They're Insane, I Tell You!  Completely Insane!

by Bob Wallace 

Okay, after listening to Bush babble about "changing the world for the better," I've finally been pushed over the line, just the way I used to swing back and forth in my swing-set when I was a kid until it tumped over: oops, here I am on the edge!  Oops, now here I go! Bam!  

I've now decided Bush is insane.  I've tried to give him the benefit of the doubt: He's just dumb because his brain is squished like Play Doh in that inbred, narrow, simian head of his, or he's a spoiled, childish rich boy who avoided Vietnam with sporadic attendance in the National Guard, or several million of his brain cells are playing little harps because he croaked them guzzling a few hundred gallons of booze.  

But no more.  I no longer care what his problem is.  All I'm concerned about now is that he's as insane as any of the monsters in Stephen King's or H.P. Lovecraft's fevered imaginations.  At least walking Chattery Teeth that bite people's noses off, or meteorites that land in wells and turn out to be monsters, are fantasies, unlike Bush's 600 dead Americans and hundreds of billions of wasted dollars.  (And all wussy neocon cowards like William Kristol, whom I doubt has ever fired a BB gun, can do is howl, More! More! More!)  

I'm beginning to think I'm in one of those horror-cum-humor movies, like Young Frankenstein, where Marty Feldman, after he steals a brain in a jar for Dr. Frankstein, tells him the name on the jar was "Abby Normal."  And Dr. Frankenstein used it anyway, just the way the American people used Bush's brain by voting him into office, even though he says Abby Normal things like "strategery" and "warren terrism."  

Bush has got to go.  Right back to his ranch in Texas, where he can wear a cowboy hat and con himself all he wants he's a real Texan and not some crackpot Yankee out of New England.  

Now maybe he's not totally Ur-Insane, like Hannibal Lecter, but he's as insane as Brain, as Simon Barsinister, as Dogbert, as Dr. Morbius, as Dr. Evil, as Mojo Jojo, as Dr. Jumba Jookiba, as Dr. Loveless, as Emilio Lizardo, as Phor Tak (since you don't know who Phor Tak is, I should explain he's a Mad Scientist in Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Fighting Man of Mars.  He used to go "Heigh-oo," probably like Ed Mahon did when he introduced Johnny Carson.).

When Bush stutters and stumbles and finally halfway gets his brain in gear and says "we have an opportunity to change the world," what he means, whether he understands it or not (and I've convinced he doesn't), is that he wants to conquer it.  That's the only way the world can be changed.  What's the other alternative?  "Could you pretty please with sugar on top embrace democracy?"  The man would make more sense if his brain was removed and replaced with a cheeseburger.

A raccoon would make a better president.  He'd only raid my garbage can at night, not go on TV and try to convince everyone that Drones of Death were going to be flown across the Atlantic Ocean by a country with an economy the size of North Carolina's.  By a leader we helped put into power and who we turned into an enemy.

Bush, who is playing Mortimer Snerd to the neocons' Edgar Bergen, isn't just merely a Would-Be World Conqueror, like every cartoon villain I've encountered since I was maybe two years old.  I've decided he and the crazed neocons (is that one word or two?) are Mad Scientists.  Why?  Because they plan on using advanced American technology to further their nefarious ends of being tyrants masquerading as benefactors.

The free online encyclopedia Wikipedia defines Mad Scientists as those "typically characterized by obsessive behaviour and the employment of extremely dangerous methods."  (They even have a drawing of a Mad Scientist with the caption, "They LAUGHED at my theories at the institute! Fools! I'll destroy them all!")

Oh boy oh boy.  Bush et al certainly are obsessed with Iraq (indeed the entire region over there) and they certainly are using dangerous methods.  ("Yeah, I know I've invaded and occupied your country, but I've got a helicopter with a 40 mm cannon, and you don't.  Oops!  Sorry about blowing the arms and legs off of that there little boy and girl who got in the way!")

All Mad Scientists in stories and films have certain quirks in common.  One, all used technology in unethical ways.  Indeed, they used it without regard to any law at all, except the maniacal fantasies in their minds!  We whine because Saddam Hussein maybe used poison gas on his own people?  Hell, we dropped an atomic bomb on one-seventh of Japanese Christians!  We firebombed Dresden the night children were out in holiday costumes!  Both were non-military targets!  We're supposed to be a "Christian" country?

