Is America getting too crazy even for America?
After a week that saw an unhinged tax protester fly his plane into an IRS office, a loony neurobiologist shoot three fellow professors, a crackpot at the CPAC convention call for the hanging of a U.S. senator and Glenn Beck being Glenn Beck, the question must be asked: Is America harboring a dangerously high percentage of nut jobs?
The answer, according to an informal survey I took among three or four friends and a bike messenger who almost ran me over on Eighth Avenue yesterday, is a resounding yes. This country is crazier than ever.
Every few years, the American Psychiatric Association updates its compendium, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which lists every known mental disorder and each time, it gets bigger. The fifth edition of the DSM is out in 2013 and I’m afraid no one will be able to lift it.
Next question: What are we going to do about it?
We have some of the world’s finest psychiatrists and psychologists here with an absolutely spectacular selection of drugs but they mostly treat the slightly crazy. The totally crazy won’t go. Problem is they’re too crazy to know they’re crazy.
One thing we might consider is bringing back the guys in white coats who carry butterfly nets. I don’t know if they ever really existed but you see them in old movies sometimes.
It would be nice if you could call 999 or something and report A Person Who Looks Like They’re About to Do Something Seriously Crazy and the white coats come running, net them, wrestle them into a straitjacket and bundle them off to an appropriate facility.
The beautiful part is that guys with butterfly nets look comical instead of sinister—you’d have to laugh when you saw them chasing a gibbering maniac–so they don’t up our paranoia quotient any further and make everyone even crazier. In fact, they’d provide comic relief. Bystanders would cheer and yell, “Go, white jackets! Grab that loony!” The laughter would release tension.
We all seem very tense these days.
A big part of the problem is politics. I have reported frequently on the alarming incidence of craziness on the right. But whether the American right wing is actively making people crazy or just serving as a clubhouse for the demented I’m not sure. I do know that right-wing craziness is the fastest-growing segment of the crazy demographic.
Right-wing insanity alone will probably take up about 50 percent of the new DSM.
You probably saw the news item that a significant number of Americans think Joe Stack is a hero.
Need I say more?
Well, I will, anyway. Hey, do you think it’s just a coincidence that a movie titled The Crazies is about to open? Or that Scorsese’s new one, Shutter Island, is set in a dark and scary lunatic asylum?
Our artists are trying to tell us something.
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We have legitimized the lunies. They are at the controls and we can only look on with ever wider eyes as did Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now as he made his way up the Mekong Delta to find the nightmare crazy in charge – Kurtz-Marlon Brando – “the horror, the horror, the horror. . .”
Crazy is relative. Beware the moving average!
Crazy is indeed relative and those who throw such terms around to describe others they disagree with are as dangerous as the “crazies” themselves.
The problem is that those on the right and the left can’t even agree on what is real. They’re operating from different sets of facts, different moral compasses, and different political preferences. Calling them “crazy” because you can’t find a middle ground misses the point.
Blame the likes of Rush Limbaugh for all the good it will do. Whether you agree or disagree with his politics or his version of the facts, he has far too many followers to hospitalize in an insane asylum.
That’s a reality that I think both the Right and the Left can agree upon.
In response to another comment. See in context »Gulags.
If you on the edge and in need of a good push over the cliff, all you need is a clip from Bachmann, Rush, O’Reiley, Palin, or nearly any GOP senator. There are no cures at this time….just have to wait it out!
Not just from the “right”–I had a dream that a man named Barack or something like that was promising to allow importation of prescription drugs from Canada and to use government buying power to induce cost savings from big pharma. The words were still ringing in my ears when I woke up and read about a Barack having made a secret backroom deal with big pharma in exchange for a health insurance bill that never made it.
I haven’t been smoking angel dust, I swear it!
Who said anything about hospitalization? But clearly some are highly sensitive to the term, “crazy.” Mr. Grossberger may have considered other less inflammatory descriptive terms such as wacko, preposterous, half-baked, around the bend, impracticable. Just to quote a few from the Thesaurus – which seems more apropos when speaking of the direction our country is taking and the apparent beliefs held by our mainstream population (those who listen to Rush and Glenn – the multitudes)?