Doc Savage's oft-misunderstood "Crime College"

Modern readers unanimously find Doc's Crime College pretty creepy and sinister. It's a place where bad guys either get an operation to remove their memories, or are retrained psychologically to hate crime (exactly what the Crime College did wasn't that clear, and the hints varied on the novel). To modern eyes, the Crime College sounds like brainwashing, or a lobotomy, or both. It doesn't exactly help Doc keeps the place a secret.

Doc's Crime College crops up in other places in pop culture, never taken at face value, usually to talk about how disturbing the implications of it are. The B-Mod devices in "Squadron Supreme" were based on it, as was the memory wipe for criminals on Babylon 5. And the Crime College is immortalized in literature thanks to a mention in Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood."

I've always said the Crime College is the single most misunderstood element of the entire Doc Savage canon. It has to be understood in terms of the context it existed. In the 1930s, the Crime College seemed very modern; a humanitarian alternative to prison that emphasized true reform instead of punishment. There was a time when the brain, as an organ, wasn't all that understood and lobotomy seemed like a miracle cure for many disorders. Lobotomy was on the cutting edge (no pun intended), much like how we regard stem cell research today.

The Crime College seems like an extension of the rationalism of the Doc Savage stories, applied to behaviorism and ethics: criminal tendencies aren't due to "evil" or supernatural causes but bad upbringing and problems with the brain as an organ. Modern psychology bears this out: a good portion of violent criminals were abused as children, physically and sexually. This doesn't give them the right to harm innocent people – I'm just saying, it's very possible to create a very reasonable argument violent crime is solvable by psychological treatments. Could anything be more modernist?

What's more, the 1920s and 1930s were defined by the shellshocked attempt to understand the hideous human evil of World War I. The answer, by writers of pulp and horror fiction, was sometimes to say that normal people aren't capable of evil. There were a few stories by August Derleth in the 20s that explained the cause of World War I: an evil subrace of mankind living among us in secret that hated and sought our destruction.

Heck, maybe one of the most famous artists of the early 20th Century, Stanislav Szukalski, claimed that Communism, Facism, WWI and WWII were caused by a subrace of humans that bred with Yeti. He seriously believed this and he was NOT joking. Heck, he devoted a huge chunk of his obvious talent to showing evil people in history kind of look like Yeti if you squint hard enough.

And…c'mon, guys: you really think Doc Savage of all people, Abe Lincoln and Hippocrates in a ripped shirt, would actually lobotomize criminals? It's beyond his moral code. Something like that would make Doc, his world and heroism, look sinister and hypocritical.

I find the view the Crime College is some behavior modification to be untrue. It has to be understood in the context of its age: the belief in rational, compassionate, scientific reform methods that make prison and punitive methods obsolete, and a naïve attempt to understand human evil. I think we have to accept the Crime College at face value and not project suspicion on it..

Casadastraphobia – the Fear of Being Sucked into the Sky, and How That Can Label You

Why are some people eccentric, nonconformist types?

A big answer, for a lot of human behavior, is labeling.

There was a great Bruce Coville (My Teacher is an Alien) kids' book called Space Brat, which had that as the theme. If you say someone's a "brat" over and over, how are they going to act? How are they going to think of themselves?

In "Space Brat," an alien kid in a very impersonal mechanistic society, at birth got a bit of egg behind an ear, which made him cry with irritation. As a result, a caretaker robot stamped BRAT on his forehead, and that stuck with him until he really did live up to it. Like all of Coville's work, it's heavy stuff for a kids' book with a silly name.

With that in mind, I think part of the reason (not the only one) I became an eccentric noncomformist is because I got that label due to lots of people around me not understanding my reactions, because I had a fear I didn't even know was a real thing: Casadastraphobia.

Casadastraphobia is the fear of being sucked up into the sky. 

Okay, done laughing? It's a variation on agoraphobia. It was much worse when I was a kid, where I often got extremely nervous looking up after a long time especially on clear days, but what's interesting is, I don't even have a severe case of it: some people can't even go out to open air spaces like football fields, and some are so terrified they can't even go outside for fear of being sucked into the sky. Compared that poor soul, I'm pretty functional with a high ability to "deal."

In the hopes of preserving my now forever shattered reputation as a rational, levelheaded "down to earth" (no pun intended) guy with the ability to deal, I should point out the last time I had a very serious attack of this, a few months ago at a MetroRail station on a disturbingly clear, cloudless day, I fought off my anxiety about the situation by reminding myself in the billions of years of earth's history gravity has never reversed itself, and indeed, that would go against all the laws of universal gravitation, where the force of gravity is proportional to the product of the two masses involved and inversely proportioned to the the square of the distance. If you think I kept my mind busy by doing the math for two diagrams attracting each other, you obviously know me very well, except who the hell can remember the gravitational constant off the top of their head, even physicists?

Moral of the story: if a fear is not rational, you can fight it with rationality.

At my elementary school's weekly open field assemblies, kids used to regularly get helium filled balloons on their birthdays. Being fumbly fingered kids, we sometimes let them go until they floated into the sky. And boy, would I ever freak out. Watching balloons disappear into the sky in an open field is terrible for someone afraid of getting sucked into the sky, so there's no surprise I'd have a pretty major freakout.

I got a reputation in the First Grade as "that kid who's scared of balloons." People in other grades and classes heard of me. I was labeled a "weirdo" for having an uncommonly known phobia. Eventually, I had to leave that school for a variety of reasons, but the one they gave my parents was along the lines of, "hey, it's not him, it's us."

It's funny how some things can stick with you. Recently, I was reading the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, maybe the funniest and most readable book ever written by a president. What's absolutely strange is, there was this weird interlude where he talks about how, with obvious pain, as a nine year old he was tricked into buying a blind horse and became the laughingstock of the town. Here was a man who won the Civil War, defeated Robert E. Lee, and became president of the United States...who was still thinking about how people laughed at him for buying a blind horse from a sharpie.

Learning about casadastraphobia was an incredibly liberating experience. It's always a source of relief and courage to learn something you've always dealt with you assume is unique to you, actually has a name, and is something other people have.

It's also a source of incredible anger, too. The first time anybody ever called me an "odd duck" was when I became "that kid who was scared of balloons." And if people call you a weirdo over and over, how are you going to act? How do you think about yourself?

In the meantime, I'll take the advice some wiseass gave a lady asking for tips on dealing with their Casadastraphobia:

"Wear a ten gallon hat so you don't look up, and put glue on the soles of your shoes."