Never walk into a bar and give people clues to your blog, especially if the bar is one of the deeper dives in the Weirdness that is Washington.
Well, if you're me, you've had weirder things for breakfast than most of these people could ever hope to see, much less to be. But for the average person with the average idea of what constitutes sanity? Kiss your average ideas and average sanity goodbye. In particular, never let troublemakers mine your blog output for whatever will most annoy you, because Washington being Washington, and carpetbaggers being carpetbaggers, they will do whatever they can to get your goat.
That's okay... I've been a regular on the scene in the District since long before these kids were born, and while the respect I get from real District Denizens might be a bit grudging at times, since I know how to mind my manners, I have it.
And as for these kids from out of town who think they've got new tricks for the old dog, all I ever have to do is to mention that the only difference between a tourist and a carpetbagger is that the carpetbagger has an address, and make that mention to any of a large number of real District homeboys who have known me to have done them no harm in the 20 or 30 years they've known me.
If you think that the national sport of Washington DC is "fucking with tourists", that's nothing compared to what we got for carpetbaggers, and you'll be moving right along as people ask with big sorrowful eyes, "Leaving us so soon?" and then make damn sure the door hits you in the ass as you get the fuck out... but not fast enough.
A lot of carpetbaggers never quite understand that a real Washingtonian is never unintentionally rude. They then compound that mistake with mistaking politeness for weakness.
For example, it's exceptionally polite to say "If it wouldn't be too much trouble, do please be so kind as think up something appropriate in terms of a comeuppance for someone who actually made me mutter, every day in every way forces me to add to the very long list of people who can just kiss my fat ass". And you know what? If someone asks you politely like that, well, something's just got to be done, know-what-I-mean? Especially if you're one of those special people who remembers having the cartoon in question stapled to the fabric of their government cubicle.
Moving right along: the Washington Post reports on an increasing awareness of the profound dangers of atypical antipsychotics and antidepressants of the benzidiazepine class. Please see Anti-Anxiety Drugs Raise New Fears ("Anti-Anxiety Drugs Raise New Fears", Balestra, Katie, Washington Post, June 30, 2009).
Benzodiazepines, often prescribed to manage anxiety, panic and sleep disorders, include Xanax, Ativan, Valium and Klonopin. Originally pushed as an alternative to barbiturates, their use has grown rapidly in the past 30 years. But critics say their long-term effects have gone largely unaddressed. Health professionals and consumers are increasingly recognizing that taking the drugs for more than a few weeks can lead to physical dependence, often ending with a grueling withdrawal.
[ ... ]
Some doctors have been turning to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, such as Paxil, to replace benzodiazepines in the treatment of anxiety, although those antidepressants may also produce withdrawal symptoms. Steven Daviss, chairman of psychiatry at the Baltimore Washington Medical Center, said SSRIs are a safer alternative for panic and anxiety disorders, with less risk for dependence and a less dangerous withdrawal.
The ordeal of withdrawing from benzodiazepines can rival that of kicking a heroin habit, according to some who have had success. Abrupt withdrawal can result in hallucinations, seizures and even death, experts say.
Don't forget that as of tomorrow, July First 2009, it is illegal to park a commercial vehicle either on the street or on private property in most parts of Montgomery County in or near Aspen Hill or Silver Spring. Furthermore, the police and Code Enforcement will now be working hand in hand, so that the old game ends, the game of "get a ticket on the street, move it onto the lot and it'll be six months before Code Enforcement cites it, park on the street again, start the whole 6-month cycle all over again without paying a cent".
No, the County is hungry for Revenue... and we the suffering citizens who have had to put up with watching our neighborhoods assume the appearance and appeal of industrial parks, well, we'll be phoning it in right and left. I might even go out and charge up the cellphone just so I can blow $50.00 of prepaid minutes busting out the sort of asshole who cuts down every tree they have and paves the yard to park their fleet of work vehicles in residential neighborhoods.
So, how much is that ticket/citation again? $500.00?
My goal? To make five million dollars of commerical-vehicle illegal parking revenue for the County... by mid-July.
I am almost exactly the same age as Michael Jackson, or Madonna, for that matter.
Despite their human foibles, I've always looked up to them as icons of my age and culture.
I grew up with Michael Jackson, but until Thriller came out, I didn't pay any more attention to him than I had to... and then there he was.
