March 6, 1998
It is no doubt well known that insanity is increasing at an alarming rate. Indeed, the day is in sight when the few remaining sane people are put into confinement and the lunatics are at large.
Robert E. Sherwood, 1940
The above quote is from Sherwood's play There Shall Be No Night. It was written at the time when Hitler was at the height of his power and after the rest of Europe capitulated to him at Munich. The newsreels in the movie theaters were full of scenes of masses of uniformed men shouting "Sieg Heil" in large swastika-draped arenas. Have things changed since then? Have things ever been any other way?
The difference between now and the days that Hitler was coming into power is not that people are any different. The difference is that the madmen who are the equivalent of Hitler have nowhere near the military or industrial power that Hitler had. They do, however, have oil; and oil can be traded for weapons with the industrial powers who make those weapons and are glad to sell them.
If you watch TV, it's easy to imagine that things are much worse than they were in the late 30s. Every nut has a free platform on TV.
Ted Kaczinski is crazy as a bedbug; but are the people who were prosecuting, defending or judging him very much saner? The prosecution spent money to transport Kaczinski's shack from Montana to Sacramento to prove that he is crazy, which is exactly what they didn't want the defense to convince a jury of. It seems that they needed a psychiatrist to pronounce him schizophrenic. I have been told that there is a difference between being crazy and being legally insane; but I have no idea what it is. Apparently the State of California was willing to spend millions to try to get Kaczinski executed. For much less money, they now have a conviction that will incarcerate him for the rest of his life.
If it is insane to want to get away from everything having to do with cities, there are lots of us who are just as insane. What makes Kaczinski crazy is that he expected to improve the world by killing individual people whom he didn't even know. Come to think of it, that's what Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin believed.
A nutty physicist says that he is going to clone people and he is given a chance to appear on TV. Who is crazier, him or the people who put him on TV?
The economy has been so good lately, that there will soon be a budget surplus. This is not the fault of the president or congress. The main reason that a balanced budget wasn't achieved a long time ago is the national debt of more than $5,000,000,000,000; the interest on it being more than the defense budget. That debt is the largest debt in the history of the world. Yet, the media and politicians leave us with the impression that the federal government is now in good financial shape. A quiet note of sanity was added by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who softly suggested that any budget surpluses be used to start to pay down the national debt.
Then there is the Laytonville school system.... But I'd better not get into that.