Association of Free Citizens

I have been puzzled by the events leading up to the 2008 election.  It seems as if some ancient divine archetypes floated down and attached themselves to Obama and Palin just to make humankind mad.  The deeply visceral reactions both these people have elicited goes far beyond the normal scope and range of human insanity.  People of great notoriety normally attract a smallish number of folks who see them as either divine or demonic and react accordingly.  In the case of these two the numbers of worshipers (in both the positive and negative sense) is greater than expected by several orders of magnitude.

I do not believe in archetypes as having other than mythological reality (Pace, Dr. Jung!), but I am reminded of my father’s admonition to me as a kid, “Whom the gods would destroy they first make angry.”  The original Greek has, I believe, “would first make mad” (as in insane).  This would mean, as I see it, we, as a culture, are in deep doo-doo not so much because of the actions of our national leaders, but because vast swathes of the population have taken leave of their senses.