A Collective Madness

Years back, I was an avid fan of The Twilight Zone and One Step Beyond –  which we watched in Venezuela as Un Paso Al Mas Alla. It turns out that One Step Beyond is now on Prime, Roku, and You Tube, 39 episodes that began in 1959. The narrator is as good as Rod Serling on Twilight Zone. His voice is almost hypnotic.

I remember that on a particular night of the week,  my sister, Mary,  and I would run into the living room or the kitchen, wherever our parents were, and announce that Un Paso Al Mas Alla was on. Bring the popcorn!

These episodes were just 30 minutes. Short, enjoyable, eerie. & I think it was on one of these where we watched a story about a peaceful, loving town where, one night a year, they were permitted to indulge in a collective madness.

The people went totally batshit, killing each other, smashing windows, stealing whatever they could get their hands on. They tortured each other with glee, blood ran in the streets. Of course, this was the late 1950s, so they didn’t show the blood. But you get the idea.

In many ways, it seems that the country now has  been seized by a similar collective madness that has lasted much longer than a single night. It may have begun the night that trump came down the escalator with melania to announce his candidacy for president and that was in, what? 2015? 2016? Now it’s nearly 2024.  I’d hoped this collective madness had ended with the insurrection on J 6, but it seems to have only gotten worse.

It’s likely that Trump will be  the Republican nomination for president in spite of his 91 federal indictments and the civil charges against him  If  he were any other American citizen, he would be seriously gagged by being tossed his jail for his repeated attacks on judges, law clerks, election workers and anyone else connected with these indictments and civil cases whom he perceives as an enemy.

The trump malignancy has spread throughout most of the republican party and is now evident in their chosen Speaker of the House, Michael Johnson,  a deeply religious, hardline conservative and an ally of trump’s. Against abortion, of course, and with a long history of LGBTQ rhetoric, this guy is the epitome of how the trump malignancy has spread.

Then you have the other politicians and governors like DeSantis who seem to think that if they mimic  Trump and become even more right wing, it increases their chance at the presidency. But as governor, Desantis acts like an entitled king, banning books, dictating how children are educated, denying women the right to make decisions about their own bodies and health care. When he planned to run for the presidency, he got the Florida legislature to toss out the law that stated if a Fla gov ran for the presidency, he or she had to cease being governor. The legislature now acts like his personal genie in the bottle, granting him his every wish.

This collective madness hasn’t lasted for just a single night like it did in One Step Beyond.  It has persevered and spread, just like Covid did. And maybe that’s the whole thing: this collective madness is very much like a pandemic.