Charles Krauthammer called it “surreal.” And truly, Obama is the Dali of politics. Even while he gaveled the UN Securtiy Council with the assurance that he had done something to make the world a safer place, not singling out any nation, he knew that thousands of centrifuges in a mountain outside of Qom were making enriched uranium. He has known all along. This has all been a farce. OK, I guess it’s even worse than I expected but at least my expectations were that he would be a weakling. A sitzpinkler where the Iranians, the Russians, the Chinese, or indeed, any country that shows a ruthless character toward its own citizens, are concerned. He’s just that kind of guy. Right now, I feel sorry for those people who said that I needed to give him a chance, a few more months to prove himself. Not months, as it turns out. Just a few short days. Our world grows more dangerous by the minute.
…..
On a personal level, the week ended with the loss of a great young woman. There are many, many people in Texas mourning tonight for Brianna. Only 21, her friendships spanned generations and her generosity of spirit, her bubbly joyfulness captivated everyone she met. She was conservative, a remarkable and tireless activist, the most beloved member of the Young Conservatives of Texas. She was the happiest of the happy warriors. Her Facebook status notes that she bounced between being driven crazy about the LSAT she was going to take next week, and her love for Tony (boyfriend,) random friends, and family. Our consolation is that she apparently died without suffering, and she is with the angels and the God she loved so much.
Requiesscat in pace, beloved.
Comments 44
My condolences Barbara. Loss of a loved one is always terrible; but of one so young, all but unbearable.
As to the president I think the events and revelations at the UN have hastened his irrelevency. The man’s out of his depth and it showed this week even more than most. Most members of the public are very slow to give much of a damn about what politicians do; but he’s giving them plenty of opportunities to get to know his limitations.
September 26th, 2009 at 6:39 pm
What I find more surreal (not to be confused with threatening) than anything else about Obama is his support of Zelaya after the story came out about the statements he has been making to the radio stations he calls. The New York Times reported that he said that “Israeli commandos have been hired to kill him; he is being secretly poisoned by gas and radiation.” (“Battle for Honduras Echoes Loudly in Media,” Sept. 25). Like so many people, Zelaya is cuckoo. He seems so very much stupider than Ahmadinejad, which is saying a great deal. How can the United States support him?
September 26th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
I also feel a little sorry for people trying to reason with you about Obama.
September 26th, 2009 at 6:56 pm
George,
Maybe Zelaya is being poisoned. The statements I read were beyond bizarre, like stuff coming out of schizophrenia or a drug trip. Considering the way Nixon was acting during the end game stage of Watergate (according to Kissinger) Zelaya’s statements aren’t completely surprising.
As to President Obama supporting him, I don’t find that surreal at all. His support for caudillos and wannabe caudillos is only surprising if you think he believes in constitutional government.
September 26th, 2009 at 6:57 pm
@Sully – Thanks.
September 26th, 2009 at 6:58 pm
Sully,
If Zelaya really is being poisoned, then his statements are accurate. I don’t think that’s what you mean at all.
Supporting caudillos is all different from supporting wannabe caudillos. Zelaya is a loser, unlike Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong-il, who are still in power.
September 26th, 2009 at 7:09 pm
Condolences from me, too, Barbara. Between tragedies public if not yet realized, and personal, yes, truly a terrible week.
Yet it’s hard not to laugh out loud when you see the word “Sitzpinkler” applied to our TGL, or TG Sitzpinkler.
September 26th, 2009 at 7:10 pm
@fuster – So, fuster, as a member of both groups, you are entitled not only to my pity but your own. Congratulations.
September 26th, 2009 at 7:17 pm
@CK MacLeod – Please laugh out loud. What else are you going to do? I’ve been enjoined from using the word that I really want to apply to him by my friend who taught it to me but said, “Really, Barbara, you must never, never use it. It’s very bad.” I’m trying to maintain some modicum of respect.
And thank you for your condolences. She was near in age to my daughter, and very much like her. Daughter is fine, thank G*d, but the reminder that all that happiness and hope can be gone in the blink of an eye is so much more affecting to me than I would have predicted.
September 26th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
@Barbara – Does this mean that I’m someone that you wish to look up to?
I’m unsure of which groups you mean.
September 26th, 2009 at 7:27 pm
@George Jochnowitz – Zelaya is straight out of Bananas: “Citizens of San Marcos will henceforth be required to change their underwear every half-hour.” It’s indeed disturbing that our government should be supporting him.
