THE SAD STATE OF ECCENTRICITY

MADALYN MURRAY O'HAIR, the angry atheist, may well have more religious fervor than anyone since Cotton Mather. Her fervor is aimed at making sure that reports of God's death are not exaggerated. Spouting the Constitution as Scripture, she has forced the Supreme Court to ban compulsory public-school prayers, threatened the tax exemption on church property, and is currently protesting the astronauts' moonside recitation of Genesis last Christmas Eve. "I'm no eccentric," she said recently. "I'm the leader of a valid movement."

The denial was not convincing, but it raises the question of what an eccentric is in modern America--and how many of them there are. What primarily distinguishes an eccentric, says Harvard Sociologist Peter McEwan, is that he is "extraordinarily secure. Other people are either wrong or going about life ineffectually. He thinks that he has the answer." That definition might equally fit Atheist O'Hair ("I will separate church and state, by God"), Hugh Hefner, Admiral Hyman Rickover--or Sirhan Sirhan. In fact, genuine eccentricity generally stops far short of pathological conduct. According to McEwan, the real thing is deviant behavior that does not require society to do anything about the behavior.

Between Two Conformities

An earlier America seemed to have many eccentrics, such as Johnny Appleseed and Thoreau, both of whom heard "a different drummer." The Boston Brahmins produced Eleonora Sears, a ferocious walker who once hiked 110 miles nonstop. Mrs. Isabella Gardner shocked Beacon Hill by practicing Buddhism, drinking beer and strolling down Tremont Street with a lion. Until he died in 1957, "Silver Dollar" Jim West was Houston's favorite millionaire. He owned 30 cars, lived in a $500,000 castle, often wore a pistol and a diamond-studded Texas Ranger's badge. He lugged his own butter to expensive restaurants and carried up to 80 silver dollars for tips.

Where are the Wests, the Thoreaus, the Gardners of today? Some claim that eccentricity is vanishing in America, Mrs. O'Hair notwithstanding. Appearance mav seem to belie this conclusion, since the age abounds with beards, long hair, acidheads and nude actresses. Skeptics argue, however, that all this is actually more conformity than eccentricity. As they see it, urbanization has freed Americans from many small-town strictures but has left millions of young people yearning for acceptance in new groups--the hippies, for example--that create their own standards. "Eccentricity," says New York Sociologist Werner Cahnman, "frequently becomes only the transition between two conformities."

Meantime, the acceptance of psychiatry has taught Americans to be more tolerant than before of unusual behavior. Eccentricity means, literally, to be off-center. But in the permissive society, where almost anything goes, eccentricity no longer stands out against any dominant "center." Since eccentricity is also relative to its place and time, rapid change now often turns it into conventional behavior. Only a few years ago, Longshoreman-Philosopher Eric Hoffer seemed eccentric indeed; now the young scorn him as an Establishmentarian. Conceivably, some current student radicals may go the same way--as some black leaders already have. In short, real eccentricity is probably harder to achieve than ever.

Still, the connoisseur can find a few true American eccentrics--people who consistently follow their own' seemingly exotic standards. Eugene McCarthy, who now disappoints many of his former disciples, marches to his own one-man band. So, for that matter, does Harold Stassen. While Timothy Leary preaches drug salvation, Vince Lombardi has mystical visions of football and Howard Hughes eludes the world behind moats of money.

The country has plenty of less famous eccentrics too. Terrified of driving, a Kansas scion solves the problem by packing his Rolls-Royce aboard a railroad flatcar, sitting behind the wheel and riding wherever he pleases. An Oregon sportswriter is so hung up on streetcars that he roams the U.S. to find and ride them. An Arkansas housewife fills her house with flocks of birds that swirl through the rooms; she spends $200 a month to feed them--not to mention the cleaning bills. For ten years, a 52-year-old man named Clint Wescott camped in a weed-choked field in Los Angeles. Last year, when a New York lawyer tried to give him nearly $20,000 for the sale of the gas station that he had owned and abandoned, Wescott refused the money.

On the other hand, Sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski needs whatever income he can collect from cattle breeding and tourists to pursue his passion: personally blasting a larger-than-Rushmore likeness of Chief Crazy Horse out of a South Dakota mountain. A fortune from manufacturing has liberated Oklahoma's John Zink, a Hemingwayesque character who thrives in feudal splendor on a 10,000-acre ranch near Tulsa. Zink used to greet guests by firing a revolver into the beams of his baronial office, but stopped doing so when a ricochet almost hit his secretary. One night, when a Supreme Court Justice came to visit, Zink released a coon and a pack of hounds in the middle of dinner. Another original is Seattle's Lorenzo Milam, who lives on a houseboat, runs the Jean-Paul Sartre Memorial No Exit Roominghouse, teaches literature in a reformatory and currently hopes to become Seattle's "existentialist" mayor by "abolishing the environment" so that "there would be nothing to pollute."

Patterns and Possibilities

What makes an eccentric? For one thing, fear causes some people to behave peculiarly when they wish above all to be merely "normal"; some eccentrics doubtless create their own rules of conduct because they do not wish to compete by conventional standards. For others, eccentricity is clearly a bid for attention, an attempt to show their distinctiveness as people. Whatever the cause, there are clearly two basic kinds of eccentricity: selfish and productive. The best eccentrics have always been discoverers, creative men who saw new patterns and possibilities. It is easy to smile at today's International Flat Earth Society, devotees of flying saucers and prophets of intelligent life on Mars. It is also easy to forget that many pioneers, including Galileo and Freud, were initially considered quite eccentric. On a lesser scale, Ford, Edison and the Wright brothers were eccentrics who stubbornly imagined radically different realities. Many crusaders like Ralph Nader, however prickly they seem, often serve a similar purpose. The point is that eccentrics--or anyway the benign kind--are nearly always worth heeding.

Unfortunately, their voice is not very strong today. U.S. eccentricity currently lacks the grand style and creative bursts--either of sane whimsy or crazy sanity--that marked the golden age of English eccentrics, among them one exotic aristocrat who habitually dined with dogs dressed as humans and another who spent his life trying to breed a symmetrically spotted mouse. If nothing else, such obsessions had a mad integrity that might now leaven modern grimness, or even produce occasionally brilliant insights. The U.S. surely could use more authentically unconventional people who dispute conventional wisdom--or at least make life a bit more interesting. A nation that fails to nurture eccentrics, after all, runs the risk of becoming the victim of a kind of national eccentricity.

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