Sounds like a good premise for a book.
KESEY, YOU AND YOUR FUCKING INDIAN CAN BITE ME.
To be fair, Arkham Asylum is a very professional facility staffed by dedicated and highly-qualified staff, such as Dr. Harleen Quinzel.
WHAT DID YOU SAY ABOUT THE INDIAN, FULLER?
Kesey -- the idea was used in a book, maybe 20 years ago, Alas, I can't recall the title, only the fact it was part of a series centered about a NYC prosecuting attorney. You might be pleased to know that at the end of the book, the gangster type after considerable (and all too typical) overdosing on Thorazine was in fact as whacked out as all the "normal" mental hospital inmates and it was clear this wasn't going to change in the next 40-60 years of his life...
I recently read I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, in which the crazy girl is not faking it, and I kind of dearly loved it for all it's incredibly wooden prose and melodramatic psychoanalysis and fits of crazy.
Ooh! I liked I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. I think it was one of the books I salvaged from my mom's house before the estate sale.
Ah yes. Robert Tanenbaum's "Butch Karp" series. Sorry I can't recall which particular book to point to. OTOH, you might enjoy working your way through the series. It's quite readable.
They did an experiment way back when where they sent volunteers to mental hospitals with completely bogus diagnoses, to see if the doctors would realize the diagnoses were wrong. The volunteers were supposed to act normal, but the doctors saw everything they did through the prism of their diagnosis.
If you run through the streets, saying you are a lunatic, you are in fact a lunatic.
10: Okay, but I'm still not going to consider you wise.
An article about the suicides at Broadmoor, where this guy was.
I got the impression that the story was framed to be a bit more ambiguous and Rashomon-like than it really is. Sort of freaky, though.
Tangentially, that narrator is one of my least favorite TAL contributors. He does the annoying "I'm not a journalist, I'm a storyteller" thing that makes him sound like David Sedaris on assignment. He gives the impression that he's just making the whole thing up.
Jon Ronson is indeed rather annoying.
A true story about Broadmoor: Reggie Kray's wife visited him there and Reggie remarked that he had stopped eating beef, "because I've heard about this Mad Cow Disease and I don't want to become mad."
"Reggie, love," she replied, "you don't have to worry about that. You're already mad. What do you think you're doing in Broadmoor?"
Ronson's fantastic, though I can see his style being annoying to some (especially non-Brits). If you haven't already, you really should read his books Them: Adventures With Extremists, and The Men Who Stare At Goats.
Anyway, back to the original subject, I dispute the idea that there are any cushy secure mental institutions in the UK. In my experience (one of my friends was sectioned for a while) they're mostly hellholes, even outside the notorious Broadmoor.
The books are better - on camera (and probably on radio) he seems to fall into the same annoyingly faux-naive category as Louis Theroux and Sacha Baron Cohen.
"Hellhole" is a bit much but they're not good places to spend time.
#9: The Rosenhan experiment (1972). "It is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals. The hospital itself imposes a special environment in which the meanings of behavior can easily be misunderstood."
8: & 16: The last few Tanenbaums were dreadful. He's changed partners and they can't dance. The earlier ones prompted reserves at the library for the next one.
I agree, Ronson's books are great.
The books are better - on camera (and probably on radio) he seems to fall into the same annoyingly faux-naive category as Louis Theroux and Sacha Baron Cohen.
Ronson claims (half-jokingly) that Theroux just ripped him off. And I wouldn't call Cohen's characters naive.
The phrases "Ronson's fantastic" and "Ronson's material is fantastic" should not be regarded as synonymous. Ronson writes like someone you would run away from at a party, but the people he writes about are horribly fascinating. It's your call whether the one balances the other.
Speaking of crazy:
http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/gates_incident_report_redacted.pdf
1,2,4:Apparently Kesey actually wrote the book in 1959 even though it was not published until 1962.
"The phrases "Ronson's fantastic" and "Ronson's material is fantastic" should not be regarded as synonymous."
True enough, though I don't think he comes across that badly as a person. He overeggs his writing (especially the weekly columns he used to do) with a lot of British and Jewish self-deprecation and is clearly well aware of his own ridiculousness.
22: Whaddya know, there's a whole 'nother thread about it already.
I wouldn't call Cohen's characters naive.
