One Flew Over the Coocoo’s Nest is an academy award-winning movie from 1975. It stars Jack Nicholson as a petty criminal, Randle McNeil, who is sent to an institution for the mentally ill. He is not mentally ill in a traditional sense; he’s just an ill-disciplined man who has trouble adjusting to normal American life. He is in the institution with many men who are broken in one way or the other, and they are ruled by a woman, Nurse Rachet, who keeps them drugged and compliant. Also in the institution is a large and silent native American.
Over the course of the film, the question about who is mentally ill is investigated. The men in the film are presented as ill adjusted but entirely logical victims, and Nurse Rachet as at least as mentally ill due to her rigidity. Rachet is unfeeling and unfair, and it is her goal, according to the logic of the film, to keep the men from every expressing their individual will. The subtext is that it is the rulers, not the ruled, who are ‘sick.’ It is ‘society’ that is ill, not the men in the institution.
This idea, that society is ill, and not the agents of order and prosperity, is a common theme from the vanguard of the now dominate counterculture. I’ve written about another groundbreaking counterculture film, Billy Jack, here, and a whole series about Charlie Manson here. One Flew Over the Coocoo’s Nest was another view into this critical time in American history.
We are now living in a malignant time, far downstream from the early indications in the 1970s, of the declaration that the agents of prosperity and order as the real sickos. The idea of turning things upside down, an idea burning unrestrained in the revolutionary spirit, is now linked across spectrums that otherwise might have nothing in common. What else could explain the idea perfect summed up in the phrase “Queers for Palestine?”
The Palestinian cause is the lifework of the most reactionary aspects of a Muslim identity that just two generations back showed real signs of modernization. A glance at the graduating class of any Arab university in 1970 is worlds away from the picture that emerges from Arab society of today. Just as the American culture was starting to turn away from order and discipline, the Arab world was in the process of modernization. That turn from an orderly Western-oriented culture in the 1970s morphed into a return to strict Islam in the Islamic world in the 1980s. Now, every explicitly Palestinian organization treats women as property, hates queers, hates Jews, hates democracy and as such, hates the USA and Europe. Further, they don’t care about the environment or climate change. From the climate radical trans-women of Portland to the Islamicist promoting jihad and raping Jewish women in Israel is a long arc and yet, here we are with the ‘Queers for Palestine’ in the street carrying signs about genocide and chanting the tired old 1960s blowhard “Hey hey, ho ho, blah blah blah has got to go!”
Why are these contrary forces aligned? They are aligned in their hatreds, first and foremost, and what they hate most of all is the success of others. It has long been said that greed was the vice of the wealthy Americans and their Western European counterparts, and that greed drove their colonization and exploitation of anyone without sufficient powers to resisting them. Perhaps there is truth to that notion. The history of the colonized, in places like Peru, are compelling to read and comprehend. But we are hundreds of years past that moment, and now, the dominate malignant force in the world is envy. It is envy of the successful that drives the idea that anyone who has a safe, healthy, prosperous, and meaningful like gained that life through an unearned privilege, and such people are to be punished and ultimately subjugated. Envy is at least as powerful a force as greed, and envy drives the murderous rage seen in the various Socialist revolutions in the twentieth century and now drives the Woke cultural religion in this century. From the gulags of the 1920s in the Soviet period to the baby burning monster of Hamas in the 2020s is the common theme of envy of the successful. This envy justifies every evil imaginable, and it demands the academic cover that ‘Critical Race Theory’ and ‘white privilege,’ as well as other fashionable philosophies provide.
In One Flew Over the Coocoo’s Nest, Rachet’s authoritarian prompting fails to subdue the irrepressible Randle, and so he is mentally neutered by shock therapy. He returns from the shock therapy room a vegetable, and the big Indian then mercifully smothers him with a pillow and breaks out of the institution, presumably taking Randle’s ‘spirit’ with him. It’s a fitting end to the film, within the film’s logic. Shock therapy, however, didn’t render people vegetables, and so another way of seeing the ending would be to note that the big native American murdered Randle and fled the scene of the crime. Randle was an ill-disciplined man who could not control his impulses, and another man of a similar disposition killed him. Nurse Rachet offered these men a safe place with food and shelter even though they contributed nothing to the general health and well-being of the society around them. The world before the Industrial Revolution, which brought on such prosperity as to allow the mentally weak to survive, is not what killed them; it was their own chaotic thoughts and actions that brought on their demise, and now, the lunatics, in the guise of the countercultural left, are in charge the world over. Envy has given reign to the most disordered among us, and the capital cities of the Western Enlightenment, places like New York and London, are populated by the fellow travelers who align with the savage killers in the terror ranks. The trans and the terrorist lack any moral foundation, and while they seem to have nothing in common, they have their bloodlust born of envy as their foundation. These are the agents of lunatic chaos, and they must be resisted because their triumph ends in the return of poverty and ignorance.
TomRoushOnline 