Be warned. Some people in America appear to be undergoing a mass nervous breakdown. You may meet one soon in a social setting or at work and I would hate for you to be taken by surprise.
So be reassured. Surprise is natural. Most of us have had conversations with a person who seems sensible at first encounter. We listen politely as the presumptively sane person talks and talks.
But a time inevitably comes in such situations when our minds become a little confused by the drift in the conversation and we may wonder whether it's our fault that we do not fully comprehend.
Then it happens. The realization. The speaker mentions something that is just too bizarre. The thought dawns on us, slowly at first and then in a rush, "This is someone .... who is seriously off their rocker."
To be fair, people often have that reaction when reading this column. Ah, but there is method in my madness, which is more than you can say for some. Those some have had an off-the-rocker moment perhaps unparalleled in the political life of America, which admittedly is enough to drive anyone crazy.
The exact moment came the other day, when voices were raised about President Obama's speech to the nation's kiddies, a notion so vanilla, so squeaky clean and wholesome, surely nobody could object, especially as Obama would not be the first president to do this. But such a logical assumption did not reckon on mass rocker detachment.
Yes, there was always the danger that normal kids might be tempted into truancy if forced to endure such a pep talk. You would have heard no complaints from me if Obama's innocuous idea to broadcast to the kids had been criticized beforehand on the grounds that it might be so boring as to constitute cruel and unusual punishment of children. But, no.
If the criticism had been focused entirely on the Education Department's original suggested lesson plan that kids write letters to themselves telling the president how they could help him, I would have applauded that, too. Writing letters to yourself as a child can have serious consequences as an adult. It is the type of self-centered behavior that can lead one to become a blogger.
Instead, and this is where rockers became generally unglued, certain people said that the speech was about Obama wishing to spread his "socialist ideology" and making "a personality cult" of himself.
What, kids being told to work hard in school by the president is socialistic? Damn those socialists for stealing our best ideas. Next thing you know, the president won't be able to tell the kids to eat their spinach (don't tell Popeye, he'll be inconsolable).
At that exact moment when all the partisan craziness and stupidity congealed at last to form this pathetic noodle to lash the president, marbles began pouring out of some people's ears so that they could not hear themselves fall off their own rockers. I am sure that in some cases, the gabfester Glenn Beck for example, whose own rocker is but a residual stump, very few marbles were left to fall.
The shame is that off-the-rocker people actually think of themselves as conservative, which I have to believe is an affront to those remaining conservatives who have been conservative enough not to fall off their rockers.
In fairness to those good and reasonable people like Laura Bush, who declared that it is fine for the president to talk up education nationally, I wish now to give another name to those who have gone off their rockers. Let us call them crackgopers -- a melding of crackpot and GOP, their group home. I apologize to any genuine crackpots who are offended to be linked to people who believe a president's speech to kids is cause for alarm.
What a sad day for America. The home of the brave has become the land of the freewheeling cretins. Some of us have seen where this was heading in the last year but never believed that it would come to this. The infatuation with birth certificates. The alleged palling around with terrorists. The denouncement of presidential Marxism by those who like to shop at Wal-Mart so that Communist China can be enriched. We can only marvel at the extreme hatred and bitterness that finally put them off their rockers.
Obama hasn't done very well in his first few months in office. But this time his enemies plainly showed everyone where they are coming from -- and he looked much better for the comparison, as any sane person would. And it was child's play.
(Reg Henry is a columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. E-mail rhenry(at)post-gazette.com)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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