“...It is time to wake up”

Stockholm Syndrome Republicans

by Bryan Zepp Jamieson
11/19/04
 

I have a friend who is fond of a particular koan, sometimes prefacing his public addresses with it. The koan, like all such, is a statement of such simplicity so as to seem self evident:

“When your dream becomes a nightmare, it is time to wake up.”

Like all such zen statements, the mere fact of its utterance demonstrates that it is neither simple nor straightforward. For most people, it isn’t a matter of conscious control, and someone awakening from a nightmare usually does so out of fright, and not from awareness that it was a nightmare. I’m frequently aware of the fact that I am dreaming, and it is only when I lose that self-referential detachment that I fall into a nightmare. Otherwise, I’m just doing the somatic equivalent of munching popcorn and looking to see if I can spot the wires on the closet monster.

So when my friend, who considers Choice to be the defining element of being human, says “it is time to wake up,” he isn’t postulating that a conscious choice is being made. (An unconscious one, certainly!) It merely means that a point has been reached, events have come to a point where change is necessary.

Nightmares, like shades of color, are things that most people know instantly, and find impossible to describe. “Scary dreams,” like “different wavelengths,” is an accurate description, but too general to do much good. Nightmares are also like trees. Say the word “tree” and an image comes to mind instantly. Did you think of a sequoia? I did. If you didn’t, you clearly have no idea what a tree is!

Get people to describe their pet nightmares, and while there might be points of commonality, no two are exactly alike. Everyone knows what a maple tree looks like, and knows it isn’t a sequoia. But no two maples are identical.

No two people agree on what a nightmare is. Tears For Fears, in their bleakly brilliant song, “Mad World” sang, “It’s really kind of funny, it’s really kind of sad, that the dreams in which I’m dying are the best I ever had.”

Not only is the intensity of nightmares a subjective experience, but they are defined by comparison to waking life. For some people, a dream in which they have a vague sense that they may have mislaid their eyeglasses is enough to jolt them awake, in a cold sweat. What could someone stuck on one of America’s cold and cruel death rows dream of that could be a nightmare compared to his waking life?

One friend refers to Republican voters who aren’t independently wealthy or hopelessly god-struck as “Stockholm Syndrome Republicans.” The Stockholm Syndrome refers to a phenomenon in which a captive begins to identify with his captors, and forms a “willingly” submissive and dependent attitude toward same.

It’s an apt description. You have tens of millions of people who have suffered under Republican policies, losing thousands in benefits for a measly $300 tax cut that wasn’t even a real cut, but had to be repaid the following year. They groan about “tax-and-spend” liberals, but fail to recognize that more than three out of every four dollars amassed under the federal debt came under Republican administrations – less than one in eight dollars came from the New Deal or the Great Society.

They love Republicans because Republicans protect them from evil – they literally believe that. Talk to a Stockholm Syndrome Republican and you will discover that Republicans protected them from Saddam Hussein, have brought freedom and democracy to Iraq (immediately after the election, brave American troops just liberated the hell out of the “insurgents” in Falluja) and brought Christianity back to America.

Most of all, Republicans protected them from liberals. You know liberals: those awful people who brought you the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and America. The ones who want to subject decent Americans to everything from movies about Kinsey to banning bibles.

Stockholm Syndrom Republicans really believe liberals want to ban bibles. It’s amazing to hear.

“Freedom is on the march!” It sounds like one of the slogans from those grainy black-and-white newsreel features from the forties, but it’s one used frequently by Republicans to assure their followers that they are taking good care of them. Only through mindless obedience can one be free.

Freedom, by its very definition, does not march.

The Republicans are building a paternalist image – have been for years, actually. Chris Matthews, one of those well-tended creatures filling the television niche once occupied by journalists, blatted joyously after the election that “the President” had a “prescription” for the economy, and would bring the “war” in Iraq to a successful end, and all the Democrats had to decide is whether they were going to work with the President, or just interfere.

He really said that.

The most recent examples of these dreamers embracing their nightmare came in the twin stories: Merck, the pharmaceutical giant, learned in early 2000 that their best-selling drug Vioxx was killing a lot of people. Between then and last month, when they pulled Vioxx off the market, at least 3,000 people died from taking Vioxx. Osama bin Laden would be pleased with Merck, which killed more Americans than even he could. But Merck stood to lose billions if the truth about Vioxx came out in 2000; better to rake in the profits and use some of them to fight the subsequent court fights, and set some aside to bribe former American Congressmen to whine that trial lawyers were destroying the pharmaceutical industry with frivolous lawsuits over the deaths of unimportant people.

But media attention is focused on ONE death, a girl who died after taking the abortifacient drug RU-486. There’s nothing to indicate the drug actually had anything to do with the death, but abortion was involved, and that got the Blob Squad in high dudgeon. And they do love to scream their victimhood to the skies.

Stockholm Syndrome Republicans will assume that RU-486 is a liberal conspiracy to destroy families, but that Merck is a poor, misunderstood victim of circumstance that was only trying to help people and is now beset upon by those evil trial lawyers and judges.

When your dream becomes a nightmare, it is time to wake up.

But what do you do with people who are convinced that their nightmare is their only friend, and see waking up as a threat?

A point has been reached, events have come to a point where change is necessary.

Before the nightmare becomes the waking state.