MADNESS: Madness is as madness does!

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 10, 2024

Blue America meets Forrest Gump: "Stupid is as stupid does," Forrest Gump famously said.

On occasion, the statement is also attributed to his mother. We can't instantly confirm Mrs. Gump as the original source of the quote.

Stupid is as stupid does? Except in the most egregious cases, we try to avoid that word. We all say dumb or misleading or mistaken things on occasion. 

Also, it's the rare occasion when anyone's views can be said to be wholly and indisputably correct.

That said, Stupid is as stupid does—the statement has lived on within the culture! In our view, it's a bit like that with madness too—and with that state of mind's second cousins.

As we noted yesterday, the madness was general over that forest in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The fairies were out in force that night, and they crept inside human minds.

About a decade later, Shakespeare presented King Lear, taking us to the place where a lord of men was raging on the moors. Subsequently, President Nixon sobbed and punched the floor—and 37 medical health specialists wrote essays saying that another American president seemed to have a (very serious, indeed "dangerous") mental illness problem.

It was obvious madness when Arianna sewed that deeply disturbing fourth button on Candidate Gore's disturbing suit of clothes. That form of madness went on for years, and the sane people knew to shut up.

Along with its second cousins, our madness comes in varied forms! Some forms are more virulent—they may involve clinical "mental illness. But other forms can sweep through crowds in something like a type of tulip mania. 

The term Groupthink is often used in such circumstances, as is the term True Belief. As for the other term we have just used, this is where it comes from:

Tulip mania 

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. It is generally considered to have been the first recorded speculative bubble or asset bubble in history.

In many ways, the tulip mania was more of a then-unknown socioeconomic phenomenon than a significant economic crisis. It had no critical influence on the prosperity of the Dutch Republic, which was one of the world's leading economic and financial powers in the 17th century, with the highest per capita income in the world from about 1600 to about 1720. 

The term tulip mania is now often used metaphorically to refer to any large economic bubble when asset prices deviate from intrinsic values.

Forward markets appeared in the Dutch Republic during the 17th century. Among the most notable was one centered on the tulip market. 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. 

"Your money or your life," Jack Benny said he once heard a mugger say.

"I'm thinking! I'm thinking!" the exasperated skinflint replied.

In the matter of this famous mania, the stakes were a bit different. The madness had driven Dutch citizens to this:

Your wages over the course of a decade for a single tulip!

The tulip mania came and went. Over here, so did the Salem witch trials, roughly sixty years later. In fairness, everyone believed in witchcraft then, including Isaac Newton.

(Full disclosure: Our own Cousin Elizabeth married the Reverend Hale after the madness ended. Reverend Hale had turned against the Salem trials when his own first wife, later deceased, was suddenly accused.)

Madness is as madness does, and it comes in various forms. Sometimes, it can take the form of TribeThink, or even Red or Blue NationThink, especially inside fevered brains.

In fairness, what should be scored as a "fevered brain?" No mathematical formula allows us to make foolproof designations! We're left with matters of subjective assessment—ideally, with us the people trying to form our assessments in good faith.

This brings us to a pair of remarkable documents which have now appeared on the front. Yesterday afternoon, hey sent us back in search of two other documents on which we've never remarked. 

(Also, to Al Sharpton's speech.)

We're going to link you to those four documents now, just to create the resource. We'll start with the two documents which appeared yesterday, then include the two others:

I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.
Uri Berliner. The Free Press, April 9, 2024.

Which Trump lies stick? Republicans believe some falsehoods more than they did six years ago, our poll finds.
Glenn Kessler, Scott Clement and Emily Guskin. The Washington Post, April 9, 2024.

Trump deploys racist tactics as Biden rematch appears likely
Laura Barron-Lopez, Amna Nawaz. The PBS NewsHour, January 26, 2024.

Interview with cult expert Steven Hassan
Joy Reid, The ReidOut, April 2, 2024.

Then too, we'll cite an astoundingly negative book review, recently published by The Atlantic. 