And now he's gone, not even the shade is left here on this earth, though his influence may cast a shadow down through the ages, as much as he shone a light of music into the culture.
After some weeks of poring through various old Subdivision Plats and assorted deeds, I found out a few interesting things about the development history of Aspen Hill.
During the very early years of Maryland settlement by Europeans -- mostly by the English, in the early days -- grants of land as large as 5000 acres or so were granted via "patents".
Aspen Hill, west of Georgia Avenue, is split between two such patents. One would be "Hermitage", and the other would be Bradford's Rest.
I've discovered that the line of division is quite nearly west-to-east, starting from Rock Creek across the stream from Meadow Hall, running at roughly 87 degrees East of North, to a bit east of the intersection of Aspen Hill Road and Georgia Avenue.
"Hermitage" lies to the south of this line -- which in the present day is roughly the line of Aspen Hill Road from the Aspen Hill Library to the fence line between Gate of Heaven Cemetery and the Aspen Manor Shopping Center -- and Bradford's Rest to the north.
A map of Bradford's Rest is available. Rotate it 90 degrees to the left to get it pointed north, and start looking at a Google map of the area. A hint, the line-segments marked "42 and 41" are roughly the course of Georgia Avenue from Aspen Hill Road to Bel Pre Road. From there the Astute Reader may calculate the extent of this huge swath of land.
Hermitage runs south to a bit past Wheaton, or "Mitchell's Cross Roads" as it was then known.
In recent days -- or perhaps weeks -- I've been able to determine the rough extents of "Cassell's land" which is often referred to in the deeds of the time and many subsequent deeds which reference the earlier deeds. It seems to be the most southeastern tract in Bradford's Rest, comprising lands now BAE Systems, Home Depot, much of the English Manor and parts of the Wheaton Woods subdivision north of Aspen Hill Road, and the Northgate Plaza shoppiong center.
Also more rigorously determined, the bounds of the "Bauer Tract", the present-day site of the Aspen Hill Library and a narrow strip of subdivision running 6 blocks north. Also, some of the bounds of the so-called Earle Tract, much of the original route of Aspen Hill Road, etc etc.
Given a bit of time, and some walkabout with a GPS, I should be able to generate nice googlemaps and potentially a MPG movie of boundaries over time including the times of subdivision.
By the time I'm done, assuming that anyone in Aspen Hill remains who can speak English -- generally speaking, that may be a sucker bet -- this should be a comprehensive history of land-use pattern changes over time, all as a backdrop to other evolving histories of the place.
Well, I can't be categorized as yet-another frat-boy cut-and-paste term paper writer. I'm actually doing my own research, and doing a lot of walk-around and transcription from onlined microfilm images.
Between this and my UNIX and internet skills, not to mention my ability to read and write English without needing a spellchecker, you'd think I could get a fucking job.
But that's not going to happen... so all I have is a hobby.
I decided I was bring horribly horribly eurocentric with my boring video postings. Not merely eurocentric, but limiting myself to NW Europe. What total lack of diversity! What, can't the former satellite states of USSR get any credit?
Really, they're all moving into the modern age. Here we have post-punk beach music from Hungarian rockers Supernem. It's enough to make you want to drive your Trabant all of the way to the shores of the Baltic and see if the surf's up:
And who would believe that even in the Czech Republic they have Gothic bands? Not too bad, actually. Bratrstvo Luny:
Ani Lorak of Ukraine can definitely rock a soft love ballad with "Rozkazhy". As best I can make it out, she's moping about how she's devoted her entire life to some guy, but what she wants the most of anything is to hear him tell her "I love you". Mariah Carey, look out.
Of course, in Russia, they have actual culture, this is traditional instruments and good musicians. Of course, if you are Russian at soccer game and this comes on speaker, you are required as patriotic gesture to drink entire bottle of vodka, empty the benches of stadium onto field, and fight until police come with tear gas.
Of course, you might want to think twice, in case this is the team you are playing:
As to this last video, nobody has ever figured out what the hell it's supposed to be about. Nobody. Ever.
you can't believe how hard I had to dig for this, but at long last: Tibetan Reggae.
No Thursday would be complete without a Korean punk rock club video.
