Poetry & Blindfolds

Crazy people are, let’s face it, pretty common.  It seems, for every person walking down the street whistling, there is another person who is whistling out an orifice that is more troubling.  I’ve seen my share of crazy people and am tied to a few, loathe as I am to admit it.

In the realm of science fiction fandom, there are those who are not satisfied to enjoy a tale and let the possibilities and promise roll around in their heads.  No, there are a select few who wear head masks that could be mistaken for a swollen testicle but which is really the dome of a Klingon.  There are those who hold brooms differently now, as if a certain grip could lend to that broom the power of flight.  There are those who see sand dunes and, instead of thinking of temperature or humidity, allow their minds to think of giant worms sprouting out of them.

These are my crazy people.  I have long been a fan of science fiction, from ‘Star Trek’ to ‘Doctor Who’ to ‘Babylon 5’ to the original ‘Battlestar Galactica.’  I am fully aware that my ‘mainstream’ enjoyment of these stories, books and films contributes to my crazy people.  For without mainstream interest – that is, interest that permits a story, book or film to travel beyond its creator’s walls – there would be no crazy people.  So it is inevitable.  My appreciation of William Shatner’s portrayal of Captain James T. Kirk feeds into a crazy person’s pride at being the first person in his or her group to know that the ‘T’ stands for ‘Tiberius’.

Likewise, in the realm of music, I have my crazy people – in fact, I was one of those for a very long time!  You could name a Beatles song and I could tell you how long it was, in addition to scores of other random and incredibly useless trivia (to pick a song at random: ‘Come Together’ is 4:16; track 1 on side 1 of ‘Abbey Road’, b-side to ‘Something’, originally a fast rocker but slowed down thanks to Paul McCartney’s swampy, bouncy bassline, etc.etc.  — all of these facts are just in my head).  Although I have grown out of that kind of crazy, that doesn’t mean that kind of crazy ceased to exist in the world.  Indeed, you can still find people who know the time of day that Pete Best was called by Brian Epstein to inform him that he was no longer in the band.  I’m not one of those anymore, but I am well aware that my mainstream enjoyment of the Beatle boys keeps the crazy folks percolating out there somewhere.

If one can conclude anything from the above, it’s what I’ve said: mainstream appreciation of anything, be it a genre or a music or television show or a actor or anything, creates conditions in which crazy people can grow and flourish.  In fact, crazy people can only exist because of mainstream appreciation.  I think this is a pretty sound theory.

And then there’s Scott Roeder.  He can be called crazy – in fact, some friends and family have already called him as much in the few news reports I’ve read about the man himself.  Scott Roeder was a religious man (“very religious in an Old Testament, eye-for-an-eye way,” according to his ex-wife).  He thought government was doing a bad job (and joined a militia to express that disappointment loudly).  He once subscribed to a magazine suggesting “justifiable homicide” against doctors who performed abortions, and apparently likened Dr. George Tiller to the Nazi death-camp doctor Josef Mengele.  And Scott Roeder shot Dr. George Tiller to death while the doctor was acting as an usher in his church.  Operation Rescue, an pro-life establishment that has been around for years, did not literally applaud Roeder but went on record as saying the doctor, who did abortions and late-term abortions within the scope of the law, was a “mass murderer” and that his practice was “truly demonic.”

Who’s in the mainstream for this crazy guy?  

You?