US AND THEM THE PEOPLE: "I see dead people," the little boy said!

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2021

The rest of us see something worse: The Sixth Sense was released (into theaters!) in August 1999. It was a very big hit.

It was the second highest-grossing film of 1999. It received six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director, along with two acting noms.

That very same month, Gennifer Flowers did a half-hour interview on Hardball. During the session, she told the world about the Clintons' many murders—more precisely, about the disturbing phenomenon she described as "the Clinton body count."

The silent secession—the retreat from sanity—was already underway. 

Chris Matthews told Flowers what a major stone-cold "knockout" she was, sliming Hillary Clinton as he did. We'd show you exactly what he said, except that would force us to let him repeat a widely-repeated claim which was almost certainly false.

Because Flowers' performance was so insane, she was quickly rewarded with a full hour on Hannity & Colmes. Curing that hour, she went substantially further in her ugly, deeply stupid commentary concerning Clinton and Clinton. 

We've never been able to find a single "journalist" who commented on any of this. This is who and what our self-impressed tribe actually was at the time, and it's who and what we've always been. For the record, this was the start of the brain-damaged road which ended up giving us Trump.

Starting that very same month, The Sixth Sense was a very big hit. It turned on a heart-breaking statement made by a terrified little boy:

"I see dead people," the little boy says in the film. The actor, who was 11 years old, received one of those acting noms.

Last week, we watched The Sixth Sense again. With Halloween approaching, it aired on the SyFy Channel and appeared on our free On Demand. 

(Apparently, basic cable isn't able to fill every hour with its endless catalogue of slasher films.) 

We watched The Sixth Sense again. It occurs to us that that little boy isn't like Us and Them the people. 

The little boy kept seeing dead people. As major experts keep telling us, we the humans are strongly inclined to see very bad people—and to see such bad people in groups.

We're wired to see Us, the very good / very smart people, and Them, the very bad, very dumb people. Within this framework, we see very bad people all the time—and they're always found in groups, Over There, where The Others and the otherized dwell.

We're almost completely unable to see how dumb our own tribe is. We can only see the dumbness when it occurs among Them, as it quite massively does.

The little boy kept seeing dead people. Every morning, when we scan our tribe's leading papers, we keep seeing dumb people.

The dumb people we keep seeing are reciting our own tribe's dogmas. Quite often, Cassandra speaks to us at such times, and she tells us there's no way out.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but our own highly self-impressed tribe is just relentlessly dumb. We go out of our way to establish that fact, and then we prove it again.

Chris Matthews maintained his lunatic conduct for years back in the day. His episode with Gennifer Flowers was jaw-droppingly stupid and weird. Her love affair with Kathleen Willey was even dumber and worse.

We the blue people—we, the amazingly brilliant people—just sat there and didn't say jack. Them the people are amazingly dumb, but we can match them dumbness for dumbness. We do so every day in the week.

Question!

Can Us and Them the people survive a dumbness-driven regime in which everyone sees very bad people, and sees such people in groups? 

Top experts all say we can't. In a way, Cassandra was able to see dead people too, and she says those experts are right.

Full disclosure: We're avoiding the most interesting thing we read and researched this morning. After all these years, at long last, we no longer see a point.

(It's related to Kevin Drum's reference to VanDerWerff v. Iglesias as seen in this new post. We're not suggesting that there were any "bad people" involved in that striking matter, which of course could never be resolved in any ultimate way.)

In this, a possible week that was, we're finally reaching the point where a living person with an active awareness just pretty much has to give up. In the end, even the Bruce Willis character was forced to abandon his pose.

We humans can be amazingly dumb—and we constantly see bad people. It's the wiring, nothing more,  those despondent top experts have said.