Intellectuals love to talk about what an emotional medium television is, but it’s hard to know exactly what they mean until you meet people who watch a lot of it. I finally understood one day this March when I went on a political show to discuss Ross Perot. During the program I made the point — in a subtle way, I thought — that Perot might not be all there, a few tacos short of a combo platter perhaps. At the time, it didn’t seem like an outrageous thing to say. Understated, even. Others didn’t agree.
By the time I got back to my office there were a number of angry messages on my machine. One stood out as particularly enraged — I could almost feel the woman shaking with fury as she spoke. I decided to return it, if only for nostalgic reasons. One of my first jobs in Washington had been as the Nut Mail Editor of a quarterly magazine. It was a self-appointed position — nobody else wanted to assume it — but in its own way a rewarding one. I took calls and answered letters from people upset over our editorial stands: conspiracy wackos, Libertarians, men with strange accents ranting about obscure ethnic conflicts (“I can assure you that the Kazakh people will not abide this blood libel . . .”), and so obsessively on. After a year and a half as NME, I thought I knew all about outraged callers.
So I called the woman back. She started yelling immediately. Who did I think I was? she wanted to know, and where did I get off saying something like that, and just how did I get to be such a repulsive, reprehensible person? I made a game attempt at answering, but she cut me off. You say Ross Perot is crazy? she screamed. “You’re crazy.”
How did she know? “I’m a psychologist.” Her name was Pat Cummings, and she claimed to have a practice in suburban Maryland. That’s how she knew I was crazy. And, she explained, not crazy in a good way. Bad crazy: delusional, vicious, sociopathic. Evil, really.
Well, I said, since you’re a psychologist, you’ll definitely want to get some treatment for that anger problem of yours. Then I signed off. Talking to Dr. Cummings was starting to depress me.
Not that I really believed her. A real psychologist wouldn’t talk that way. No actual licensed Mental Health Professional would call a total stranger ” crazy.” What if I’d taken her diagnosis to heart and had myself committed? No, the more I thought about it, the less I believed her. Pretending to be a shrink must be the 90s version of a Napoleon complex.
Four days later, I ran into Pat Cummings again. This time she was staring at me from a monitor in a television studio where I’d shown up to talk about Ross Perot again. So, it turned out, had she. Only, as a cameraman explained, she had refused to share a set with me and so was doing the interview by remote from another studio upstairs in the building. “Pat Cummings, Ph.D.,” I soon learned, was both a real psychologist and a Perot volunteer.
On-air discussion that night never touched on our previous chat, and though I wanted to reminisce, Dr. Cummings must have slipped out the back door because I never saw her again. Months went by and my memory started to fog. Could the genuine psychologist on television really have been the same person who called to scream at me? I began to doubt it, and before long Pat Cummings left my thoughts entirely.
The other day, she reappeared. Over breakfast last week, I was amazed to find Dr. Cummings lurking in the second paragraph of a David Broder column in the Washington Post. Identified as a “clinical psychologist and independent candidate for the Maryland legislature,” Cummings was quoted extensively claiming that “Ross Perot is not crazy.” “In fact,” she assured Broder’s readers, “he could be included in a study of exceptionally healthy individuals.” Sounded like the same woman to me.
Still, I had to be sure. So I called her. She not only confirmed her identity but also her diagnosis of me: still crazy after all these months. As she explained it, I was “a person who lacks conscience and an ability to interact in a responsible and ethical way in this society.” Just in case I didn’t understand the textbook definition, she reduced it to layman’s terms: ” Look, I have no respect for you . . . I think that you are a person of very low character.”
Interesting, I said. May I quote you on that? Even over the phone line, I thought I could hear her mind begin to imagine the consequences: a trip to the professional review board, charges of irresponsible conduct, punishment. ” Are you going to now try to cost me my license?” she demanded, sounding a shade less confident.
For once, an accurate diagnosis.
TUCKER CARLSON, cc: Maryland Board of Examiners of Psychologists
