Alice fell down a rabbit hole and found herself in a strange country full of curious things. As she wandered through it, she found a small cake which, if she nibbled one side, made her grow tall while a bite on the other side made her shrink. There was a mushroom that had the same effect. An articulate, grinning Cheshire Cat gave her directions and explained some of the odd happenings by telling her that everyone there was mad. Admittedly it's ludicrous and far-fetched to compare this country in the opening decade of the twenty-first century to Lewis Carroll's Wonderland but these days there are certainly inescapable parallels to make the simile valid. Let's consider a few of them.
In the Wonderland of Texas the State Board of Education didn't need a magic cake or mushroom to shrink the third president of the United States, one of the revered Founding Fathers, and an eminent writer down to a mere name. The Board was displeased and in fact, repulsed by Jefferson's advanced thinking. It was too profound for them. It was the dangerous sort of thing that might put Ideas into young minds. This must at all costs be avoided so the Board all but erased him from their American history textbooks. As a result, generations of students reading the approved version will relegate Jefferson to the president after John Adams and may never realize how great a man he actually was.
Most Americans rightly consider the carefully crafted U.S. Constitution an inspired document and some tend to speak of it in almost hushed voices as if it were Holy Writ. Nevertheless there are discussions about changing in it to suit individual tastes. Six years ago when Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor of California, he was the darling of the GOP--their golden boy. There were regrets that as Austrian born, he was ineligible for president of the U.S. and some murmurs about the possibility of amending the Constitution. Now Arnold's star has dimmed The "birthers" who hysterically maintain that President Obama is not American born are vigorously defending that law. The Second Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms is the conservatives' favorite. Free speech is okay as long as it's theirs and doesn't extend to flag burning which is carrying it too far. An amendment to the Constitution making this form of protest a criminal offense is what they want and free speech be damned.
In Alice's Wonderland there were rose trees whose blooms were the wrong color. Gardeners were hastily correcting this by simply painting them the desired shade. In the same manner the Bush administration covered the ugly, medieval-sounding word "torture" with the chaste term "enhanced interrogation". The gardeners were caught in the act and the Queen ordered their heads off. Bush, Cheney & Co. were caught too but they were lucky--they got away with their nasty tricks.
It's easy to imagine Sarah and Orly taking tea with the Mad Hatter and the March Hare. They would be boon companions and the level of conversation would be as perplexing as Alice found that of the Hatter, the Hare, and the dormouse.
As for the phenomenon of the Tea Party, which is openly flirting with the GOP, and often reducing the members of that cumbersome body to a state of bewildered consternation, it's like Carroll's Lobster Quadrille, a case of of "Will you, won't you, will you join the dance?"
Alice awoke and found her Wonderland had been a dream but we linger in ours and are having a hard time getting out it.