Hey, when the world is an immense trainwreck crashing all around you and you seem to be the only adult on the car, you worry, you get angry, you run around and do stuff. But once the wheels come off of the tracks while the train is still moving, it's beyond anything you can do and you might as well surrender to intertia. In the end when you have done all that you can, you just sit back and wait for the moment that all of the metal folds up around you when the inertia encounters the immovable object, or perhaps you get lucky and a hundred cars of freight and passengers all slide more-or-less gently to a stop.
Might as well put on some music and crank all knobs completely clockwise.
I said I'd be trying to find some europop and ideally this page with send your browser into a screaming crash landing.
This, I think, might be the German equivalent of Miley Cyrus, or maybe not. At least it shows that girl groups that have actual talent not only still exist, but can put out a video that isn't all about skin and strut. Too bad you have to go to Germany to see it.
And then there's a bit of French pop from Alizee. Remember, French pop isn't for everyone but this one's a bit naughty:
"It's not my fault When the cat's got my tongue I see them gather 'round to pounce It's not my fault That I hear everything around me, is 'Lolita' Me, Lolita".
Moving right along back to Deutschland, here in a popwindow is video prooof that no German anywhere -- especially not in Germany -- has ever had a sense of humor. Please see Deichkind -- Ich Betaube Mich.
Now you will understand why Frankfort is the industrial and banking capital of the world. It's the deep and endless seriousness, I tell you.
And then there's Yvonne Catterfeld, who can sing a sappy ballad far better than Britney has done for years:
But of course no German popmuzik sampler is complete without the Cookie Monster lyrics of Rammstein:
Clearly no reasonable person would accept a performance video from Russian pop stars "T.A.T.U." as proof positive that Capitalism leads to degeneracy. After all, what they have in Russia isn't actually capitalism, it just looks like capitalism. Don't believe me? See the Mercedes? It looks like capitalism until you get close enough to see that the car is very well armored. For a while there, it was a kleptocracy, from what we are told here in the West, then once everything had been stolen and the thefts had been consolidated, it became an oligarchy with wealth defended with private armies and with the State withering away even as had been predicted by Karl Marx. Yet, of course, in any anarchic conditions, new centers of power emerge and it has been interesting indeed to watch a very strange set of contrasts playing against each other. To fight against the consolidation of power around the oligarchs and their private armies, Mr Putin declared that Russian Federation would be a country founded on Rule of Law rather than on the power of the strong-man. Yet of course, it is necessary for him to become strong-man to do this...
In the end, forces originating far from Moscow reached out across the globe and in places have forced entire nations into economic collapse. In Iceland, the national debt is 850 percent of Gross Domestic Product. Comparable ratios of debt to GDP exist in various Balkan nations outside of the European Union, though Iceland is widely believed to have been the worst victim.
Capitalism in the US isn't doing very well, either.
Can you call it capitalism when it isn't exactly a free-market economy?
Can socialism save us?
It may not work very well when there are mixtures of economic models, each without a clear demarkation of domain. When a flooding river crosses lava from a volcanic eruption, can we say that it has changed its course when it flashes into live steam?
We have no certainty... only data, slices out of time and with limited field of vision.
As much as I dislike what has proceded from the writings of Karl Marx, still, many of his observations are close to truth.
Failures of Capitalism are generally in two classes. First, there is the failure of the individual as economic pressures invite the capitalist to maximize profits, ideally with a view to expanding the capital investment in infrastructure or production, but done in such as way as to drive payments to the workers to the lowest level where the worker can survive and reproduce his kind.
The second failure of Capitalism is a failure of the system. Pure capitalism is effectively anarchy which inevitably comes to be dominated by wealth, with little or no restraint on that wealth. Monopoly becomes entrenched and eventually various monopolies will battle, and will consolidate their holdings, eventually becoming not much different from political sovereigns of the hereditary aristocracy.
Both of these classes of failure have long been known in the US, and various regulations have been placed to guard against excessive power of Monopoly, and to protect and defend the rights of the worker for collective bargaining and on-the-job safey and retirement benefits.
Yet we have seen a third type of failure. As this is the second time within a century, we may assume that regulatory evasion -- or exploitation of regulatory blind-spots -- will be another of the failure modes of capitalism against which we must always guard.
For now, though, we are watching a destitution of the workers, and a harvesting of the wealth of the middle-class, who were encouraged to gamble in a rigged game that favors management.
