Weary of the weird

Turn the page and take your meds

A good friend working as a corrections officer down at the jail could only take it for a year. By the time he quit, my sane, mentally healthy pal needed therapy to recover from immersing himself in a world peopled with many broken souls.

“Gets to you,“ he said.

I get it now. We’ve been immersed in the broken MAGA world for nearly a decade. Those of us who were relatively sane have severe lunacy fatigue in this, as we approach a decade of Trump psychosis and his band of psychotics. Are you as weary of the theater of the mad as I am?

Women who don’t have children are psychos. They’re eating the cats and the dogs. Biden’s laptop. Watch me dance to my playlist favorites for half an hour.

Following this babble makes one feel trapped in a carnival fun house of Fox and mirrors with no way out.

I am not a shrink. I am not a mental health expert. The only nuts I know anything about are cashews and pistachios.

Dear Editor:

Fitzsimmons’ use of the word “nuts “ to describe the mentally ill is offensive.

Tony Walnuts

But I’m not going to let my world renowned ignorance stop me from diagnosing every strutting Mussolini and deranged delusional daffy duck out there who needs help.

Allow me to assert from my perch of ignorance that MAGA folks at the top are not weird, they are profoundly troubled.

The whole cast of Cuckoo’s Nest now wants to control the Senate as well as the House. They have not gone laughably “crackers”, they are seriously ill sociopaths, frightening psychopaths and malignant narcissists. The parade of "looney tunes” from Mar-a-lago who want to turn us into a banana republic are not “bananas”. They are seriously deranged megalomaniacs, delusional paranoids and dangerously rabid cult followers and I’m exhausted from struggling “satirize” their toxic madness. It's like staring into a snake pit of raw insanity for much too long.

Today I attended the Obama Rally on the UA campus and bathed in the normalcy of thousands of normal people gathering in a nut free environment, no gun nuts, no religious nuts, no racist nuts. No conspiracy nuts. Just normal everyday Arizonans of all sizes, shapes, colors and creeds.

I savored the warmth and freedom of knowing there was not one tiresome right wing loon within 5-miles of this rich diverse multicultural gathering of normal Tucsonans.

Despite my lunacy fatigue I took in a debate earlier this week. This contest of the minds was between Ruben Gallego, an accomplished sane individual— a marine for God’s sake— and his crackpot opponent, Kari Lake, a fine example of the unfit, the unwell and the untreated rising to the bottom. She is a Greek tragedy, a MAGA majorette marching away from mental health and into historic oblivion.

Mrs. Lake believes her enemies are following “demonic" ideologies. Let’s hope after she loses this election the true “Queen of Arizona" confesses to her intake nurse that she believes demons are afoot and out to get her. An important detail that will help with a proper diagnosis and treatment.

Lake wrote a book called "Unafraid. Just getting started." Clearance bin tripe. Doing what? Stalking President Trump at his home? She sees herself as unafraid and golly gosh darn just getting started on anything but exploring her crippling delusions with a mental health professional.

Often such individuals lack self-awareness. Exhibit A is her 2020 post-election loss tweet: “Arizonans know BS when they see it.” Kari, we know a megalomaniac with delusions when we see one.

Do you?

Arizonans know BSC when they see it. Bat shit crazy.

Lake's narcissism is as transparent as her lip gloss. Her delusional megalomania has been center stage for years. We all saw her Devil wears Pravda debate performance as a defensive chronic liar in denial, a fevered soul impervious to reality.

In short, an ideal Trump candidate.

Before President Obama made his pitch to us to work more we heard from Ruben Gallego, Kirsten Engel, Regina Romero and other remarkably normal people. No lies. No fantastic claims. No threats of violence. Just normal people out to help other normal people have better lives.

We all know souls who have wrestled with mental illness much of their lives, people who have courageously sought help, stuck with counseling, treatments and meds, earnest sufferers who have had good days and bad days but yet heroically persist in daunting self examination.

And we all know souls who will never submit to diagnosis and get the help they need and for a select few Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” asylum is their refuge, and cynical right wing media paranoia machines like X, Q-Anon, Info Wars and FOX news their enablers.

MAGA has long welcomed, nourished and attracted candidates who are egomaniacs, sadistic bullies, sociopathic charlatans, lunatic paranoids, and your run of the political mill irrational gun stroking conspiracy obsessives. MAGA is a carnival side show of dysfunctional freaks who are awkward social outcasts.

Violence is in the air. Decay is in their candidate. The Democratic Party offices in my city have become dark storefronts because of the gunfire attacks on the Tempe office. Most of the Trumpers in my suburban neighborhood (Treasonous lunatics who don’t think character matters) are rumored to own AR-15s. Why? I can’t imagine.

The normal sane moderate Republicans are gone, driven out by ill souls like the attention craving Marjorie Taylor Green, who tells us pasteurized milk is bad and space lasers are real.

Or deranged broken souls like Trump who insists we should inject bleach into our arms, Putin is “swell” and windmills cause cancer.

Or our very own Kari Lake who believes she is our duly elected Governor of Arizona, or as her leader Trump calls it, “Azurasia”, calling to mind the cartoon trope of the insane asylum inmate who believes himself to be Napoleon Bonaparte contradicted by the hundreds of inmates shouting the same claim. Yes, Madame Governor Bonaparte. Oui.

MAGA doesn’t care about the mental health of its leading flickering lights.

The party’s indifference to madness calls to mind the old joke about the family that isn’t concerned that their uncle believes he is a chicken. “Why haven’t you taken him to a doctor?”

“We need the eggs.”

They must really need candidates.

MAGA attracts many messianic souls like Steve Bannon or Mark Finchem, Arizona's furtive as a weasel nonsense addict who believes himself to be a “messenger” gifting us with his special nonsensical insights about where ISIS will strike next. Of course Finchem was just elected to the legislature. A lot of MAGAzonans are happy to validate his belief he is a savior, yet one more basket case who is “trodden upon”.

Persecution complexes are rampant among Trump’s exhausting whiners.

These tragically tiresome founts of "secret knowledge” who are obsessed with calling attention to their incurious selves day after day, week after week, cycle after cycle and rather than seeking help they are driven by their obsessive madness to seek the public stage.

Our governing bodies were not intended to serve as warehouses for the deranged, parliaments for every unproductive pathology know to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Our Founders did not envision our state houses and our congress as lunatic asylums offering a disgraceful public stage, a theater for babbling lunatics, perverts and cruel deviants.

The MAGA Party hierarchy is a refuge for the emotionally and mentally troubled.

Our sensationalist media rewards the disturbed with fame and notoriety, distracting them from ever engaging in the healthy self-examination that comes only from reflective solitude.

On election day help the disturbed and profoundly troubled. Cast your vote for the sane, the mentally and emotionally healthy among us. Reject the troubled. Drive them from public life and straight into private counseling for their own good and ours, where they can “work out” their issues without harming others, our communities or our nation.

Relieve them of the duty for which they are sorely unfit. Help them to find truly meaningful productive lives, to stop hurting others, themselves and our nation. Those MAGA folks we laugh off as nuts, dim bulbs, unhinged goobers, cranks, flakes, gun fetishists, fanatics, loons, screwballs, lunatics, cyber ninja nitwits, wing nuts, and crackpots are our brothers and sisters in need of compassionate mental health care.

As for me, when this election season ends, whenever it ends, I’m seeing a shrink.