Who's the Crazy One?

On first read, the Los Angeles Times report of pianist Krystian Zimerman's angry tirade near the conclusion of his Disney Hall recital seems a another tale of a pampered, self-righteous artist, with Zimerman announcing this was his last U.S. concert due to this country's military policies. "Get your hands off my country," he is reported as saying, although accounts of U.S. military operations in both Poland, the country of his birth, and Switzerland, his adopted country, appear rather hard to come by.

Then you get to this sentence: "An earlier piano was destroyed by Homeland Security at JFK airport because officials were suspicious that its glue could be an explosive in disguise." Bureaucrats hacked apart a priceless Steinway belonging to one of the world's most accomplished - and well known - musicians because they thought the glue smelled funny. Zimerman is merely rude, perhaps only direct. We seem to be insane.