The Washington Post notes a curious gap in home-ownership stastistical surveillance. It seems that a million or more homeowners are seriously delinquent but not in foreclosure.
The article offers a bit of insight:
[ ... ] The backlog of seriously delinquent mortgages, which so far affects about 1 million borrowers, is a shadow over hopes for a rebound in the nation's housing markets. It masks the full extent of the foreclosure crisis and threatens to depress prices even further just as some parts of the country are hinting at recovery. For lenders, it could portend even more financial losses tied to the mortgage meltdown.
"It just means foreclosure rates are going to keep rising," said Patrick Newport, an economist for IHS Global Insight.
Rising mortgage delinquencies were at the root of the recession, and many economists say an economic recovery will be difficult until the housing market recovers and home prices stabilize.
And even though a delayed foreclosure can be a blessing for some troubled homeowners, for others, it simply prolongs the financial distress, leaving them on the hook for the condition of the property. Even if they move out, they cannot move on.
"I have even begged them for a foreclosure," delinquent mortgage-holder Charlotte Jensen said. When she realized she couldn't save her Glen Allen home last year, she filed for bankruptcy, packed up her family and moved out. Nearly a year later, Bank of America has yet to take back the home. [ ... ] ("Not Paying the Mortgage, Yet Stuck With the Keys", Merle, Renae, Washington Post, June 24, 2009)
This reminds me of how, in October 2007, it was observed that home sales were starting to slow and that there was a vast overhang of unsold new homes were being helf off the market by the builders, but that it was expected that the builders would have to start putting them into the market no later than mid-2008 at the far outside.
The Astute Reader will recall that this combined with the massive rise in fuel prices to slow the economy to the point where home prices started to decline, and highly leveraged "commoditized debt obligations" stopped increasing in value and that put a stop to the function of the even more highly leveraged "credit default swaps" and that crippled the financial market to the point where nobody could borrow anything or lend anything and we saw the creation of "toxic debt", as utter uncertainty of valuation -- or even potential valuation or even sanity of attempting to assing value -- came to resemble a classic thought-experiment in physics, and Schrödinger's Cat Clawed Wall Street A New One.
The problem we may have, as noted above in the Post, could be that the banks and other lenders are in no hurry to assume full ownership of these properties, preferring them to "languish off of the books" as it were. Why rush to take on more assets to sell at a loss?
It's also quite possible that the lenders don't want to put these onto the market -- which they would have to do, as soon as they reclaim title -- as that would drive the market even lower. And what happens to the value of their toxic assets, then? They still don't really know the value of the toxic assets, and they're not even sure whether or not reclaiming ultimate title to these million-or-so properties adds those properties to the toxic-assets column, or to the real (non-variable and accurately accountable) assets column.
All they do know for sure is that the more homes they bring to market, the less the value of any of them. And they also know that they cannot long remain in the business of being real-estate owners in the home market... lest they be forced into commoditizing it, and selling it as tranches. And we all know where that led.
Further, the Post notes that new home sales are stagnant and that there is an estimated backlog of new homes that would take 10.2 months to sell at the present rate ("New-Home Sales Stagnant Despite Hopeful Predictions", Merle, Renae, Washington Post, June 24, 2009).
So, with an increasing need for certainty as to the valuation of the "toxic assets", the lenders are going to have to start being more aggressive in foreclosing properties that are "seriously delinquent" in mortgage payments. That will add to the downward pressure on new-home prices and remove almost all incentive in the industry to build new homes. The new-home construction industry is effectively dead at this point in time.
Such home sales as are occurring tend to be in "distressed properties" yet even with these bargain-basement prices, sales are far lower than expected.
In part, this may be due to a gut feeling on the part of consumers that a vicious cycle is poised at clifftop, ready to fall over the edge at any time.
As the new homes construction industry is in fact just about out of business for now, the majority of the workers are laid off, and are not making enough money to avoid becoming "seriously delinquent" on their own mortages.
Here in Montgomery, we have seen a significant increase in home overcrowding, especially as "immigrant workers" (legal, or otherwise) increase their living density as some become unable to pay their own mortgages and move in with other groups in the hope that with enough people, at least that one mortgage can be paid.
Yet with those new residents at the overcrowded homes, there is also an overcrowding of possessions... and starting July 1, commercial vehicles can't be parked on the streets where this home overcrowding is prevalent, and commercial vehicles suddenly also cannot be parked on the properties. New and rather more aggressive measures against home-overcrowding and storage of the tools of business will also come into effect on July 1.
