IN A CRAZED SOCIETY, WHO IS SANE?

Chris Hayes  Special "All In" is at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVbMKVbwbUk

Who ever guessed that a news show would have more guts and eloquence than the entire Republican party?  Chris Hayes' 

"A-block" essay at the beginning of this show combines the history and explanation in a way customary to his friend Maddow's show.  It hits me particularly hard because in Canada, just over the border to the north of me, the same investigations are going on in Alberta where the same organizations that formed at the end of the American Civil War found a refuge.  Many Texans up there. 

Our history has hit them, too, even without slavery or Vietnam.  Lethbridge was one of my shopping towns (only 130 miles north) until a passport was required.  (Mine has expired.)  "The Medicine Line" has been a game element in many contexts: Prohibition whiskey smuggling preceded drugs.  If my diabetes gets worse to the point that I need insulin, I can probably justify paying to renew my passport in order to get my drugs there. Disgusted as they get with Trudeau, he is not a madman.  Things are still relatively stable.

This is from Twitter:

"Duty To Warn

@duty2warn

All of us know narcissists. But Malignant Narcissism is different - narcissistic disorder with sociopathy, paranoia, and sadism. The malignant narcissist nestles between sanity and insanity. It's a cause of the most vicious inhumanity in history. They rarely go down alone."

One of the most effective ploys for old folks slipping into dementia but denying it is to project their own situation on everyone around them.  One of the most dangerous and easily weaponized dimensions of this is insanity.  As Hayes pointed out, this is one condition that justifies incarceration, as it was used by Stalin, involuntarily.  The political is identified as a mental matter -- unless you are the president.  But even George III was forced off his throne.

We are at a point of ambiguity in the relationship of the individual to the society as a whole.  If a powerful person can convince society that dissension is really mental illness, then one joins a long list of martyrs.  Being insane occupies a place between the medical and the military, between confrontation and heresy.  In some times we have burned such individuals at the stake.  Today we put them in endless solitary confinement and prevent their incarceration from ever ending.  We justify forcing them to take medications of unproven efficacy and possible inappropriateness.  We have had demented presidents before.  None of them have been like this.

There are two forces in play at the moment.  One is the gradual realization of how crazy Trump really is, the possibility that he may die in front of our eyes -- maybe not physically right away, but mentally already.  He is a zombie.  But we are so afraid of calling him crazy that we let him shred our claims of law and order.

The other force is that of criminalizing dissension expressed in violent force.  The far right empowering mass shootings and prompting a constant stream of violence reminiscent of the Old South -- as well as the state-encouraged violence at our borders -- means that we are well into using criminalization to authorize political vengeance.  Family destruction, formal court trials for toddlers, solitary confinement are CAUSING mental trauma, precursors to madness.  Very clever gamesmanship when the idea later will be to stigmatize them as crazy.  Lock 'em up.

That the insanity and criminality of the president is directly connected to the domestic terrorism of incels and redneck law enforcement should not surprise us as much as it does.  The only explanation is denial.  The two meanings of the word "mad" are confusing each other.  Trump hides his insanity behind tirades of rage. Some compare Reagan who was also demented, but always calm and pleasant. It's terrifying that a mind can slip away.

I'm generally at the thin end of the Bell curve when it comes to crazy.  One illustration was in a UU congregation when I was a member in the '70's attending a workshop about the importance of "letting all out," expressing one's emotions.  The very nice civilized couple who were running the event offered a paper instrument, multiple choice, meant to reveal whether you were repressed.  At the end of the meeting, they pulled me aside to say they were worried because I scored as having so much fury.  They were afraid that I might burst out with some --ulp -- antisocial act.

They had no idea.  I was recently divorced after ten extreme years.  They didn't know that I was working at animal control where every day leaving work I passed a pile of dead pets no one wanted and every day during work knocked on doors opened by people knee-deep in debris and filth, people who were barely coping and were held together by love of their dogs or cats.  Until more recently, people were totally unaware of all this because society kept it secret to avoid uproar.  I survived despair by using rage.  I thanked them and denied them.

