Caveat: Crazy about Crazy

The Korean word for “crazy” is “미친” (mi-chin).
When we say someone or something is crazy, in English, there’s not really a value judgment involved – at least, it’s not a very strong one. Being a child of the 60’s, myself, I would go so far as to say that there are plenty of times when the word “crazy” can be used to mean something almost complementary. As when you’re sitting, reminiscing with friends, and someone says, “those sure were crazy times.”
But if you say someone is “michin” in Korean, it’s a grave insult – at least on the level of “son of a bitch” according to some of my students, if not a great deal worse.  There’s a great deal of cultural anxiety about craziness, here. And this got me to thinking about the issue with the madness about mad cow disease and the national paranoia over American beef imports.
Perhaps the real problem is the name of the disease. If it were only ever called Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), would anyone care about it, in its extreme rarity?  Did the British name the disease unpropitiously? Are Koreans going crazy and rioting in the streets because of a crazy fear of craziness and of a crazily named disease?
What might Foucault have to say about that? And how might this national anxiety about craziness impact the reception of a text such as Don Quijote? Maybe I should research this – I saw a Korean language edition of DQ on sale at Kyobo the last time I was there.  Maybe I’ll pick it up, and try to decipher clues to its reception.  Ha… as if my Korean were even close to being up to the task. But it’s an interesting question, I think.
Here’s a coworker at the hagwon. He remains nameless.