As Senator Ted Cruz Blabs His Narcissistic and Absurdly Well Televised Way — into the Hearts of His Tea Party Supporters — in Regard to Defunding ObamaCare — We Can Representatively Conclude that America Has Gone Psychiatrically Crazy — Just as Henry Giroux Has Suggested

© 2013 Peter Free

 

25 September 2013

 

Background — to understanding the cultural insanity argument

 

Senator Ted Cruz has been flapping his intelligent, but paradoxically brainless, lips for some hours now.

 

In case you missed the gist of Ted’s Tantrum — Senator Cruz wants to shut the Federal Government down, unless the President agrees to defund ObamaCare:

 

 

He took control of the floor at 2:41 Tuesday afternoon and crossed the 18-hour, 23-minute mark at 9:04 Wednesday morning, officially passing Sen. Robert La Follette Sr.’s filibuster in 1908.

 

Mr. Cruz was trying to rally both Republicans and Democrats to defy their leaders and vote to block action on a stopgap spending bill, arguing that it was the only way to force Democratic leaders, who control the chamber, to relent and allow a more robust debate on whether to fund the health care law.

 

© 2013 Stephen Dinan, Ted Cruz’s filibuster on Obamacare is 4th longest in Senate history, Washington Times (25 September 2013)

 

 

Even in this report, there is a sign that some of the media were not telling the truth

 

Contrary to the Washington Time’s erroneous (and apparently politically deliberate) depiction, Cruz’s effort is not a filibuster.

 

His long-winded blather will not delay a scheduled vote on a stopgap budget — which it would have to be capable of doing had it actually been a filibuster, as defined by Senate rules.

 

Instead, Senator Cruz’s ranting speech was pre-arranged with Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid:

 

 

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's spokesman said Tuesday that Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) filibuster was fake.

 

"Fun fact: Senator Cruz pre-negotiated the terms of his #fakefilibuster with Senator Reid yesterday. Not exactly a Mr. Smith moment," Adam Jentleson, the Communications Director for Reid (D-Nev.) tweeted more than two hours after Cruz took to the Senate floor.

 

© 2013 Ramsey Cox, Reid's office: Cruz filibuster is fake, The Hill (24 September 2013)

 

Senator Cruz’s prearranged, absurdly meandering speech is aimed at boosting his popularity with Tea Party folks, who would (effectively speaking) like nothing better than to destroy the very America they purport to love.

 

More experienced national Republican leaders think that’s a bad idea.

 

And most rational people recognize that the Cruz Crusade is politically futile and aimed only at building Teddy the Consistent Dick’s popularity with his apparently unrealistic followers.

 

From a historical perspective, Ted Cruz is attempting to follow in 1950s Senator Joe McCarthy’s cult-like reign of terror against Commies, wherever his clearly deluded mind claimed to see them.

 

 

Disproportionate and misaimed media coverage

 

The amount of media coverage that Senator Cruz’s non-event has accumulated leads thoughtful people to wonder why “we” are always paying adulating attention to the aggressively stupidest and most socially destructive people in our midst.

 

Why, for example, was it necessary for television coverage of Senator Cruz to continue on and on — to the exclusion of other arguably newsworthy happenings — even after the consensus emerged that the non-esteemed Senator is both an idiot and involved in a futile and nationally destructive quest that will provide him only narcissistic benefit?

 

Answer — we’re sick.

 

 

Yesterday, I wrote about the importance of conceptual framing in regard to gun control — today, let’s take a similar look at the broader cultural picture

 

A relatively recent Henry Giroux essay makes a splendid springboard:

 

 

America is descending into madness.

 

A predatory culture celebrates a narcissistic hyper-individualism that radiates a near sociopathic lack of interest in or compassion and responsibility for others.

 

Anti-public intellectuals dominate the screen . . . urging us to shop more, indulge more, and make a virtue out of the pursuit of personal gain, all the while promoting a depoliticizing culture of consumerism.

 

Undermining life-affirming social solidarities and any viable notion of the public good, right-wing politicians trade in forms of idiocy and superstition that mesmerize the illiterate and render the thoughtful cynical and disengaged. 

 

Congressional lobbyists for the big corporations and defense contractors create conditions in which war zones abroad can be recreated at home in order to provide endless consumer products, such as high tech weapons and surveillance tools for gated communities and for prisons alike.

 

The issue of who gets to define the future . . . has become largely invisible.

 

© 2013 Henry Giroux, The Politics of Cruelty — America’s Descent Into Madness, CounterPunch (12 August 2013) (paragraphs split)

 

Notice that Professor Giroux leads with the conceptual frame of madness — which in olden days was the term for psychosis.

 

He is saying that we have literally gone nuts.

 

 

Are we psychiatrically crazy?

 

Culturally, yes.

 

Wall to wall coverage of Cruz’s non-event as merely a small example of the self-destructive social phenomenon that Professor Giroux attacked in his essay.

 

When an entire nation continues to do things that are clearly self-destructive — like Vietnam through Afghanistan, combined with our now perennial failure to govern domestically with an eye toward future economic and social survival — there is clearly something seriously wrong with our mindsets.  Most organisms do not intentionally pursue courses to self-elimination.

 

National psychosis is not too far a diagnostic stretch.

 

 

Does framing our self-destructive approach to governance and military affairs — in the terms of national psychosis — aid our ability to self-reflect and potentially heal?

 

Yes.

 

Complacence is an engrained human characteristic.  It takes a bit of a shock to upset it enough for us to recognize the harm that our current course of behavior is doing.

 

The popular conception that addicts (for example) need to hit rock bottom, before they actually try to reform is reasonably accurate. My experience as a medical student treating patients, who were both substance abusers and psychiatrically ill, certainly agrees — based on these often admirable people’s evaluations of their own histories.  And they uniformly maintained that accepting the reality of their current condition was necessary before treatment had any hope of managing their illnesses.

 

Denial kills.

 

 

The moral? — If we look around, we see that Henry Giroux’s diagnosis of national illness is correct

 

The coverage “we” accorded Ted Cruz these last two days is only a tiny example of the kind of misbegotten attention that we routinely give anything that keeps us, unconsciously, on course toward national self-destruction.

 

By definition, a nation of resource-hoggers, narcissists, and narcissist-voyeurs cannot possibly succeed.  A society of overweeningly selfish and self-admiring isolates cannot cooperate enough to move the national team forward.

 

Intellectually, that conclusion should be obvious as heck.  But our psychotic national infatuation with self-indulgence and uninterrupted entertainment prevents us from seeing it.