Our Leaders Are Losing It

Wilhelm Reich

I’m not the smartest guy in the world and I can still be fooled once in a while, but I’ve learned a few things and my intuitive BS alarm works pretty well. For example, as soon as I heard of Sigmund Freud’s Oedipus Complex — that we males are born with a sexual attraction for our mothers — I knew it was hokey. Lately though, my alarm is going off so often I have an  almost-constant headache.

Bernie Sanders

A few months ago, I learned that Bernie Sanders neglected his studies at the University of Chicago because he was obsessed with Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Wilhelm Reich. “Wilhelm who?” you may ask. Well, driving around in remote Rangeley, Maine four years ago I came upon the Wilhelm Reich Museum. A student of Freud, Reich had been dead for more than a half century, but his research into human orgasm continues in rural Maine. Young people with dreadlocks, metal in their faces, and a wide-eyed spaciness greeted me when I got to the door, but I went inside anyway as one would to see a freak show at the fair.

Reich Museum in Rangely, Maine

On display were some of Reich’s devices including what looked like an old telephone booth but actually was an “orgone energy accumulator.” The UK Guardian described it as “an almost magical device that could improve its users' ‘orgastic potency.’” The Guardian article continued saying: “The accumulator was used by such countercultural figureheads as Norman Mailer, JD Salinger, Saul Bellow, Paul Goodman, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Dwight Macdonald and William S Burroughs.” Reich also recommended that his “patients” should be massaged while naked to “loosen their body armour.”

Woman in "Orgone Energy Accumulator"

Some of the Bernie! supporters I see around Maine and New Hampshire remind me of the starry-eyed docents I met at the museum. Do they know Senator Sanders continued his obsession with Reich until he was at least thirty? After moving to nearby Vermont, Sanders wrote articles referring to Reich in the Vermont Freeman, an alternative newspaper. Mother Jones reported that: “His early writings reflect a political worldview rooted in the fad psychology and anti-capitalist rhetoric of the era and infused with a libertarianesque critique of state power. Sanders feared that the erosion of individual freedom—via compulsory education, sexual repression, and, yes, fluoridated water—began at birth. And, he postulated, authoritarianism might even cause cancer.”

Cancer!

Authoritarianism may cause cancer? Some of us think it’s time for Sanders to retire to his orgasmatron, but he’s a leading Democrat candidate for president of the United States. How many of his supporters know about the his obsession with Reich? I’m afraid to ask, but now Bernie is claiming that terrorism is caused by "climate change" and not radical Islam.

Though Islamist terrorism in Paris put France into a three-month state of emergency a few weeks ago, the biggest concentration of world leaders ever is meeting there to “save the world” from climate change. It all reminds me of how crazy-worried our leaders were about Y2K, which turned out to be nothing. Our “leaders” pretend all that paranoia never happened but they’re right back at it with President Obama playing the role of Chicken-Little-in-Chief. He’s about to cripple America’s already anemic economy by jacking up energy costs “before it’s too late.” He insists climate change is a much bigger threat than ISIS, our $20 trillion debt, or anything else. So he says.

Hansen warns us to watch out for those boulders!

Retired NASA scientist and “world-renowned climatologist” James Hansen claims Obama is not going far enough. Hansen warns that climate change causes “flying boulders” too. It whipped up storms so powerful they blew boulders weighing thousands of tons up onto cliffs in the Bahamas 100,000 years ago. Hansen’s claims are so out there that even the liberal Washington Post worries that: “some critics wonder whether the man [Hansen] who helped spawn the whole debate about the dangers of climate change has finally gone too far.”

Only some critics wonder that?

Reich is buried next to his cloudbuster

Wilhelm Reich, Bernie Sanders’ psycho-psychoanalyst, also built a “cloudbuster" machine I saw at the Rangeley museum. He claimed it could be put into reverse and draw in “orgone energy” from the atmosphere, which could then be infused into his orgasmatrons. Is something similar on the table in Paris? According to Bloomberg, today’s climate geniuses propose “replicating the planet-cooling effect of a volcanic eruption… The idea is to mimic [Mount] Pinatubo by using a fleet of modified business jets to inject fine droplets of sulfuric acid into the stratosphere, where they would combine with water vapor to form fine sulfate particles that reflect sunlight away from the earth.”

As I said, I’ve learned a few things over my sixty-four years, like Rudyard Kipling's warning to “keep your head when all about you are losing theirs...”