Asshole of the century nomination

Is anybody reading this? I don't suppose it matters. Somebody recently said to me in passing that "it wouldn't be so bad to be a Borg". I replied, "Sure, and I don't suppose you would mind if you were given a lobotomy. Would you like to volunteer?"

So on a whim I read a little bit about lobotomies. The procedure was invented by a Swiss doctor and was performed by drilling into the patients head and extracting parts of their frontal lobes. 46 years later a Portuguese doctor mixed it up a bit and destroyed the tissue by injecting it with alcohol. He eventually won a Nobel Prize for it. I guess they were having a slow year.

That's when Dr. James W. Watts stepped in. Instead of spending hours drilling into people's heads, he sped up the process by sticking a knife into the patient's eye socket and cutting through brain tissue. This procedure is informally known as an icepick lobotomy and takes just 10 minutes to perform.

When he introduced the new technique to America, it caught on rapidly. Before lobotomies, nobody really knew how to deal with mental patients. They would just throw them in the loony bin, most of which were naturally overcrowded. Watts was convinced that he was going to revolutionize medicine. I suppose he was right. He performed thousands of lobotomies over the next decade. He eventually decided that patients with severe mental illness were not the only ones who could benefit from his magic surgery.

When Lou Dully got tired of her stepson's defiant attitude, she took him to a bunch of doctors who all told her the same thing: There was nothing wrong with him. He was a typical, rebellious 12 year old boy.

Enter Dr. Watts.

"Oh no, Mrs. Dully, Howard isn't your average preteen. He has a personality disorder."

"Oh lord! Is there anything we can do, Doctor?"

"Not to worry, ma'am. I'll just jam an icepick into his eye sockets, wiggle it around a bit, and he'll be good as new."

"Praise the lord! I don't know what I would do without you, Doctor Watts."

"A little parenting, perhaps?"

"Enough chit-chat. Get on with the stabbing."

[The preceding dialogue was a dramatization based on extensive research I made up for this story.]

Howard Dully's case was not an isolated incident. There are hundreds of stories just like it. One of the more infamous cases is that of Rosemary Kennedy, the late President's sister. She had her brains mutilated because of mood swings and promiscuity. Watts asked her to recite songs and count backwards as he cut into her skull, deciding how deep to go based on her responses. He stopped when she became incoherent. She spent the rest of her days staring at walls for hours and babbling gibberish.

Despite his tendency to ruin people's lives, Watts' ego continued to grow. Instead of working one eye at a time, he started performing lobotomies with both hands to show off. He once performed 228 lobotomies in two weeks, including 25 women in a single day. He toured the country performing lobotomies in his van, which he dubbed the lobotomobile.

No, really, the lobotomobile. I wish I was making this up.

Finally, perhaps by divine intervention, antipsychotics such as Thorazine were made available in the mid 1950's, rendering lobotomies obsolete. The medical community suddenly made another remarkable discovery: their conscience. They decided that sticking instruments into people's heads and shredding their brains wasn't a very nice thing to do, and lobotomies were essentially abolished. Dr. Watts, being the arrogant asshole that he was, refused to accept the conventional wisdom. He sold his house and spent the rest of his life traveling the country in his lobotomobile, visiting former patients in a futile attempt to prove that he had changed their lives for the better.

Who was he trying to convince? Perhaps the Nobel Prize committee. Perhaps the hospitals that wouldn't hire him anymore. Perhaps himself. It doesn't really matter. He was an asshole. If there was an asshole of the century award, he probably wouldn't win. Guys like Adolph Hitler, L. Ron Hubbard, Barry Bonds, and Madonna would beat him in a landslide. But he should still be considered. He's certainly on my list.