THE CRAZY: Here Comes the Sun, David Brooks suggests!

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2022

Some parts of The Crazy don't leave: At some point, the fever fueling the Tulip Craze finally broke.

Today, it's sometimes called the Tulip Mania. The leading authority on the craze thumbnails it as shown:

Tulip mania was a period during the Dutch Golden Age when contract prices for some bulbs of the recently introduced and fashionable tulip reached extraordinarily high levels. The major acceleration started in 1634 and then dramatically collapsed in February 1637...

...At the peak of tulip mania, in February 1637, some single tulip bulbs sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled artisan. Research is difficult because of the limited economic data from the 1630s, much of which come from biased and speculative sources. Some modern economists have proposed rational explanations, rather than a speculative mania, for the rise and fall in prices.

The 1637 event gained popular attention in 1841 with the publication of the book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, written by Scottish journalist Charles Mackay, who wrote that at one point 12 acres of land were offered for a Semper Augustus bulb...Although Mackay's book is a classic, his account is contested. Many modern scholars believe that the mania was not as destructive as he described, but was limited to cliques of urban artisans.

It was just those cliques of urban artisans! The craze was limited to them!

According to the leading authority, the following may explain the way the mania began to subside: 

The collapse began in Haarlem, when, for the first time, buyers apparently refused to show up at a routine bulb auction. This may have been because Haarlem was then suffering from an outbreak of bubonic plague. The existence of the plague may have helped to create a culture of fatalistic risk-taking that allowed the speculation to skyrocket in the first place; this outbreak might also have helped to burst the bubble.

There was no bossa nova back then. For that reason, the authority blames the rise and fall of the mania on the bubonic plague!

The tulip craze has long existed as a narrative metaphor—as a symbol of the way large populations can (at times) go wild. In recent years, our own country has suffered from an episode of The Crazy—an episode featuring widespread unsupported beliefs driven by such figures as Jerry Falwell and, of course, Donald J. Trump.

The mainstream press corps played a leading role in various parts of this era, especially those involving wild claims about both Clintons and Candidate Gore. This morning, though, David Brooks suggests the possibility that this decades-long fever may have started to break.

Here comes the sun, Brooks has said or suggested—and he could even be right! For the record, here's the way his new column starts, headline included:

The Fever Is Breaking

A convulsion has shaken America and many other Western democracies over the past few years. People became disgusted with established power, trust in many institutions neared rock bottom, populist fury rose from right and left.

On the right, in America, this manifested as Donald Trump. To his great credit, Trump reinvented the G.O.P. He destroyed the corporate husk of Reaganism and set the party on the path to being a multiracial working-class party. To his great discredit, he enshrouded this transition in bigotry, buffoonery and corruption. He ushered in an age of performance politics—an age in which leaders put more emphasis on attention-grabbing postures than on practical change.

Brooks is focused on the manifestations of this fever "over the past few years." In our view, he goes a million miles out of his way to be fair and balanced concerning Trump, but he's expressing a hopeful view, one which has been widely voiced since this Wednesday morning.

For our money, the fever which Trump took to a new level got started decades ago. We'd include the passing mania which had missing children on the nation's milk cartons, along with the mania which sent owners of preschools off to die in jail.

As a people, we've been displaying a vast ability to buy into the unfounded ans The Crazy. As Brooks considers the past few years, he says the fever has broken:

BROOKS: Performative populism has begun to ebb. Twitter doesn’t have the hold on the media class it had two years ago. Peak wokeness has passed. There seem to be fewer cancellations recently, and less intellectual intimidation. I was a skeptic of the Jan. 6 committee at first, but I now recognize it’s played an important cultural role. That committee forced America to look into the abyss, to see the nihilistic violence that lay at the heart of Trumpian populism.

The election of 2022 marked the moment when America began to put performative populism behind us. Though the results are partial, and Trump acolytes could still help Republicans control Congress, this election we saw the emergence of an anti-Trump majority.

Have the elections which (mostly) ended this week really "marked the moment when America began to put performative populism behind us?" Has the price of our tulips begun to come down? On balance, have we as a very large, flailing nation started to walk away from The Crazy this week?

At this site, we can't be sure. That said, some manifestations of The Crazy are very deeply entrenched. Over the course of centuries, these manifestations have produced vicious behaviors around the world. 

A few weeks back, NBA star Kyrie Irving linked himself to one of these endless episodes. At the start of this report for RollingStone, Jon Blistein describes some of the poisonous claims to which Irving linked: 

BLISTEIN (10/29/22): Hours before another Brooklyn Nets loss on Thursday, noted “free-thinker” and basketball player Kyrie Irving took to Twitter to boost a movie and book, Hebrews to Negroes, stuffed with antisemitic tropes.

The 2018 film was directed by Ronald Dalton, Jr., and based upon his 2015 book of the same name. A description for the film states that it “uncovers the true identity of the Children of Israel,” while a similar one for the book reads, “Since the European and Arab slave traders stepped foot into Africa, blacks have been told lies about their heritage.” Both suggest Hebrews to Negroes espouses ideas in line with more extreme factions of the Black Hebrew Israelites, which have a long history of misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and especially antisemitism.

