He always was crazy and it kept us from going insane. I’m talking, of course, about Waylon Jennings, who passed away on Valentine’s Eve. I was lucky enough to see him in concert with Willie Nelson and Neil Young many years ago. Writing songs about being crazy before being crazy was cool, Waylon gifted the world some unforgettable lyricS, including “I’ve always been crazy, but it’s helped me from going insane,” and”Good-hearted woman, in love with a good timin’ man.”
Now, even liberal New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is writing that crazy is cool: “The Europeans don’t favor any military action against Iraq, Iran or North Korea. Neither do I,” writes Friedman. “But what is their alternative? To wait until Saddam Hussein’s son, Uday, who’s even a bigger psychopath than his father, has bio-weapons and missiles that can hit Paris? No, the axis-of-evil idea isn’t thought through – but that’s what I like about it. It·says to these countries and their terrorist pals: ‘We know what you’re cooking in your bathtubs. We don’t know exactly what we’re going to do about it, but if you think we are going to just sit back and take another dose from you, you’re wrong. Meet Don Rumsfeld – he’s even crazier than you are.’ There is a lot about the Bush team’s foreign policy I don’t like, but their willingness to restore our deterrence, and to be as crazy as some of our enemies, is one thing they have right.” Friedman, Christopher Hitchens, Bernard Lewis, Charles Krauthammer, Samuel Huntington, and Andrew Sullivan are all in favor of getting crazy, and I think they have the best grasp on the situation.
