Michael Blowhard opens Weirdos and Culture with a litany of famous weirdos — Susan Sontag, David O. Russell, Tchaikovsky, and Andrea Dworkin — and then recounts his own experiences as a fairly normal guy in “the cultureworld”:
It took me ages to understand that many of the people I was encountering in the cultureworld weren’t charming eccentrics or engaging oddballs. What I finally woke up to was the simple fact that many people in the cultureword are real weirdos — people who are so deeply off as to be close to mentally ill, if not actually mentally ill. They aren’t crazy with a small c — crazy as in eccentric. No, they’re Crazy with a great big C — crazy as in loony-bin-worthy, or something close to it.I also woke up to the fact that many inhabitants of the cultureworld aren’t sweetly nuts. They’re destructively nuts. In my clueless smalltown way, I’d had trouble imagining that anyone — anyone short of a Hitler, a Stalin, or a Jeffrey Dahmer — might wish the general run of humanity ill. Yet what I found was that a fair number of people in the American cultureworld seethe with bile and contempt towards the mainstream.
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I’ve come to suspect that this kind of capital-C Craziness helps explain some of the characteristics of our cultural world. The cultureworld exists in defiance of normal life because the people in it really do stand in opposition to normal life. Normal life made them suffer. Not only can they not forgive, they’re determined to find meaning in that suffering. They didn’t suffer back in high school because they were weird. No, they were made to suffer because they were special — special and better.