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It Takes a Village Idiot….
I am old enough to remember when almost any town over a certain size had a place for the mentally troubled of the citizenry – my grandfather, who was kind of tough, called it the ‘nut-house’; my grandmother, who was genteel, called it the ‘funny farm,’ but for the most part it went by the more clinical name of the ‘sanatorium.’ It was the place where crazy people who were liable to hurt themselves or others were inventoried.
Now we also had a fair share of folks who were ‘not-quite-right-in-the-head-but-fundamentally-harmless’ – of no danger to anyone, including themselves. These were permitted continued free use of public spaces and formed a part of our town’s peculiar quality – a sort of patina on the overall population that gave us our unique character, added interest, and that we would have sorely missed if absent.
Such was Mr. Reginald, who thought he was George Washington. Not that he wandered around town in a cocked hat carrying a sword – his most characteristic sartorial flourish was the suspenders he used to hold up his jeans – and he never said ‘ye’ or ‘thou’ or any fancy stuff when he spoke – and he never inquired about a horse – but he was absolutely dead certain that he was George Washington, and if you were not careful he would tell you all about it.
He was our most prominent village idiot – a not-sensible person whom no one took too seriously, but who had an entertaining, almost endearing side.
He died in the 70s, missing by about 45 years the phenomenon of social media that would have validated his entire belief system.
That social media has completely transformed communication is not news, but the most pernicious part of that new form is the megaphone it has given to every village idiot on the planet.
It’s not that there are more village idiots these days – they have always been around – it’s just that now they are so much more visible than when they were safely stored away in various sanatoria or simply wandering no further than the town line.
Of course, the condition is made worse by the media, which used to be lorded over by an editorial class with a set of standards and professional conduct; a discipline now reduced to carnival barkers for a midway freak show – making their money on getting us to look – and look we do, don’t we?
After all, what better to look at, even for a brief instant, than the freak show? – the freakier, the better. In the quest for holy mammon, no stoopid is too stoopid; in the age of click cash, the louder and more idiotic the village idiot, the better.
Voilà, our civic discourse in the early 21st century. Half of it, anyway.
Mr. Reginald died too early – what a pity for him. If he was around today, he could allow himself to be convinced he was Martha Washington, and he could have scored a scholarship on the women’s swim team under Title IX at State University.
But I doubt he would have done that – he would have been too much of a lady.
Published in Culture
IDDS. Implantable Drug Delivery Systems. We have the medical technology to implant a system that will deliver anti-schizophrenia drugs for up to 3 years. We have good medicines for mental illness and drug addiction and we don’t need to “institutionalize” people any more. It is cheap and effective, so no corporation will lobby for it, but it is still a good solution for our time.
Please share a link. Drugs are a necessary treatment for the more severe cases of schizophrenia but schizophrenics often don’t take them. This solves the problem. But I don’t understand how you can fit three years of schizophrenic drugs into a tube in your body.
And what might some of those people do if they were convinced the “system” had to be removed?
Heck, maybe he wasn’t George Washington, but he could still be president! FJB proved that. For sure he could be a senator.
If he could speak, he’d be way ahead of Fetterman.
This will probably be the mandated delivery system for meds for the next P(l)andemic. None of that mRNA stuff will be needed. What could possibly go wrong?
Why wouldn’t they use those mandated delivery systems FOR the mRNA?
When I first hit the streets as a police officer, we had a state hospital for the criminally insane and a state hospital for the non-criminally insane. The state hospital for the non-criminally insane was shut down.
There are some paranoid schizophrenics that do not respond to medication, some do but if left untreated or unsupervised they start self-medicating.
Police officers are not called until someone is in a four-alarm psychotic crisis. It does not hurt any less when stabbed, beaten or shot from someone in the four-alarm psychotic crisis than it does from a common criminal.
Sure, but, sometimes the overreaction is itself criminal.
Here’s an article on an IDDS (pill-sized) that is implanted in the nasal cavity and lasts 90 days for schizophrenia.
Here is a table of technologies. Micro-electronics and machines and chemistry and materials science has resulted in big advances in the last 5 years.
Table 1
Comparison among non-biodegradable reservoir-based polymer systems
Right, but, if you have someone in bad shape who thinks there’s something “alien” or “evil” inside their body, have you seen what they sometimes do if they think they have to get it out?
It may not happen often, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen at all. And things could get worse from there.
Great Post. Love the title.
As for Implantable Drug Systems, best be careful because such a system could easily be subverted into a devastating social control system.
I am a little confused about the comments, although I am always appreciative of consideration…. but I could have sworn the topic was actually not about mental health …. or perhaps it is just me ….
Bingo. There have always been kooks and weirdos, but people only knew about the ones who lived nearby. Now it just takes someone with an internet following to broadcast the story about a kook and they become nationally famous, for a little while at least.
The college of village idiots at East Anglia?
Well that bit of history explains why they were one of the loci of the climate warming hoax nonsense (in conjunction with Prof Mann from Pennsylvania).
I noticed that too.
What was your town?