"INSANITY," said
R. D. Laing, is “a perfectly rational adjustment to the insane world.”

Mass killings have become so commonplace in our
country that we have become inured to it.  Sure, we give lip service to how horrible it is, how something needs to
be done, but nothing in fact gets done.  Today the U.S. Senate voted down a bill that would have created some
very limited protection from gun violence, essentially telling the parents of
the children murdered in Newtown that their children are just additional
statistics to be counted and shelved, along with the names of the growing
roster of mass killers.

Psychopathy runs rampant, as if there is something
about the American experience that breeds it.  The movie industry glorifies it; children too young to enlist to kill
foreigners prepare by blasting away in video games; the media thrives on
it.  CNN, the 24/7 news channel, sends
its best reporters to Boston to spend all day, day after day, hyperventilating
over the deaths and maiming of hundreds of innocent race watchers.  On a slow day, they revert to ongoing
coverage of the Arias trial, the woman charged with killing her boyfriend by
multiple stab thrusts, almost beheading him by slitting his throat, and then
shooting him in the head.  She claims, of
course, self-defense.

Norman Mailer wrote back in 1957 (“The White Negro”)
how psychopathy presented an answer to the meaninglessness and ennui of
contemporary life.  He foresaw the
nascent development of a new nervous system, revolutionized by the changes in
our increasingly techno society.  Marshall McLuhan reached the same conclusion. 

Welcome to the 21^st Century!  Welcome to a society within which roam
amoral, guilt-free egoists, armed to the teeth, taking out their boredom and
outrage and hurt upon the rest of us.  The
NRA and the congress which they have purchased with their dollars are
criminally complicit in this.  For our
own protection we are forced to become ever-vigilant, a state of being “where
paranoia is as vital to survival as blood.” (Mailer)