Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy (85 page)

Adeel Ayub
, 30, a stocker at a supermarket in Preston, England, was arrested in 2009 for, among other things, licking a raw chicken in the store. A coworker filmed the chicken-licking, the video ended up on YouTube, and Ayub was arrested. He was later sentenced to two months in prison.

A farmer named
Luis Alfonso Sanchez was treated at a Colombian hospital in December 2009—after he castrated himself so that he wouldn’t cheat on his wife. She had refused to have sex with him, he told doctors. “When I saw that I could no longer count on her,” he said, “I made the decision to cut my testicles off because I am a Christian and did not want to go look for another.” He also said that, as a farmer, he had castrated many animals, so he thought it was no big deal. “He’s been looked at by the urology department,” a hospital spokesman said, “and they found a complete absence of the testicles.” They added, however, that his wounds had become infected.

In January
2010, lawyer Jeffrey Denner stood up in court in Woburn, Massachusetts, and told the judge that his client, Eben Howard, on trial for assault, was mentally competent to stand trial. His client suddenly jumped out of his seat, accused Denner of putting poison in his cranberry juice, and attacked him. Courtroom security had to restrain him. “Perhaps,” Denner said later, “I spoke too hastily.” The trial continued at a later date.

The total number of counterfeit U.S. $50 and $100 notes passed and seized in 1990: 1,240,840
.

IT’S TOO LATE…

…to contemplate. The world’s already gone crazy
.

“The weird and the stupid are becoming our cultural norms, even our cultural ideal.”

—Carl Bernstein

“The world today doesn’t make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?”

—Pablo Picasso

“The human race’s prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenseless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenseless against ourselves.”

—Arnold J. Toynbee

“Perhaps in time, the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.”

—Georg Lichtenberg

“Ninety-nine percent of the people in the world are fools, and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.”

—Thornton Wilder

“There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy.”

—Henry Miller

“Maybe this world is another planet’s Hell.”

—Aldous Huxley

“You can’t make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you’re doing is recording it.”

—Art Buchwald

“It’s not the end of the world, but you can see it from here.”

—Pierre Trudeau

“I think the people you should worry about are the ones who say, ‘Everything is fine.’”

—Parker Posey

“The world just doesn’t work. It’s an idea whose time is gone.”

—Joseph Heller

“The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.”

—James Branch Cabell

“We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.”

—Johann von Goethe

In 2009, the Maldives govt. held a meeting underwater to highlight the threat of global warming
.

A WORLD GONE…
SANE
?

Maybe Earth isn’t quite as cracked up as it’s cracked up to be
.

E
VERYTHING’S COMING UP ROSES
“We are living in the most peaceful moment of our species’ time on Earth,” according to Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker. Using models based on modern hunter-gatherer societies, Pinker theorizes that if we all lived like our pre-agrarian tribal ancestors, death rates from violence would be around 2,000 percent higher. During the 20th century alone (which included two world wars), instead of the 100 million lives lost due to conflict, the number would have been closer to two billion. In short, people just aren’t killing each other the way they used to.

The rate of state-based conflicts (wars) worldwide has declined since the end of World War II and has dropped 40 percent since 1992. On February 15, 2003, in 800 cities around the world, 20 million people protested against the impending invasion of Iraq. Although the protests didn’t stop the war,
Guinness World Records
lists it as “the largest anti-war demonstration in history.”

On a smaller scale, says Pinker, cruelty-as-entertainment is almost gone. Our ancestors flocked to see convicted criminals hanged, beheaded, or burned at the stake. The Romans routinely threw Christians to the lions before thousands of cheering spectators. But public executions rarely occur today, and when they do, they’re condemned by the world community.

NEW AGE THINKING

So when did humanity start evolving into a softer, gentler race? Pinker points to the Age of Enlightenment in the 17th century. One of the by-products of the newfound reasoning in which superstition gave way to science was that people began to develop more empathy for each other. In today’s “Age of Information,” it’s easier than ever before to know about people on the other side of the world, which also leads to increased empathy. Western-style democracies, which rely on cooperation rather than conflict, have also contributed significantly to the sharp decline in violence. There were 20 democratic governments worldwide in 1946; in 2005 there were 88.

The 1-inch-long vampire moth feeds on the blood of elephants
.

EVEN MORE POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT

According to the Millennium Project, an international think tank, there could be even more reason to be hopeful about the future:

• Thanks in large part to emerging technologies, global literacy rates are way up and are expected to rise. In 1970, just 63 percent of people over the age of 15 were literate, compared to 82 percent today. One billion people now have access to information technology and that number is expected to rise, too.

• Population growth, which is currently putting a strain on the world’s resources, will begin declining by 2050. By 2100, there will be one billion fewer people than there are today. The alternative forms of energy that are starting to be implemented on a wide scale should provide more than enough power for them to thrive.

LOOK ON THE SUNNY SIDE

So if the world is actually becoming safer, smarter, and nicer, what accounts for all the gloom and doom on the news? “Better reporting,” says Pinker. He calls it a
cognitive illusion
: “The easier it is for us to recall specific instances of something, the higher the probability we will assign to it.” In other words, when we see violence and political discord all over television, we assume it’s happening
everywhere
. To combat it, says Pinker, adopt a glass-half-f attitude: “We tend to view things by how low our behavior can sink as opposed to how high our standards have risen.”

So maybe all the crazy stuff in this book is the exception, not the norm. But to be honest, we hope the world doesn’t go
completely
sane—because it just wouldn’t be as much fun to write about.

PERHAPS YOU SHOULD DISREGARD THE ABOVE

In 2007 a 21-year-old Seattle woman was arrested for assaulting a man in a karaoke bar after his rendition of Coldplay’s “Yellow.” A witness reported that the woman shouted, “Not that song, I hate that song,” before telling the victim that his “singing sucked” and then running up and punching him twice in the face. After she was arrested, the woman head-butted a police officer several times before she was finally subdued and handcuffed.