Sunset Barbecues and Outdoor Kitchens

Earlier on, I mentioned the idea that perfect paranoia is perfect awareness. To that we could add that paranoia may be the last defense of the overstrained mind. Much of the literature of the twentieth century, from such diverse sources as Bertolt Brecht, Jean-Paul Sartre, Edward Albee, Thomas Hardy, even F. Scott Fitzgerald, has suggested that we live in an existential sort of world, a planless insane asylum where things just happen. IS GOD DEAD? asks the Time magazine cover in the waiting room of Rosemary Woodhouse's Satanic obstetrician. In such a world it is perfectly credible that a mental defective should sit on the upper floor of a little-used building, wearing a Hanes t-shirt, eating take-out chicken, and waiting to use his mail-order rifle to blow out the brains of an American president; perfectly possible that another mental defective should be able to stand around in a hotel kitchen a few years later waiting to do exactly the same thing to that defunct president's younger brother; perfectly understandable that nice American boys from Iowa and California and Delaware should have spent their tours in Vietnam collecting ears, many of them extremely tiny; that the world should begin to move once more toward the brink of an apocalyptic war because of the preachings of an eighty-year-old Moslem holy man who is probably foggy on what he had for breakfast by the time sunset rolls around ...»