I

I begin this essay by revealing to the reader that my father was a magnet for lunatics. Why he was irresistibly charming to the disturbed and the delusional is a question I’m not at present prepared to answer; but I will say that, for one reason or another, humanity has a way of manifesting itself more on some faces than others, and maybe those in desperate need could see something in my father’s eyes that the sane among us normally missed.

It was the custom of my parents to attend meetings of the city council. When my sister wasn’t around to watch me I got roped into going but, to be honest, I enjoyed the hubbub, sights and smells of these gatherings. People stood around outside to smoke and some of the men puffed on cigars. I always headed for the cigars since I found the sweet aroma intoxicating. The man who was the city attorney was short, wore pants that were too long for his legs and had a weird slant to his bald spot that made it look as if someone had clobbered him with a clothes iron. And yet I liked him because I sensed that he didn’t care about any of that. I think that if anyone had come up to him to say, “You’re always stepping on your pant cuffs and the back of your head is flat as a pancake.” I think that he would have only smiled as if to say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about and neither do I care.”

The mayor was short and jovial, had the physique of a pot belly pig and told funny stories that today would have landed him in hot water. He called my mother “Poly.” It wasn’t until many years later that I became impressed by the fact that everyone knew my mother. Council members, secretaries, police officers, firefighters, the guys who fixed pot holes -they all knew my mother!

This meant that there was never a quick escape from these meetings. My mother had to talk to everyone before we could leave. One night my father and I sat in the car waiting for what seemed like hours for my mother to finish her social rounds. The old man didn’t mind this in the least. He could sleep (he had an extraordinary ability to nod off anywhere) or smoke unfiltered Pall Malls and talk to me about things like democracy, the Cold War or how athletic a skater he had been in Chicago. I liked the times we had together, but this was not going to be one of them.

A rather large woman with a tangled mop of hair on her head walked up to our car and began talking to my father as if she knew him. She had something important to say but no one would listen to her. Every night the police broke into her house and beat her up. Locking the doors did no good since the cops had a key that could open any door. Sometimes they waited for her to fall asleep before breaking in. They whipped her with belts, beat her with night sticks and broke her furniture.

My father only nodded, shook his head and murmured, “That’s terrible. No, they shouldn’t do that. You’re right, something needs to be done.”

I was in a state of shock. Could the police really break into a house and then beat people up? Every notion I had of the world had suddenly been turned upside down. The police were supposed to protect us, not work us over as if we were punching bags.

Before I could ask my father about this, however, he shook his head and said, “That poor woman.”

In an instant I knew that, after years of hearing about crazy people, I had finally met one. Crazy people didn’t just wander onto television shows or movies. They were real. It was like finding out that unicorns or some other mythical beasts live next door, go to work and mow the lawn. But there was something else in the encounter that made a deep impression on me: crazy people are more than just weird; they are people who suffer. To be beaten up is bad enough, but to be beaten up night after night, without a friend in the world who believes you, is hell.

II

In our home politics, like rotting fish, permeated everything. The news was political, sports was political, the length of hair on a kid was political and probably the weather, too, although I can’t swear to that. My parents talked back to the radio, the television and even the newspapers. We were extremely tribal. People who were on the “wrong end” of the political spectrum looked seedy, shabby and were not to be trusted. People who were, like us, on the “correct end” of the political spectrum were decent, clean cut and trustworthy. Once, when we found ourselves on the losing side of a presidential election, my parents actually took to wearing black armbands. It seemed a bit silly to me but our household had a definite flair for the dramatic.

I grew up in the fifties, when tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union were at their highest. For the first time in history sober, rational people talked about the possible end of life on earth. But The Cold War, I think, only radiated pleasure to the apocalyptic center of my mother’s brain. She volunteered her services to Civil Defense, gave public presentations of bomb shelters and never missed an opportunity to predict Doomsday. It was plain to us that our Godless enemies could hardly wait to vaporize El Monte (the nation’s leader in the recreational vehicle industry, it should be noted). We anticipated thermonuclear war the way other people anticipated Labor Day sales.

