In 1980, Ronald Reaganthat befuddled Hollywood actor and darling of the Tea Partywas elected president. He served two terms, during which time he created, trained and funded what later became Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. He also supported apartheid in South Africa, genocide in South America, and ignored the AIDS epidemic for four years. I could go on.
However, pertinent to this Senior Moment is his closing of mental institutions and turning psychiatric patients out onto the streets. This disregard for the sick and vulnerable ushered in a new kind of Christianitya phony, selfish Christianity, not based on "Peace and Love Thy Neighbor," but "Guns, God and Hate Thy Neighbor." Jesus Christ must be turning in his grave, or he would be if he hadn't risen into heaven to join the celestial choir with Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Whitney Houston, Kurt Cobain, Liberace and Elvis Presley.
Well ,Mr. Dead President, karma is a bitch, as those mental patients you tossed out of the asylums have taken over the GOP, attaching themselves to the hull of the thieving Republican pirate ship like barnacles, refusing to let go. You made this bed; now lie in it. The clinically insane now have a political party of their very own.
The brain-dead, the baffled, the demented, the dribbling and the completely ga-ga are now strutting their insanity on the political catwalk. The much-predicted 21st-century zombie apocalypse is upon us, as these petulant half-human/half-blueberry muffins walk among us attempting to turn the United States back to the 1950s. Even Nostradamus, the 14th-century prophet and alchemist who predicted Napoleon and Adolf Hitler, didn't see this one coming.
It's a scientific and medical fact that people who think they can TALK to God are mentally ill. They just are. Thomas Szasz, the psychologist, wrote, "If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia."
If Donald Trump, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum and the other untreated Republican psychiatric patients had said in the 1970s what they're saying today, they would have been locked away in a rubber room. They would have scrambled eggs and grits shoved under their cell doors three times a day on metal trays. The highlight of their days would be the nightly Jello cups. They would be wearing straitjackets instead of Armani suits. They would be receiving 800 milliamps of electricity directly into their skulls in a futile attempt to shock some sense into them. They would be frothing at the mouth from the side effects of psychotropic drugs. And, most important of all, they would be hidden away from the rest of us, where they can babble away with God until the cows come home.
The Victorian asylums in the 19th century in London were filled with people who thought they could talk to God. Talking to God was even scorned by the Catholic Church at one time. Joan of Arc and Francis of Assisi, both on speaking terms with God, were pronounced demon-possessed. Only later were they canonized to exploit a gullible and superstitious public.
Trump, Huckabee, Santorum and their ilk need specialist help and drugslots and lots of drugs. These stooges all turn to God to guide their political careers and, therefore, are all insane, tent-revivalist preachers, carnival barkers, snake-oil salesmen, con artists, grifters and charlatans. They are all trying to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge.
I don't want to be accused of being nut-phobic. I have nothing against lunatics or people with mental health issues. In fact, some of my closest friends are certifiably insane. I'm not saying we should go back to the days of locking up psychiatric patients, electro-convulsive therapy or padded cells. That's not what I'm saying at all. Those were the dark ages. Lunatics have a place in this world. Lunatics make wonderful fiction writers, artists, sculptors, village idiots, court jesters, circus clowns and serial killers.
What lunatics are not, and never will be, are presidents.
The GOP zombie apocalypse is upon us. The walking brain-dead want your vote.