Several weeks in rural Ireland may have softened the emotional carapace required for any extended immersion in American politics these days, but it's hard not to be taken aback by the televised images of people opposed to healthcare reform carrying guns to rallies at which President Obama is speaking.
At least a dozen people openly displaying everything from an AR-15 assault rifle to 9-millimeter Beretta sidearms were in the crowd outside the hall where Obama spoke in Arizona on Monday. The state is one of those that have a so-called open-carry law, which allows people into public places with loaded weapons. Their appearance at recent rallies is supposed to signal their implacable opposition to the "tyranny" of healthcare reform.
In Hagerstown, Md., last week, a man appeared at a town hall meeting hosted by Sen. Benjamin Cardin (D-Md.) with a sign that read "Death to Obama" and "Death to Michelle and her two stupid kids."
Something has shifted since Obama's election. Along with the now mindlessly normative red state/blue state polarization and autonomic politicization of even the most trivial incident, there's a kind of hysteria that seems to be creeping in from the fringes -- a new tenor to our disagreements and a startling attenuation of reason.
For people in my end of journalism, barely two hours now pass without the arrival of one or more e-mails -- or e-mailed "investigative" articles -- from people who continue to insist that Obama is not a native-born American citizen. Despite the fact that the governor and chief medical officer of his home state, Hawaii, have confirmed as recently as late last month that public records confirm the president was born there, the so-called birthers continue to assert that he's actually a Kenyan, or an Indonesian or even a Canadian.
Some of these characters pirouette off that delusion into charges that Obama secretly is a Muslim, that his educational record is fabricated (tell that one to his classmates) or that he covertly belongs to an underground Marxist party that lurks somewhere in south Chicago and has long been planning a socialist coup. One awaits the inevitable revelation that his "real parents" were among the space aliens everyone knows the government keeps hidden in Area 51.