September 26th, 2009 at 8:13 pm
Barbara, my sympathy. It is a sad loss to many people I’m sure.
Obama’s performance at the UN was done with the knowledge of Iran’s facility. It was, O thinks, strategic: Get everyone to agree to a limitation of nuclear weapons, and then Iran doesn’t have a leg to stand on. Of course, Iran has been in violation of lots of treaties and resolutions, but hey! it’s a reset moment. Surely, once they are not afraid of aggression from the US, Iran will surely cooperate.
Our president is really flashing his naivete and his crude anti-Americanism.
September 26th, 2009 at 9:09 pm
My sympathies and condolences as well, Barbara. Brianna sounds like a young woman whose price was far above rubies, who opened her mouth with wisdom, and in whose tongue was the law of kindness.
It has been a sad and appalling week at the UN, and for America. It saddens me a great deal to see some leftists clap and cheer for Obama’s pseudo-clever mendacity about the Iranian nuclear site. God help us with such a president.
September 26th, 2009 at 11:42 pm
@J.E. Dyer – they’re going to play it out for as long as they can, JED – what else can they do? And they’re going to feel great and patriotic about it, and hate you for not feeling and thinking the same way. And not just on Iran.
Depending on how things go, the mental acrobatics on behalf of presidential mendacity, diffidence, and self-sabotage on health care, Afghanistan, and Iran may even take on some measure of credibility for extended periods. The misdirection you describe in your Cirincione piece has been in the cards for a long time.
September 27th, 2009 at 12:09 am
George,
You’re right. I got a little tangled up in that last post.
I don’t actually believe Zelaya is being poisoned, although I’ve long thought that some sort of longlasting, nonfatal, hard to detect neurotoxin would be the perfect weapon for influencing political affairs. In any event I find it completely incredible that “Israeli commandos” would be doing something to him in preference to concentrating on enemies a lot closer.
I think Zelaya has broken under the stress and is now saying impolitic things that he has long believed. He gambled, after all, for absolute power, and he lost. Not at all surprising that he should be a bit distraught and confused.
But then there is the fact that Zelaya is raving about beliefs very similar in kind to those held by probably 50% of the Muslim world and 30% or so of our own Democratic party – so it’s clearly wrong to think him “crazy” if that word is meant to indicate someone whose mind is not functioning “normally.”
September 27th, 2009 at 9:51 am
Sully,
Thank you for your thought-provoking comment. Sometimes, alas, big chunks of the world go crazy. It happened in Germany, an extremely sane country today and equally sane before the days of Hitler. Ionesco’s play RHINOCERITIS is about this, as I mention in my “Rhinoceritis” essay
http://www.jochnowitz.net/Essays/Rhinoceritis.html
It is interesting that in the days of the Cold War, the fear of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) kept the world alive. Nowadays, people are comparing Afghanistan with Vietnam. There is a big difference, however. There were no terrorist groups housed in Vietnam that flew planes into American buildings or plotted to set off bombs in the subway or in the Holland Tunnel. Communists were pretty crazy, as the Mao-made famine proves, but they weren’t eager to launch suicide missions.
Today, leftists are crazier than they were during the Cold War. We would expect an al-Qaeda type to make the sort of statements that Zelaya is making, but Communists didn’t talk that way. They didn’t act that way. They have caught a bad case of rhinoceritis from Islamists.
September 27th, 2009 at 11:28 am
Barbara, My condolences as well on the loss of Briana.
Vis-a-vis the Loser-in-Chief knowing all along about Mahmoud’s dirty little secret, this means that even as he boasted about his willingness to sit down with preconditions, he knew that there was 800-pound gorilla in the room. All I can say is “Mmm mmm mmm, Barack Insane Obama.”
@fuster — If you are the voice of reason when it comes to the Loser-in-Chief, he is in bigger trouble than I thought.
September 27th, 2009 at 11:46 am
@Howard Portnoy – Buddy, before I’m the voice of reason, we’ll all be undead.
September 27th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
George – “Today, leftists are crazier than they were during the Cold War.”
I can’t agree with you. There was a quite substantial unilateral disarmament movement back then that was almost completely composed of people who knew quite well, or could quite easily have known quite well, the facts about Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse Tung. The ideological impulse to break however many eggs are necessary to achieve heaven on earth is a constant with the left. It is, in fact, a qualification for membership in good standing in the hard left.
