We know that societies and countries go crazy in as many varied ways as do individuals (France in1789; Germany in 1933, China in the 1960s, etc.).

Sometimes the symptoms of national dementia are immediately apparent (the guillotine, the Cultural Revolution). At other times only slowly does it become obvious that madness has taken over a land.

With hindsight after the madness has run its course we can see seeds within a culture that blossomed into poisonous flowers. But who, before 1933, could have predicted that the Germany of Bach, Goethe, Beethoven, and Mann would produce Auschwitz?

The United States has certainly seen its share of demential outbreaks: three centuries of slavery continuing even under a constitution proclaiming equality for all, almost complete genocide of Native Americans.

Drop the fancy word. What we’re talking about here is insanity, a group of people going crazy.

When a nation goes crazy, not everybody joins in. All it takes is people at the top, people with power losing contact with consensual reality, believing that their reality is the only reality ("You’re either with us or against us," "Our God is bigger than your God").

Lately the group presently ruling America has been showing disturbing signs of dementia:

the increasing willingness to demonize others (Axis of Evil, etc.). grossly inappropriate affect (George Bush’s 9-11 reaction in the Florida classroom; Tom Ridge's duct tape suggestion; Tom DeLay’s remark, "I am the federal government"). talk of suspension of the presidential election (a coup by any other name). Cheney's Senate--and other—public outbursts of profanity, etc.). delusional thinking (the high-level repetition of what are demonstrably lies as if just saying makes it so ("Mission accomplished"; the susbstitution of crypto-religious "science" for the real thing). rock-solid belief that anyone who disagrees is hate-filled and non-patriotic). the prohibition of photographs of the returning war-dead. belief that war in the Middle East is fine because it means we’re that much closer to the day when Jesus returns. the practice of preemptive war. widespread detention of persons without access to courts of law or other legal redress. Chain-of-command failure to accept responsibility for mis-deeds and lies (WMD’s in Iraq; the alleged connection between Saddam Hussein and Al-Queda; Abu Ghraib).

And so on.

What makes this possible American dementia especially troublesome and possibly very dangerous is that, through the de-regulated and massively corporate media, the disjunctive beliefs are spread and repeated daily. Thanks to talk radio, Fox News, and the like, a large, frightened, gullible subset of the American populace is kept in a state heightened fear and blind faith in the "wisdom" of the leaders.

The world watches and recoils in horror and disbelief as America goes crazy.

What do you do if the biggest kid (by far) on the block loses his mind and defines reality in ways that serve only his own deluded self-interest?

Obviously there is cause for concern when another group of moneyed crazies is loose in the world and is willing and able to recruit suicide-minded young men to further an equally crazed agenda. That behavior is tragic—and dangerous—enough on its own.

The greater tragedy and the greater danger occurs when the leadership of the dominant power in the world itself begins losing touch with reality. Result: a conflation of delusion and self-referential patriotism which is enormously seductive for a certain large segment of the American populace.

George Bush has repeatedly and in various contexts asserted that he believes God is speaking through him. Given the stakes not just for America but for the world, this puts us far beyond satire and into true dementia.

Remember the old Fugs song? "It’s a quarter to twelve and there’s a mad man at the wheel."

When it was released at the height of the Cold War, Dr. Strangelove seemed frighteningly prescient. With the end of that conflict, the movie’s prescience became, briefly, a mere artifact of history. Watch the movie now and you will be chilled by its renewed—and dead-on-accurate—prescience.