Insanity Fair

A crazy old woman of Rhyde
Ate too many green apples, and died.
The apples fermented
Inside the demented
And soon she had cider inside her inside.

I learned that poem from my father, who knew many similarly questionable classics. (Another was “It wasn’t the cough that carried him off – But the coffin they carried him off in.”)

However, I must admit that I emended that first verse. The original said, “the lamented,” not “the demented,” and it began “There was a young woman of Rhyde.” I had to make her old and crazy to fit with “demented.” And that is the major point of this essay: it is no longer socially, or medically, correct to call people crazy, even if they obviously are. The approved term today is “demented,” and the condition is no longer madness or insanity – it is “dementia.”

It comes in kinds and degrees. It receives all sorts of pills, and other treatments. You can go out of your mind at any age, but the longer you live, the better your chances are of doing so. This, of course, is one of the penalties of longevity. And taking this idea to its logical conclusion, one shudders even to speculate as to the mental condition of those who achieve immortality.

I am reminded of a successful 1980 South African Film called The Gods Must Be Crazy, in which the standard of sanity is taken to be that of a tribe of Kalahari Bushmen who have had no contact with civilization as we know it. One day, they are confronted by a mysterious object that has fallen out of the sky. To them, it is a message from the Gods. To us, it is an empty Coke bottle. This object eventually causes so much dissention and consternation in the tribe that one Bushman is assigned the job of returning it to the Gods by throwing it off a great precipice which they know as “The Edge of the World.”

This calls to mind another movie, a more recent American production, called Thelma and Louise, at the climax of which the two heroines do the same thing to solve their own problems – only in this case, what they throw off a precipice – into the Grand Canyon – is themselves, driving over it in a car – a very un-American deed. Americans are traditionally an optimistic people. Suicide is not considered a characteristic American way of dealing with life’s problems, but rather a symptom of insanity.

But ironically even in America, the highest professional suicide rate is to be found among physicians, including psychiatrists – the very people in whom we place most trust to deal with cases of dementia.

However, from an international perspective, it is the nation of Hungary that has long been known to have, proportionally, more suicides than any other country in Europe. Yet, it was the Hungarians who gave us such world-renowned medical men as Ignaz Semmelweis (a pioneer of sanitation whose ideas were however rejected by his colleagues, leading to his death in a madhouse); Hans Selye, whose reputation ironically rests on his studies of stress, which must be a leading cause of suicide; and Max Nordau, whose own claim to fame stems significantly from his work on the phenomenon of “DEGENERACY.” (Incidentally, among Nordau’s other crazy ideas, was his belief, half a century before it actually happened, that there could one day be a Jewish State.)

But if we must associate suicide with insanity, look what has happened to religion. It used to be okay to die for your beliefs – that was crazy enough. But now it hardly counts, unless you take as many other people as possible with you, preferably innocent people whom you don’t know, and who have nothing whatever to do with your particular issue.

What’s really insane is that we no longer even call such conduct crazy. It has become a new normal. We dare not stigmatize suicide bombers as lunatics – the worst we can say about them is that they are “fanatics” or misguided religious zealots. They have their own rationale for mass murder, and who is to say that blowing yourself up on behalf of a cause you really believe in is not as logical as getting yourself marked for life with tattoos, or jumping out of airplanes for fun, or listening to amplified music until you go deaf?

If I had a case, this might be a good point at which to rest it.