Crazy (Signs Of The Times, Eight.)

Captain Mandrake: General Ripper, sir, as an officer in Her Majesty's Air Force, it is my clear duty, under the present circumstances, to issue the recall code, upon my own authority, and bring back the wing. If you'll excuse me sir. [Mandrake tries all exits and finds them locked] I'm afraid sir, I must ask you for the key and the recall code. Have you got them handy sir?

General Ripper: I told you to take it easy, Group Captain. There's nothing anybody can do about this thing now. I'm the only person who knows the three letter code group.

Capt. Mandrake: Then I must insist, sir, that you give them to me.

[Ripper lifts a folder off of his desk, revealing a pistol]

Capt. Mandrake: Do I take it, sir, that you are threatening a brother officer with a gun?

Gen. Ripper: Mandrake, I suppose it never occurred to you that while we're chatting here so enjoyably, a decision is being made by the President and the Joint Chiefs in the war room at the Pentagon. And when they realize there is no possibility of recalling the wing, there will be only one course of action open: total commitment. Mandrake, do you recall what Clemenceau once said about war?

Capt. Mandrake: No. I don't think I do sir, no.

Gen. Ripper: He said war was too important to be left to the Generals. When he said that, fifty years ago, he might have been right. But today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

~From the film Dr. Strangelove

I saw this last night, and it pissed me off.

There's a lot of reasons for that, but chief among them is that both my Mom and her partner are retired Social Workers, neither is a Marxist or anymore "Woke" than would be the professional standards for a job dedicated to dealing with mental health crises and social problems. In fact my Mom's partner is a US Army Aviation veteran (both Active Duty and Army National Guard) who fought in Vietnam and the Gulf War and who, except some interruptions (like for when he went to college) had a career spanning 30 years. Dude is basically a conservative Democrat, a lot more Joe Manchin than a Tim Walz type. Hell, My Mom had a small business for easily the entire first half of my life and, although nobody in my family was ever really hard-core conservative, she only really started shifting to being a Democrat in the second half of the 1990's.

She raised me to be a Republican, I'm a United States Air Force security forces veteran. Hell, *I* was pretty much the last person in my family to actually make the switch from Republican voter to Democratic voter, and I still maintain that I did this under duress in 2008, primarily because conspiracy theories and racism were deal-breakers for me, but also because I didn't like Sarah Palin one bit.

And I've known plenty of conservative or Republican social workers, not least the counselor I had (though the VA) when I had my mental health crisis...but I'd say that very few of them are MAGA and the reasons for that should be self-evident.

A good day on the job for Jordan Peterson is that he says dumb shit and gets money.

A good day on the job for the average social worker might well be preventing somebody from killing themselves.

Social workers are typically underpaid, overstressed and massively overworked, and in a lot of places the budgets they have to work with are set by Republican legislatures...and it's their job, given those constraints, to produce good outcomes for distressed people, the mentally ill, needy families and so on.

And while I'm at it, a fair number of social workers and the agencies for which they work are explicitly Christian, because after all Christ Himself specifically commanded Believers to help the needy, the orphans, the widows, and so on.

I fully well realize that all this shit is probably lost on idiots that are banging on about Communism...which has not been a thing since 1989 despite the very serious efforts made by Vladimir Putin to bring that shit back, efforts in which Republicans are fully complicit, by the way...in 2024.

Trying to equate modern, American Democrats with Communists pretty much is just crazy.

But then, I actually know some stuff about actual political systems, not just the Fox News Fantasy Football version.

So let me translate all this crap into Republican for ya.

There's this other guy I know.

We'll call him Tarzan, it's his actual nickname, don't ask me why. He was basically...and I'm gonna be very politically incorrect here because it's the truth...the town welfare rat in the town right south of where my Mom lives. He had a half-ass business selling CB radio type shit for quite a few years, a wife who didn't work, and a bunch of kids they pretty much let the school system raise.

Tarzan is massively mentally ill, the fuck if I know with what. 

In 1990 me and a bunch of kids from the immediate area I lived in changed schools from the town to the north of where my mom lives at, to the town to the south, and I met this motherfucker. One of his kids was in one of my math classes and there wasn't a week went by during the school year that he didn't show up to scream at somebody at least once. He did give a shit about his kids, for all his shitty abilities in taking actual care of them.

Not necessarily a bad guy, although he was also in and out of jail on a regular basis, more a result of his being bat-fuck crazy than anything else.

And it's through that situational aspect that my Mom got to know this dude, and helped him actually resolve some issues back in the early aughts.