The Black Hebrew Israelite movement is fairly broad, comprising organizations that (per the Anti-Defamation League) “operate semi-independently.” The movement generally coalesces around the notion that Black people are the real descendants of the ancient Israelites, with more extreme factions claiming that Black people have been “robbed of their identity as being ‘God’s chosen people'” (via the Southern Poverty Law Center).

It’s those extremist sects that have often parroted “classic” antisemitic tropes, like claiming European Jews (often referred to as the “synagogue of Satan”) wield outsized control over society, especially in industries like banking and the media. They’ve also pushed antisemitic claims that Jews are responsible for slavery and the “effeminizing of Black men.”

At one point in the purported documentary Irving shared, Dalton (who also narrates the film) brings up the “real truth about the slave trades.” He claims that, when teaching slavery, schools don’t mention the involvement of the Catholic Church, Arab, East African, or Islamic slave traders, or “the Jewish slave ships that brought our West African negro or Bantu ancestors to slave ports owned by [Jews].”

Immediately after, Dalton pivots to the mass media, calling it “the biggest tool of indoctrination, brainwashing, and propaganda that the world has seen” and adding that it’s been “helping Satan deceive the world” for centuries. To back up his claim, Dalton utilizes a fabricated quote that’s been a staple of antisemitic literature for decades. The quote—which details the supposed control Jews have over every facet of society—is attributed to Harold Rosenthal, an aide to former New York Senator Jacob Javits who was killed in a terrorist attack in Istanbul in 1976. The “quote” first appeared two years later, published in a pamphlet called The Hidden Tyranny by a man named Walter White, Jr., who appeared to make up an entire interview with Rosenthal to push this antisemitic theory.

In introducing the phony quote, Dalton pointedly describes Rosenthal as an “Ashkenazi Jew.”

According to Dalton's film, the mass media has been “helping Satan deceive the world” for centuries. To support this claim, Dalton utilizes a fabricated quote, which first appeared in an entirely fabricated interview.

Blistein doesn't repeat the fabricated quote. Eventually, he describes parts of the Dalton book upon which the film is based:

BLISTEIN: Hebrews to Negroes, the book, contains even more instances of antisemitism...

[One] section wonders if there is “any connection” between Lucifer, Satan, Freemasonry, and Judaism and includes the claim, “Interesting enough, in earlier years, many Jews and European Scottish/York Freemasons have claimed that they worship Satan or Lucifer. Many famous high-ranking Jews and Freemasons have written books admitting to this.” 

The book also quotes the infamous antisemitic hoax, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion...

Interestingly, many famous high-ranking Jews have written books admitting to their worship of Satan! Assuming that Blistein can be believed, so Dalton says in his book.

This is the species of disordered belief to which Irving decided to link. His decision is derived from the brutal history of our deeply flawed species—a brutal history involving murderous behavior toward people who identify as Jews and towards people of African descent.

Breaking! Borrowing from sacred Wittgenstein in a totally different context, the ability to believe ugly, unfounded claims is "as much a part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing." 

The tendency to invent such murderous claims is also part of our natural history. Our species' powers of discernment are sometimes extremely limited when it comes to the adoption of such unfounded beliefs.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but we humans are strongly inclined to place our faith in false and unfounded belief. (As we'll note next week, we routinely do this in our blue tribe too.)  When Irving linked to the film in question, he seemed to be inclined to assert the worst about one historically brutalized group because of the depth of his feelings concerning the horrific way another historically brutalized group has been treated.

This morning, a news report in the New York Times appears beneath this headline:

Kyrie Irving Is Not Antisemitic, N.B.A. Commissioner Adam Silver Says

As far as we know, that assessment is some version of accurate. Sopan Deb's report begins as shown:

DEB (11/11/22): N.B.A. Commissioner Adam Silver said Thursday that he didn’t believe Nets guard Kyrie Irving was antisemitic after meeting with him in person this week at the league’s headquarters in Manhattan. Irving has been facing backlash for promoting an antisemitic film on Twitter last month.

“We had a direct and candid conversation,” Silver, who is Jewish, said in an interview with The New York Times, adding, “He’s someone I’ve known for a decade, and I’ve never heard an antisemitic word from him or, frankly, hate directed at any group.”

In a follow-up phone conversation, Silver added, “Whether or not he is antisemitic is not relevant to the damage caused by the posting of hateful content.”

Silver declined to elaborate on his meeting with Irving, citing an agreement with him to keep the details of their conversation private. 

In Silver's assessment, Irving isn't antisemitic, but his link to the crackpot film and its hateful content did create plenty of damage.

Irving is or isn't antisemitic, but he's plainly human. Also, he seems to have an extremely jumbled mind, a fact which became clear a few years ago when he attempted to discuss his claim that the earth may in fact be flat.

Tomorrow, we'll show you excerpts from that astoundingly muddled interview with Deb. For the record, Wittgenstein said this remarkably muddled behavior extends all the way up the line to the highest levels of the academy, a point we'll visit, once again, in tomorrow's report.

Tomorrow: The rational animal's words

No day not improved: Any day can be improved by listening to George Harrison's spectacularly elegant Here Comes the Sun. To see him sing it with Paul Simon, you can just click here.

Also, Simon's Under African Skies. Linda Ronstadt adds her life story to say we're (secretly) the same beings the whole world over. 

To see the same song performed with Miriam Makeba's life story replacing Ronstadt's, you can just click here. "This is the way we begin to remember," or so Simon's lyrics have claimed.