In my imagination (and perhaps in reality) the entire city was seething with fear, paranoia and righteous indignation. Sneaks, spies, traitors and silly do-gooder goofs were everywhere; and every contest, no matter how small, was a life-or-death struggle. Neighbors who campaigned for people my mother didn’t like stopped talking to us. When the city voted to divide itself in half my parents reacted as if they were the victims of a Greek tragedy.

Eternal vigilance was our motto, for we had to worry not only about sudden atomic annihilation, but absolutely grotesque perversion as well. This became clear to me one afternoon as I took a walk with my father. We were in the city’s largest municipal park on a day when people came to hear speeches, distribute flyers, eat hot dogs and listen to music.

One elderly woman whom I recognized from church made a bee-line for my father. She carried a clipboard and was collecting signatures.

“Do you know,” she said, tightening the muscles around her blazing eyes. “That there are no laws against bestiality! People can do whatever they want with their animals. It’s a disgrace, a blot on the character of our nation and an abomination. We shouldn’t stand for it! It’s intolerable! If nothing is done, believe me, buster, God will judge us and we won’t get off easy. I want you to sign my petition so that I can send it to the Governor.”

“That’s terrible,” my father murmured. “Yes, you’re right, something has to be done.”

Once again, my sheltered life had been turned upside down and shaken. Bob down the street could cohabitate with an entire flock of sheep and who would stop him! Women would not only marry pigs, they’d marry REAL pigs. This was embarrassing. How had we overlooked the existence of such perverse liberties?

When we were by ourselves, I said, “Dad, she thinks that…?”

“For the love of God,” my dad sighed, rolling his eyes. “Of all the damn stupid things to get worked up about...”

III

One summer my family decided that it would be fun to drive across the country in a Volkswagen bug to visit my cousins back east. This turned out to be so much fun that it nearly gave my father a stroke.

I sat next to my grandmother, reading Homer’s Odyssey and finding it much more entertaining that I had expected. Five minutes into our journey my grandmother had to use a restroom.

“Jim, can we stop at that gas station?” she said.

Once she was out of the car my father said under his breath, “She isn’t going to do that the whole trip is she?”

She did. We got to know every gas station from Garvey Avenue to Wrigley Field. The back of my father’s neck kept turning red and he beat his poor leg so much that I was afraid he’d break it. My mother studied maps and only added to my father’s misery by informing him that every turn he made was a wrong one. Driving through Texas during a storm was terrifying. I had heard thunder before, but the thunder in Texas was like H-bombs going off overhead and I had vivid images of us floating away in a flash flood. Day after day, I was fascinated by vast stretches of nothingness. The heartland of America, except for gas stations, billboards and cows, seemed empty. All we could get on the radio was farm reports or people screaming about Jesus. I wondered if it were possible that the country’s food was grown by only a handful of people who had been driven insane by listening to the radio.

When we finally got to Chicago to meet my aunt and cousins, I immediately understood why my parents had fled to California. My mother’s sister and her husband owned a grocery store, kept money hidden in a mattress, left half-empty bottles of Pepsi everywhere and liked to show off one of their prized possessions, a sawed-off shotgun. Aunt Mary regularly flew into rages and beat her younger son, a boy who liked to talk to me about sex, karate and body-building. Grandmother worked from morning to night like a servant, often cleaning up messes on the floor left by the family’s crippled dog. They were surrounded by African-Americans who were never called African-Americans or even negros. The house seemed to exude tension as if inhabited by people preparing for war.

One night a woman I didn’t know and never met again came over for a visit. After dinner, as the adults enjoyed coffee and cigarettes in the living room, she began talking about her fears of going insane. Her mother was schizophrenic, and she thought that it was only a matter of time before she, too, began to experience delusions and hallucinations. Of course, the person she opened up to was my father.

Knowing absolutely nothing about schizophrenia, I thought that her fears were ridiculous. Mental illness, I was sure, could not possibly be passed down to an offspring as if it were money or a family heirloom. No! Craziness is something one must work for by reading strange books, living in a castle, joining a secret cult, or wandering around the planet for forty years after the Trojan War. Insanity, I was sure, wasn’t a kind of ticking time bomb hidden away in our cells, counting down the days and years for just the right moment to blow reality to smithereens.

