America the Paranoid

Dating back to the colonial era, the American character has been partially defined by mistrust and suspicion. From Salem to McCarthyism to Glenn Beck, Americans have a history of deep distrust for their government, the media, and each other. Ultimately, it doesn't matter who is in the White House, Americans will forever take to the streets and voice their displeasure at injustices both real and imagined.

To the many people who admire Barack Obama, it is appalling to see images of him defaced with Hitler moustaches and swastikas or to hear a U.S. congressman shout him down at a joint session of Congress. In response, the American Left has accused the Right of launching attacks that go beyond reasonable criticism. Yet, how many times did we see George W. Bush hung and burned in effigy, or see charts that compared the former president to a monkey? Bush was regularly denounced as a Nazi, a callous villain who would stop at nothing to turn the U.S. from the world's greatest democracy into a government controlled police state.

The similarities in tone between demonization of the previous administration and the protests against the current one are uncanny. In essence, both are an outgrowth of Americans' unique capacity to strive for the best by suspecting the worst. What's more, the correlation seems to have flown over the heads of many on both sides of America's great political divide.

The single greatest aspect of what allows America to continue this tradition of paranoid rage into the 21st century is the prominence of the most outrageous theories in both the mainstream media, and increasingly, the Internet. Speculation that 9/11 was an inside job refuses to subside. Ironically, it is usually those who ridicule Bush as an idiot that propagate this theory and its implications of diabolical genius. Skip ahead a few years and America has produced the Birther movement, a group that contends against all logic and evidence that the president was born in Kenya. Both accusations have drawn subscribers online and both have received significant media attention, despite the absurdity of both claims.

Paranoia is a self-sustaining cycle. Latch onto one idea you will see every action through the prism of that theory. To those who believed that Bush was actively seeking to convert the US into a dictatorship, even policies as unrelated as his moral opposition to stem cell research were provided as proof. Likewise, those who believe Obama is a foreign Marxist will view all of his policies in the context of what they suspect is his depraved socialist agenda. While it is often laudable to criticize the policies of one's government, it is another thing entirely to mold real world events into one's preconceived notions about what is supposedly going on behind the metaphoric veil. It is then that you cross the line from dissent into irrational indignation. Despite the historical greatness of their nation, it is a distinction that many Americans have yet to make.