With no work now, nor for the forseeable future, with not much credit available and with no declarable income, falling irremediably far behind on the mortgages yet unable to divest via foreclosure final actions, what happens to these properties?
Perhaps we'll all wind up skinny and decadent:
But somehow I doubt that in the US, obesity will stop being a problem, although as in the video above, inevitable comparisons with the migration of lemmings will occur.
More to come? If so, I'll try to drag out some more fun europop video.
I then digressed with an actual schizothemia, and wrapped that within another digression on nearly ubiquitous functional illiteracy even among college graduates. This makes it difficult for me to communicate at my own level with others, even in a text mode. In person, I rarely speak, mostly for the reason that I never know if anyone will understand what I'm trying to communicate.
I then felt it necessary to point out that the Modern Western Way isn't the only culture that deals with small-time recurrent criminals by marginalizing them as mentally ill and then forcing them into "treatment". In Haiti, the approach is really disturbingly similar, yet somehow here in the US, we fear the very name of Zombi.
I then felt it necessary to briefly digress on my faith (or lack thereof) mostly to point out that I'm not trying to be judgemental on the basis of faith, and that if I am making judgements, to the degree possible, I base them in science and philosophy rather than faith.
I pointed out that even here under the Modern Western Way, there is a disturbing rise in the percentage of mentally ill in jails. I argue fallaciously by anecdote drawing from the individual to the general, to the effect that for me at least, the local mental health care system was broken, and dangerously so. Yet despite my personal experience being unlikely to be the common case, until you actually test to see if it is common, my assertion is as valid as is any other and frankly I don't think there are any independent oversight tracking mechanisms in place.
In any case, it's clear that there is an increase in the numbers of people both jailed over mental health issues, and those in the community at risk for being jailed for mental health issues.
It is also clear that we are not sufficiently funding programs to help the mentally ill, or perhaps -- and this is just as likely, and must be investigated -- the programs we are funding are ineffective, or even operate in ways so odious as to repel potential clients.
In 1996, the Federal Food and Drug Administration approved "Zyprexa" for general distribution as a so-called "atypical antipsychotic". Within years, the disorders for which it was prescribed included such things as Alzheimer’s, personality disorder, conduct disorders and severe aggression in children, and non-psychotic depression.
About that time, the Federal Ethics Guidelines were revised and republished, with significant changes in allowable procedures for experimentation on human subjects, especially regarding the concept of Informed Consent.
Prior to those changes, widespread allegations circulated -- and these allegations were one of the things forcing the revision of the Informed Consent rules -- that various pharmaceutical companies were "beta testing", or doing "large sample statistical studies", on populations such as the homeless. Using the poor (or other captive populations) as human guinea-pigs isn't exactly new. In the US, for example, the Tuskegee Study of the effects of untreated syphilis on poor blacks is rightly infamous.
Possibly it's also not common knowledge how many people do know of these risks, and prefer to suffer symptoms of mild mental dysfunction rather than run the well-documented risk of increasing their body weight 20-percent and developing diabetes.
It's logical, really. Look at it this way: would you rather not take one drug which is elective, or wind up dependent for the rest of your life on insulin?
As for me, I'd rather not be a diabetic on dope that makes my uncoordinated and a slow thinker.
I would rather be a grumpy guitar player of moderate skill and be a very fast thinker when it comes to UNIX system administration.
You know, it's funny. I made that choice -- about taking the thyroid I actually need, and not taking the Zyprexa that gave me very bad reactions -- over a decade or so ago.
In the interim, I haven't wound up in jail, or in the mental health clinic, for that matter.
If I feel a little down, I like to go see a good band at a bar, and dance. Even if I don't go see a band, I like to play guitar and if I've got the blues, I play the blues. I'm still recovering from having my left hand broken about a year ago, and so when it hurts to play guitar, I like to listen to recordings of guitar players.
Well, possibly this isn't the exact track you'd pick for Music Appreciation Therapy aimed at most of the people served by Montgomery public health care services, whether delivered from 751 Twinbrook Parkway, or from County Jail.
But I can about guarantee you, as you watch the speeding fingers of Albert Lee, that man isn't taking any goddamned Zyprexa.
