Yeah, I noticed that a lot of us have gone crazy, too.
As with other forms of dementia, the signs weren’t obvious at first. After the 2008 election, when former House majority leader Tom DeLay suggested that instead of a formal inauguration, Barack Obama should “have a nice little chicken dinner, and we’ll save the $125 million,” black folks didn’t miss the implication. References to chicken, particularly of the fried variety, have long served as a kind of code when white folks referred to black people and their gustatory preferences—and weren’t many of us already accustomed to older white politicians making such gaffes? But who among us sensed that it was a harbinger that an entire nation was plunging into madness?
Mainly, people are just unusually unhappy. But whatever the causes may be, we haven’t seen this kind of crazy in my lifetime. I don’t think we’ve seen it in centuries.
Are things ever going to be normal again? Are we ever going to be able to have a semi-honest political debate again? Or, is this it? We’ve lost our shit, and there is no going back.
