During my psychiatry rotation in medical school, I learned to divide patients with personality disorders into “onions” and “garlics.” The “onions” were offensive to others and knew they were offensive, such as those with depressive personalities. The “garlics” were offensive to others but didn’t know they were offensive, such as those with paranoid or histrionic personalities.
Literature about America is full of these people. The character Miss Wallachia Petrie, an American feminist visiting Italy in Trollope’s novel He Knew He Was Right, is a classic “garlic.” She is honest, clever, and in earnest, but she hates ranks, she hates riches, she hates monarchy, and grows so tiresome in her obsession with women’s rights, even interrupting daily pleasantries to make her points, that Trollope calls her a “republican virago.”
In contrast, the American newspaper correspondent in Dickens’s novel Martin Chuzzlewit is a classic “onion.” He is obnoxious, pushy, and full of bluster. “We are independent here. We do as we like” he brags to a visiting Englishman about life in America. He’s annoying but not unselfconscious, working as he does for the aptly named New York Rowdy Journal.
At the hospital I found “garlics” who talked non-stop especially interesting. From the moment I walked into their rooms, they gave long opinions on everything from politics to dinner recipes. They babbled on about their personal lives and peddled conspiracy theories—in one patient, how the government and extra-terrestrial beings had conspired to have him committed. These people had no idea how tiresome and ridiculous they were. Often, I politely tried to interrupt their rantings, but they remained oblivious to my hints.
“Garlics” are not just confined to mental institutions these days. On the contrary, they are ubiquitous in American politics, both on the woke left and the woke right. They imagine crazy conspiracies—for example, that 9/11 was an inside job. One prominent podcaster on the woke right rants that the French and Israeli governments are trying to assassinate her.
The woke left has an exceptionally high number of “garlics” who are oblivious to the resentment they arouse in others. Commuters trying to get to work resent climate activists who block traffic. Students resent social justice warriors who shout, sing, and bang drums in the college library, keeping them from studying for final exams. These activists and social justice warriors have no idea how off-putting they are.
And yet “garlics” have been ubiquitous in American life since the country’s founding. Indeed, the great European novelists observed this almost two centuries ago. Charles Dickens, in American Notes, wrote of how he had to fight against the urge to resent “the near approach of a class of strangers, who, at home [England], would keep aloof.”
He tells the funny story of his encounter with an American shoemaker—a true “garlic,” to use my language—someone who talked, mused, whistled, expounded on the differences between American and English boots, and digressed over the boot on Dickens’s foot “after the manner of Hamlet with Yorick’s skull,” all while rising from time to time to look at himself in the mirror. Dickens dropped hints that he found the interview tiresome and wanted to finish quickly, but the American shoemaker remained oblivious. Like all “garlics,” he thought himself both important and fascinating, and kept on speaking.
G.K. Chesterton’s experience with an American “garlic” so amazed him that he devoted several pages in What I Saw in America to describing the event. He was travelling through Oklahoma City when a stranger approached him and struck up a conversation. The stranger was a lean man wearing an odd coat covered with metallic emblems, most likely symbols of the various societies and causes he supported. Only in his case, wrote Chesterton, “the rash of symbolism seemed to have broken out all over the man.” When the man approached him and asked him why he was in town, Chesterton explained he was there to lecture, at which point the man replied without restraint, but rather with an expansive pride, that he also lectured—on astronomy. In addition, he said, he lectured on anthropology, archaeology, paleontology, and embryology.
Then the man said, “I have a great responsibility in watching over this city. My friend the mayor and I have a great responsibility.” The man digressed about his important mission in life, at one point reaching in his coat pocket for what Chesterton feared might be a gun. Chesterton later defended his suspicions, observing that “in [America] it often seems that the law is made by a lunatic, you never know when the lunatic may not shoot you for keeping it.”
“Who and what was that man?” Chesterton mused. Yes, he was obviously a crank. But there was something deeply American about him, too, something that “suggested the old border life of America.” I would have diagnosed the man as an “aggressive garlic.” Crude, vain, prone to feeling indignant, and potentially violent, this kind of “garlic” has always existed in America. Indeed, Chesterton credited the man’s existence to America’s democratic environment.
This is more than just a typical mental illness translated into something American. An example of that phenomenon would be the observation made in the early twentieth century that in European insane asylums crazy men bragged they were princes, while in American insane asylums they bragged they were millionaires. Same problem, different content.
Instead, there is a special kind of mania in democratic America to which some of its citizens succumb to. It mixes together different currents: the inflamed optimism that comes from living in a country that, in such a short time, succeeded wildly beyond the world’s imagination; a practical, no-nonsense, can-do quality, of the kind that enabled the pioneers to drain Chicago out of a swamp and build Los Angeles in a desert; a frustration that arises from being told that anyone can be president or a business tycoon, all while knowing, deep down, this isn’t really true; and finally, the satisfaction felt when an explanation for life’s disappointments is rooted in a formula whose fundamental illogicality can be so logically and consistently expounded that in the end it unifies itself into something that resembles a system.
All of our contemporary political “garlics” share these qualities to one degree or another. They represent a mix of American idealism, American shrewdness, and American resentment, along with every garlic’s secret conviction that he or she is altogether exceptional.
Not the writer Aldous Huxley but his wife, Maria, who accompanied him on his visit to America in 1937, captured what it is like to tour a nation over-flowing with “garlics.” In a letter home she wrote, “Because if only one could do all [those experiences in America] without talking; but it is this incessant burbling unnecessary words that sometimes drives me crazy.”
For those who think crazy American leftists and rightists are an aberration, think again.
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