**HOW** RIGHT WINGERS GO NUTS | 1999-07-24
We live in a world where people with titles like "Professor" and "Reverend" and "Father" routinely show less intelligence than a ten-year-old child. In our society, a person who does not support silliness as national policy cannot obtain those titles. No reasonably intelligent or moral person could support leftism or respectable conservatism. But to get a title in our society, you must.
The result is that we are ruled by total silliness.
Rightists cannot accept this simple reality. Instead of seeing stupidity and callousness for what it is, no matter how impressive a title supports it, they invent vastly complicated explanations for what is going on. They invent conspiracy theories. They declare that it is all the result of a diabolical falling away from their version of God.
In other words, right wingers take leftists seriously, so they get as silly as the leftists are.
Why do right wingers all seem to go nuts eventually? The explanation goes back to a joke I heard when I was very small. A woman was walking along when she saw three men. One was plucking at the air. Another was leaning down, plucking at the empty ground. The third man was standing there pumping his arms furiously.
So the woman asked each what he was doing. The first said, "I am plucking stars out of the sky." The second said, "I am picking up the stars he is plucking out of the sky."
Then she walked up to the third man, the one who was pumping his arms furiously, and asked what he was doing. He answered, "I'm running away. These guys are NUTS!"
There are an awfully lot of right wingers who end up standing there, pumping their arms furiously.
They honestly believe they look sane.
All this is the salvation of the political left. Dumb as they are, they can always point to a right that is even dumber. They can point to wild theories of conspiracies, when it is obvious to everybody that they cannot organize a single working theory, much less a conspiracy.
They can point at rightists who declare they represent The Only True Religion, which is a laugh to everybody.
Nobody believes some clown on the right who declares he is some kind of Political Pope. Nobody believes in vast conspiracies. People CAN see how stupid and callous our leaders are. But as long as those who denounce them are even more stupid and even sillier, they will maintain their power.