Subscribe | UPI Odd Newsletter Subscribe (Commentary) (Part of UPI's Special Report reviewing 2002 and previewing 2003). Advertisement NEW YORK (UPI) -- The mood of the country entering the third year of this strange new century is that of a paranoid schizophrenic. On the one hand we imagine conniving enemies behind every kiosk in the mall and sinister cabals plotting our destruction in the desert warrens of far-off barbarian fiefdoms. On the other hand we insist that the orchid show must go on. In fact, we consider it an act of patriotism to buy more orchids this year than we bought last, as a defiant gesture meant to send a signal to the world that we WILL have our orchids. We're very much all about sending signals to the world, which is actually another symptom of the delusional mind. It's not clear yet whether the world is actually listening to the signals -- we may be ham radio operators broadcasting to the icy shipping lanes near Greenland -- but in the manner of a well-dressed burgher who whistles in the dark as he passes the thieves market, we adjust our cravats just so and put an extra kick in our stride so that the low-lives know we're not intimidated by their guttural growls. Advertisement In other words, we're scared, and so a great many of us have become monarchists. The very thing we like about George W. Bush is that he acts like a king -- a petulant king from the 17th century who would rather do without international treaties or parliaments or deliberative bodies of any type. Like Napoleon, he likes to strike first and negotiate later, figuring that we live in a state of perpetual warfare anyway and so we might as well have the advantage of the blitzkrieg. And we like this. It makes us feel that we're repairing the breaches without requiring us to learn the actual difference between al Qaida, Saddam Hussein and Hezbollah -- although the differences are many. We regard the war on terror in much the same way that English commoners must have regarded the War of the Roses. We see it stretching on for years, with only vague intimations of what the goal is, and yet we assume the monarch knows things we could never fathom, so we'll fight when necessary once the enemy duchies are identified. On the other hand, we have no faith at all in the Congress. We think of it as a doddering inefficient body of squabblers, barely held above chaos, like the Greek senate after the empire had started to decline. Our old notion of "the people," in the form of the legislature having the sole power to make war, is regarded as quaint, if not irrelevant. And our very congressmen themselves feel the same way. In private they say they don't want war, but in public they say they dare not insist on their historical prerogatives. Advertisement In this sense Robert Byrd is our Tiresias. "Blind and improvident!" he thundered from his pulpit, calling for calm slow deliberation and defiance of the president before a Congress that wasn't even listening. "Blind and improvident!" he repeated. But he's an old man, and we no longer listen to our old men. We have, for the first time since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, a moneyed nobility. We have a handful of billionaires who control the majority of our capital, and to some extent direct our foreign policy, and those men -- who earn more in one day's interest than the average laborer will earn in a lifetime -- are symbols of our greatness. They are lionized as warriors in much the same way that medieval nobles were thought to be blessed by God because they were able to continually enlarge their estates and crush their neighbors. A nation that produces such men, we think, must be equally blessed. We don't entirely trust them, and yet we endow them with more and more power, hoping that at some point we too can aspire to nobility. And just as we have an upper class, we once again have a lower class. Increasingly we vote to put this class in prison and throw away the key. We lock up more of our citizens than most Third World countries, because we believe there's something sinister and deadly and unreformable in the hearts of our fellow men, as thought they're another species that dwells among us but is not OF us. Whereas we once said "There but for the grace of God go I," today we say, "There by the wrath of God go they." Advertisement We are schizophrenic in other ways as well. We insist in the belief that all races, creeds, ethnic groups and nationalities are basically good, endowed with equal ability to contribute to the American mosaic, and yet at the same time we fear immigration as never before. We don't really understand Islam, even though many of us have converted to it in recent years, drawn by the revolutionary message of Malcolm X, which is not that different from the revolutionary message of mullahs in Nigeria. We think that there must be some kinder, gentler version of Islam that can prevail in the world, and yet the most prominent American Islamic leader, Louis Farrakhan, is himself a radical who has preached intolerance. We don't trust our children. We think their values are suspect, their morals are loose, their patriotism questionable. And yet our most unforgiving laws are enforced in their names. (Some of the laws are even named after deceased children.) We speak of them as our future, but we don't trust them with a cocktail or a driver's license. We believe they should be pressed into military service as a matter of our right and their dues, and yet we don't believe in mandatory retirement in order to let them assume places held by the elderly. Advertisement We're jealous of our privacy, on the one hand, and yet not too bothered when the government snoops and asks for extraordinary powers to snoop even more. We're capable of enormous outrage when our loved ones are wrongly imprisoned, yet we're strangely diffident when we read of the suspension of habeas corpus. We think that religion is a good idea, but only if people don't get carried away with it and start trying to divine God's will. American fundamentalists scare us just as much as foreign ayatollahs, because they eventually say something to make us believe they would take away our propensity to lead bizarre private lives. And even as our public lives become more patriotic -- often resembling some outdated idea of what it meant to be a patriot 60 years ago -- our private lives do become increasingly strange. Many of us live in walled communities where private dramas are played out inside houses ringed with security gear. Few of us know our neighbors. We move from our homes to our cars and back again to our homes, seeking minimal contact with anyone who could make a claim on our attention. We medicate ourselves for complex inner demons that we're loathe to reveal to others. We are a lonely people, which is perhaps why we insist we live in paradise. Advertisement Historically the treatment for a schizophrenic was to remove him from his family, treat him with rest and kindness, and eventually hope his symptoms could be controlled enough that he could return to society. We switched in the 1970s to "community care," which meant giving him drugs and basically letting him fend for himself. His paranoid fantasies became less evidence of illness than of mere eccentricity. His inner contradictions became a simple expression of his personality. We're not willing to say anyone is actually sick anymore --because, when we think about it, it hits too close to home. We want to be able to say both "It's okay to be scared" and "I'm not scared." We run daily between the one and the other. -- (John Bloom writes a number of columns for UPI and may be contacted at [email protected] or through his Web site at joebobbriggs.com. Snail mail: P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, Texas 75221.)
