“I like him,” I said. (Of course I like him. He’s taking charge of a sinking ship and I’m on it.)
But she didn’t really want to heart that. “That’s not his real name you know,” she said. Can I remember what she said is his real name? No I cannot. But I remember her referring to Obama as his stage name, as if he suddenly arrived in Chicago from St. Louis, putting on airs, when he was wanted for cheating at cards up and down the river.
And I thought, “Uh oh, there’s somebody locked in the cellar and she gets fed through a slit in the door.”
Even now when I remember it, I feel a little crazy. Funny how far an empathetic person will listen, politely, to drivel when it comes from somebody you really, really need to believe is on top of their game. You can almost watch the rats turn on each other as the cage shrinks. She dispatched Obama as a fraud and then began on the horror stories of Canadian health care. As if this wasn’t enough sideshow, she said that cholesterol doesn’t hurt anyone and no matter how high the numbers, not to worry.
I watched her without getting involved in her logic. It all grows very neatly from the source, which is generally some perceived authority figure, often as not crazy as bat shit. Some of them even have radio and television shows. Some of them are on the internet. Some of them are coming to a venue near you.
The first time I met her was at Cuppers coffee shop. I had looked on Craigslist to see if there were any groups here, so I could try to find some social connections. There was something listed having to do withWilhelm Reich. I thought that might be interesting because he was the dark child of Freud. As Jung moved to archetypes and Adler to power, Reich looked at sexual energy as a source of neurosis, or rather the blockage of it, and he located the source of the problem in the sacral muscles. It is adhesions in these muscles that creates neurosis, he believed, and full orgasm releases the sacrum and resets the system.
As it turned out the meeting was a search for investors in a rain making apparatus. When an investment opportunity requires the suspension of disbelief, I will pass.
Of course, there was a part of me that said, why not? It may be true. He’s about four, maybe five, I guess.
>I do not believe that anybody could get to be President of the United States and secretly be an illegal alien under an assumed name. I do not believe we can get more rain in town if we set up an orgone acccumulator, I don’t think cholesterol levels should be ignored, and I don’t think Dr. Deagle is good source material.
The lies and crazy talk picked up on cable television and the internet are proliferating viruses. They infect people and as a virus must they come to a stasis with the host so as to feed on it but not kill it. The ideas came out from a certainty that defines the anima possession. Jung famously described the animus possessed woman as saying, “I am, unfortunately, always right.” What appears to a woman in this state of possession as undisputed truth actually can have no foundation at all. It is just constructed in the air, of opinions mistaken for facts. (The corresponding state in a man is one in which he is defined by moods, inexplicable and often changing without any apparent outside cause. “He turned on me, just like that.” Finger snap.)
I recall reading a dream Joseph Henderson had, in Germany before the war. He was in a large hall, and there were only men. Women were not allowed in. On a stage there was a female figure who wore a triangular costume, split horizontally between red and black, as I recall. She moved in an oddly mechanical way, but the men loved it, and cheered wildly for her dance. The dream showed the collective in the possession of a pattern. They were essentially aligned to this negative anima, which would be dispelled by any actual femininity to expose the excitement it generates as based on nothing.
I recall when I was young interviewing a psychiatrist at what was then the Arizona State Hospital. My focus was on sociopathy, but we were also talking about schizophrenia, and he said one of the hardest things for people to realize is how easy it is to get caught up in a schizophrenic’s constructed reality. He said it was hard for him, and he’s trained to deal with it. The story line can pull you right in, and after awhile, you’re proof that crazy is contagious.
>My theory is that when Reagan closed all the public asylums and put the crazy people on the streets, it started an epidemic that has now reached critical mass. Soon we’ll all be rhinoceroses.
When I left the office I felt like I was in one of those movies, in which people have been taken over by some alien pods which seal off faculties, occupy nervous systems, and reprogram logical functions, until the host has been consumed and replaced by the invading virus. In the end, at least in the movies, resistance is futile.