But here's the fuckin' thing.

In 2000, for reasons that remain mostly unknown to me, Tarzan decided to run for Sheriff. He lost, massively, as it turned out, to a registered Democrat (as if that really means much when it's a cop.)

I think he was bored, because the last of his kids graduated from high school, joined the Marines and got the fuck out, and never came back.

Again, though, the fuckin' thing is that his insurgent Independent outsider small-town candidacy was epically popular...as it turns out...with the kind of people who'd later become (wait for it) Trump Supporters.  His main (if not only) campaign merch that I ever saw or even heard about was lighters that said "Tarzan for Sheriff" on them. I heard him give a...er, speech...once. Funny enough, it was at the local corner bar by where my Mom lives.

That fucking crazy bastard talked for four hours. I didn't sit through the whole thing, I stopped in to get an order of bar food for my grandparents when it started, and when me and the girlfriend (later wife and now ex-wife) decided to make a late run to the store before it closed. All the cars were still there. So we stopped in, out of curiosity. His talk was part Fidel Castro, part Muhammar Gaddafi, part Randy Weaver with a side of Boss Hogg, all wrapped up in the kind of Libertarian arglebargle that I was only familiar with because throughout much of the 1990's parts of Northeast Michigan were hives of militia activity. 

For fuck's sake the sons of bitches tried to recruit me once, when I was in full uniform, getting gas on the way back to the Base. It was a high-school friend of mine, I told him to get the fuck out of my face before I fucked him up. It's a good thing he did, too, 'cause I wasn't kidding.

As you can probably infer, I have an extremely low opinion of that type of shit.

And he sounded crazy enough to creep out my crazy ex.

Think about that for a second.

Anyway, fast forward about five years and Tarzan was having one of many mental health episodes. That one, he'd waved a gun around and threatened to kill himself (and basically, everybody else in that town and the surrounding area who wasn't a cop or a medical professional or mental health worker said "Have fun." i.e. this had happened before, and it has also happened since.)

My mom was a relatively-new mental health professional with a Masters Degree in Social Work, and was working at her agency's satellite office in town, right next to where the Secretary Of State was at the time. She got called to the jail to try and help this dude.

I don't really know the specifics and couldn't say if I did, but she helped that dude get a clean enough bill of health when he was evaluated by a psychologist a few days later that they let him go with a bond and a court date.

I've heard and feel like I can say that much.

Sixteen years later when I moved back up here, lo and behold my freaking Doctor's Office is right across from Tarzan's...well, it's not so much a house anymore as a compound. Like in The Hills Have Eyes, but add a couple of fake palm trees.

So far as I know he's never been elected to anything (thank Jesus) but he's a perennial candidate and he does fine now as a local politician MAGA Grifter and his bargain-basement Jim Jones-plex is covered with so much Trump Swag...both purchased and self-made by this dude...that you can probably see it from space. 

It's right on the highway, too.

All of this stuff is verifiable, hell, it's all public knowledge to one degree or another. You can even look that dude up on Ballot-pedia, though there's not much in the entry (I looked out of morbid curiosity one day while I was waiting for a doctor's appointment. He's on there with his nickname listed as his first name.)

The actual fucking point here is that social workers, despite mostly being Democrats and respecting pronouns and shit to one degree or another...because you aren't going to help a person in a crisis by disrespecting them...are fundamentally non-partisan professionals who do a job, a job that's indispensable in many communities, for often not-much respect and shitty pay.

Unlike Jordan Peterson, they're not trying to immanentize some kind of political eschaton while talking like something straight out of the Empire from Star Wars. While I'm at it, my Mom hates politics.

Not everything is politically partisan, nor should it be. 

Especially people's mental health!

My Mom eventually retired in 2017 because, as she put it, the drugs had gotten too bad and all the crazy shit that was going on at the time was making her job too stressful. 

Don't be like Jordan Peterson. He's the one that's the ideologically-captured radical. And people like him want to make everything political, simply so they can keep their mob of followers amped up all the time and giving them money.

Give your local mental health professionals and social workers a little goddamn respect.

I'm asking you to because they won't.

They're only trying to help you, and more than a few go into the field because of their own issues and because they want to help people avoid some of the shit that might've happened to them.

Now, ask yourself, why the fuck do "Conservatives" want people to be crazy and distressed and miserable?? This is, mind you, a party that's gotten too crazy for Dick Cheney.

Who does that benefit?

That's all.

You figure it out.

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Seven

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. ~George Orwell, 1984.