Paranoia, the Destroyer

Silly boy ya self-destroyer.
Paranoia, the destroyer
* * *
The time device of self-destruction
Light the fuse and start eruption

--Paranoia, The Kinks

The're watching my house and they're tapping my telephone,
I can't trust nobody, but I'm much too scared to be on my own.
And the income tax collectors got his beady eye on me,
Oh there ain't no cure for acute schizophrenia disease.

--Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues, The Kinks

A nod to Ray Davies for some psychological insight into this sordid affair. It seems the Iraq War as an entity demonstrates several psychotic or delusional qualities. These include the pathologies of the Bush administration policies, which in effect unleashed a national psychosis in Iraq, as well as America.

By GWB's own admission, our national psyche is tenuous. There is ample need of psychiatric intervention, but instead the military is expected to mediate the opposing psychotic behaviors with tools expressly unsuited to such a refined, yet herculean undertaking.

It is psychotic to believe that the war in Iraq anything to do with a terrorist threat to the American taxpayer. Further, current Iraqi society exhibits all of the signs of a rampant national psychosis on the order of the mindless ideology that gripped Germany after WWI. Both psychoses were unleashed as the unintended consequences of war.

So, the psychiatrist in this scenario must reckon with two opposing pathologies. America for its part must resolve the clinically paranoid behavior that has gripped the policies of this nation. The fear of terrorism can not, should not and must not be the only guiding principle of an entire country. U.S. policy is no longer stupid, it's downright schizophrenic, with paranoid ideation.

The U.S. must treat this malignancy before anything will be resolved in the streets of Baghdad. I don't even see a therapeutic dynamo of the combined likes of Dr. Phil, Dr. Laura, and Oprah being able to extricate us from this morass.

by Jim and Lisa