Respect Authority

When they’re not being predominantly creepy or smelly, the mentally ill are often quite interesting to behold. Russel Fong, an amateur videographer from the more-clean-than-mean streets of Brooklyn apparently agrees, as he recently sat down and interviewed Lawrence LaDouceur, more commonly known as The Bedford Ranter or just “that guy who yells in the middle of the street.” Heck, he’s as much a Williamsburg fixture as plastic wayfarers or a crushed can of PBR.

Considering his litany of felony charges and various bouts of institutionalization, the man can’t exactly get a job at the closest Mickey D’s, so Lawrence spends most of his time ranting about the sad state of our society in his own special breed of psychosis-addled English. Of course, some have contended that psychosis is merely an extreme state of consciousness that falls beyond the norms experienced by most — and one would be hard pressed to argue that Lawrence doesn’t experience the world in quite the same way as the average complacent cog walking down the street.

His ideas are incendiary, occasionally veering into the dangerous gray areas surrounding xenophobia; nonetheless, his story, albeit tragic, is consistently fascinating, especially as a rare view into the actual life of one of the so-called nutcrackers we regularly dismiss on our daily commutes to our arguably insane 9 to 5 routines.

As the old quote goes, “It’s no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” And while Lawrence might not be exactly well adjusted in… fuck it, just about any society, at the very least, I would hope we could all agree that the amount of attention paid to whether or not the stars of Twilight are doing it is quite demented in its own right.