The Politics of Psychosis: "I know you are but what am I?"

As Democrats and Republicans happily continue to play their game of partisan political ping-pong with the Tucson massacre, perhaps the most unwittingly ironic assertion is that which claims the assassin's act has little or nothing to do with mainstream politics because the assassin himself is clearly a deranged and mentally disturbed individual.  It is by means of this precise argument that the deranged and disturbed proponents of the Democratic and Republican parties seek to wash their hands of the bloody affair after first attempting to wipe them clean with the other side's dirty laundry.  Yet, the psychotic senselessness, the violence and brutality of the assassin's act stands as an appropriate metaphor for Democratic-Republican party politics and government itself, in which character assassination functions as both a primary means and end.

If psychosis is defined as loss of contact with reality, then Democratic-Republican party politics under the conditions of the global warfare and corporate welfare state has been psychotic for quite some time, complete with delusions of grandeur and paranoid hallucinations.  The self-satisfied authors of empire imagine enemies everywhere in the alternate realities they create for themselves.  Reflecting on Post-Tucson Partisanship and Pathology, Sam Wilson writes:

given how little reasoned discourse has emerged from the partisan camps since Saturday, shouldn't we question any distinction that privileges partisan ideology as rational in order to exempt it from association with the accused's mania?

The sick and twisted irrationality of Democratic-Republican party politics is never more clear than it is in moments of tragedy such as this.  It is as if the trauma provokes a psychotic break that lays bare the wholly mechanical nature of the procedures and formulas that animate what passes for mainstream political discourse.  Such scenes resemble nothing so much as Harpo and Groucho Marx's famous mirror shtick in Duck Soup:  Democrats denounce the violent rhetoric of Republicans, Republicans denounce the violent rhetoric of Democrats, Democrats denounce the conservative climate of hate, Republicans denounce the progressive climate of hate, and so on ad infinitum.  Democratic-Republican party politics is nothing more than an extended game of "I'm rubber and you're glue," or "I know you are but what am I."