I mean, I still have a favorite aircraft, all these years later. It's the P-38 Lightning, naturally, it being the fighter of choice of Richard Bong, the most successful ace of the war. Twin engines meant greater survivability, it packed a heavy punch, and while it wasn't nimble, it could outclimb almost all of its adversaries. Why do I still know all of this? It's just in there. All this stuff still bops around in my brain.
I remember, too, talking with my maternal grandfather about the war. Grandfather was a mathematician, and in that capacity worked on the home front as part of the science-side of the war effort. But his cousin died aboard the Arizona when it was sunk by Japanese planes at Pearl Harbor. One summer, when visiting them down in Georgia, I asked him about the Germans.
I found Nazi Germany confusing when I was a boy, because while it had some really cool aircraft, it was also obviously and purely evil. Every defining feature of evil was present: lies, brutality, horror, the desire to dominate, blame, bitterness, and a valorization of violence. And yet Germans, insofar as I was aware of them in the late 1970s, weren't monsters. They weren't inherently stupid people, and were often quite the opposite. They made rock-solid cars. They were our friends again.
My question, to my Grandfather: what happened? How could a people who were really no different from us do such obviously horrific things?
His response came after some reflection. "I think, honestly, that they all went crazy. Really actually crazy."
Grandfather introduced me, then, to the idea of mass psychosis. An entire group of human beings can become consumed by the same collective delusion.
Which, clearly, is where we are now.
We are in a place where vaccines are considered a Big Pharma Conspiracy. Where crazy blatant racist lies against migrants legally in this country are spouted at the highest levels. Where an entire party is organized around a Big Lie. "Truth" is no longer grounded in objective reality.
And Lord, does that go deep.
There are rumblings about fluoride in water. Talk of secret cabals controlling the weather is now acceptable political discourse. The idea that we are being subjugated by chemtrails is taken as a topic of serious conversation.
I mean, fluoride? WEATHER CONTROL? CHEMTRAILS?
These are markers of the vintage 20th century paranoid delusional, definitively, stereotypically so, the sort of thing you expect to hear That Guy talking about. You know That Guy, the grizzled one six houses down, whose high-fenced yard is cluttered with old rusted hulks, who has ten bolts on his door and cameras everywhere, and who either looks at you furtively from behind his blinds or buttonholes you for a nice long wild-eyed harangue.
If this is what we're talking about as a people, seriously talking about, there's no question that a substantial portion of the population has kind of lost it.
And in this Republic, they're all voters.
Guess I should fasten my seatbelt, and put my chair and tray table in their locked and upright positions.
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