The previous posts: what do you think they are about? If you thought "Donald Trump" you would be absolutely correct, that is why I posted them. But those are quotations, they are taken from a book that I read part of back in 2011, written by Professor Gordon Wood, and the book is not about Donald Trump, it's a book about pre-Revolution America, it's titled The Idea of America. Reflections on the Birth of the United States. It was this book more than any single source that produced the idea in my head that the United States is MENTALLY ILL. Has been mentally ill since before it was the United States; that the Declaration of Independence was the product of mentally ill minds, and embarrassing as the insane sometimes are; that the United States' mental illness comes and goes, is sometimes latent and sometimes acute in the patois; that Donald Trump is mentally ill, his supporters are mentally ill; and that they are pathognomonic of this American mental illness. The full quotes with references to the Revolution are below.
From Chapter One, "Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution":
It has been rather the unusual nature of the Revolution and the constant need to explain what on the face of it seems inexplicable...
...
"There was none of the legendary tyranny that had so often driven desperate peoples into revolution.The Americans were not a oppressed people; they had no crushing imperial shackles to throw off. In fact, the Americans knew they were probably freer and less burdened with cumbersome feudal and monarchical restraints than any part of mankind in the eighteenth century...The Americans' response was out of all proportion to the stimuli. The objective social reality scarcely seemed capable of explaining a revolution.
...
"...It was the Americans' peculiar conception of reality more than anything else that convinced them that tyranny was afoot and that they must fight if their liberty was to survive.
...
"No explanation of the American Revolution in terms of the intentions and designs of particular individuals could have been more crudely put than that offered by the Revolutionaries themselves.
Were the American Revolutionaries mentally disturbed?
From Chapter One, "Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution":
It has been rather the unusual nature of the Revolution and the constant need to explain what on the face of it seems inexplicable...
...
"There was none of the legendary tyranny that had so often driven desperate peoples into revolution.The Americans were not a oppressed people; they had no crushing imperial shackles to throw off. In fact, the Americans knew they were probably freer and less burdened with cumbersome feudal and monarchical restraints than any part of mankind in the eighteenth century...The Americans' response was out of all proportion to the stimuli. The objective social reality scarcely seemed capable of explaining a revolution.
...
"...It was the Americans' peculiar conception of reality more than anything else that convinced them that tyranny was afoot and that they must fight if their liberty was to survive.
...
"No explanation of the American Revolution in terms of the intentions and designs of particular individuals could have been more crudely put than that offered by the Revolutionaries themselves.
...
"When the ideas of the Americans are examined comprehensively, when all of the rhetoric, irrational as well as rational, is taken into account, one cannot but be struck by the predominant characteristics of fear and frenzy, the exaggerations and the enthusiasm, the general sense of social corruption and disorder out of which would be born a new world of benevolence and harmony...there is simply too much fanatical thinking even by the best minds that must be explained...
From Chapter Three, "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and deceit in the Eighteenth Century":
"When the ideas of the Americans are examined comprehensively, when all of the rhetoric, irrational as well as rational, is taken into account, one cannot but be struck by the predominant characteristics of fear and frenzy, the exaggerations and the enthusiasm, the general sense of social corruption and disorder out of which would be born a new world of benevolence and harmony...there is simply too much fanatical thinking even by the best minds that must be explained...
From Chapter Three, "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and deceit in the Eighteenth Century":
Were the American Revolutionaries mentally disturbed?
(To my exasperation (which is why I did not finish the book), Professor Wood answers his own question, "No."))