Conservative movements that inherently are skeptical of government’s ability to perfect the human condition contain some potential megalomaniacal dictators as cynical hangers on, leftist movements, insofar as they are composed of people who believe in “to each according to his need. . .” are composed almost soley of potential megalomaniacal dictators.
As to Germany, I just don’t buy sudden temporary insanity as a full explanation for the thoroughly planned and thought out unlimited aggressive war of conquest that was WW2 or for the holocaust, which was only a subset of a plan that would have depopulated a very large tract of Poland and western Russia if it had gone to its conclusion. Like the Japanese, the Germans did not go temporarily insane, they went raiding for loot in the same way the Vikings did, or Tamerlane did. In Germany’s case they found plenty of moral justification in Nietsche. I don’t know the text on which Japanese self assumption of superiority rests.
September 27th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
@Sully – got to agree with you there, Sully, on both counts – that is, that there’s no reason to believe that leftists are more insane now than before, or that WW2 was merely the product of insanity.
The German war of conquest was the completely logical output of a set of mutually reinforcing ideological and material inputs. That something is ill-conceived, unrealistic, and morally unacceptable doesn’t make it “insane,” though I think it’s probably fair to say that a lot of people drove themselves or were driven insane in the attempt to implement the doomed plan, and that qualities of mind that would have remained repressed in other historical contexts were instead encouraged in the Nazi context.
As for the leftists, if they seem more unhinged, even frivolous, today, it’s probably because there’s so much less of the old ideological and party structures organizing and disciplining them. Instead of having ready-made Marxist diatribes to spout, with the expectation that anyone will take them seriously, figures like Zelaya are left to improvise.
September 27th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
@MacLeod, @Sully: thank you gentlemen, for my opening. On Friday I was contemplating a humorous post about my chiropractor who is a Hindu of the New Age variety. It was a bizarre scene: she, while babbling away about Cathars, Jesuits, and a trip to Poland, clutching my head, cracking my neck, asked my opinion abut the veracity of “The Templar Revelation” (the supposed “scholarly” work that launched The Da Vinci Code.) What could I say? “Sure, sounds plausible- boy, those Catholics are sneaky!” seemed the most expedient thing under the circumstances. Then she described the massacre of the Cathars and assorted French villagers by the Pope’s army. OK- then she said, “And you know, I believe in reincarnation, so you know, like the Holocaust, I think those people who were killed were probably like the Pope’s army and that Pope and were getting their reward for showing religious intolerance in a previous life.”
I thought, but didn’t say (my head was still in a precarious position) “So, you think that Hitler was an instrument of cosmic justice, not a mass murderer?”
My take about the lunacy that is gripping our general culture is this: as a general rule, logic is no longer considered the trump card in persuasion or debate or winning an argument. This is easier now because most people are really poorly educated. Logic, as a virtue, as been deeply discounted just to make it fair and easier on the self-esteems of the millions whose teachers have done them a great disservice over the last 40 years. I blame The Feminist Movement and Sesame Street. You add to this that it is no longer acceptable, much less de rigueur, to sneer contemptuously** at someone who is spouting utter nonsense, and you end up with millions of people who feel at total liberty to spout such nonsense.
**preferably while he is at an impressionable age so that he remains inhibited for a substantial portion of the remainder of his life.
September 27th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
@Sully – I think you may have misread George’s statement that “leftists are crazier than they were during the Cold War.” I believe he was referring to leftist heads of state (in China and the USSR then, in places like Venezuela now and Honduras as of a few months ago), not to leftists in this country.
September 27th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Peter,
Thank you.
Colin,
Despite the fact that Hitler’s policies were internally logical, driving out Jewish atomic scientists and including Enrico Fermi, married to a Jew, was insane. Killing Jewish pets (described by Victor Klemperer in his diaries and reported in other sources) was insane.
September 27th, 2009 at 6:04 pm
George, there were countless actions by the Nazis that qualify as irrational by one or another standard, and one of the many, many dysfunctional characteristics of the Nazi state was that stupid, criminal, and even insane people were placed in positions of power – including especially the Leader himself. If, on the other hand, you believed that the Leader was the Greatest Genius of All Time, then it would be insane to ask him to share power with anyone else.
