Plenty of perfectly sane adults go to Star Trek conventions, dressed up as Star Trek characters, even dressed up as aliens, speaking Klingon, and indulge themselves in their weird little world, the world of phasers and photon torpedos and new planets and the Borg. Then they go home to their relatively normal lives, putting the world of Star Fleet behind.
That’s the key. They go home and take off the costumes and the fake ears.
Plenty of normal people dress up and go off to Ren Fest, dressed as kings and queens and varlets and wenches, gnawing on their turkey legs, drinking their fake “mead”. And then they leave that world behind and go home.
Even children open up Harry Potter books and dive into a world of magic and fantasy. Then they close the books and go back to reality.
But there is a particular fantasy world that some people have trouble letting go of. Planet Wingnut. Every day the fans of this particular fantasy turn on Fox and Rush, and listen to their fantastic tales of this mythical planet, where the president is a Marxist Muslim from another country, where Big Gummint is plotting to take away all your rights and all your guns, where all white people are afraid, where all black and brown people are lazy and scary by turns, where the astounding lies of Beck and Hannity are actually true. The problem being that the listeners turn off their televisions and radios – and refuse to go back to reality. They think that Planet Wingnut is where they really live, in the real world. As though the other folks really thought they were on the bridge of the Enterprise, or at the court of Henry VIII, or at Hogwarts. The wingnuts have created a fantasy world for themselves, but they refuse to leave it.
Rush claims that leftist terrorists caused the BP spill, that Obama has ignored the Tennessee flood, that Obama threw a party to celebrate the unemployment rate going to 9.9 percent, that Obama lied about the Times Square bomber’s ties to Pakistani terrorists, that Homeland Security handled the Times Square case incompetently, that America supports arresting people without due process, that Obamacare will cut your insurance and raise the deficit, that only the rich pay taxes, that Obama caused the Dow to crash…those are the wingnut lies, JUST from Rush Limbaugh, JUST from today.
People listen to this crap for hours every day, and it’s practically all the “news” they get regarding the outside world.
And these are the people who control the agenda of the GOP. People who are clinically insane. And instead of plastic “phasers” and Tudor-style broadswords, these people have real guns with real bullets. And they really think the people around them – you and me – are the Klingons who need to be destroyed. In fact, the crazier they are, the more they indulge in all the Obama-wants-your-guns paranoia, the more likely they are to have guns.
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