The DNC: Deinstitutionalized National Census

Democrats launched the deinstitutionalization movement back in 1963, after which state mental hospitals began closing one by one, and the chronically mentally ill began dispersing into the streets, under bridges, and into the faculty lounge.

So in this sense, the DNC is a welcome event, because it is the only time we have so many of these lost souls in one place, and can therefore get a handle on the depth and scope of the problem.

In other words, the DNC is an uninhibited celebration of florid pneumapathology, in which we are privvy to a rainbow of disordered thought concerning just about everything and anything, so long as there's a pot of government gold at the end of it.

Viewing the proceedings is very much like peeping through the two-way mirrors that were once deployed in state mental hospitals, through which patients could be observed without disturbing their spontaneous behavior. Your television is like the invisible fourth wall of the insane asylum. But you don't need the quadrennial DNC to peek in, since MSNBC is available five days a week.

We are all familiar with Einstein's theory of imbecility, which involves doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result. And in the next few days, we will hear all about why voters should do the same Obama again, even while expecting different results.

Now, man is one. But in what way is he one? Genetically? No, that only accounts for a very superficial oneness of form, not content. Genetics never stopped anyone from bashing in the other guy's skull and eating his brain.

Rather, the true oneness of man derives from the Logos -- the transcendent Reason -- we all share. In the absence of this Logos, no agreement is possible because no unity is conceivable.

To put it in more mythospeculative terms, men can only be brothers if they share the same Father. For the left, fatherhood is unnecessary and probably oppressive. A taste for patricide is not the cause of their exile from the Law; rather, alienation and self-exile render them patricidal, since they feel unjustly excluded from the father's table.

"The Logos," writes Voegelin, "is the common bond of humanity." In its absence there can be only a multitude of private worlds consisting of passion + imagination.

And since there is no father to come down and sort things out -- to pull the cosmic bus over and knock some heads together -- it leads to perpetual brother-on-brother violence -- i.e., sibling rivalry -- in which the more powerful brother prevails. And which leaves sisters completely out of the equation, except as booty. Or, women are acceptable so long as they are a flock of flukes, flakes, and flaks for a phony feminism that simply envies the brothelhood of vulgar menfolkers.

The Logos is the only light we have, or which illuminates us all. For Voegelin, there is inevitable conflict "between the men who lead a waking life and the sleepwalkers who take their dreams for reality."

"I have a dream," said Martin Luther King. It was an eschatological dream -- the same one that animated America's founders -- in which "one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together."

Only a severe literalist would take this as a political program. But then the EPA would never permit such actions against hills, mountains, and other rough places.

Again, only brotherhood -- and therefore a descent from common fatherhood -- makes this dream even dreamable: "With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood" (King).

Obama and his fellow pneumapaths profess and practice precisely the opposite: only by provoking the jangling discords of racial resentment and class envy can his band of homeless (groundless) and fatherless (Logo-less) orphans secure power for another four years.

King's dream is not about the vulgar world of politics, but about the proper ground of politics. And "in turning away from the ground man turns away from his own self; thus, alienation is a withdrawal from the humanity that is constituted by the tension toward the ground" (Voegelin).

In other words, man, being uniquely aware of imperfection -- and therefore the superior and the Perfect -- lives in the tension between the way things are and the way they ought to be, the latter of which is articulated via the eschatological dream that lures us in its wake.

In The River, the political moron Bruce Springsteen asks, duh, "is a dream a lie if it don't come true?" No. It is a lie if it does come true, because a dream is a dream and reality is reality. When Obama tries to make the dream from his twisted father come true, it results in a multitude of private nightmares.

In other words, when a person insists that the irrational is rational, he is beyond help. Obama invites us to join him in his alienation from the ground, and to band together with fellow misfits to steal it back from whoever supposedly appropriated it -- millionaires and billionaires, Rush Limbaugh, Todd Akin, Paul Ryan, Ann Romney, or whoever is the personalized and frozen target of the week.

For Voegelin, those who represent the hostile rejection of reality "aggressively claim for their mental disease the status of mental health."

Even so, "man cannot live by perversion alone" (ibid.). We can only take so much harassment from malignant utopians and daydreamers in high places. These are the dangerous idealists who want to inflict their dream

"of perfection by violence on everyman's humanity. In the activist's language, Utopianism has become the great symbol that is supposed to justify any action, whatever its human cost, if it pretends to overcome the imperfection of man's existence."

But one thing you can say about the attempt to get to reality via unreality: you can't here from there. For

The man that is will shadow / The man that pretends to be. --Eliot