Mr. 'Crazy Eddie' Goes To Washington

In the New York area during my teenage years, the airwaves were covered by commercials for a consumer electronics chain called "Crazy Eddie", with a distinctive frenetic, loud-mouth character who would scream the tag line "His prices are IN-SAAAANE!!!"

As it turns out, they were, and the chain eventually collapsed in a spectacular fraud scandal.

Before the collapse, the name made its way into the science fiction of author Larry Niven, who, somewhat prophetically, used it to represent an idea from an alien species, the Moties. This idea has been on my mind lately, as I think about the Congress and particularly the political news from Washington.

Here is how Niven describes it:

Within the Motie culture there is a form of silliness so common that it is represented by a legendary being. A Motie goes "Crazy Eddie" by trying to keep things as they are when they are clearly about to change. He sacrifices long-term for short-term goals.

When a city is so heavily populated that all available vehicles are engaged in moving food and water in and garbage out, and none are left even to evacuate the inhabitants, then it is that Crazy Eddie leads the movers of garbage out on strike for better working conditions.

In Niven's fictional universe, the legendary Crazy Eddie represents a certain kind of self-defeating fanaticism, a commitment to a cause which ignores, no, which actually makes worse everything surrounding it.

What makes Crazy Eddie 'crazy' is his acting as if the impossible can be achieved. Part of Niven's novel highlights how belief in doing the 'impossible', in a less toxic form, leads to innovation and technological advancement, but that taken to an extreme, it is, truly, crazy. It makes things worse, sometimes much worse.

What brings this novel read long ago back to mind lately is contemplating the way that the modern Republican party has gone beyond ambition all the way to full-bore "Crazy Eddie". The story of the George Bush era has been that of fiercely seizing on toxic insane ideas, and making them real, simultaneously transforming the public discussion, so that tacit acceptance of such insane things is commonplace.

To use Niven's illustration, they have not only convinced the garbage haulers to go on strike, they've spread an ideology that garbage haulers by rights shouldn't have to work, because their economic theory clearly shows that by increasing food and water shipments into the city, garbage and waste production will drop to nothing! And it's not just that they treat insane things as sane, but they are fanatically devoted to them, and hostile to any who suggest alternate ideas.

How is it that we have people campaigning for President pressing both for continued war expenditure and more tax cuts? How is it that Congressmen vote against sick children and for a lame duck with historically low approval numbers? How is it that an Attorney General nominee can't admit that a torture technique (dating back to the friggin' Spanish Inquisition!) is, actually and not hypothetically, torture?

I used to think it was about duplicity, or hypocrisy, or power-hunger, or greed, and I'm sure there is plenty of that. And it's true that, more than ever, inside-the-Beltway culture is cut off from the real world, and convinced of its own importance. But it's gone on so long, and gotten so extreme, that it seems to have transformed. It's not just more-of-the-same, it's become something different. Our politicans and government have gone "Crazy Eddie."

Their leadership is IN-SAAAANE!!!

Update: How is it that a Senate Majority Leader is on the verge of ignoring a hold request by a member of his own party, forcing him to filibuster a bill providing immunity for helping the President violate the privacy of Americans?