Today I figured it out, and I feel much better.
This morning I was befuddled. I had just received an appalling e-mail forward, one of a series on the general subject, which demonstrated by the force of anecdote and analogy how you must deal with an enemy: Hit him and hit him and beat him and beat him up and beat him some more and when he is finally cringing on the floor and moaning for mercy beat him and beat him some more and make him suffer and did I mention beat him some more and then beat him up, and when he has finally mumbled out the words "I was wrong" you will live in peace.
It had some application to current affairs on some other continent. The application was not left to one's own perspicacity. (I could provide documentation to anyone so crazy as to want to confirm that I am not exaggerating.)
This sort of thing used to the be property of red-state lumpenproletariat, ignorant of the world, deliberately and maliciously miseducated, and panicked at the bidding of the government in proportion to their insulation from the rest of the world by thousands of miles of ocean and in some cases an expanse of coastal states, terrified by the hideous thing that happened in New York and therefore requiring much larger DHS appropriations to protect Podunk, while New Yorkers who breathed the toxic smoke and the incinerated and decomposing remains of their fellow citizens have repaired what they could and gone on living and being -- thank God! -- New Yorkers. A thing for which I'm not sure I'd have expected ever to thank Divine Providence.
But no more. Now things like this come from people who are not pig-ignorant, who used to be, and still are in many ways, reasonable people. Largely they are people, and here we approach getting to a point, who belong to some ethnic group that shall not be named here, but I assure you its history in the USA is honorable or maybe stellar, and with a claimed heritage from those who gave us the upper limit of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
Alan Dershowitz going over to the dark side may be shrugged off as almost predictable, but there are decent people who seem to be heading his way. Of course, the lever is the same "The very existence of your people is at stake" lies that the red states take from Washington, but the audience is different, or I thought it was. This upsets my lifelong assumptions and is disturbing.
But tonight, driving along and contemplating the necessity of exercising self-discipline to destroy such stuff without reading, so as not to be thinking about its wrongness to such an extent that useful thoughts are displaced, I figured it out. This is not real life.
I have strayed into a production of Rhinoceros.