I wanted life to be fair; and to me getting a mental illness the same way one gets a skin or eye color seemed a monstrosity of unfairness. Before I took my first college course in psychology to learn that there is, in fact, a genetic factor in the pre-disposition toward schizophrenia, my father talked to me one night about his aunt.

We had built a long, rectangular room in the back of the house. With all of its windows, it was the coolest place in the house during summer. Dad and I often stayed up late on a Friday night to watch B horror movies on channel 13. Sometimes we just talked until the wee hours of the night.

I think now that there must have been a lifelong feeling of loneliness in my father. His mother had died when he was a small child and, being raised by an abusive grandfather, he often, as my sister once pointed out, seemed perpetually unsure of what a normal family should look like. He had no siblings and his father was as paternal as a block of ice but he did have a favorite aunt, and he talked about her during a stifling moonlit night when the entire neighborhood seemed to be covered with June bugs.

She was a troubled woman, given to bouts of delusional thinking. When he was in his teens, my father thought that he could save her by being her trusted confidant. Eventually, however, his aunt was committed to a mental hospital. For the rest of his life he carried within him the belief that he had let her down, that somehow her insanity was his fault.

There is nothing fair about mental illness, just as there is nothing fair about the guilt so many people feel they must hold onto.

IV

“…many of the persons thus represented, being examined, several of them have been convicted of a very damnable witchcraft: yea, more than one twenty have confessed, that they have signed unto a book, which the devil showed them, and engaged in his hellish design of bewitching and ruining our land.” -Cotton Mather, The Wonders of the Invisible World, 1693

“…I have in my possession the names of fifty-seven Communists who are in the State Department…” -Senator Joseph McCarthy, 1950

“Americans have always valued the idea of FUN. We have a National Craving for FUN. We don’t get very much of it anymore, so we do two things: first we rummage around for anything that might be FUN, then (since it wasn’t really FUN stuff in the first place) we pretend to enjoy it (whatever it was). The net result: STRESSED CHEESE.” – Frank Zappa, 1981

Insanity, like a contagion, can spread and, in times of stress and uncertainty, spread quickly. But what I find remarkable about America is how sane it has largely remained through the centuries despite so many outbreaks of mass hysteria, fanaticism and demagoguery. No small feat for a people who left home (thousands or hundreds of years ago) in order to fight for survival in a strange land surrounded by dark and alien wilderness. That it has left a legacy of paranoia in our national character is undeniable; and yet we remain stubbornly optimistic, as if our fears contain within them something childlike, strong or idiotic that defies despair.

Simply because we all haven’t moved to the funny farm, however, doesn’t reassure me about the present or the future of the Republic. Millions of us have substituted conspiracy theories for political dialog, casting a long shadow over our confidence in democratic institutions. Many of the seemingly capable people you pass on the street live in a world that barely resembles reality.

Plato wrote that the State “is man writ large.” Could that mean that the concept of mental illness can be applied to states as well as to men? After all, if there are “outlaw states” then there may as well be “crazy states.” Perhaps psychologists can be trained to treat cities, states or entire countries, although I doubt it. For one thing, the paper work alone would be crushing and how big of a waiting room would one have to have?

The nature of political reality always involves a struggle to define reality, which is why the exercise of reason is so important. But reason is not always easy to cultivate, especially when a fragmented political landscape is dotted with as much misinformation and delusion as reality. And yet it remains our duty to cultivate and to exercise reason, to keep our mind open to all the surprising ways reality may reveal itself to us.

The great question is, is reason alone enough? When I listen to some people talk about reason, I get the feeling that I’m having a conversation with a calculator.

“So, someone’s hungry or out of work,” they sniff. “By what logic is that my problem?”

Society is seen as a loose collection of strangers, or it is seen as a kind of extended family. I prefer the latter view. To see others as related to us is to understand that compassion and a desire to fight injustice is not soft-headed sentimentality but rationality at its highest level.

My father, despite all of his prejudices, hated unfairness. Even if he didn’t want to live next door to you, he didn’t want to see you treated unfairly. Perhaps that is what those who were troubled saw in him, why they talked to a man they didn’t know but didn’t see as a stranger.