The other incident was admission to seminary.  Shortly after, we ambitiously formed a women-only group for sharing and support. One of the women who had been on the admissions committee disclosed that I'd been accepted only because my minister was so powerful, and that my response had been so emotional that they worried I was crazy. They hoped they hadn't made a mistake.  It was a time and place where only cool rationality was intelligent. I've never gotten over that.  It was a little seed that grew.  So now I'm withdrawing the denial and letting it out.  Was I crazier then or now?  

Crazy in terms of self-management in the face of stress is one thing.  Senile dementia, the loss of the use of one's brain, is something else.  One can learn to handle a lot of things, but organic derangement is final.  When I was ward clerk in a nursing home with Alzheimer's patients, I learned first hand.  One woman had been the kindest, most understanding of all the nursing aides, but when her mind failed, she sat and cursed so violently and obscenely that she had to be wheeled to a private room.  Then she began to wail and scream with no letup until she was sedated and finally died.  People say about lesser cases, "He's just not the same person."  I'm sure some people feel that way about our president.

WHEN IS MADNESS A DEFENSE?

Sometimes I read tweets or hear remarks from people who say they have writer's block -- that they want to write but can't think what to write about.  This always makes me giggle, because I have the opposite problem -- far too much to write about.  Even after getting past the narcissistic mirror-tales of my own life, which in the past has been exciting, there is so much to think about, more now and more urgently than ever before.  

Today I'm buzzing inside with two stories.  One will be a long-term focus, I think for the rest of my life.  The other is -- I hope -- transient, at least comparatively.  I'll write separate posts because when I cram them together it gets everyone confused.

The shorter thought is about trying to retrieve the work of Norval Morris, for whom I typed and made coffee at the U of Chicago Law school in '81-82.  He was a particularly distinguished and unique professor and I amused and bemused him in our small interactions.  One day he gave me careful instructions about using a Chemex coffeemaker and the next he shook his head when I went to sit down in the ultlramodern chair in his office and fell on the floor instead.  

His specialty was handing the treatment of convicted prisoners, with special focus on those who suffered from insanity.  I wish he were still living to help us think about what to do with Trump if he should be dethroned but try to evade justice by pleading insanity.  Not just the narcissistic power disorder that has made him what he is, but the organic failure to function he inherited from father.  What justice is there?

I have two books by Morris.  One is "Madness and the Criminal Law" (1982) and the other is "The Brothel Boy and Other Parables of the Law" (1992).  They are not law-based but case-based.  He hit upon the hoax/strategy/punking idea of pretending to be George Orwell, a much-admired writer who was in real life a police magistrate in the Asian SE pressed into deciding impossible cases.  Morris' writing was hard thinking in intelligent penetrating style, meant to bump students out of the assumptions they so often made about the Other.

The joke was that Morris was such a good writer and the cases were so intriguing that much of the media thought there really was a new book discovered in the archives of Orwell.  Morris had to get a friend to "reveal" that he'd made the whole thing up.  He was such an irreproachable and highly placed person that no one at that time accused him of hoax.  Now they might.  Now even the highly "respected" are considered an Other capable of rot.  I can't think of another scholar with enough impressive weight and insight for problems like ours.

I see two great dilemmas of our times as being cultural dyads, key debates.  Ordinarily I try to escape from binaries because they tend to lock up and turn to force when they ought to be conversations.  One of these is the tension between the individual and the whole society, which anyway refuses to stick together into something that could be addressed.  Individuals present a similar problem by being so solipsistic that they can't constructively join with others for a common goal.  Contrasting cultures develop internally or come from other places to give us mutually exclusive commands.  "Cover your hair" versus "do not cover your hair."

The other big difficulty is that our educated elites have concentrated on being rational, excluding all emotion as being "animal."  Surprisingly, it turns out that "rationally" it is provable that emotion is part of everything and that we ARE animal.  As an insult, it's childish, uninformed.  But those benighted elites, mostly white male Ivy-bedecked big shots, can't give up the pretense of rationality.  