Wouldn't you? I'd have said that's the whole point. The Comedy Foreigner with the moustache comes to the US and is amazed that Americans don't e.g. sell their daughters into forced marriages or whatever they do back in Comedy Foreign Land. Maybe you mean something different by naive?
The history of lobotomies is so incredibly disturbing: it looks as though the average omelette-making person is more careful about their egg beating than the average 'psychosurgical' innovator is about sticking an ice pick in someone's head and giving it a vigorous to and fro. Makes me want to give up on being human in hope of aligning myself with ... molluscs, perhaps. On this evidence, the only way to go is up.
What's poignant is that many lobotomy victims seem to have been chosen because they satisfied two conditions: first, they were outspoken; second, they were socially disempowered.
28: Me, I'd definitely rather have a bottle in front of me.
"The Comedy Foreigner with the moustache comes to the US and is amazed that Americans don't e.g. sell their daughters into forced marriages or whatever they do back in Comedy Foreign Land. Maybe you mean something different by naive?"
Clearly I do. I'd call them ignorant. Derogatively so in Ali G's case, and merely descriptively so in Borat's case. And as for Bruno, ignorance doesn't even come into it from what I saw on the TV show - it's all about innuendo and provoking a response.
To clarify, naive implies to me unworldly. You couldn't call Ali G that, though it's more debatable with Borat. But even with Borat, he's perfectly worldly in (his fictional) Kazakhstan, just not in the US. And moreover, the emphasis is on the otherness, not on the unworldliness.
19: Biohazard is completely correct. I loved those Tanenbaum books (the wife! those kids!) until he switched ghosts (or whatever) and now they suuuuuuuuuck. Can't he get the old guy back?
30, 31: OK, I see what you mean. I think. But doesn't Louis Theroux do the same innocent-abroad thing when he goes to talk to the Montana Militia or whatever?
22: Link is broken. But when I go to the Globe's main page and read the link about Gates, AFAICT the only news in there not already covered in our previous thread was the fact that there's a sociologist at Harvard, and colleague of Gates, named Bobo.
Ronson writes like someone you would run away from at a party, but the people he writes about are horribly fascinating.
This is true. I loved Them. I'm obsessively fascinated by obsessives and kooks. Ron Rosenbaum used to write entertainingly about that sort of thing before he sailed off to PajamasMediaLand. Occupational hazard, I suppose.
I've known at least two people who've gone into mental institutions while sane. One of them was studying to become a psychologist (though when I knew her she was a dance teacher and choreographer) and thought that the only way to understand the institutional experience was by living it herself. She said that of course it made her feel crazy. The other one was trying to flunk out of the military draft (in France) and ended up spending a month or two completely fucked up on psychedelics he'd smuggled into the military insane asylum. He was not very lucid about the whole experience, frankly.
The takeaway from all of it seems to be, no, seriously, don't get yourself locked into a mental institution.
35 - I loved Travels with Dr. Death and most of The Secret Parts of Fortune, but then Rosenbaum started writing floridly (and extremely unconvincingly) about Nabokov and then went right off the rails during Iraq. What happened? Just another person with Hitchens Reflexive Contrarian syndrome? Creeping AIPAC neoconism?
36: Ha! Nearly every French guy I know spent time in the booby hatch as his way of evading mandatory military service. But I don't think they took anything to improve their chances; I think they just insisted on their insanity and did their (relatively short) time. It seems it was the done thing at one point and both patients and doctors knew the score. I once asked my extraordinarily aristocratic French friend how he got out of it and he looked at me sternly and replied, "I didn't."
I had no idea the French had a draft.
I think you have to be over 30, 35 to have been conscripted into national service. My ex, who really should have qualified for conscious objector status, spent about five or six sessions with a psychiatrist to get out. He ended up convincing himself that he was suicidally depressive, however, so I'm not sure it was such an easy experience.
39: They don't anymore (it was repealed in the past decade, I think). And "service" could take many forms. The above-mentioned friend did something businessy in Nigeria.
"But doesn't Louis Theroux do the same innocent-abroad thing when he goes to talk to the Montana Militia or whatever?"