The proscription of Jewish pets was just one aspect of the systematic destruction of all Jewish rights and privileges eventually including, of course, the right to live. From the perspective of the German interest, as we might have defined it, it was completely insane to drive out Jewish and other scientists. From the perspective of the German interest as the Nazis defined it (especially the “German” part of German interest), it was essential.
I remember reading somewhere that the Khmer Rouge ordered dogs killed because police agents liked to hide under people’s beds, a favorite spot for dogs, too. Insane or perfectly rational – once you’ve decided that even the most trivial interest of the master is more important than any interest of the slave?
September 27th, 2009 at 6:43 pm
Colin,
The Khmer Rouge was less irrational in this particular respect than Chairman Mao, who banned the ownership of dogs in cities because owning them was too bourgeois. I guess Mao felt that the love bestowed on one’s pet should be directed instead to the Communist Party.
September 27th, 2009 at 9:16 pm
@George Jochnowitz – That’s consistent with a story that I remember, from the 1950′s or ’60′s, about two Chinese peasants applying to the local authorities for a marriage license. The cognizant official asked why they wanted to get married and they said “We are in love.” The official replied that love is no substitute for ideological affinity.
September 27th, 2009 at 9:37 pm
Peter and George,
Nikita Krushchev took off his shoe and pounded it on his desk at the UN like a schoolboy having a tantrum, and he was quite a bit more savory, and sane, than Stalin or Beria. Stalin killed a large chunk of his army’s officers not long before the war.
Mao Tse Tung ordered millions of villagers to build backyard steel foundries. Then he let loose the maelstrom of the cultural revolution. Mao also made statements about China’s ability to survive nuclear war after the U.S. and Russia were well into the overkill era of warhead building.
The cold war communists didn’t as loosely talk about their eagerness to immolate themselves for their beliefs like Ahmedinejad and other Islamist nutcases; but I note that the Imams and vocal leaders never seem to wire themselves up for suicide missions. And, oddly enough they never seem to wire up their sons or daughters either.
September 27th, 2009 at 9:39 pm
Sully,
Mao’s backyard furnaces, in which farmers had to melt their tools, were a major factor leading to the famine of 1959-61, the most murderous famine in human history. The steel turned out to be useless. The furnace decision can be used as an argument that Mao was as crazy as anybody.
During the spring break at Hebei University in 1989, I visited the family of a student at the College of Staten Island who suggested that I go to see his parents, who lived in Shanxi Province. I saw the remains of a backyard furnace from their window.
Imams never wire themselves or their children up as suicide bombers, but Rafsanjani’s famous al-Quds speech of 2001 suggested that Iran should turn itself into a suicide bomb. That may well be what Ahmadinejad is trying to do–commit suicide and take his nation with him.
September 27th, 2009 at 10:09 pm
George – “Rafsanjani’s famous al-Quds speech of 2001 suggested that Iran should turn itself into a suicide bomb. That may well be what Ahmadinejad is trying to do–commit suicide and take his nation with him.”
Nothing I’ve written should be taken as indicating that I think any threat by any country’s leader should be taken lightly. From the moment of Ahmedinejad’s threat I’ve believed that Israel and the U.S. have had complete moral license to act as necessary to end the possibility that he can carry it out.
Personally I think that we or Israel should have politely asked him to recant and then put a cruise missile into his home after 24 hours of silence on his part.
Re Mao – I recently read a voluminous book by his personal doctor. Very illuminating. The man was way out there on the limb of the sanity curve – a psychopath. Fortunately few of those come along who are capable of getting to national power, but history is full of them.
September 27th, 2009 at 10:22 pm
Yet once again: Rafsanjani’s speech is being misinterpreted here. That’s NOT to say that it’s unthreatening or that Iran is unthreatening. Here’s a version of his remarks as originally reported by the Iranian news agency, provided by MEMRI:
The threat is not of turning Iran into a suicide weapon: It is of Iran/Islam dealing securely, from a position of strength, while separating Israel from its “colonial” sponsors. The whole point is that, because a nuclear Iran/Islam would survive a nuclear exchange, Israel would no longer have a nuclear trump card.
There is a lot more that could be said about this statement – mainly it’s a concoction of blather and half-truths, with a kernel of strategic sense and utility to it, much like the Mao statement mentioned above.
Part of the reason that Rafsanjani uttered it s that the War on Terror had just begun. The statement was made on 12-15-01. Part of the rationale for it also was that several important fatwas have stated that nukes are un-Islamic. Whether they could be revised or not, supporters of a weapons program need to overcome the arguments.
