Heading For Jonestown

I've marveled, the last couple of days, how the crackpot right can muster outrage over such a small thing as the President's choice of mustard. I have, in the past, assumed that similar outbursts were symptoms of insanity. Doug over at Balloon Juice goes meta and clarifies things for me:if you look at it from the right perspective. Dijongate—along with a
great deal of what happens on Glenn Beck—doesn’t make any sense. It
isn’t clear to me that it’s even supposed to make sense...I can’t
help but feel that the whole texture of wingnuttia is starting to feel
different these days. And that more generally, any kind of mythology
eventually moves towards forms that cannot be understood on a literal
level.If you look at the overblown reaction of the far right to utterly insignificant "outrages" it becomes clear: these are neither sincere reactions nor empty political posturing. They're much more complicated than that. They're rituals designed to simultaneously bond and reassure a diminishing community of True Believers. I've assumed that the right would catch on to how nutty it sounds when it accuses President Obama of being, for example, simultaneously fascist and socialist. I've assumed they'd moderate their rhetoric so they didn't sound loony. Now I understand: rationality is not an issue because the point of what they're doing is not to persuade people on the outside to come in, but to reassure those on the inside that they're members in good standing of a viable "movement." In a threatening environment, the best way to do that is to move toward forms that, as Doug says, can not be understood on a literal level. So, like members of a cult which perceives itself under attack, the far right is talking more and more only to itself, using code words and constructs that are indecipherable to those on the outside. They are, in effect, preparing for the ultimate act of purification, after which they'll be out of our hair for a while.