A Comedy of Errors

Magical Thinking: Sean Connery, Sean Conley, Peter Sellers

What once was considered “Good Conscience and Bad Faith” or “Cognitive Dissonance,” the syndromes or concepts that describe the paradox of holding contradictory thoughts and acting contrary to an interest in civility or survival or your own beliefs, has been severely challenged by the transcendent conversion to “Magical Thinking,” which ignores commonsensical notions based on a modicum of rationality.

As Republican pols and their political progeny celebrated at a Super spreader Rose Garden event that “demonstrates” the “Blind Ambition” of an unmasked Amy Coney Barrett, the judge and mother of seven children, nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court, we saw the lie that bespeaks the GOP commitment to life.

However inadvertently (?) Barrett jeopardized some of her children at the Rose garden event as several high profile supporters, including President Trump, subsequently came down with the Corona Virus, but previously brushed up against the space occupied by her and her children. The “right to lifers” promote the idea that sacred vitality begins at conception and must be carried to term, regardless of whether unwanted progeny might end as kids in cages or die from malnutrition or abuse by parents, who cannot care for offspring. (Who’s caring for President Trump?)

Evidently Barrett believes the end justifies the means, refusing to set aside a belief that contradicts the studies of child neglect as the current Trump administration seeks to gut the ACA or attempts to reduce food stamp allocations to needy families. Nor will Barrett’s sponsors pass current legislation to aid those, including children, who sink into poverty due to Covid 19. Whether the child is a product of lust or laziness, negligence, or human error, the right wing would use magical thinking as mask for Corporate greed, gutting the ACA in an effort to control the masses with court edicts and force them into dependency on insurance companies.

Meanwhile self-destructive republicans test positive for Covid 19 and may not be able to hold hearings in the U.S. Senate to fulfill Barrett’s grand design. The President appears in public, disheveled, slow of speech, and waves to well-wishers from the rear window of a hermetically sealed SUV. (Who is allowing this to happen? Where are his children?)

Trump’s newest sycophant, Dr. Sean Conley, compares unfavorably with the legendary [double] 007 Bond figure played by Sean Connery, who saved the West so many times in spite of itself. A previous Republican administration lied about “Weapons of Mass Destruction” while watching the TV series, starring Kiefer Sutherland in “24” as inspiration for torturing terrorists in what began the deep dive into violations of the Geneva accords. Gitmo lives on.

Now the Republican party’s knee jerk reaction to revenge has turned away from enemies, foreign and domestic, but has focused like one of Goldfinger’s lasers on democrats and their own base, including elected and appointed leaders of their own party.

When you show contempt for mortal life, given the limits nature places on the existence of Magical Thinking, tragedy exits and laughter begins. Now I’m thinking of Peter Sellers as social critic not in “Dr. Strangelove,” “Being There,” early Bond in Casino Royale, or the Closeau in The Pink Panthers. But mostly it is as Guy Grand in “The Magic Christian” or his Trumpian role in “The Mouse that Roared,” where Sellers appears as the prophetic figure in this moment of American farce.