Iran is dangerous and shouldn’t be allowed to become a nuclear power, but we should deal with it as it is, not waste our time with scare scenarios that de-sensitize the public and create a kind of pre-deterrence – encouraging negotiations at all cost rather than allowing us to deal from strength.
September 27th, 2009 at 11:47 pm
Look at the quotation cited above:
“If one day, he said, the world of Islam comes to possess the weapons currently in Israel’s possession–ON THAT DAY this method of global arrogance would come to an end. This, he said, is because the use of a nuclear bomb in Israel WILL LEAVE NOTHING ON THE GROUND, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam” (emphasis added). Rafsanjani said as clearly as anyone could that the instant Iran gets nuclear weapons it will use them to destroy Israel.
September 28th, 2009 at 12:03 am
No, George. In my opinion you have completely and utterly misread the statement. The entire speech, of which this section on Israel is a small part, dealt with “colonialism” from a 3rd Worldist perspective. Phrases like “method of global arrogance,” which I’m guessing make little impression on you, are critical to Rafsanjani: From his point of view, countries like Iran as well as the entire House of Islam are subjected to colonialist – economic, political, cultural, military – encroachment and domination. THAT is what Rafsanjani believes will come to an end “on that day.”
I know you believe that the Iranians are lunatics, but, if they really wanted to announce to the world their intention to attack Israel or anyone else “on the day” that they went nuclear, they could say so clearly. But they’re not lunatics on that order. Nor are they speaking in code or subtle ambiguities that we just happen to be brilliant enough to decipher. He is very clearly enunciating a balance of power justification for the acquisition of nuclear arms – nuclear arms as an equalizer.
The threat you interpret him to be making would be an absurdity. If he really meant it in that way, it would be ridiculous for him to say it. That it continually gets repeated and passed around harms the credibility of the anti-Iranian right wing. It’s not serious. Neither are the EMP attack and terrorist hand-off scenarios that are continually passed around. People cling to them because they’re much easier to grasp – initially – than the real problems. It doesn’t do any good. It’s as unrealistic and counterproductive as the head-in-the-sand, diplomacy-at-any-cost attitude of the transnational left.
Neither the Israelis nor any serious observer of the situation believes that Iran is sprinting to a bomb for the sake of genocide ASAP. That is not the same as saying that Iranian nukes don’t objectively increase the danger to Israel and others.
September 28th, 2009 at 1:16 am
Colin,
Iranians are not lunatics, as is shown by their opposition to a lunatic regime. On the other hand, continuing an 8-year destructive war against Iraq that led to more than 100,000 Iranian casualties after Iraq withdrew and sued for peace was crazy. Holding American hostages for 444 days was crazy.
The words “on that day” and “will leave nothing standing” are unambiguous despite their occurrence in a much longer speech. Including Israel in a speech against colonialism made no sense, since Israel had never and could never try to colonize Iran. Besides, Iran has never been a colony.
September 28th, 2009 at 9:07 am
There is also the fact that a theocracy is almost by definition lead by men who have little technical knowledge.
Even in the U.S. with a free press the building and development of nuclear weapons went on to a ridiculous extent. You need go no further than to google The Davy Crockett for instance to know that somebody was not thinking clearly while watching over the techies and gun nuts.
The planning for nuclear weapons use became positively bizarre. You can’t trust wikipedia implicitly on such matters but I think this article gives a reasonable flavor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Integrated_Operational_Plan
I can’t find it now, but as I recall Kennedy was said to have said to a general something like “you don’t have a plan, you have a mad spasm.”
The scariest thing about Iran getting these things is that it’s not at all apparent that a religious leader, even a wordly leader whose primary education is in a madrassah, will have the slightest sense of what he’ll be playing with and making statements about.
All of the logic is on taking preparations to a hair trigger so as to be able to strike first and as hard as necessary if you’re a little country like Israel with almost all of your population in a few target centers and you think there’s even a possibility that an opponent will use such weapons.
The ethicists advising or commenting on Israeli plans have to be grappling with the tradeoff between killing some innocent Iranians now to push back the threat and courting the real possibility of killing a lot of Iranians later when the threat gets beyond addressing with conventional weapons. Not a good place to be.