Searching for rationality in a terrifying time, these people more than some others have been vulnerable to the idea that money is an index of the meritocracy.  If one has a lot of money, one is "supreme" even the face of a weepy defense of beer-drunkenness.  No one argues with this.  At least not effectively enough to disbar such a person from being a lawyer, much less on a high court.  The only people to object are women and they don't count for anything.

"The Brothel Boy" includes the earlier "Madness" stories.  It is not about male sexwork but about a mentally limited boy who lived as a servant in a brothel and caused a death.  It comes up against an argument that has revived among us:  should capital punishment ever be imposed?  What is the role of popular opinion in who, when and how death should be imposed?  (Was Epstein's death pre-emptive or imposed?)  The point of the stories is that they are irresolvable.  Does it matter?

One of the problems with rationality is that it often asks for a definitive answer when there is none.  One of the problems with money is that the rackets of symbolism and reputation make it possible for Trump to be seen as a billionaire when he is no such thing.  So how can we ever reach a rational conclusion?  It's got to be emotional in large part and since he knows that, is a master of pop emotion, his defenses are strong.

Our idea of justice is confused with the Rule of Law, which asks for uniformity.  The same punishment for the same offense without capricious adjustments.  But one of the deep arguments between law and justice is that circumstances are not the same.  Every case is different.  In our times the cases are different because the world is so changed by the Internet, by the scarcity of resources, and by new equations of who is important.  These books are tight and time-consuming, but what could be more imporant to help find the way forward?

ARE THESE THE WINDS OF CHANGE?

I never expected things to go this way.  I’m scared.  I’m always wary but usually of things like a bad winter or even a rise in sea level due to a warming north pole — two things that are evidently connected.  I say “evidently” because that’s what the evidence tells us.  But that’s not really what is disturbing my sleep now.

It’s Trump.

I agree with Ken Olbermann www.gq.com/story/watch-the-closer-keith-olbermann  He is evidence-based and sums it up accurately.  Even the local Flat Earth Society, even the people who keep their tin hats handy in case the aliens kill another cow, are feeling uncertain now.  They thought that, once elected, Trump would drop his disguise and become rational.  

NOT.

The most thoughtful people in town (women) defended Trump, mostly because they despised Hilary and her pant suits (they wear jeans).  Now they’re trying not to think, binging on housework and holding family close, using medicinal chocolate.  I don’t bring up the subject.

We have met the enemy and he looks like a kewpie doll and has the mentality of Clem Kadiddlehopper.  I have two thoughts:  one is gratitude for my neighbor who almost secretly shoveled out my snowed-in driveway — never asking for gratitude but going ahead as the people here have always done to help each other.  The other is that Trump has got to be the dorsal fin of the shark to have gotten to this position of President Elect.  There must be a lot more holding him up than some kind of neurotic compulsion of the population.  

I don’t think the choice ever was change versus the status quo.  Change was murdered in its cradle by the global Status Quo Board of Directors.  And something is fiddling with my internet connection.

This time of year people make lists of blogs in Montana.  They are always political, always from the high-pop mountain cities, and often written by people under forty who didn't grow up here.  When I first came back in 1999 I was writing under the radar because everyone thought of me as an historical extension of Bob Scriver.  Then I got his biography written.  (Which was ignored because as one veteran told me, books are only bought by distributors if a salesman comes and tells them what is important, and anyway this book was published in Canada and I only wanted people to read it because I’m a bitter old woman.)  At least I’ve never worn a pantsuit. Amazon shows the covers of my other published books.

Then came blogging.  Wheeee!  Amazon links to my main blog.  But I’m still under the radar.  Rather glad of it, actually.  Because I write scary.  I’m not bitter: I’m reckless.  And I’m reckless because there is less and less to lose by speaking out, joining “The Resistance.”  I wish Olbermann weren’t sponsored by a men’s magazine focused on style.  It’s too easy to brush him off.  (He wears pantsuits but at least they're not three-piece.)

