Near the Mountains of Madness
At the Mountains of Madness is one of H.P. Lovecraft's most memorable works, a combination of science fiction, fantasy and Lovecraftian horror that deals with an ancient and alien city in the mountains of Antarctica. Near the end, one of the lead characters descends into madness because of what he sees.
H.P. Lovecraft was far from the first writer to dabble in the theme of madness, of course. One of his chief influences was a writer named Robert W. Chambers, who--in 1895--published a collection of loosely connected short stories entitled The King in Yellow. The first story in the collection is entitled "The Repairer of Reputations," and concerns a man who sustains a head injury and is eventually revealed to be stark raving mad.
The problem--for the reader--is that the story is told in the first person from the point of view of the insane man, one Hildred Castaigne. Thus, every detail the narrator shares, every observation he makes may not be reflective of reality, at all. In this way, it's is very reminiscent of the movie The Usual Suspects, insofar as it's impossible to tell what is reality, what is really happening.
And I can't help but wonder if we--all of us--are currently trapped within a similar situation, as we are subjected to political opinion after political opinion in the media that may very well be coming from people that have slipped into madness...
Consider this piece by Gary Kamiya at Salon. Entitled "The anti-Obama cult," it is a supposed analysis of right wing thinking, the how and the why such thinking has manifested itself as, for all intents and purposes, a cult springing from Christian roots with one primary goal: opposing the President.
The analysis--at first glance--appears deep, the language scholarly, the conclusions profound. A sample:
Because “big government” does not have a fixed meaning, attacking it can simultaneously serve as a rallying cry for racial resentment, an impassioned demand for personal liberation and a marker of class-and region-based solidarity. This is why when the Republican candidates inveigh against big government, which they do approximately every time they open their mouths, their rants have all the weird, malevolent imprecision of a Stalinist attack on “running dog lackeys of the bourgeoisie.” They are the ravings of True Believers, of cult members.Kamiya breaks down the opposition to Obama and finds it based on a furtive totalitarian agenda, not unlike the ideology of Stalin and Mao, but rooted in faith and race. And because he cannot comprehend some ideas, they must not be truly meaningful. The oddest part of the piece is his conclusion of why "cult" is the appropriate descriptor. It is because:
...cults always delineate themselves by drawing sharp lines between Us and Them.Continued on the next page
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