Long ago, we knew one of the book's two authors a tad. He's a very good guy, and we vote the same way--but does a cousin to madness possibly lurk in the book which was reviewed beneath this headline?

An Utterly Misleading Book About Rural America

Are fairies dancing in a forest inside that new book? We haven't read the book, but we can't say the idea is impossible.

Wow! For scholars of mania and / or madness and its various cousins, yesterday was truly A Day That Was. 

For starters, we'll direct you to Kevin Drum's post about the first document on that list—the document which emerged from deep inside NPR. Kevin's post appears beneath this headline:

The peculiar tale of NPR’s decline and fall

We had read the FreePress essay in question before we saw Kevin's post. We had reacted to the first three items in that essay in much the same way Kevin did—though we will record one difference:

Kevin opined that the author, NPR's Ira Berliner, had "fallen prey to a sort of conventional centrist wisdom." We were struck by the lack of basic analytical skill on display in those first three chunks of Berliner's essay, even coming from a highly regarded member of the American mainstream press elite.

(More on that tomorrow.)

Full disclosure! We also agreed with some criticisms of Kevin's post—criticisms which were offered in comments. We also thought that some of the other comments to Kevin's post showed the shape of the problem we now all live with—the (alleged) problem under review at this site this week.

We'll have to spend a few more days critiquing the contents of those four documents. We think they show a type of madness-adjacent behavior which is infesting, and failing to help. our own Blue America tribe.

For today, we'll leave it at this:

We were most directly struck by the headline atop that Washington Post report. Has an editorial Rubicon been crossed? Once again, the headline says this:

Which Trump lies stick? Republicans believe some falsehoods more than they did six years ago, our poll finds.

To our eye, it looks like an editorial Rubicon has been crossed. 

During the Trump presidency (and beyond), Kessler's long list of Trump's misstatements never used the term "lies." 

At the Post's FactChecker site, Kessler would report the precise number of Trump's misstatements, a slightly overwrought type of journalistic act in itself. 

But when Kessler counted the many misstatements, he would only refer to falsehoods and misleading statements; he wouldn't refer to "lies." Now, it looks like that bond-simple, age-old distinction has been tossed.

It's the most obvious distinction in the book!  A misleading statement or a simple falsehood won't typically be a "lie!" 

That's such a boneheaded, age-old distinction that it defies belief when major journalists and academics decide to conflate the terms. But when fairies start dancing in the forest, it turns out that our most "highly-educated" leadership cadres are eager to wipe away such distinctions. 

At times like these, when the tulips scream, our flawed brains tell us to go there. Fairies danced in the forest and Lear raged on the moors; and Blue America's elites love to do that.

We blame it all on David Corn, who we knew and very much liked long ago. We blame it all on Lawrence O'Donnell.

At Fox, Mark Levin is now "The Man Who Screams." To see (a small part of) Lawrence's famous screaming attack from the days of the Bush-Kerry campaign, you can just click here.

We saw it happen live! It went on and on, then on and on, right through a commercial break and into the next segment. For the record, it wasn't a helpful performance at all. Nor was it clear that John O'Neill was even wrong in his assertions, let alone that he was lying.

Was a bit of madness involved that night? If so, such things sometimes happen. This seems to be the full transcript.

Madness once gripped Agamemnon, lord of men. It held him for more than nine years.

Madness gripped Chris Matthews for twenty months all through Campaign 2000. Earlier, we had lunched with Chris at The Palm.

The mainstream madness was all around during that twenty-month campaign. We chronicled it day after day, sending out mailers as we did, but no one stood up and said so.

Later, Kevin asked, in a slightly annoyed fashion, why we kept saying it so much. Our answer came to us straight from Olympus:

We've kept saying it because we can't get anyone else to do so!

The people we're told to trust today all knew it was going on. Aside from a few tiny dollops here and there, they also chose not to tell you.

In fairness, we wouldn't call that madness at all. We'll guess it was income protection!

Tomorrow: What Uri Berliner said

This afternoon: Amazingly, Gutfeld! again