But I should stop defining people by their choices of identification.  For instance, one of the most intelligent and connected-to-reality publications on the Internet is called VICE and came to my attention because of an exposé of “law and order” on the rez at its worst.  The report was accurate and a reporter came here to see, instead of depending on second hand stuff.  But it also prints material that matches its title.

The wind is rising, as was forecast, and the work of my neighbor in shoveling my driveway out is being erased by larger forces, the global east-flow jet stream among them.  So do I go see if I have mail, bundled up in my down rancher coat, or shall I just hunker down and wait until tomorrow?  At the moment I vote for hunkering.

But when it comes to Trump, I think that’s the wrong choice.

This is less than my self-imposed quota of a thousand words, but I need to go dig around to see if I can find some chocolate, since I won’t be making it to the store until tomorrow.

AM I DEMENTED?

Am I crazy?  Oh, yeah.  If you mean a little bit askew, maybe over-individuated, kinda ridiculous, sometimes unreasonable, I’ll claim it.  Like everyone else, I wonder about Alzheimer’s every time I lose the pickup keys, even though I screwed a cup hook into the end of my kitchen counter and taught myself to make sure to put the keys there when I came in.  Habit can get you through a lot of mild dementia.

So far I haven’t gotten bad enough to offend the sensibilities of the community except by not keeping my yard the way they want it.  Nothing I could be arrested for, like going to the post office stark naked.  I don’t get drunk, which is a kind of voluntary dementia very popular around here.  Clearly they don’t like being “in their right minds.”

It seems clear to me that Omar Mateen was demented psychologically to not recognize he wasn’t resolving his double minds (I was going to right double binds but I think he DID have double and conflicted minds.) and then I wonder whether it’s demented to have written “right” instead of “write.”  It’s not a mistake I would have made last fall.  It happens a lot these days, so I have to proof carefully.

Dementia seems to include:

1.  Deluded: that is, having ideas that are not supported by evidence.

2.  Glitches in managing complex processes like vocabulary or small daily routines.  If I’m tired or distracted, I find that I skip steps in things like going between programs, which I do most of the day.  I’m stumped about operations I don’t do very often, or I do them in the wrong order and am baffled by strange results.

3.  My old basic character flaws (paranoia, procrastination, non-compliance to regimes) increase.  Temper, temper.

4.  Loss of homeostasis, not correcting to maintain what is functional and healthy.  The stream of parameters seems to be getting narrower.

The culture around me also seems to be demented.  We see totally unrealistic demands at our town council meetings.  Trump is clearly nuts.  And then there’s Mateen.  I have a friend who lives off in the woods by himself.  As soon as he heard there was another shooting, he shut off every source of news in the house.  Isn’t it sane to not want to hear about such a thing?  (I couldn’t because I was afraid friends might have been shot -- possible but not likely, and listening wouldn't have helped anyone.  Not sensible.)

So a downer.  Where are the sane parts?  This winter and earlier I’ve been absorbed and inspired by new theories of the world, an expansion of thought that opens new horizons on every side.  That helps me forgive myself for aging.  It's intellectual to try to understand the new ideas, but emotional once assimilated.  Here’s a list of some of them.  If you google them, you’ll discover vids, books, organizations, and individual thinkers (though they tend to work in teams, which seems sane to me).

Summer here is still more of a calendrical theory than an experienced fact unless you look at the tall green grass and fields instead of the snow in Logan Pass.  It must be summer elsewhere because the "tourii" are beginning to arrive.  In this season I interact a little more with urban, white, educated, prosperous people.  Not that I want to.  I’m finding that if I try to explain the new paradigm concepts that have had me so excited all winter, their faces slam shut, esp. the men. They reject new ideas.  Is that sane?

NEW PARADIGM CONCEPTS

LONG NOW:  Ideas that take into account the next 10,000 years instead of a five-year plan.  

DEEP TIME:  "The multimillion year time frame within which scientists believe the earth has existed, and which is supported by the observation of natural, mostly geological, phenomena."