September 28th, 2009 at 10:44 am
@George Jochnowitz – George, 3rd Worldists see Israel as a US aircraft carrier, and they see “colonialism” as a cultural and economic reality, not as an attempt to install little Plymouth Rocks and Roanokes in their territory. The “will leave nothing standing” is the Iranian version of deterrence. It does not occur in his statement as a promise to take place “on that day.”
Sully’s description gets closer, in my view, to the real danger, or one aspect of the real danger. As he also points out, we ourselves adopted a number of policies that seem crazy – and yet are still implicitly in force. For every scare quote patched together by ignorance and paranoia into something it isn’t, Curtis LeMay, as head of SAC and with the weapons to do it, had several explicit promises to wipe out both sides for the sake of “victory.” He once said if there were 2 Americans and 1 Russian left afterward, then we would have won.
September 28th, 2009 at 11:02 am
I’m surprised LeMay granted the possibility of that one Russian escaping his plans. As I recall McNamara discovered that the Moscow area was targetted with 60 or so weapons in the SIOP, at least a few of them surely multi-megaton devices, for that was at the end of the era when real men still delivered real bombs, not these little pipsqueak 200KT things they put by the handful on top of missiles.
Talk about assured destruction.
September 28th, 2009 at 11:17 am
Excuse me! My hands been up for a while! Hellloooo….!!!
Is all this about whether or not a state or a regime can be “crazy”, as in clinically crazy? Because that’s what I keep reading in George’s comments: Mao doing this was crazy, the Khmer Rouge doing that was crazy, etc.
I’m learning a lot of interesting facts about history along the way, but it’s not really addressing the question, which I think began as “The Leftists are crazier today than they used to be.”
I propose that this is not really measurable unless you define a whole bunch of terms which this thread has failed to do. I also propose that the Iranian regime can’t be defined as “Leftist.” I also propose that you can’t define a state as “crazy” clinically. I also propose that just because an action is ignorant and destructive doesn’t mean it’s crazy. I also propose that just because an action looks ignorant and destructive to us, doesn’t mean it isn’t serving some useful purpose to the people making the decisions, which would make it pretty logical. Killing the pets of Jews served a purpose, and frankly had huge indoctrination/ coercion value. I mean, hell, you’re rounding up the owners and tossing them into camps: why are you going to treat their dogs any better? And can you imagine being horrified at the fate of the pooch in those circumstances? “Bye, Bubbe! Wait…Not Fluffy too!! Oh, the horror!”
Come on, guys. Time to get your own thread. Somebody put up a post, “Can a Regime be Crazy?” and go to town.
Time for Roger & Beverley’s 2nd Law: Anything taken to its logical extreme is ridiculous.
September 28th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
@Barbara – The question would be “Can a regime not be crazy?” I would say “no.” It’s a corollary to “absolute power corrupts absolutely”: The more powerful an individual or group, the more fully realized their imperfections. The utopian statists are the worst, of course, because they are committed to monopolies of power. When they inevitably fail to deliver on their promises, their ideologies provide them with no alternative but to try even harder.
September 28th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
And who are Roger & Beverly?
September 28th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
@CK MacLeod – Yes, CK: your answer is correct to the question you posed which was an appropriate response to the original question. The linkage between power and “craziness” (not the clinical variety, really) is vital. Let’s face it: a part of maintaining control is dealing with threats to your power. That in itself tends to feed paranoia. It’s an old story.
Dad ‘n’ Mum. When reading Chesterton, I discovered that he had a much longer and more entertaining way of expressing the same thought, but I’ll abbreviate: The most logical people on earth are in insane asylums. Isn’t that beautifully anachronistic? Oh, for the days when the mentally ill were confined.
September 28th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
And that’s Beverley. L-E-Y. And don’t you forget it, buster.
September 28th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
Barbara – “The most logical people on earth are in insane asylums”
Excellent book – The Professor and the Madman – about one of the most prolific contributors to the OED.
A quote from my Philadelphia junkman uncle to my dad, me about seven in the back seat of the car, as we passed the most impressively medical looking building of the Norristown State Hospital – “That’s the building where they give them the black bottle.”
September 28th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
@Sully – I’ve always wanted to read that book- thanks for reminding me!
September 28th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
Barbara,
It’s very cheap used on Amazon. Or, if you’re comfortable sending your address to sullyaugustine@aol.com I’ll send you my copy. I’m engaged in a very long term project to send my books to good homes.
September 28th, 2009 at 2:42 pm