To the editor:

Thirty years ago, Carl Pfluger wrote a great essay, “On Cranks.” If one submits more than four letters per year to the editor of one’s local newspaper, chances are, one is a crank.

Here are a few takes from Pfluger’s essay: “A crank is a man possessed by a rampant idea… Anyone may have ideas, but a crank’s idea has him… We recognize a crank not by the content of his thought but by its style… I suspect that most people, on hearing a man described as a crank, cannot help making some association with the ubiquitous machine of the same name. We have, after all, so many other mechanical metaphors for mental aberrations — loose screws, crossed wires, going off the rails — and our most common gesture for indicating insanity is to twirl a finger, crank-like, near the side of one’s head… As a rule, cranks may be described as ill-tempered, in both the ancient and modern senses of the word. There is something out of balance in their constitutions: their most characteristic shortcoming is an absence of critical thinking, or of any respect for boundary, limit, or restraint… Thus, lacking any sense of proportion, any self-regulating adjustment, their souls are out of tune, devoid of that essential harmony which is the old meaning of temperament. And this discordance of their mental strings gives them a problem of temper in the modern sense too, which manifests itself most clearly when they engage in controversy, as, of course, they always do. No one argues more shrilly, more intemperately, than a crank.”

Chris Loetscher

New Ulm