OK

The OK Corral:

Our friend Lars Walker reminds us that we have just passed the day that in 1881 saw the most famous gunfight in American history. I've written about the subject several times in the past (and offered additional asides, like this one), so I won't test your patience with another version of the story. I will, however, give you a sense of the glorious treatment the man received in the 1950s:



"The West it was lawless, but one man was flawless, and his is the story you'll hear. Wyatt Earp, Wyatt Earp, brave courageous and bold! Long live his fame, and long live his glory, and long may his story be told!"

Sound too shrill? Remember this study:

Many years ago, a team of researchers at the department of anthropology at the University of Minnesota decided to put [a theory that religion was linked to mental illness] to the test. They studied certain fringe religious groups, such as fundamentalist Baptists, Pentecostalists and the snake-handlers of West Virginia, to see if they showed the particular type of psychopathology associated with mental illness. Members of mainstream Protestant churches from a similar social and financial background provided a good control group for comparison. Some of the wilder fundamentalists prayed with what can only be described as great and transcendental ecstasy, but there was no obvious sign of any particular psychopathology among most of the people studied. After further analysis, however, there appeared a tendency to what can only be described as mental instability in one particular group. The study was blinded, so that most of the research team involved with questionnaires did not have access to the final data. When they were asked which group they thought would show the most disturbed psychopathology, the whole team identified the snake-handlers. But when the data were revealed, the reverse was true: there was more mental illness among the conventional Protestant churchgoers - the "extrinsically" religious - than among the fervently committed.

The control group were the psycopaths. Interesting fact, I think: it is important to dare to believe, and enough to let that belief move you. It seems to purify. It matters that we have a vision of the right in the part of our heart that heeds myth, even if we can see the ways the truth fell short in the part of our minds that does reason.

Wyatt Earp is mentioned on that page too, as it happens -- in an old post about something Peggy Noonan once wrote. You can find it if you're curious.