| Section
One The Pursuit
of Happiness
On the 5th of July
last year, a mammoth lout threw a
firecracker at me. No adolescent
prankster, he: rather, a
40-year-old convenience-store
worker with ten pounds of weight
for every year of his life. The
firecracker missed me by about
eighteen inches, so I suppose the
guy expected me to thank him, or
to laugh it off. But I was having
one of those days, and I let him
have it. Verbally.
In retrospect, I could have
made my point a little better
with one good clout against the
skull with the business end of a
Louisville Slugger. You see,
Sparky wasn’t doing anything
wrong, as he saw it. Just getting
rid of some surplus fire-crackers
in the wake of the Fourth. Not
minding pedestrians. Not caring
that the noise of exploding
gunpowder is something of an
irritant when it’s a foot
and a half away from you. In
fact, Sparky became violently
angry that I had the nerve to
talk back to him (as indeed I
did), and I ended up running from
this gorilla with a Social
Security number, before he put me
in hospital.
This incident seems to be
typical Life in the Big City
nowadays. A life in which
consideration is passe’ and
civility outmoded; an atmosphere
in which silence and respect and
prudence have gone the way of the
dinosaur, the dodo bird, and
Henry Ford’s Edsel. The
pursuit of happiness for Me And
Only Me.
Incivility can kill. In
December 2000, a British singer
named Kirsty MacColl was swimming
near the coral reefs off a
Caribbean island, in an inlet
reserved exclusively for
swimmers, an area from which all
seagoing vehicles, be they
surf-boards or jet-skis, were
prohibited. Swimming along, happy
as a clam, enjoying the brilliant
sapphire waters ... when a
speedboat came zipping by,
striking her in the head and
killing her instantly. Kirsty
MacColl was 41 years old.
Well, our blithe boaters
can’t let some stuffy
regulation interfere with their
good time, can they? Oh, no. For
this is the age of the Good Time
U"ber Alles. The pursuit of
happiness By Any Means Necessary.
I can do whatever I want because
This Is A Free Country.
"Sometimes," as Denis
Leary crooned in his anatomically
named tribute to the jerks of the
world, "I gotta have fun at
other people’s
expense." That nifty little
number really should be our
national anthem.
And please don’t get me
started on the Boom-Box Fiends,
the Sonic Home Invaders, the
Radio As A Weapon crowd. The car
radio, that is to say, the volume
at which most Noddle Island
saints and sages blast their car
radio, be they young or
middle-aged, white or black or
brown or something else, is the
strongest argument I can think of
against gun control. Here again,
perhaps, the Louisville Slugger
could come in handy. We smile at
Robin Williams smashing the
tail-lights of a speeding pick-up
truck in the 1982 film "The
World According to Garp." He
swings the pipe like Lewis
Carroll’s vorpal blade,
shouting all the while: "We
are civilized people! And
civilized people obey
rules!" I hear you, Robin, I
hear you. But no one else seems
to hear you. The
speedboat-motor’s drowning
you out.
***
Section
Two
The
Garden of Eden, 500 mg: To Be
Taken Twice Daily
It doesn’t shock us
anymore. We said so at the time
of the Jonesboro, Arkansas school
shooting—and since then,
there’s been Columbine High
and Edgewater Techno- logies,
most notably. We’ve even
seen our own government resort to
guns in the noble cause of prying
a seven-year-old Cuban child away
from loving Miami relatives and
back into the arms of Uncle
Fidel. Precious little can
surprise us.
It is alleged that on the day
after last Christmas, a software
expert named Michael McDermott
blew his top, got some weapons,
and killed seven persons at his
Wakefield, Mass. workplace.
Apparently irate at the impending
garnishment of his wages, he
reportedly gunned down seven of
his co-workers. It was reported
further that Mr McDermott had
been under the care of a
psychiatrist, and was taking a
number of medications including
Paxil and Prozac.
What
can we deduce?
Is it now safe to assume that
the majority of psychiatrists and
psychotherapists, who see life in
terms of blood chemistry and
Freudianism and coping strategies
and behaviorist orthodoxies,
possess a woefully inadequate,
glaringly deficient insight into
the mystery of evil? Is it not
obvious (we ask) that the Bishop
Sheens and Mother Angelicas of
the world, who speak in the
"harsh" and
"intolerant" dialect of
vice and virtue, right and wrong,
good and bad, have much clearer
insight into the awful
consequences of abused human
freedom than does our new clerisy
of shrinks and pill-pushers?
We do not go so far as to say
that the Prozac, Paxil, and other
pills were accessories before the
fact to the Wakefield massacre,
though that can be argued. Nor do
we indict any therapist or
clinician for lacking the ability
to foresee the horrible deeds of
December 26th. We do
say (aware of our finite
scientific acumen and limited
general wisdom) that if anyone
believes that the shrinks’
Magic Pills will restore a fallen
world to the Garden of Eden, then
please, please think again.
Perhaps the chemicals in some
medications can becalm a jittery
soul and begin to smooth some of
life’s smaller potholes, in
a few select cases. But
skepticism is warranted.
Ultimately, we can’t
medicate Evil away, although our
old chum The Devil would like to
make us think we can.
The pretensions of psychiatry
are almost infinite, a pill for
every ill and a smile on every
face. A happy camper in every
happy camp. But there needs to be
a little more humility in that
occupation, a lot more respect
for the human person, a reverence
for the majesty of human freedom
(what theologians call "the
image of God"—will,
intellect, choice, morality), and
an unsentimental awareness of the
ineradicable human capacity to
choose darkness over light.
An Italian prelate, Cardinal
Pericle Felici, denounced
psychiatry in 1953, and said that
Catholics who seek therapy are
guilty of mortal sin. Nowadays,
many priests are psychologists.
The public and private morality
of the civilized nations of the
world doesn’t seem to have
improved in the last
half-century.
We shrive ourselves. We pop
pills. And the world goes to
hell.
(to
be continued ... )
©
2001, All rights
reserved. Tom DeFreitas.
|
