Book of the Absurd? Point Is Lost in Southern California

To see that life is absurd we need look no further than our daily newspaper.

Life has probably been absurd since Adam and Eve, but with the media exploring every corner of our society today, fewer instances of it go unnoticed.

Workman has now published “The Journal of the Absurd,” a book of absurdities compiled by Bernard Garfinkel, “an editor and writer who has never been seen without a necktie,” and Jules Siegel, “a raffish writer and graphic artist who loves fresh air and shuns barbers.”

They attempt to categorize their absurdities, but there is no point in it, since absurdities are too absurd to classify.

Here are a few of the shorter cases gleaned from the book:

Sir MacFarlane Burnet, an Australian biologist and 1960 Nobel Prize winner, urges that all infants who are not “within the bounds of genetic normality” be killed at birth to avoid overpopulation and genetic deterioration. (Who’s going to decide?)

In Germany the socialized medicine program has authorized payment of $10 per treatment for patients whose psychotherapists have prescribed six months of weekly visits with a prostitute. (German prostitutes should strike for higher wages.)

In Gladwyne, Mass., the historical society has put up a plaque in the women’s room of a local gas station to commemorate a visit by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. It seems she used the restroom while in town for a Kennedy wedding.

Police called to the home of Barbara Smith in King County, Wash., found a smashed car and a broken baseball bat. “I feel good,” Smith told the cops. “That car has been giving me misery for years, and I killed it.”

When Ursala Beckley of Seaford, N.Y., was cracking the third egg of a three-egg omelet, a 6-inch snake slithered into her bowl. Claiming “severe trauma,” she sued the supplier for $3.6 million.

Martha Burke has sued two airlines for $110,000, claiming that when her twin sister died in an airplane crash she suffered severe “extrasensory empathy.” Burke said she had also suffered when her sister had a heart attack and bore a child.

Countries around the world spend nearly a million dollars a minute on war weapons. The United States and the Soviet Union possess nuclear arsenals with the explosive power of four tons of TNT for every man, woman and child on Earth, or enough to drop 2,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs on the 400 largest cities in the Northern Hemisphere. (That ought to do it.)

The United States has a greater proportion of its population in jail than any other country. The rate is 215 per 100,000 people and going up. It is 12 times higher than Holland’s, which is 18 per 100,000.

George Whitmore was beaten into confessing a murder he did not commit and spent four years in prison before the error was discovered. He was denied the right to sue New York for damages because the statute of limitations allows a complainant only three years to seek redress.

Miami Herald reporter Colin Dangaard found that people do not trust the Declaration of Independence.

When he asked 50 people to sign a typed copy of the Declaration, only one would do so. Some called it “Commie junk;” one wanted to tell the FBI about it; its author was called “a hippie,” “a raver” and a “redneck revolutionary.”

Southeast Missouri State University offers a two-credit course in Unidentified Flying Objects. For a $50 fee, students receive a “scientific kit” to help them spot UFOs and a week’s instruction from UFOlogist Harley Rutledge. (One wonders: Can they read?)

Learning Mendel’s theory of genetics used to be the curse of every schoolchild. Now we learn that he cheated, gave himself the benefit of every doubt and made numerous mathematical errors, almost always in his favor.

In San Francisco, which routinely grants permits allowing all sorts of bizarre behavior, Members of the Church of the Divine Light were granted a permit to burn all their worldly possessions, including fur coats and other luxurious articles, in a huge pyre overlooking the Pacific.

The book makes no mention of two absurdities that came to our attention recently in Southern California. There was the San Bernardino schoolgirl who was flunked in biology because she refused to dissect a frog.

Then there was the case of the twin boys in Orange County who were kicked out of the Boy Scouts of America because they declined to express the obligatory belief in God as set forth in the Boy Scout oath. What about Confucianists and Buddhists? Aren’t they eligible?

Their moral precepts are far more extensive and eloquent than those of the Scouts.

As Lucius Annaeus Seneca said (and Shakespeare repeated): “What fools these mortals be.”