Well, that's kind of my point. Theroux's schtick (which is to a large degree the same as Ronson's) is totally different in execution and intention from Borat. The way Borat works is that he gets supposedly ordinary/civilised people to go along with absurd and/or offensive things because he's supposed to be from some backwards country. By contrast, Theroux and Ronson use their outward naivete to get extraordinary (and usually insular) people to open themselves up to them and the world. And they don't always play on the foreigner angle - Theroux's stuff with the Hamiltons for instance, and most of Ronson's printed work in fact, have little or nothing to do with their nationality.
Everywhere has a draft, to a first approximation. Sweden - land of personnummers, and also a land with a history of lobotomising people, I've learned - still has one. I think it's one of those phases a country goes through.
Greece still requires national service (on account of the menacing Turks).
45: Turkey still has it too; what's their excuse?
45: That's what they say. My guess is they are just waiting until the attention dies down before taking over the new Macedonia or forcing them to call it 'Pseudonia'.
46: Kurds and Armenians. Maybe Magyars too.
Well, Russia, perhaps. Although even so, conscription hardly helps. Interestingly, Turkey was the only country able to do much in the way of military retaliation with respect to Georgia. Not that they'd have been at all willing, I suspect.
45: Who was it who suggested that the rest of Nato should insist on describing them as "The Former Ottoman Province of Greece"?
My all-time favorite Jon Ronson piece on TAL is from this episode, wherein he goes to his high school reunion to confront old friends about a time they pushed him into a lake, only to find that none of them have the slightest recollection of its having happened. The rest of the episode is pretty damn good too.
Did somebody give the Internet the day off and not tell me?
Most governors have furloughed the internet on alternating Tuesdays.
If the Soviets ever invaded, Western European countries were supposed to provide the infantry while the US would provide the navy and air forces. Many European countries had short military service requirements so that they had lots of people on hand who'd fired a rifle. If the Soviets managed overrun all of continental Europe (which every European from that era I ever spoke to thought was inevitable), the back up plan was that the US would launch a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, if Britain and France hadn't already.
The menace of the Greeks.
Hott.
I had a friend in college who, our freshman year, had a massive crush on a guy in her dorm whose dual citizenship with somewhere or another meant that he was due to have started national service when he turned 18 and was now technically wanted for arrest in that nation on account of never having shown up. Its only impact on his life was that he couldn't go home for holidays but he couldn't write "wanted criminal" on his request to stay in the dorms over breaks so, if I recall correctly, he had a whole lot of extremely complicated made-up pleas to be plead and at least one or two fall breaks spent in the one motel in town that was affordable to students but was so sleazy it featured hourly rates on its sign.
Sounds as if your friend missed an opportunity by not offering to put him up.
57: Oh, that's a whole other matched set of anecdotes.
If the Soviets ever invaded, Western European countries were supposed to provide the infantry while the US would provide the navy and air forces.
Maybe you mean "the bulk of teh infantry"? There were quite a few US infantry and armor divisions stationed on the eastern front of NATO.
Yeah, bulk of the infantry, though my impression is that the function of the US divisions was to act as a tripwire so that the US wouldn't be tempted to stay out of the war.
Speaking of crazy, hey, it's not as if having good schools and universities ever did anything valuable for California. Surely a 20% cut in state support for higher education won't do any real harm.
Higher education doesn't teach you the skills you need for a failed state, like open water piracy and making meth. California is properly allocating resources in accordance with our new direction.
Let us hope that Emerson is down in the Siskiyous building some fortifications to cut off I-5 when the invading hordes pour north.
56: It might well have been Greece; I swam with a guy who had that problem with not being able to see go back and visit relatives in Greece (and I forget exactly what the citizenship status was that triggered it, I think he had been born there and came over as an infant). This would have been around 1970.
The skills you need for a failed state.
56: I knew a bunch of guys who'd fled South Africa to avoid military service, including a couple of actual no-shit deserters. One of them was the first out gay guy I ever knew. Nice fellow, but you'd be hard pressed to come up with someone less suited to military service, particularly in defense of Apartheid.
Damn, that narrator with the English accent is SUPER ANNOYING. He's really pleased with his own boring observations. Plus the accent itself, ugh.
He must be the "Ronson" guy people are going on about above. I came to my conclusion about his annoyingness independently.
59: Including my mom at one point.
70: No wonder we were safe.
Thank you, Mrs. minneapolitan.