BIG HISTORY: "Examines our past, explains our present and imagines our future."  No longer is history limited to the records in print, but now can include geological evidence, cosmology, and the fossil record which suggests that there have been maybe two hundred species of hominins before the version we call “ourselves.”

NEUROPLASTICITY:  "Neuroplasticity, also known as brain plasticity, is an umbrella term that describes lasting change to the brain throughout an individual's life course."  This includes the idea of the “fourth gestational trimester", the first three months outside the womb when the skull is growing fast enough to allow brain expansion -- which means that the unprotected environment penetrates and informs the basic concepts of the infant.  It also addresses the subsequent apoptosis of unused neurons and the bursts of regrowth when sexual elements come “online,” another burst of new mental abilities once sex is stabilized, and now a suggestion of a burst of new abilities in midlife, a crisis of the good kind.

THEORY OF MIND:  This may need a better name, for instance, social cognition, which comes from the study of children.  The concept is understanding that other sentient beings have minds — not like ours maybe but certainly with intentions, strategies, and opinions that we can figure out.  That’s “ours” in terms of human minds as species-wide (given the enormous varieties due to environment and culture) and also “ours” as individuals or as groups like families.  

I subscribe to a website about psychology and art, including both philosophers and psychoanalysts, which could be said to be disciplines of introspection, the latter poetic/symbolic or the former, logical/definitional.  I find that when I enter the conversation out of left field (Method acting, sensation-based neurology, raw experience) the poets welcome my ideas but often misunderstand them, and the philosophers want to argue/fight/deny.  They understand what I’m saying, but they do not admit the acceptability of me saying it, partly because of deficient credentials.  They do not care to admit that I have a worthy mind.  So which of us is crazy?

Word-based logic and credentials have been the markers of peak sanity for centuries now.  Psychoanalysis and humanities (art, music, drama, film) have been working away outside their perimeters for quite a while.  So has the catastrophic insanity of human-controlled events or humans trying to survive non-human devastations.  We see that science becomes technology, that advantages become burdens, that lack of empathy is a shield that kills others.

Bruce Strachan, 1948

After a car crash that changed him and his family forever.

Two members of my immediate family had closed-skull trauma, and my husband was also changed by vascular damage from stroke and heart attack.  Diminishing sanity was a long withdrawing ebb from both empathy and self-realization.  Not sudden aphasia or paralysis, not thinking someone is their hat, but a flattening, a social blindness, a lack of compensation for daily small blunders.  It wasn’t Alzheimers — they didn’t wander off down the streets or forget who they were.  But their faces were closed.

“What does it mean?” Kenner would ask.  “What does it mean?”  At least the possibilities are expanding, the skies and the cells are opening.  I think he might say that life is jazz, so get your instrument and start playing.  Or at least listen carefully.

STALKING SYNDROME

The best laundromat around here is in Cut Bank, thirty miles away. The owners are there all the time and their machines are relatively new. Also, it is close enough to Browning that I sometimes run into friends. The other two relatively close laundromats are in Shelby and in Conrad. Both are deteriorating. When I bought this house, it had a washing machine, but that broke down within weeks. The Valier laundromat was replaced by more junk food space for the gas station because “laundromats are just too much work.”

This situation is the result of economic pressure and the changing face of commerce. But the complication is that I can’t use the Cut Bank laundromat because of a stalker. He’s a “Christian” who insists he’s converting me. He knows that I’m an ordained minister, but that doesn’t stop him. At one time he was a teacher but now he wanders the community living off of social services and, I presume, what I’m told is a wealthy father. His mother is somehow missing. He’s close to fifty. I’ve ignored him, yelled at him, asked the management to forbid him (they think he’s funny), and finally just took my business elsewhere.

I know insanity when I see it. Here are official-type descriptions of this miserable disorder:

“Stalking is a crime of obsession, and is often associated with different types of psychopathology, often an axis II, Cluster B personality disorder [antisocial, borderline, narcissistic, and histrionic] (Mullen 1999).

