My father died in a VA hospital in Waco, Tx. I grew up there. He was a US Army veteran of WWII. He served in the Signal Corps along the Ledo Road in Burma. After the war he studied electrical engineering at Purdue on the GI Bill.
I find the spectacle of a Governor of Texas and a US Senator more than just pandering to the ignorant. At a minimum it is a big slap in the face to my father and all of those who are part of the US military in Texas. There could be half a million people who live and work on all of the military bases, VA hospitals and other installations such as NASA. That doesn't count the plethora if defense contractors who do work for the Pentagon.
There is something much deeper going on here that we should really be very concerned about.
People like to laugh at this but this is not funny. If Jeb Bush or Scott Walker become the next President we will be dealing with more of this and on a national scale. Please follow this for a contemplation as to why this is a problem, that one politic party has become infected by a viral sort of thinking.
We need to dust off history books and the study of anthropology and psychology about the mass hysteria of the 1600s in Europe.
This is beyond our vocabulary because we have not seen this as far as we know.
This is a byproduct of the massive amount of money that conservative oil interests and others have spent over the past fifty years to beam thoughts into the heads of conservatives in order to manipulate them to vote against their own interests.
The total probably can't be added up. But it may be in the trillions over the decades. This isn't about TV commercials during election time. This is about the money it took to set up all the think tanks. These are really operations in which boatloads of smart people with Journalism or PR degrees and backgrounds, English majors and others are hired to work all day, every day to influence the media. this is about the money needed to buy radio station licenses and set up radio networks to support right wing talk radio, including Rush Limbaugh. This is about the money that has been contributed to preachers and church's that by now have twisted the gospels to support the oligarchy. This is about what it takes to lobby Congress and fifty state legislatures. A lot of money.
This has had an effect on the culture, and particular on the heads of people who are inclined towards conservatism.
This 24/7 effort, relentlessly pursued over decades has driven people mad.
The facts in Texas are obvious. There are lots of military bases. Ft. Hood is a massive reservation area where the US Army does maneuvers and exercises constantly, as it has since about the time if the Spanish American War. There is a network of VA hospitals that serves veterans in every part of the state. My father, a World War II veteran of the Burma theater, died in one. A massive facility in Waco.
Madness is partly the result of separating what you know perfectly well on the one hand, from having your head in a completely different artificially created world and speaking from that without spotting the contradiction.
In the 1600s people were massively convinced across Europe into a public hysteria over witches. Tens of thousands of women were hounded and improsoned and tortured and executed in front of cheering crowds.
This hysteria over the issue of women's liberation and a true feminist running for president may be a part of this. The deeper reasons for the anti science crusade by the right may be a cultural throwback to the Puritans, and their roots in medieval Europe.
Wilhelm Reich was a German psychiatrist who had to go into exile after writing a book in the 1930s about mass consciousness and the ability of a society to develop psychopathology just like individuals.
We may be seeing a modern version of an old European proclivity to madness on a societal scale.