“These are the Armies of The Night. They are 60,000 strong. They outnumber the cops five to one. They could run New York City.”

If you’ve ever been unfortunate enough to have an insane person in your life, then you know the red flags that indicate you’re in the presence of a troubled mind. I’m not talking charming eccentricity or uneasy mercurialness. I mean batshittery.

Conspiracy-related paranoia is key for the unstable. There’s always some form of shadow government or encroaching social malaise that only they and the like-minded can see coming. A wildly inflated sense of self-importance is also integral; something about them makes them so special that powerful forces are uniting to destroy or discredit them. Secret societies — the Illuminati, Satanists, Communists, and aliens (the illegal kind and the invading variety) — are typical oppressor fixations.

Lately I’ve been positing that extreme racist and ethnist reactions may be a form of mental illness themselves. The causal and “enlightened” forms of prejudice — the kind you have to awkwardly dance around as you argue you can spot an undocumented worker by the type of footwear they sport — are character flaws, but the sort of convulsive, visceral kind that revolves around the idea that our arch nemeses Hawaii and Kenya would collude to put a Manchurian Candidate in the White House is a whole different bag.

The really disturbed Freepers — the Bachmanns, the Malkins, the LaBarberas — all have that same imperative urgency of mission coupled with glassy, unfocused gazes that are obvious signs of inner issues, and as clearly flipped as they all are, even they’ve been outdone this week by Sterling, Virginia Supervisor Eugene Delgaudio (above left), whose recent fundraising letter has Steve Clemons of The Washington Note branding it “the craziest, most bizarre political letter I have ever read”. Excerpts of the letter reveal fairly typical rhetoric about the peril of impending gay “special rights,” but the real slice of crazy comes in the form of a bizarre anecdote detailing Delgaudio’s stakeout of an assembly-line gay petition factory.

You know it’s a gay petition factory because everyone works without shirts and knows how to collate:

“One stormy night I drove to a mail shop hidden deep in a nearly deserted stand of warehouses. I’d heard something was up and wanted to see for myself. As I rounded the final turn my eyes nearly popped. Tractor-trailers pulled up to loading docks, cars and vans everywhere and long-haired, earring-pierced men scurrying around running forklifts, inserters and huge printing presses. Trembling with worry I went inside. It was worse than I ever imagined. Row after row of boxes bulging with pro-homosexual petitions lined the walls, stacked to the ceiling. My mind reeled as I realized hundreds, maybe thousands, more boxes were already loaded on the tractor-trailers. And still more petitions were flying off the press.

Suddenly a dark-haired man screeched, “Delgaudio what are you doing here?” Dozens of men began moving toward me. I’d been recognized. As I retreated to my car, the man chortled, “This time Delgaudio we can’t lose.” Driving away, my eyes filled with tears as I realized he might be right. This time the Radical Homosexuals could win. You see, even though homosexuals are just 1% of the population, if every one sent a petition to Congress it would generate a tidal wave of two or three million petitions or more. Hundreds of thousands of pro-homosexual petitions will soon flood Congress, and my friends in Congress tell me there’s virtually nothing on Capitol Hill from the tens of millions of Americans like you who oppose the radical Homosexual Agenda and the Gay Bill of Special Rights.”

Omigod! Omigod! Omigod! Please tell me that these asphalt punks were wearing vests with no shirts and ’70s skinny jeans just like in The Warriors, the exploitation classic whose tagline warned of inner city gangs rising up and had the Big Apple freaked out for a spell in 1979.

Or maybe they were just like the post-apocalyptic marauders in any Italian future schlock movie, wherein the macho gangs of tomorrow inevitably opt for assless chaps, mohawks, cowboy hats, and Cirque du Soleil face paint. I’ll bust a nut if they were.

We know there’s two default gay-mongering images summoned up in the minds of tradition defenders, and if it isn’t transsexuals and drag queens getting hired at Christian book stores and Bible study groups, then it’s Monster Queers decked out in leather and chains pillaging the country.

Here we get the latter, and Delgaudio — top bitch of the conservative non-profit organization Public Advocate of the U.S. — is no amateur when it comes to this type of “political guerrilla theater.” If you can liken a puritanical PAC Whore to a Fame Whore, then Delgaudio is the Values Voter answer to Tila Tequila.

It’s no big deduction that Heavy D pulled this shit about gangs of brass knuckle- and clipboard-wielding gay petitioners out of the air, but the real question remains: is there more than just cynical inflaming of the public for the purpose of raking in the cash going on here? I’m thinking yes, and the reason I know he’s a screw-loose is because he just couldn’t resist inserting himself into the narrative, which ultimately only makes his claim that much more implausible. A well mind would’ve kept it vague. The fact that casting himself as some concerned citizen hero on a stakeout defeats the whole account was still not enough to keep him from making himself the whistleblowing hero.

A narcissistic personality doesn’t just need attention; he requires a position of authority or leadership to cement his self-styled superiority. Grandiose stands and public spectacles are his bread and butter, and since there is no such thing as bad attention for this type, a narcissist seems to forever function without the self-awareness to realize he’s humiliating himself. The paranoid notion of enemies whose very existence confirms his significance as an eminent figure are textbook because power and influence beget opponents, and they can easily be concocted in any self-propelled fiction.

This whole scene ends up sounding like a topical-themed Titan deepthroat or a fisting epic — The Big Gay Agenda: Cramming It Down Your Throats or Ballot Stuffing: Elbow-Greased For Political Action — as pixelated through the warped mind of a histrionic zealot who equates sex with treason. I guess these are the same homo thugs throwing molotov cocktails through suburban split-level windows and crashing prayer rallies on motorcycles. Even the gang’s whole m.o. is curiously redolent of a nuisance camera-op Delgaudio felt compelled to stage in Washington, complete with boxes of petitions. A man this pathologically full of himself can’t help but be convinced that his enemies are trying to beat him at his own game.

The biggest tell of all? He even essentially admits to trespassing on the property of an organization that — call me crazy — doesn’t sound particularly illegal or even that unsavory to rational ears, and when discovered, finds the Armies of The Night recognize him on sight (!?). Why, they’re so evil and sure of their victory, they didn’t even bother to capture him to be used as a sacrifice in a Black Mass! “Beat it, Delgaudio! Our vicious gang don’t need no guns or no flamethrowers to rule this bitch! We’re gonna paper-cut the fuck out of Congress! Come tomorrow, we’ll be teaching your little brats to DP!”

If I’m guaranteed my own vest with our gang tag emblazoned on the back, then I’m ready to come out and play, sucka.

© 2010, Shawn Baker. All rights reserved. Nightcharm.com