Two: experimentation on others.  Let's call that "social engineering through the use of advanced technology," as in "submit or die."  Sure, the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese were dumb enough to perform medical experiments on captured prisoners (and what they got for that was a last cigarette before they dangled).  The US government is performing medical experiments on entire countries.   Which is worse?

Three: playing God, as in "We aren't just the Created. Now we've decided we are the Creators."  What's the word for that?  Wait a minute--I'll think of it.  Oh, yeah--blasphemy.  Boy, would I like to see a lightning bolt hit them in their heads, just like what happened to Beavis and Butthead in Beavis and Butthead Do America.  Oh, heck--who am I kidding?  I want those lightning bolts lower.  So much lower none of the neoconsters will never pass on their genes.  And I want to get it on tape.

What's the story behind all three of those Mad Scientist characteristics?  Why, hubris, of course.  "I can do God-like things, like putting  An End to Evil."  (I don't care if Richard Perle and David Frum wrote the book; both are as clueless as stuffed armadillos.  Frum should take himself and his bad haircut right back to his native Canada. Perle should get the Last Cigarette treatment, war criminal that he is.  I'd bet he'd cry, though.  I bet they'd both cry like girls if I corked them on the arm.)

What's the ending to the story of hubris?  You got it: nemesis.  Or: "pride goes before a fall, and a haughty spirit before destruction."

Sheesh--don't politicians ever learn?  Or Homer Simpsonesque Mass Man?   I certainly don't expect them to know anything about the Bible or Greek myths, but haven't they at least watched Pinky and the Brain?  "Hey, that little mutant mouse keeps conking his head when he tries to conquer the world.  Hmm . . . there's a message there.  Maybe I should ask a four-year-old child what it is.")

There is a law called "Cooper's Law."  It's not a law in a book.  Most of those aren't laws, anyway, even if the State does try and con people into believing that words on a piece of paper are laws.  Cooper's Law is a Natural Law, which means it's inherent in the universe, can't be changed, and is discoverable by anyone.  It states, "All machines are amplifiers."

Machines amplify human abilities, for good or bad.   There isn't one machine that doesn't do this. And it's easy to understand.  Lawyers aren't needed for this one.  They're aren't needed to explain most Natural Laws.  I certainly didn't need one to tell me that blankets don't make good parachutes when I jumped off the hayloft.  Even if I did land in a pile of hay.  After I got my breath back I decided maybe the law of gravity isn't always my friend.

So what am I supposed to think about an administration that uses advanced technology to commit mass murder, theft and destruction.  Exactly which traits are being amplified?

I'll tell you which.  Bush thinks he is a religious man, that he's doing God's work on earth.  He think he's using technology in the service of God.  But you know what?  I don't think so.  When one is being a Mad Scientist, playing God, and using advanced technology unethically to murder, maim, steal and destroy, it's not God who's whispering to Bush in his head.  It's the Other Guy, whose worst crime was that of hubris.  The one who says, "Might makes right."

That's what's being amplified by our machines, just like Dr. Morbius' Id in Forbidden Planet.  Hubris, and all that goes with it: arrogance, conceit, self-deception, murder, mayhem, theft, destruction.  The blind leading the blind, and heading toward the ditch.

Good Lord.  Those half-animal, half-people in H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau had more sense than the warmongers in the administration and in the public.  ("What is the law?  Not to spill blood; not to chase other men; not to go on all fours; not to eat flesh.  This is the law.  Are we not men?")

It'd be a lot easier to identify the animals among humans if they did go on all fours.  The chicken-hawk arm-chair warriors are certainly not men on the inside, just on the outside, where they wrap themselves in the flag.

What's that Biblical saying?  "How terrible for you, teachers of the law and Pharisees!  You are hypocrites!  You wash the outside of your cups and dishes, but inside they are full of things you got by cheating others and by pleasing only yourselves.   Pharisees, you are blind! First make the inside of the cup clean, and then the outside of the cup can be truly clean."

Three-piece suits on the outside; Mad Scientists on the inside.  Brrr.