Sometimes the funniest part of an Andy Borowitz piece at the New Yorker is the headline,
as in last week's
Zombie Jonas Salk Rises from Grave to Hunt Idiots. But his
piece on bringing back the glories of the Bush years with Jeb (speaking of zombies) is a satirical masterpiece from start to finish.
The Salk piece of course is about the Internet-stoked and celebrity-enabled justification for refusing measles inoculations that is now paying off in a resurgence of a once-dead disease. Millions of dollars, suffering and perhaps some lives will be the price for this. Notably, a whole lot of backtracking is going on now, as people wake up to the consequences that were staring them in the face.
Hysteria, born of repressed unconscious emotions, has been a feature of so-called civilization since well before the witch hunts, but contemporary complacency (it can't happen here, or now) is unwarranted, especially since the instantaneous mobs enabled by the Internet have proven such eruptions are alive and well, and larger and faster than ever.
It's easier for some to discount or ignore these phenomena, based on the conventional dogmas of mechanistic psychology and the brain as computer. Yet old fashioned Freudian/Jungian terms are the only ones that actually explain what's going on, as unconscious fears are displaced (from suspected conspiracies that are too big to think about, to seemingly safer but illusory ones) and projected (furnishing a lot of the lynch mob energy that gets focused on leadership figures, currently including Brian Williams but also, on any given week, President Obama.)
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