The liberal elite’s pathological reactions to President Bush’s reelection on Nov. 2 never cease to amaze me. Two overheated responses prevail among the glitterati: lugubrious self-pity (the Sorry Everybody movement, in which Dem aging hippies and neo-hippies post their photos on the Internet along with their written apologies to the “world” for the fact that the majority of Americans voted Republican); and nasty pokes at the religiosity of the majority of Americans (the Jesusland map that’s now racing around the liberal blogs).
Now comes columnist Tina Brown to report in today’s Washington Post that tout New York City–or at least tout the exalted Mnahttan socioeconomic circles in which Tina moves–isn’t just feeling sad or mad but has actually been pyschologically traumatized–in the clinical sense–by Bush’s win. The glit people don’t just feel let down, as you or I might if our favorite candidate lost; they’re seeking help from mental-health professionals. Tina writes:
“The psychiatrist Hadassah Brooks Morgan says that John Kerry’s defeat, coming on the heels of the Yankees’ collapse in the playoffs against the Red Sox, plunged many of her patients into near-catatonic distress. ‘In my whole 40 years of practice here I have never heard patients as bereft by a result as this,’ she told me on the phone. ‘There was a feeling in session after session of the insult to one’s tribe, a loss of purpose and direction. For men, their sports team being beaten at the same time made them feel New York is no longer the command center, no longer the winning city they identify with or that so many people move here to find.’
Good heavens! Are our intellectual betters really so mentally fragile that they’re falling to pieces just because Kerry lost and the Yankees blew the playoffs? Apparently so. Makes me a little scared myself–to visit New York City, what with so many of the Dem demented running around loose.
The silver lining in this cloud of gloom is that the newspeople of the mainstream media, those onetime gods who once deemed it their mission to guide their coverage (the Microsoft Selectric typewriter, those weekend-before-the-election “missing” explosives) so that the rest of us would vote correctly, seem to be caught up in the mental malaise, too, Tina reports:
“News anchors who had to spend a heroic year as the only mortals on the planet who couldn’t voice an opinion are sullen now with their perceived irrelevance.”
Notice to underemployed shrinks: There’s this island called Manhattan where you just want might to move and hang out your shingles. You’ll be dining at Ducasse within months.