How MAGA Madness Reminds Me of Islamicists

Islamicists and MAGA Extremists continually seek fiercer, deadlier evocations of their respective beliefs like cocaine users graduating to crack and ultimately mainlining the stuff in their veins.

By

David Gottfried

The internal MAGA conflict over Jeffrey Epstein – should we have a delusional political discourse about Jeffrey Epstein, Hillary Clinton and white slavery or leave it alone as it was just Political BS dreamed up for the campaign – reminds me of what Bernard Lewis once said about Muslim politics.

Bernard Lewis, a scathingly brilliant “Orientalist” (This ancient academic term has fallen out of favor.), focused on the Mid-East, that seething, turbulent hothouse in which theology and ideology collide into each other and create the ideational approximation of nuclear fission.

Lewis was often denigrated as an antiquarian oddity, a Winston Churchill who had come out of his grave and stoutly declaimed, “I’m not through with my ponderous and proud pontifications. This British Lion has more roaring to do.” Although he may seem like a hoary Tory, I think his ideas were often uncommonly wise.

Lewis said, among other things, that because of quirks in Islamic theology, and sundry psychological aberrations, Muslims will constantly eat their own because no one will be sufficiently shocking and explosively radical to really turn them on.

They are looking for a leader and group who will give a sermon that is sort of like Mick Jagger singing “Brown Sugar,” the difference being that Jagger is singing for sex and the Muslims are chanting for holy war. They pine for a great catharsis of bile and bloody hate blitzkrieging on your video screens.

Islamics often bump off their leaders for a leader who will be more emphatic and explosive. They may first love Mick Jagger, believing that he can burn down our school so we won’t have to go back in September, but after Mick Jagger wastes their time by being feckless and fashionable with Princess Margaret, they dump the Stones and go apeshit over Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols.

I contend that American conservatives, since the time of Barry Goldwater, are the same way: They keep gravitating toward more and more extreme iterations of the conservative dogma, and as their rhetoric becomes more florid and ferocious, their acts become more violent and virulent.

First, a brief review of how Muslim political expression has changed since the 1950’s.

The Muslim Drive for More and More emphatic and combustible Expressions of their Ideology

Muslims, in the 50’s and 60’s, gravitated toward radical but seemingly reasonable reds like Egypt’s anti-colonialist firebrand Nassar. Nassar and his supporters were warlike. They were loud. But they were like Nikita Khrushchev of the USSR and not like a suicide bomber hallucinating orgies with 72 virgins.

However, after Egypt’s defeat in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the Muslim world tired of the Soviet Union and sober socialist revolution and longed for some romance. They wanted Saladin. They wanted MGM epic desert spectacles.

Therefore, they assumed the form of religious outlaws. They were like Alice Cooper blasting music with all the thunder of the Vatican. As Alice Cooper would sing, “No more, Mr. Nice Guy,” they would shout, “No more, Mr. Felafel vendor.”

However, when that didn’t give them Nirvana, they went for newer and crazier derivations of the same tantrum throwing teenager who is upset ‘cause he can’t cop some ludes. In the late 70’s, they looked for that old time religion, and they got a whopping dose of it in the Iranian revolution. These guys didn’t pussy foot like Arab Marxists who studied revolution on the Parisian Left Bank. They didn’t call the United States an Imperialistic, Capitalistic engine of exploitation. They called the United States the Great Satan. With terminology as stark and savage as that, any peasant will get all riled up, whether it be a peasant on the teeming Arab Street or a peasant raised on the turgid, tyrannical tracts of Baptist preachers in Alabama.

Of course, after a while the Arab street was no longer tickled pink by talk about the Great Satan. Like a cocaine user craving bigger and bigger doses of the divine white powder, they sought language and imagery which screamed with more incendiary superlatives. They didn’t want a mere revolution. They wanted the Mother of all Revolutions. Consequently, the Shiites invented the cosmic holy hate of Al-Qaeda, and when that became passe, the orgiastic craving to kill conjured up ISIS.