My uncle jumped onstage with the Beatles in Hamburg and slept with his carbine when the Berlin Wall went up. Wild, wacky stuff.
"My uncle ... slept with his carbine when the Berlin Wall went up."
I'm sure that all of that construction work must have made him tired.
Crazy Is ... the United States of America--Critics Slam Overweight Surgeon General Pick, Regina Benjamin.
Give me a freaking break. Let's hope one of her first big goals is attacking body image issues.
67: My dad joined the Navy on 12/8/41, but some months later he spent a night in the brig for going AWOL. He hated the food they were feeding him, so he hopped on a train back to Jersey City to eat his mama's food and then turned around and went back.
To be honest, most of the scenarios I've seen involve the Russians reaching the Elbe by about D+3, the US using tactical nuclear weapons by D+5, and the situation escalating to a strategic exchange by D+6, which would give you the rest of the weekend off.
68: racist.
I find ronson tough going too, but he chaired the single greatest moment of on-screen mentalism ever to be seen on brit TV (by me): a late-night chat show format, a gaggle of conspiracy theorists in a circle of easy chairs, many of them mutual rivals, discussing aliens and the facts of humans in space, so far so predictable obviously.
At a particular point -- iirc while describing "independence day" as a massive propaganda coup by The Man against The Truth That Is Out There, the gathered fruit-loops put aside their testy differences and began hinting at a conspiracy so vast , so awful that they were NOT GOING TO REVEAL IT ON TELLY -- "it is not yet time" they agreed darkly.
It was quite hard not to shout at the TV at this point: YOU GUYS WILL NEVER BE ALLOWED OUT IN PUBLIC AGAIN! EN MASSE OR EVEN ONE BY ONE! SEIZE THE MOMENT! WE DESERVE TO KNOW!
But they were adamant, and we will never know.
77: I would like to think that the reasoning was "No, if we say that on camera, people might think we're crazy".
The impression I got was that they were actually -- literally -- too collectively frightened of the various implications (for them; for reality) to go beyond veiled hints. I've honestly never seen anything resembling it on TV, even in the totally unpoliced reaches of the late-night chunter shows of 10-15 years ago. It was a sudden visible shift in mood, and confidence: it was very striking.
What they were comfy claiming and assuming on-air was much of it beyond far out -- but also every time contested (by which I mean, anything brought up for public consumption someone there hotly disputed). This thing that was Too Big to Speak of (etc) was something they all seemd to agree they agreed about -- whatever it was.
79: I'm reminded of Doc Smith's Lensmen series. There's this non-human villian, all-powerful, hyper-intelligent, totally evil, eating kittens and babies as snacks, and so on, and behind this villian was a Really Bad creature.
'Twas evil beasties all the way down.
The ultimate conspiracy theory would be that all the conspiracy nuts are in fact involved in a very real and serious conspiracy, and their image as conspiracy nuts is a cultivated image to deflect suspicion from whatever it is they're conspiring to do. I might write this when I retire, if somebody else hasn't already.
That's sort of the plot of Illuminatus! if it could actually be compressed into one sentence.
I suppose it is. Ah well, back to plan 'A', start a religion...
Using techniques I gleaned at Rennes le Chateau, I declare it NO ACCIDENT that "Ogged" is an anagram of "e.g. GOD"
81: Or the slight variant that there is a very real and serious conspiracy that *none* of the conspiracy nuts are involved in, and their pet conspiracy theories are the result of manipulations by the real conspirators to deflect suspicion from their activities.
85: There are non-luny conspiracy who argue exactly this, with respect to several of the classics -- that the authorities are deliberately muddying the waters with peculiar and silly (but highly memeable) stuff in order to distract from the real issue.
It's routinely the case that radical and revolutionary organisations have been infiltrated: occasionally the case that -- by accident or plan -- the infiltators become the main strategists; the people arguing for the bomb outrage, or whatever. There's a folk legend about a tiny possibly Maoist groupuscule in the UK in the 70s, which turned out to consist of more than 50% police agents provocateurs, from different security branches, entirely mutually unaware of one another.
Actually the novel that combines conspiracies-within-conspiracies AND religion is G. K. Chesterton's marvellous The Man Who Was Thursday
86: IIRC, the Communist Party cell in St Petersburg in 1908 consisted of five men, four of whom were actually agents of the Okhrana.
