As America grows increasingly mad, it’s time again for “March Madness.” Since mid-March, the tournament has gripped this nutty nation, feeding our delusions with lunatic ideas usually found only in clinical settings or in remote regions of Texas.
March Madness fans usually know exactly how much mania to expect from their teams and exactly when to smile and slowly back away from the loonier players. So it was a surprise this year when fourth-seeded Duke turned out to be less unhinged than expected.
The Blue Devils were eliminated in this year’s Schizophrenic Sixteen. The upset came when Duke players refused to call global warming a hoax. This sudden lapse into sanity, in a nation where a third of all people still deny climate change, set the stage for the berserk contests that followed.
Next came the sudden surge of Iowa. The Hawkeyes, who earned a seed in the tournament by claiming the CIA had implanted mind control chips in their teeth, have been a Cinderella squad. First all five starting players supported Donald Trump. Next the coaches chimed in, saying they thought Trump was a sure winner in November. But the Hawkeyes only looked unbeatably daft when 80 percent of their fans said Trump would make “a great president.”
March Madness had never seen such lunacy but once things moved on to the Erratic Eight, the tournament became clinically paranoid.
Who would have thought that West Virginia, a team that lost last year to those minor nutcases at Wisconsin, would come roaring back with such delusions of grandeur. Their coach set the stage when he said his team was crazier than any team on the planet, even the Tea Party.
Delusions like that usually lead to defeat, but the Mountaineers survived the Erratic Eight by convincing Maryland that President Obama is the anti-Christ. After that upset, the squad romped over Villanova with a last minute “buzzer beater” by its point guard on how aliens killed JFK. And with glazed eyes and a stack of books by Glenn Beck, West Virginia headed for the Flaky Four.
But don’t count out those lovable whackos from Oregon. Any team calling themselves the Ducks is sending a message — we are seriously bonkers. And true to Left Coast lunacy, this year’s Duck squad won big by proclaiming that 9/11 was an inside job. Yep, that tired old screed blaming George Bush for 9/11 got the Ducks into the Erratic Eight. And with their coach schooling his team on “truth” about the moon landing, their future looked bright.
But then the Ducks faced No. 1-ranked Kansas. Coming from a state where creationism trumps — make that trounces — evolution hands down, the Jayhawks had home-court advantage. Kansas, after all, is the state whose legislature recently took up a bill to stop fluoridation of water. Small wonder the Jayhawks romped to early March Madness victories.
First the Jayhawks called opening round rival Connecticut “a bunch of New England libloonies.” The riled Connecticut squad fought back, convincing the Jayhawks to obsess about the Koch Brothers. But after a halftime tongue-lashing from their coach, the Jayhawks came out spewing abuse straight from the mouth of Rush Limbaugh.
Hapless Connecticut was no match for the onslaught that saw the Kansas squad raving about the “liberal media,” the evil of vaccinations and the Federal Reserve System. With a gracious nod to the growing legions of kooks across the country, Kansas cleared the Flaky Four and was on to the Crazed Championship.
Who will be this year’s maddest team? What will a nation of nuts do to democracy? Only the cracked and crazed know for sure.
