Right Wing Paranoia

In the 1990s I knew a man who was so worried that President Clinton was going to "take his guns away" that he spent thousands and thousands of dollars buying firearms, not only to take a stand for the Second Amendment, but also to protect himself from "government tyranny." It was only a matter of time, I was assured, until government troops led by the United Nations would be going door to door to disarm Americans, and this man was going to be ready.  He would not stand by idly and watch Bill Clinton usher in the New World Order. Not arming one's self against tyranny, I was told, would be "unpatriotic."

Little by little the warm feeling of security that gun ownership used to bring him was slipping away.  Each new piece added to the arsenal brought with it a growing sense of paranoia.  As the Clinton years were winding down and most of us were enjoying a booming economy and futuristic technology this man was pacing the floors and peeking out from behind the curtains, no doubt certain that at any given moment Janet Reno would arrive personally to pry his treasured weapons from his cold, dead hands. 

There were no gun grabs, no door-to-door searches by UN troops, nobody was listening to his phone calls, and those black helicopters that he found so troubling as he hurried home from work every night were in reality news choppers covering local traffic conditions.

He could breathe much easier during the Bush years, in spite of having a president who conducted warrantless wiretaps, built secret detention facilities all over the world, used torture and rendition, and sent our troops to invade countries that never attacked us.  That was okay, you see, because THAT president was a Republican and criticizing the President of the United States, I was told, would be "unpatriotic."

Here we are 20 years after Clinton took office and just like a re-run of a bad TV show that nobody liked in the first place, hysterical Right Wing Paranoia is making a resurgence at a fevered pitch.  Facebook and Twitter are exploding with photographs of people posing with their weapons and vowing to lay down their lives to protect their right to have dangerous firearms lying around the house, in spite of the fact that nobody's trying to take that right away in the first place.

If you're a right winger who's too young to remember the Clinton years, please learn from my old friend and don't waste the economic recovery that will usher in the best years yet of the 21st century by pacing around nervously and becoming delusional.  Nobody in the government is going to give a crap about you or your little arsenal, unless you start acting like this guy:



Also see my new Tumblr blog: Right Wing Paranoia: Unhinged in the Face of a Dying Ideology