Citizenship Overboard

I'm worried about us. Something in our collective psyche is coming off the hinges. It's happening in a gradual and indistinct fashion, so we may not be fully aware, but there is an erosion occurring, nonetheless. As Melville once posited, "Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and orange tint begins? So with sanity and insanity."

And everything about this latest brouhaha involving the question of Barack Obama's true origins is located on the insane side of the rainbow. It is an issue that went away months ago, only to resurface everywhere at once. All of the 24-hour news stations have been harping about it, and it was discussed at length on at least two of the evening network newscasts last night.

The fact that there are loads of facts that confirm he was born in Hawaii (and played basketball there, see above) seems not to matter. Also, Lou Dobbs won't admit exactly what precarious harm is imminent if America is being run by a foreigner. Rather, this supposition is some sort of MacGuffin--wholly unimportant to the current plot--that's meant to make viewers wonder if the person who tugs at their economy, military, and health care strings is really some great dissembler.

Except the true charlatans are the broadcasters who refuse to believe their own research departments and let this story die. Plus, I don't think rational people have any investment in this fallacy. These various news outlets keep running the same footage of a few bughouse nutsy ladies shouting in town halls and public forums. Who are these women? Where did they get the notion that the incorrectly recorded longitude and latitude of someone's birthplace somehow equals the apocalypse?

The nature of fire is to consume fuel from any source. So too fear. People are worried. Even the fortunate, with relatively secure jobs and/or fallback resources, live with the notion that unstable means unstable. The next earthquake is not going to spare you because your company reported a quarterly profit; the next round of disease is not going to skip the orphans in Darfur because they've suffered enough.

However, even knowing there is no absolute safety, we citizens need to calm down. To that end: don't plan your staycation around the next few town meetings. Don't treat the news channels like an I.V. drip. (In fact, can't congress do something productive and mandate an hour or two where Fox and CNN show Mister Ed reruns, so their staffs can go get some oxygen. Even a Denny's has to close sometimes.)

Finally, don't worry so much about the actual parchment that denotes our president's state of birth. Just assume it was melted in the same pot that burned away the full names, folk customs, and regional accents of all our immigrant grandparents.