Crazy

Everybody has their good days and their bad days, I think it is fair to say, but some of us also have our bizarre days. I had one recently, but it wasn’t my fault. I was provoked. I was provoked by the premonition that large chunks of the world as we know it have gone crazy.

Yes, of course, it’s August, and in August people are more inclined to take leave of their senses as they take leave of familiar surroundings. It’s called “vacation” in every possible sense of the word. We are also in the midst of a presidential campaign, so it is silly season to boot. And I admit that I was alarmed, but not really surprised, that Tuesday’s New York Times op-ed page gave prime real estate to none other than Michael Moore and Oliver Stone, two of the most reality-challenged citizens of our fair Republic, to defend the likes of Julian Assange, who is less reality-challenged then simply evil. (Are all the adults at the paper on vacation?) But none of that really prepared me for yesterday’s New York Times front page.

Looking just at that page above the fold, insanity seemed to suggest itself from wall to wall. If you did not see it, let me briefly describe its contents.

Starting on the far right (not exactly incidentally maybe) is an article about Representative Todd Akin. This man is crazy. At least what he said about women and abortion is crazy. I don’t mean crazy in a clinical sense necessarily, although in this case I do not casually rule it out. I mean crazy in the colloquial sense. No one who made it through high school, one would think, could possibly entertain such idiotic views. Well, one would need to think again, I guess.

Married to the article about Akin’s abortion views is a more general analysis pointing to the centrality of rolling back abortion in the Republican Party’s current political agenda. In that article the author points out that the only reason the federal government is functioning right now—by which I mean has a continuing budget resolution—is that the measure attracted enough votes only by dint of an amendment restricting abortion in the District of Columbia. This, too, is crazy, and here is why.

Culture war issues should be demoted from our national political discussion. They should be sent back to local communities, where some sense of cultural commonality offers hope of settling them, if not once and for all, then at least to an extent that is good enough for government work. On the national level, given the irreconcilable and categorical moral character of the positions taken, these issues—whether abortion, homosexual marriage, surrogate parenthood and others—can never be settled. All they do is continually polarize our politics, contributing to gridlock far and wide. (It is probably worth pointing out, too, that as far as I can tell there is no constitutional basis whatsoever for the federal government to involve itself in such matters; and that not a single culture war issue matters one whit to the increasingly urgent effort to find real solutions to the problems that will in fact define our country’s future. But no one seems to care about any of that, so I’ve put these remarks in parentheses.) It is therefore irresponsible, if not actually crazy, for the Republican Party to emphasize such issues, and it is completely crazy to graft amendments concerning abortion or gay marriage or what-have-you to legislation whose essential purposes have nothing whatsoever to do with such issues.

Moving a bit further toward the left on the front page (no political insinuation intended) is a story about Japanese nationalist activists planting the Rising Sun on an uninhabited disputed island in the Senkaku Islands chain. According to the story, the captains of the boats carrying the activists warned them not to land, lest doing so provoke a diplomatic incident. But the activists ignored the captain, jumping overboard and swimming through shark-infested waters to shove their metaphorical bamboo shoots under Chinese fingernails. These people are crazy. They are dangerous, too.

All the way to the left, beneath the heartrending photograph of parents mourning at the funeral of their son, is a story about the latest American casualty of the Afghan War. Marine Lance Corporal Gregory T. Buckley, Jr. was scheduled to leave Afghanistan later this month. But before he could do so he was murdered by one of the Afghan trainees he was trying to help.

Was this Afghan crazy? That’s hard to say without knowing his motives, but it is not too much of a stretch, I think, to label someone who kills an honest soul trying to help you as crazy. But that’s not the only thing that’s crazy in Afghanistan. The war itself has become ever so slightly crazy since the Obama Administration’s “surge” returned counterproductive results that are now far too clear to deny. That we stay in a country whose future soldiers and policemen are more interested in shooting us than in shooting Taliban is, yes, crazy.

Way back in 1961, Willie Nelson wrote the best song of his lifetime. It was called “Crazy”, and it was made famous by the incomparable Patsy Cline. The lyrics to that song are about an unrequited love that the jilted victim anticipated but pursued anyway. It has nothing to do with brainless politicians, errant Republican Party obsessions, Japanese nut cases, or futile foreign wars. Yet it is not completely irrelevant either, because the song shows how otherwise normal human beings can do crazy things even knowing at the very time they are doing them that they are in fact crazy—but they just go and do them anyway. I have a hunch that, if anything ties these above-the-fold stories together, this is it.

We are a strange species. Does any other animal on earth behave this way? Maybe tomorrow’s Times will take up the question.