David McElroy

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
— Edgar Allan Poe, in a letter to George W. Eveleth

I had just spent most of a year wanting to be rid of a woman I had been dating for three years. I broke up with her one time but I felt so guilty that I changed my mind a few days later. I wanted her to decide I was right — that we had no future. After months of this waffling from me, the day finally came.

She was giving up on me and moving on. Suddenly, I felt hurt and stricken. I had made a terrible mistake. I wanted her back.

I was in my first year of working full-time after college. My work suddenly suffered. There was one day when I didn’t show up for work until halfway through the day. I was a basket case.

A co-worker had the perfect solution for me, though. She said I needed to pretend to be seriously ill, enough to get put into a hospital. I don’t recall the details, but she had a very serious plan. She was sure this would bring my ex running back in fear that I was dying.

Although I didn’t seriously consider her plan, this has always stood out to me as the height of love’s insanity. People in love can be desperate. They can do insane things.

But I’ve had crazy thought. What if these periods of love-driven insanity are the very best parts of life? What if it’s the period of “horrible sanity” that make life unbearable? Without the unbearable insanity of love, does life have any meaning?

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When I was in elementary school, everybody in a class exchanged Valentine’s Day cards at school. Is it still that way? We each decorated a shoebox with our name on it. We cut a slit in the top for others to drop cards through. The displays were up for several days — and everybody was required to give a card to everybody else.

When I was in the fifth grade, I had a crush on a beautiful blue-eyed blonde girl named Wendy. She was my ideal girl when I was about 11 years old. I was terrified of anybody realizing this, though, because then she might know — and that seemed scary. I guess it was “puppy love” rejection I feared.

Since classes routinely gave cards to everyone, there were large packs of small, cheap cards that stores sold. I bought a pack of those generic cards — but I also bought one very special card, much nicer than the others, just for Wendy.

Surely, I thought, nobody will notice. Nobody will figure it out. My secret would be safe.

But little girls who compared the cards they received in our class did notice. And they talked among themselves. Before I knew it, everybody was whispering that I “liked Wendy.”

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I’ve always been baffled by Joe Rogan’s popularity.

His comedy isn’t funny to me. He often comes across like a thoughtless jerk who doesn’t care about others. He doesn’t seem insightful or interesting to me. He comes across as a blustering buffoon who hasn’t thought much about what he’s saying.

But it’s never crossed my mind that I should try to silence him. I simply don’t listen to him. I might tell others what I think about him. I might express surprise at his popularity. But I don’t want to muzzle him.

A lot of people want to silence Rogan right now.

Much of the mainstream news media and pretty much all of the political left is screaming to stop Rogan from distributing what they call “misinformation.” What they really mean by that is that Rogan has guests on his podcast who hold views which they disagree with. That’s the real issue.

Do you remember a time when the political left championed free speech? Do you remember when this was a core “liberal value” that was important to the left? The old counterculture leftist of the 1960s has taken over the culture — and he’s become the very thing he once knew was evil.

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