INSANITY

INSANITY

The quote is famous.

"The definition of insanity," it is said, "is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."

Its author, however, is . . . 

Disputed.

For years, the working supposition attributed the insight to Albert Einstein.  This seemed plausible.  The consummate scientist re-invented our world view.  At its most basic level, he looked at things differently, hypothesizing a relativistic space-time out of a radical challenge to Newtonian physics that empiricists spent the next century confirming.  So, it seemed, the good scientist, a man willing a la Karl Popper to falsify anything in the search for truth, would naturally tell us to stop driving ourselves crazy by expecting different results from demonstrably ludicrous behaviors. 

Unfortunately, however, there is no evidence that Einstein uttered the phrase -- no letter, note, or even memory. And nothing from the great man himself. In fact, the only actual evidence of the phrase, or versions of it, is a 1983 novel by Rita Mae Brown, and before that, both a 1981 Narcotics Anonymous ("NA")  and 1980 Alcoholics Anonymous ("AA") pamphlet.  In the latter two, "Insanity is repeating the same mistake and expecting different results."

So, on this one, it looks like the addicts beat the intellectuals to the punch (line).

Which is probably the way it should have been.

Yesterday and earlier today, there were mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio.  

In El Paso, nineteen minutes beforehand, a 21 year-old white nationalist from Dallas announced on 8chan, a far right message board,  that his planned "attack [was] a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas." He claimed white people were being replaced by foreigners (the so-called "great replacement" theory promoted by the French white nationalist Renaud Camus) ; asserted that "if we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can be more sustainable"; and praised the white supremacist New Zealand shooter who earlier this year killed scores in Christchurch. Armed with an AK-47, he then drove to a Walmart next to El Paso's Cielo Vista Mall and began shooting in the parking lot before moving inside the store.  By the time he was apprehended, twenty were dead and another twenty-six injured, some critically.  

In Dayton, a 24 year-old suited in body armor and carrying a .223-caliber high capacity magazine killed nine and injured twenty-seven in an early morning rampage in that city's entertainment district. He was killed by responding police.

In the aftermath of these shootings, the right-wing recurred to its typical, and by now worn out, shibboleths.  President Trump's acting Chief of Staff, Mick Mulvaney, defended the president against charges that his own racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric bore any responsibility for the El Paso assault, claiming instead that the El Paso and Dayton shooters were just "sick, sick people" and that Trump himself is "angry", "upset" and "wants [the killings] to stop".  Meanwhile, both the GOP's House Minority Leader, Kevin McCarthy, and Texas's Republican Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, claimed that violent video games were the cause.  For good measure, Patrick also asserted that "kick[ing]" God "out of the town square" was a culprit. Both McCarthy and Patrick made their comments on Fox's Sunday shows and declined invitations to appear on CNN.

The premise behind all these claims is false.  In the case of video games, studies have more than shown that they are not linked to and do not increase the chances of violence.  In fact, the contrary is the case.  And as for God, whether He or She enters or leaves the public square is beside the point.  The atheists are not the ones trying to take out Hispanics with AK-47s.  For that matter, there'd be a lot less carnage if Patrick and his cronies (i) worried less about where God gets to operate as a consequence of the First Amendment and (ii) stopped the Second from allowing white supremacists to sport AK-47s.

Then there's Trump, always a case unto himself.

Mulvaney's defense is that Trump is not to blame because white supremacy is abnormal. This is a version of what is known as a category mistake.  

White supremacists are abnormal in the sense that they do not define the majority of Americans or even a substantial minority.  They may even be abnormal in the sense that they suffer from some diagnosable mental illness, though this is less likely and in any case does not follow simply from the fact of the belief itself.  There have been racists and fascists throughout history who have been rational actors; the Jefferson Davises and John C. Calhouns of our history knew exactly what they were doing; so did the Ku Klux Klan; and as far as we now know, so did Patrick Crusius, the apparent El Paso shooter.  

Whether  Trump's incendiary, anti-immigrant and racist rhetoric incites or gives permission to this minority is, however, an entirely different matter.

It does.

And the notion that it doesn't is just another layer of denial Trump supporters are trotting out to defend the indefensible.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton was roundly criticized for calling Trump rally goers "deplorable".  But look at those rallies today and what they have become.  There is sheer joy on so many faces as the crowd chants racist bromides like "Send her back" or revels in the President's take down of a black Congressman from Maryland, literally enjoying -- laughing about --  the fact that his home in Baltimore had been invaded the night before.  Trump himself regularly, indeed habitually, degrades Hispanics, whether he sees them as judges whose ancestry amounts to bias against him or as "terrorists" camped at our southern border. He has separated children from their families, caged innocents, and instructed federal agents to basically terrorize Hispanics in an effort to root out the undocumented. He famously claimed that a scrum of racists and neo-Nazi white supremacists  in Charlottesvillle contained some "very fine people."  

And we're now surprised that a white supremacist drove ten hours with an AK-47 to a mall on the Mexican-American border with the express purpose of killing Hispanics to stop them from replacing whites?

Puh-leeze.

Violence is addictive.  So is racism and hatred.

They are drugs.  

Trump is the neighborhood dealer, winking and nodding at the racists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, call them what you will.  

The crack pipe is the view of the Second Amendment that puts AK-47s in the hands of people like Patrick Crusius, a view Trump shares.  

NA and AA were right.

This is insane.