Word: bedlams
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...does not revel in too many lurid scenes of zany inmates being violent or bestial (though it has its share, enough to earn it an R rating). It does not idealize the mental institution as a citadel of scientific wisdom and compassion, nor caricature it as a latter-day Bedlam administered by sadists. It does not explain away its protagonist's schizophrenia with some unearthed childhood trauma, as if the condition were a sort of Freudian acrostic to be solved...
These days most politicians are happy to call themselves conservative, and liberalism has become the sin that dares not speak its name. The September issue of Commentary in a symposium called "What Is a Liberal-Who Is a Conservative?" provides a useful guide to the semantic bedlam. Most of the 64 contributing intellectuals were once content to call themselves liberal. Now they fastidiously invoke qualifiers. They speak of early and late liberals, paleoliberals, center extremists, tough-minded liberals, of "rad-libs" and "trad-libs...
...where raving lunatics in various aspects of disintegration are portrayed to impress hellish demonology on the mind of the reader. Other times the inquirer insists that his aims are ones of great moral piety, as if in the company of Dr. Samuel Johnson on one of his strolls through Bedlam, more recently an elusive jargon of psychiatrists, speaking of "mental illness" and assuring us of "cures,", prevails. Each of these attitudes, like a mood, is at once truthful and delusory: by nature irrational, madness is more susceptible to description than definition...
...finally saw himself as he was seen-a vain "beaten dog beneath the hail/ A swollen magpie in a fitful sun." He was flown back to the States to face trial for treason, but the case never came to judgment. Declared hopelessly insane. Pound was committed to a federal bedlam in the District of Columbia...
Says Kansas City Chiefs Owner Lamar Hunt, football would become "complete bedlam...