The Mounting Frenzy of American Conservatives for More and More Decisive Gut punches into the Belly of the Hateful New York and Californian Sinner

The Maga Bunch is the same way. In fact, the conservative movement has been getting crazier and crazier ever since Barry Goldwater got the Republican Presidential nomination, in 1964, by saying that extremism was cool.

Although Goldwater talked like a crazy man, he still seemed like he was on planet earth, as dull as Des Moines, Iowa. With his big boring black glasses, you knew that he was as tethered to reality as any square physics major spending his weekends trying to invent newer and better nuclear weapons.

But then American conservatives started to get crazy. First, they were crazy in their infantile explosions of confederate passion. George Wallce ran around the country, preaching segregation and condemning King and the Kennedys with all the barbarism and stupidity of Scarlett’s Daddy in “Gone with the wind.” Lester Maddox, a former governor of Georgia who was so crazy that he seemed to have been created in the coke-filled imagination of Truman Capote, demonstrated his love of Barry Goldwater by selling bottles of Gold-colored water in his Fried Chicken restaurants in Georgia. Nixon’s Attorney General’s wife, Martha Mitchell, condemned Julia Child for cooking Fancy pants French food, imploring her to be a real American by cooking some Southern Fried Chicken.

When Reagan came along, conservatives got crazy in the sense that they made vials of Thorazine seem indispensable. Reagan visited the graves of SS murderers in Germany, made common cause with the racists in the Mississippi County where Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman were killed, and some Republicans celebrated David Duke, a patent Nazi, with plenty of jackets bearing epaulets of swastikas.

After the year 2000, our politics became so singularly schizophrenic that it seemed that every day America woke up to find a new blonde debutante, spouting delusions. ready to start a Jihad for Jesus.

First, there was the sleek and sinewy Ann Coulter, who frankly said that the United States should invade Muslim nations, kill their leaders and convert the people to Christianity.

(Coulter seemed to be the Right’s answer to Natasha of the Bullwinkle and Rocky cartoons of the early and mid-60’s. Natasha was a very thin, gorgeous, evil Russian spy who, with her buddy or lover Boris, were planning to blow up America. Natasha looked just like a slender lock of licorice, and whenever my seven-year-old self ate licorice, I imagined I was eating Natasha)

Then an assortment of gorgeous blonde bitches from Fox News taught America that the best way to report the news was to pretend you were writing a novel and just make-up colorful plots about anything that would make a character from the sit com Andy of Mayberry anxious. As exhibit A, I offer you Marjorie Taylor Greene’s contention that Jews went to outer space to shoot laser beams at the earth to create wildfires in the Southwest. This is on a par with a favorite right-wing obsession about gay narcissists and abortionists.

Allegedly, gay men, who have to look faaaabulous, are promoting abortion because the collagen and stem cells from new borns and aborted embryos have special creams and gels that make your skin stay young – and Faaaabulous -- forever.

People who have delusions like this are apt to believe anything and will develop a certain predilection for delusions pertaining to sex, children and sexual immorality. Hence, the Q anon mishigas was waiting in the wings as soon as right wing dingbats posited a link between abortionists and gay rights activists.

The Trumpy Conundrum: How to talk like a paranoid schizophrenic and govern a country at the same time.

When you are actually running a government, you must once in a while orient yourself to reality. Trump, for all his lunacy, isn’t sick enough or brazen enough to contend that Hillary Clinton is having sex with 9-year-old boys and girls. However, his base has been so violently wedded to these sorts of beliefs – they stormed the capital on January 6, 2021 because they believe that Hillary is a sexual predator and witch – that they cannot abide by Trump’s desire to move past Jeffrey Epstein. And so, like psychotics who thought that Al Qaeda was too genteel and had to be supplanted by ISIS, they may anoint as their next leader some new demonic son of a bitch, “slouching toward Bethlehem.”