Yup, one of them would be Yevno Azef, triple agent: a highly paid police spy who ran the revolutionary splinter group in question and authorised and organised the assassination of his own boss within the Okhrana, TWICE...
(click through to view Azef's amazing powers of disguise)
Would another have been Roman Malinowski, leader of the Bolshevik Duma fraction and Okhrana agent?
Solzhenitsyn* believed that Stalin was an Okhrana agent
*I think -- long time since I read this and might be thinking of someone else.
86.1: Yes, almost added that. The resulting conspiracy theories plus the actions of people "covering up" smaller scale screw-ups "conspire" to further obfuscate what really happened. An example of the latter is the FAA supervisor who admitted trashing a relevant tape recording from 9/11, I suspect because it was unflattering and/or highlighted some unprofessional behavior on his or other people's part. (And then of coure the truthers climb all over it.)
86.2: There was a This American Life episode on this scenario on a very small scale involving a rather pathetic bit of action at the 2008 Republican convention. Also see the Liberty City and the recent NYC "terrorists". We are clearly in the repeat as farce phase.
I find ronson tough going too, but he chaired the single greatest moment of on-screen mentalism ever to be seen on brit TV (by me): a late-night chat show format, a gaggle of conspiracy theorists in a circle of easy chairs, many of them mutual rivals, discussing aliens and the facts of humans in space, so far so predictable obviously.
I missed that. What was the show called and is on t'internet anywhere?
It was a fairly long time ago, GY: BBC2 after midnight, don't recall the name of the programme, if it was part of a series or anything. Might have been part of "The Ronson Mission" six-parter (1993-94), but might have been a stand-alone subsequent to that.
93: can't remember who made the point that, up to about November 1941, Stalin didn't do anything that he wouldn't have done had he been a committed Nazi agent. (Prime example: making the study of mobile armoured warfare doctrine illegal and shooting pretty much everyone who'd ever discussed it.)
97. But he started doing that stuff a decade before the Nazi party amounted to a hill of beans, so I suspect coincidence. That he would have been a Nazi rather than a Communist had he been German seems quite likely.
Lenin was widely believed to have been a German agent in 1917.
Per snarkout in 37, this is one reason that it is sad that Ron Rosenbaum has fallen off the pace so badly. He had been one of the better writers on "conspiracy" items. From Travels with Dr. Death I particularly recall the pieces on the CIA/Angleton/Soviet mole stuff and the death of Mary Meyer (a JFK mistress and another one that Angleton had some connection to).
Actually if my memory of them discussing Independence Day is correct it must be post-96
98: yes, I don't think the suggestion was that he actually was a Nazi agent... and the remark was mainly in regard to his policies towards defence and Nazi Germany (shooting Tukhachevsky and the other deep battle doctrine guys, signing a treaty with Hitler, destroying Poland, killing off most of the Comintern nets, ignoring the Rote Kapelle intelligence, approving Voroshilov's ludicrous "border defence" strategy, etc.)
There are non-luny conspiracy who argue exactly this, with respect to several of the classics -- that the authorities are deliberately muddying the waters with peculiar and silly (but highly memeable) stuff in order to distract from the real issue.
Also works for things that aren't conspiracy theories at all. For example when everyone in Washington knows that certain facts are true, but there is no hard documentary evidence of them with which to inform the average citizen. Those whom those facts reflect badly on, can produce fake evidence which seems to support the facts, release it to the media anonymously, and then later on they can prove that this evidence is faked, thus convincing the average citizen that the facts are lies and the media are liars.
e.g. this situation.
64: Twenty years ago, it was generally assumed (at Reed College, so...) that Grants Pass was already defensible against the urban Californian hordes. I expect Yevno Azef had a busman's holiday.
Clew: you would want to start at the Mt. Ashland exit. By the time you reach Grants Pass, the game is over.
It wasn't just the terrain but the locals that were thought to confine defense to Grants Pass. One of my classmates was from there, and would amiably say that beliefs about Grants Pass were about as accurate as beliefs about Reedies; but he was a central-casting Reedie. Maybe he was just good at blending whereever he was.
I am from there too. The people are pretty unremarkable. You would do better hoping for Roseburg.
