Flashback 2011: One quarter of the country has gone crazy

Generated by Dall-E.

     The good news is that the vise grip that Donald Trump has on the Republican Party seems to be slacking. The bad news is that they don't need him to continue the carnival of crazy. As I've been saying for years about Trump: he didn't create the environment he thrived in. Not a cause, but a symptom. In case this isn't clear, I offer as evidence this column from 2011 that tills the loamy soil that Trumpism, and other fact-free totalitarian causes, bloom in. Trump cut his political teeth as a proponent of birtherism, but didn't even merit mention here.

     The expression "my jaw dropped," is usually metaphorical, the writer reaching for some oomph beyond "I was really surprised."
     But reading the New York Times/CBS poll released last week that 25 percent of all Americans — and 45 percent of Republicans — believe President Obama was born outside the United States, I could feel the muscles in my jaw go slack and my chin dip.
     Why is this so amazing?
     Well, first, let’s review the evidence that Obama was born someplace other than Kapi’olani hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii, on Aug. 4, 1961:
     There isn’t any.
     None, nada, nothing. A slop bucket of rumors and lies. As opposed to the overwhelming hard proof that Obama was born exactly where he said he was born — a state birth certificate, not to mention two local newspapers printing birth announcements.
     So why does a considerable and growing chunk of the country — one in four, the same percentage of Americans who are men over the age of 37 — embrace this fallacy?
     The short answer is they believe it because they want to believe it. Belief and fact have almost no relationship to each other — we should know that by now. There is no situation so clear-cut that it cannot be twisted into a hall of mirrors. The 9/11 attacks were the most documented crime ever. Did that stop the conspiracy theories? No way.
     That said, why do 25 percent of us want to believe Obama was born in foreign soil?
     It’s obvious when you ask yourself what happened in November 2008. The nation elected its first African-American president, a Democrat. Of course that would inspire some to say, "Whoa, wait a second, this isn’t happening. This guy can’t be president!"
     He can’t? Why not? Well, umm, because he wasn’t born here. Yeah, that’s the ticket!
     Conspiracy theories flourish among those who find the truth too uncomfortable to tolerate. America being the victim of terrorist attacks made the nation sympathetic — better, in some minds, to view the United States as the perpetrator. The same dynamic inspires Holocaust denial. People don’t deny the Holocaust because of lack of evidence — those Germans, sticklers for bookkeeping. Rather, the Holocaust is uncomfortable, inconvenient to those wishing for the next one, and thus nutjobs like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad find it easier to just grin and insist it never happened.
     Obama being president of the United States is uncomfortable, inconvenient, for a lot of people, and rather than acknowledge that a majority of Americans elected him to an office he is entitled to hold, it’s easier to declare the whole thing a sham.
     Just as Holocaust denial is, on its face, anti-Semitism, so the birther movement is clearly racism. I’m reluctant to say that because racism has become such a frayed charge in recent years, thanks to professional wolf criers like the Rev. Jesse Jackson or Carol Moseley Braun. But just because some overplay the race card doesn’t mean that racism ceases to exist. Electing a black president might have been a milestone, but it did not make the bigots automatically wink out of existence, unfortunately. Where did they all go?
     To me, the sort of people who in 1961 would say, "Obama can’t be president because he’s a n-----," now, 50 years later, are saying "Obama can’t be president because he’s not an American." Progress!
     Although I refuse to believe that haters constitute a full quarter of the country. My hunch — or perhaps just hope — is that the birther mania is fueled by a hard core, say 2.5 percent, the full-time bigots, psychos and partisan operatives who come up with these lunatic theories and weave loose threads into this elaborate tapestry of delusion. Then the other 22.5 percent look at the "issue," feel it resonate in their guts, let out a few moos to tell a pollster that it all makes sense to them, then drop their muzzles back into the silage.
     You know what? I’m going to start a movement right now, insisting that Obama can’t be president because he isn’t 35, as the constitution requires. Barack Obama is only 32 — he was born in 1979. There, you read it in a newspaper. That this claim is false, contradicted by all evidence and common sense might be seen as a stumbling block, but not judging from the success of the birthers. People will believe anything that scratches their itch, and would much rather change the facts of the world than alter their opinions.
      Twenty-five percent. The jaw drops, the eyes pop, the mind reels, the heart breaks.
        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 24, 2011