“Depending on the stalker, behavior may range from overtly aggressive threats and actions, to repeated phone calls, letters or approaches. This behavior may go on for years, causing the victim to exist in a constant state of stress and fear. The violent aspects of stalking behavior often escalate over time, and in extreme cases can end in murder (Douglas 1998).”

This laundromat stalker watches for my pickup at the laundromat and if he sees it, grabs a handful of clean clothes to wash for an excuse. In other words, he’s trying to present a respectable front. I think he has a fantasy that he and I are somehow equals (because I taught here) and that confronting me all the time is a relationship.

In the last few days I made the mistake of taking another stalker seriously, this one also connected to religion. That seems to be part of the pattern. But this one is a little different. Here’s a formal description:

“The 2002 National Victim Association Academy defines an additional form of stalking: The Vengeance/Terrorist stalker. Both the Vengeance stalker and Terrorist stalker (the latter sometimes called the political stalker) do not, in contrast with some of the aforementioned types of stalkers, seek a personal relationship with their victims but rather force them to emit a certain response favourable to the stalker. While the vengeance stalker's motive is "to get even" with the other person whom he/she perceives has done some wrong to them (i.e, an employee who believes is fired without justification from their job by their superior), the political stalker intends to accomplish a political agenda, also using threats and intimidation to force his/her target to refrain and/or become involved in some particular activity, regardless of the victim’s consent.[9]

“Many stalkers fit categories with paranoia disorders. Intimacy-seeking stalkers often have delusional disorders involving erotomanic delusions. With rejected stalkers, the continual clinging to a relationship of an inadequate or dependent person couples with the entitlement of the narcissistic personality, and the persistent jealousy of the paranoid personality. In contrast, resentful stalkers demonstrate an almost “pure culture of persecution,” with delusional disorders of the paranoid type, paranoid personalities, and paranoid schizophrenia.[8]”

The internet has much expanded the capacity of delusional people to make nuisances of themselves while keeping their identities secret. In this way James Mackay was able to burrow into the Native American literature community enough to present papers that established him to the casual eye as someone who knew about the discipline, though he is not American and lives on Cyprus. With this as cover, he was able to dupe Wikipedia into letting him take charge of the category under the pseudonym of “VizJim.” (The subject of his paper was Gerald Vizenor, a major academic expert on NA lit. I’ve never contacted Vizenor.) Then he began to “research” and stigmatize NA writers, particularly ones with ties to the Gay community such as Tim Barrus and Greg Sarris and those without full-blood credentials. (Probably more than half the people considered NA writers.) He seems to feel that these characteristics justify his attacks and there are enough people -- mostly young urban female mixed bloods -- who respond to that to encourage him.

The Native American literature community was “hot” for a while in the Eighties and earlier, enough to justify the concept of an NA renaissance of writers. Sales never really took off in the way expected by the soup companies who owned the publishers and demanded ten percent returns on their investment. By now the genre has dwindled and transformed into local and theoretical works that don’t present such a prestigious status.

The irony of James Mackay’s stalking is that he’s not even American and though he’s getting a correspondence course degree from England, he’s misrepresenting his so-called work. Wikipedia is so unknown by most Indian scholars that it has not attracted the “citizen corrections” that is the cornerstone of its claim to accuracy. The whole thing is a hall of mirrors.

The worst side of these stalking obsessions is that they spread from one victim to others. Therefore, everyone who opposes the obsession with clergy misconduct becomes a new object of stalking. Even Barrus’ children and students become victims. Since the students are already struggling with HIV, his stalker finds easy targets.

Law enforcement is usually baffled by stalkers until they actually show up at a door waving a gun or, like Timothy McVeigh, set off a giant explosion. For many years they were unable to find the anthrax culprit or the Unabomber, though their stalking was deadly. In a time when we are being stalked by terrorists and pirates, we begin to be paranoid ourselves and overreact. Student shooters and mail room employees who go “postal” stir the pot. Publicity about such events may be prompting those on the edge to go into action. What we need is a cultural shift away from paranoia that thrives on suspicion about our politics, our religions and our sex-lives. I hope it comes soon.