade to drive the adult world nuts and to destroy anything that symbolized the adult world. If you feel crazy and feel under attack, that’s the desired result. Like battered women, we get all kinds of explanations and thinly veiled accusations that we are the problem. But the explanations aren’t reality. Reality is what the Clintons, the Carvilles, and the radical left in this country are trying to talk you out of reasonably concluding.

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Robert L. Kocher is the author of "The American Mind in Denial." He is an engineer working in the area of solid-state physics, and has done graduate study in clinical psychology. His email address is steiner@access.mountain.net.

It’s an ongoing morality play that goes on week after week before angry crowds who are enraged because the bad guys never admit what they are doing and never get caught, even though it’s obvious to the infuriated crowd.

Right on target article, with this exception:

It wasn't just the press. Throughout the Clinton debacle, he really was supported by a majority of the people of this country.

Misled people, certainly, many of them. Never really given a clear exposition, by the media, of the issues at stake.

Still, as the author points out, any semi-intelligent person could see exactly what Clinton was, and for whatever reason, most Americans really did choose to close their eyes to it. Indeed, there are none so blind as those who choose not to see.

TG we have a more ethical person in the White House today!

The problem with today’s problems is that the problems are not the problems. The problems are the consequence of the real problem. If one looks closely, most of the problems facing today’s society are the secondary consequence of twisted oppositional defiant arguments rationalizing and imposing support for irrationality and destructiveness.

...reality-based reason became vilified while oppositional-defiant intellectuals were given credibility and license to employ twisted logic to impose twisted solutions that made initial problems much worse.

No wonder "throwing money at the problem" never seems to work, yet is always the recommended solution.

Now, how about another article with solutions to the true problem? Are there solutions, or are we too late?

If you think it is bad now, wait until this dysfuntional, illiterate group going through school now reach the age of maturity and start taking the reins of power.

It's gonna be great! I've taught some of these kids and they are as conservative and reactionary as you could dream. They are sick and f***ing tired of having white guilt and their responsibility to pander to everyone's feelings shoved in their faces everytime they turn around. They are suspicious of their raving liberal professors and don't want to hear one more word about how wonderful the 60s were. A lot of them joined the military on Sept 12. There is hope.

Pulling it all together, what we have right here in our own country are all of the ingredients necessary for a totalitarian police state. We have a federal government that nobody in his right mind would trust, which lies to us incessantly, uses illegal force against its citizens with impunity, and collaborates with totalitarian dictators under cover of a massive propaganda campaign conducted by our supposedly free press. Our major information media are dominated by closet totalitarians who pay lip service to democracy while covertly promoting the interests of communist despots. The political opposition is made up largely of cowards who are so intimidated by our totalitarian propaganda media they are unable to offer effective resistance to even the most egregious violations of civil liberties by the corrupt Clinton regime. They have become, in the fullest sense of the term, Weimar Republicans. And finally, we have that which makes it all possible, a listless, docile, dumbed-down public who gape mindlessly at all of the above phenomena without the slightest glimmer of comprehension, and prattle the latest propaganda cliches dumped into their empty heads by the mainstream media.

The Elian affair has truly given us a glimpse into the abyss of tyranny. The message that comes through loud and clear is that the system isn't working. The question that remains to be answered is whether we still possess the intelligence and fortitude necessary to fix it.

Edward Zehr can not be reached at ezehr@capaccess.org...

Published in the May. 22, 2000 issue of The Washington Weekly

back with his bio!

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