Dick’s “theory” rears its loony head … again

by David Benjamin

“Donald Trump … suggested on Fox News Thursday night that [President] Biden should respond to the invasion by personally threatening to obliterate Russia with nuclear weapons.”

— Greg Sargent, Washington Post

MADISON, Wis. — David Brooks, the Times’ resident touchy-feely columnist, refers to Russian president Vladimir Putin as an “identity politician,” whose purpose in launching 200,000 armed killers into Ukraine is to restore the self-esteem of a nation shamed by the breakup of the Soviet tsardom. John McWhorter, an elegant writer who teaches linguistics at Columbia University, assigns to Putin a sort of philosophical medievalism, which compels him to see war as humanity’s natural condition, an innate imperative that must be necessarily sustained by regular booster shots of carnage, pillage and massacre. 

Both analyses are incisive and credible. They’re also a little overwrought when applied to the crisis that Vlad the Invader has instigated. A simpler analysis harks back to former president Richard Nixon’s “Madman Theory” of international affairs. It was Tricky Dick’s conviction that a lunatic possessed of an arsenal of several thousand ICBMs with nuclear warheads — or just an army of a million troops equipped with 20 million guns and a billion tons of TNT — can do anything he feels like doing, and there ain’t nobody gonna question his motives.

Crazy people don’t have motives. They have impulses, conniptions and tantrums. If a madman also has money and power, those impulses — spasms of anger, bouts of paranoia, panic attacks, the beheading of a wife, an urge to incinerate six million human beings — are defined by both toadies and experts as “policy.” 

History reminds us, of course, that great nations have always elevated psychotics and sociopaths to the throne. This fashion goes back to Gaius Caligula and Nero, and includes such storied wackos as George III (“The Madness of King George”) and Russia’s own Ivan the Terrible. Indeed, Russia boasts more than its share of mentally ill monarchs. Catherine the Great was pretty much around the bend throughout her reign, and Joe Stalin ranks as perhaps as the most prolific psychopath in the annals of mass murder. 

The fresh wrinkle in this trend, and we should credit Nixon for pointing it out, is that our maniacs are no longer being thrust upon us by the divine right of kings. We’re actually voting for them. Putin was elected!

The poster boy, of course, for the people’s-choice nut case is Adolf Hitler, elected chancellor in 1933. Unfortunately, despite the atrocities inflicted on humanity by Hitler, we haven’t taken his example as a cautionary case of great power infected by mental disease. Historians have many terms to describe Hitler — despot, criminal, tyrant, butcher, monster — but they avoid, perhaps because psychoanalysis makes them nervous, branding Crazy-Ass Adolf with the stigma of insanity. 

We seem to be equally squeamish about calling out the prominent powerful lunatics who pass daily through our news feed. Indeed, the U.S. political establishment, in 1964, made it a rule that you can’t say (or write) that a politician is bughouse even if everything he says is buggier than a cow’s ass in August. They called it the Goldwater Rule, named after the nuttiest presidential candidate America had seen since William Jennings Bryan. 

Partly thanks to the gentle dispensation of the Goldwater Rule, we twice elected — as president of the United States — Richard Nixon, a deeply disturbed and palpably sick man who both articulated and embodied the concept of being a madman in high office. Since then, American voters have elected to the White House (with increasingly dubious wisdom) a Georgia peanut farmer, a second-banana B-movie song-and-dance actor, three draft-dodgers, a freshman senator and  a reality-TV con man who, as long as he has lived, has demonstrated no grip whatsoever on actual reality. 

Notwithstanding the forbearance of politicians, reporters and trained psychologists to recognize and examine the derangement of the numerous Mad Hatters who roam our corridors of power, I think the determination of whether Vlad the Invader — or his BFF, the current occupant of Bedlam-a-Lago — is at least as crazy as a shithouse rat is relatively straightforward. Justice Potter Stewart, in a Supreme Court case that pondered the definition of hardcore pornography, demurred a technical analysis but added, succintly, “I know it when I see it.”

I think most of us, even if we didn’t take a Psych course at Pivnik Tech, know cuckoo when we see it. It did not take a trained shrink, for example, to see a touch of madness in Donald Trump in June 2015 when he hired people to chant his name in Trump Tower, called Mexicans rapists and murderers and then rode down that escalator waving regally at his paid throng like Caligula in his chariot or Eva Péron on her balcony.

Likewise, we don’t need a Russian-speaking geopolitical analyst from the Hoover Institution to explain a malignant narcissist who plunged a continent-wide country of 6.6 million square miles into a war with a neighbor — at the expense of his national economy and thousands of deaths — because he didn’t think Russia is big enough. We don’t need expert psychological advice to judge the sanity of a man who rides horses with his shirt off — on camera — and whom one Russian commentator described as “a man who’s 5’7” trying to be 5’8”.”

The Potter Stewart verdict on Vlad the Invader’s attempted sacking of Ukraine was delivered from an unlikely venue by an incongruous source, when Jennifer Griffin of Fox News said, “This is a man — if you look in his eyes, you see someone who has gone completely mad.”