the madness of the king

Okay, so today some guy went nuts in Dallas. Started bellowing with the clearest voice he’d ever known in his life, something about the Truth. Something about waking up and seeing the filth of his life and the path of lies he’d always followed. What does any of it matter, he raged, if it’s based in a lie; just another staged reality to poison the world, just another black vapor to choke on. The atmosphere of our collective world can only hold so much. These stinking opaque clouds won’t dissipate without great effort…and there are so many of these vapors floating like demons through our days. Will that atmosphere soon overflow and destroy us? He knows his epiphany sounds like madness but with the genuflection of the reawakened he persists in his vision, which only increases the perception of his madness in the eyes of the sleeping robots around him. It’s not that he doesn’t care –he does-, it’s just that he cannot cross back over to where he was, it is in fact the whole point: it would be a betrayal of his own heart, which he has realized he is utterly incapable of ever doing again.

This didn’t actually happen today. It didn’t happen in Dallas, or maybe it did, probably it did. Probably it happened in a dozen cities around the world, or a thousand cities and small towns and army encampment; in grocery stores and shopping malls and corporate office complexes, wherever people come together to perpetuate the society they adore but do not understand. The point is that it does happen, it happens all the time even if we don’t hear about it. Even if we’re more interested in the judgment of our favorite contestant on TV’s newest sensation, or the fluctuating price of gasoline, it happens. We are all going mad, one at a time, or in bunches. Our world has increasingly turned into a poisonous environment of lies, betrayal, murder and subterfuge. But of course, what has changed? Wasn’t Egypt like this, or Mandarin China…even in the Quaker communes people slept with each other’s wives and put hemlock in each other’s morning coffee to settle rankling grudges. What’s different now? What is different now is the wealth of rationalizations we have for inviting murder into our homes, for selling it and dressing it up as something necessary and honorable, or at least excusably profitable.

That’s what he was yelling about in Dallas, and the woman in Utah, the high school principal in Provo, and the cop in Pittsburgh. They’ve all lost their jobs, of course, and will find their ways into a byzantine labyrinth of “help”: pills and hospitals, twelve-step programs. The pills designed and dipped into that poison by the same criminals they were raging about. The programs and seminars that drove them to madness to begin with. Now they’re thrust back into the vapor and there they will wither. Not just ignored but in fact hidden from the rest of us, lest we get a glimpse into the kernel of truth that fueled the urgency of their message.

Here’s a thought: what if they’re right? What if some of them aren’t six shades of loony but rather finding themselves confronted inescapably with the truth and finding the courage to let it out, to free themselves from the terror that keeps our lips screwed tightly together, only opening to furnish prescribed responses? What are we doing then? Are we calling them crazy while we ensure the survival of our own collective insanity? If not, if we are so sane, then why did that man go crazy today in Dallas? If it wasn’t today, it’ll be tomorrow, you can be sure of that. It might be me, or it might be you bellowing in the clearest voice you’ve ever known, that the Truth has found you at last. And it will be the rest of us telling you you’re mad and packing you off to a medicated limbo. Good luck.