Whether we're a nation or a church, there's one right I'm going to try to hang onto, and that's the Constitutional right to blog, even if I can't find 'blog' anywhere I look in the text of the Constitution, which must pain the Originalists.
The next 'must-read' book on my list is this book, by Geoffrey R. Stone, called Perilous Times, Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism about how freedom of expression has suffered when paranoia has crept in.
Paranoia is the mental state of excessive fear, characterized by the loss of ability to think coolly and rationally. Panic ramps up the imagination and leaps to instantaneous conclusions. This substitute for thinking results in much craziness.
"Never underestimate the suggestibility of a hysteric," warns an old medical adage, to which I would add, "or the imagination", which is the same thing if you think about it.
No matter what you tell a hysteric, or panicky person, he, or she, will come up with a seemingly plausible reason why your explanation contains a loophole through which he, or she, can drive a truck through, the keeping the illusion intact, alive, and well.
One does not reason with a hysteric. One must take advantage of it.
Paradoxical intervention, it is called.
If you were working the psych ward when a patient who called himself Napoleon refused to clean his room, it would be a mistake to tell Napoleon he should clean his room because the hospital required clean rooms and all the other patients had clean rooms. Napoleon might attack.
However, if you told Napoleon that all good generals kept their quarters clean the better to prepare to wage war, you might find a clean room on your next visit.
Paranoia, hysteria, and panic, cannot be effectively cared for by the person experiencing it.
Sometimes the whole country may experiences a mania related to one or all of the foregoing heightened emotional states, as after Pearl Harbor on the West Coast, and 9-11 on the East.
The cause of the panic may be perfectly real.
The question is how sane is the reaction.
After Pearl Harbor, the realistic reaction was to fight a war. World War Two, in fact. It had already been raging on the ground in Europe for two years, with Hitler's 1939 invasions of Chechoslovakia and Poland, and later France and the London Blitz. No question there was a war going on then and there.
9-11 was a true terrorist attack on which the president declared we were at war.
Yes, in a manner of speaking.
We invaded Afghanistan. Good. Terrorist bases there. Training.
We invaded Iraq. Questioniable. Wrong reasons when there were other better ones that satisfied me. Way bad result, unplanned for.
Terrorism?
Still fighting that. Returns not all in yet. Specter of political game playing for election advantage carries a slight odor of manipulation.
Panicky thinking at the time?
Hard to say.
We're too close.
Gotta ask the outsiders.
Don't wanna do that, do we.
In such case the only hope is to listen to the dissidents and outsiders, like the French and Germans, fat chance and Good Luck.
Better we should listen to the Religious Right.
THEY know how to get rid of Demons (and Dems), don't they.
If only they could find Osama Bin Laden, whose half-brother just came out with a new line of perfume in Paris and isn't that nice. At least the whole family's not rotten.