Comment of The Day: Because I’m Hooked Now

Having a soft spot for the foibles of youth I did initially have a twinge about posting this pic, alleged to be of Dr Laura sprog Deryk Schlessinger, as supplied by Granny Geek over at Republic of T’s comments. (More Schlessinger from Granny Geek here)

But then this is the modern world, it’s MySpace, it was meant to be seen. Anyone who posts a MySpace page knows it’s out there, and once it’s out there, it’s Out There. If you’re in your twenties and you don’t know that, where’ve you been living, in a cave?

That’s Deryk on the left, apparently, Interesting oral action there.

Besides which, this guy is in the army killing people. He’s hardly some misguided kid, to be cushioned from reality.

One of the reasons I’m fascinated with the Deryk Schlessinger story, other than simple prurient British gawping at the excesses of the American right, is because I have two sons of similar age. Neither is a winger; they have too much sense, and besides, my obsession with it may well have put them off politics for life. But’s that’s by the by.

Any parent would be interested in the way in which the US right seems to deliberately produce indentikit sociopathic offspring like Deryk, especially if you have sons. What makes wingnuts, and why? And why do they so often turn out to be violently-inclined?

Fun as it might be we can’t blame it all on his mother Dr Laura Schlessinger. In assigning responsibility for how a child acts as an adult entirely to the parent we deny agency and free will and reduce human beings to little more than programmable biological machines. We’re all ultimately responsible for what we do: although how our parents may or may not have brought us up affects the decisons we make, in the bitter end the decision whether or not to do something is ours and ours alone.

I am simplifying horribly, obviously, and haven’t even mentioned environment or the Darwinian thing. (This is tabloid stuff, let’s not go there just now.) As much as I’d like to indulge the urge to go “Yah, boo, sucks, you raised a monster!”, it’s not entirely Dr Laura’s fault.

Though I still wouldn’t let her near a child of mine.

I began to really notice out and proud wingnuts becoming more prominent and prevalent, more mainstream, in the very early eighties when I lived in Atlanta, and the New South and the evangelical churches were on the rise.

Reagan’s election and the ascension to power of all the old evil Watergate faces, seemed to almost flick a switch in the national psyche and with the rapid acension of the Newt Gingrich tendency batshit wingnuttery became socially acceptable again, most noticeably in the media. Dr Laura Schlessinger’s generation (and mine too) grew up with the example of large numbers of criminal conspirators from Watergate and Iran-Contra just walking away, getting washed in the blood of the lamb and going on to fame and fortune. Some of us saw that and were disgusted – others like the crew at the National Review, for example embraced it with open arms. The eighties generation of rightwingers, the ones with their own youthful indescretions handily wiped clean by the get-out clause of being ‘born again’ have raised their children with the idea that nothing they do has real consequences and with ‘Greed is good’ as a mantra. But what they do does have consequences and we see them before us, written large in the disastrous Bush adminsitration and small in the likes of Deryk Schlessinger.

In place of trickle down economics we got sociopathy cascading down the generations.

But then I’m giving too much credence to one factor again. I don’t bloody know – no-one’s funding me to do a research project here. It’s a conundrum all right, and one which bears future study, if the wingnuts themselves don’t blow us all to kingdom come first. What makes sociopathic wingnuts; nature or nurture?