More on Lennon’s breakfast

The high point of this morning’s bike tour in Central Park was a stop at the Strawberry Fields memorial, just steps from the spot where John Lennon was shot dead by Marc David Chapman, as he walked with Yoko Ono outside their Upper West Side home. 

I had never been there before, and for some reason I’d always mistakenly pictured the Dakota as being on the east side of the park. There was a guitarist covering “Imagine” and “No Reply”. It seemed to me that a lot of people walking around had not been born yet on December 8, 1980. 

Chapman, the killer, had no previous record of violent crime. But he had been “treated” by psychiatrists. Our guide on the bicycle tour never uttered his name. She just said Lennon was shot by a maniac.

I wonder what a maniac actually is. It seems like the word must be related to mania, or manic - right? It's kind of ironic, because Marc David Chapman had a long history of depression, which is the opposite of mania, unless he was bipolar and he went back and forth (but I’ve never heard any theory about that - bipolar wasn’t as popular in 1980 as it is now).

There are lots of synonyms for maniac: fanatic, fiend, lunatic, nutcase, madman, and other words, some of which are very casual or pure slang, and some of which might have real meaning, at least historically, in mental health and legal circles. My 10-year-old grandson was the one who remembered what the bike tour guide had called Lennon's killer, so I struck up a conversation with him, about the difference between a maniac and a lunatic.

He knew very little about the incident from 1980, of course. He’d heard something in school about a Beatle who was killed, but nothing about any maniac or lunatic who did it.

I explained to him the roots of the words and what they might mean to mental health professionals, and the irony in Chapman’s being depressed but remembered after the fact as a maniac. He offered the opinion that a maniac was a really dangerous person, whereas a lunatic was just somebody not doing well in life, kind of dumb, and nobody likes him.

That conversation was quite interesting, and I decided to expand the survey to an intergenerational sample. When I asked my wife what the difference is between a maniac and a lunatic, she just held up a thumb and forefinger very close together in a pinching pose, silently saying, “little-teeny (almost no difference),” and probably implying disrespect for my overheard, complex explanation delivered to a 10-year-old. 

Then I asked my daughter what the difference is between a maniac and a lunatic. She cleverly said both her mom and her son were right. She also appeased me (by not implying that I waste my time even being interested in such things).

But the simple fact is, John Lennon was assassinated for never doing anything but making people happy. His killer was a product of psychiatry. A maniac. And 10-year-olds know as much about that as mental health professionals or lawyers.

The Strawberry Fields memorial in Central Park is highly recommended.