Quickies: The Desire To Be Significant

     What else could account for this lunatic’s lunacies?

     “I’m worried about these domestic attacks. As a matter of fact, I was forced to focus on it a little bit yesterday when in my office in Los Angeles one of the people opening the mail opened an envelope, and a bunch of powder fell out with a note about me dying and killing Hillary Clinton and on and on and on. This is getting more frequent, and I know that we have privacy concerns and information sharing and all that,” said [California Congresswoman Maxine] Waters.

     “I think we should focus on domestic terrorism also. So I would like to ask again, given all that you have said about how difficult it is and about privacy concerns, do you have any thoughts about what can we do to begin to deal with the KKK, the white nationalists, the extremists, the alt-right?” asked Waters at a House Financial Services Committee.

     “They’re on the Internet; they’re Breitbart. If you look at the YouTube, you see how much they want to kill me and others. What can we do?” asked Waters.

     (Courtesy of Independent Sentinel.)

     Maxine Waters has consistently represented herself in this fashion: as someone so greatly hated by the Right that we actually want to take her life. In point of fact, we’re ashamed of Waters. She’s a national disgrace: living, breathing evidence of both pervasive, unapologetic black racism and the gimme mentality that prevails among altogether too many persons in this nation. That such a creature should have been given a seat in Congress is beyond rational explanation. It calls into question the intelligence of those who voted for her.

     However, Waters is also an excellent argument for the Right. “Look at this...person,” we can say. “That is the sort of shrieking, self-obsessed harridan the Left deems a suitable representative of its causes. Wouldn’t you prefer to be represented by someone with more functioning brain matter?” Add Bernie Sanders, Keith Ellison, and Hillary Clinton for a one-round knockout.

     Waters’s self-absorption puts me in mind of an early scene from Roger Zelazny’s The Dream Master. A Congressman obsessed with the notion that someone is plotting his assassination consults psionic therapist Dr. Charles Render, supposedly to discover the plotters’ identities. What Render discovers instead is that the Senator, a “back-bencher,” wants to be the target of such a plot: it would confer a significance upon him that he feels he lacks.

     Maxine Waters might want to be that important, but for us in the Right she’s mainly a laugh line.