But I digress. In a Gazette article on the rising proportion of the mentally ill in County Jail, we get some clues as to why things are getting worse.
But [County Correctional Center therapist Victoria] Shaffer said the needs of the mentally ill often are not on the radar.
"You very seldom hear a politician run on the issue of what they'll do in office for the mentally ill," she said.
Well, I tried, a bit. So did Cary Lamari, though neither of us was very specific in our intentions or recommendations.
So, I will try to be a bit more concrete in my recommendations, and perhaps Mr Lamari can be a bit more specific as well. This blog does, of course, allow comments.
1. As one of the most destabilizing influences on mental health is stigma and harassment by a superstitious or misinformed public -- or subsets thereof -- a pervasive and uniform public education must be rapidly developed and implemented.
2. Law-enforcement agencies already have programs in place to familiarize officers with the effects suffered by people with certain classes of mental illness. Care must be taken to encourage officers to understand that such symptoms and effects are suffered only by an extreme minority of mentally ill persons, and that the vast majority of mentally ill persons are non-criminal and are indeed far more likely than the population at large to become victims of crime.
3. Mental illness, in almost all cases, is in fact a condition rather than a disease, and is communicable only to the degree that stigmatization and ostracism -- especially by the community at large -- can intensify existing conditions and possibly precipitate crises. Thus, it is far more effective to enforce laws against harassment or abuse before a crisis is precipitated, than to react to a crisis with an arrest. The former is good public health and prevention policy; the latter is effectively blaming the victim and is rightly perceived as fundamentally unfair.
3. Mental health care and mental health-care systems need to be fundamentally separate from issues of housing, food security, physician access, and training or job opportunity. To deny to anyone, on the basis of having consulted (or having been assessed by) a mental health professional, equal access to publicly funded benefits for which they otherwise quality, is a clear and blatant violation of Civil Rights under the US Constitution, Amendment 14, Section 1, "equal protection of the laws". See also the Supreme Court of the United States "O'Connor" decision and others.
4. Compliance with a medication regimen, as a pre-requisite to publicly funded benefits for which a mentally ill person would otherwise qualify, is a practice which needs to end immediately. This also violates Amendment 14, Section 1, in re: O'Connor etc.
5. Increased emphasis on "Housing First" especially in cases of persons with mental illness.
6. Any outpatient program should offer referral to vocational training opportunities.
7. Any outpatient program should offer referral to remedial education opportunities.
8. Under no circumstances should mentally ill persons be treated in a way that would make them reasonably consider themselves to be exploited as cheap labor or for "union busting", nor exploited under "volunteer hours" circumstances. Yet opportunities for volunteerism should be referred and efforts as volunteers should be encouraged and rewarded as possible.
9. Chronic funding shortfalls should be remedied by very aggressive civil litigation against businesses which show any history of open hostility to, or violence against, person with any intellectual disability, emotional disorder such as autism, or non-florid mental illness. The Americans With Disabilities act, as well as both State law and County Code have ample legal basis for such litigation.
10. As of October 2009, new laws prohibit discrimination against the disabled, and violence against the persons or effects of the Homeless. Vigorous enforcement should eliminate much of the violence and/or terrorism which so disproportionately contribute to destabilization of mentally ill, develomentally/intellectually disabled, or emotionally/socially disabled such as autists.
11. Much stronger efforts must be made, to investigate and prosecute (as reasonable) any incidents in which misguided individuals attempt to "medicate" persons they believe to be mentally ill. Any such incidents need to be prosecuted both under Common Law poisoning charges at the State level, and at the Federal level regarding prohibitions on transferring prescription medications.
12. While the majority of mentally ill persons are not criminal in nature or intentions, some are. I propose a study into the usefulness and possible modalities of a new office acting as a liaison between the law-enforcement and courts/corrections community, and the community of licensed providers of mental health services. This new office would be responsible for tracking and investigating, not those persons who wind up in jail for minor charges and who are mentally-ill, but rather those persons who wind up in jail because they are criminal in both actions and intentions, and who are also mentally ill.
More to come?
Hopefully not. See also item 11... the best way to get me to write even more 9-part dissertations is to ignore item 11.
Then I decided that -- as is proper form in all good Rhetoric -- I should Digress, with an actual schizothemia, no less, that being "digression by means of a long reminiscence". Yet bracketing that schizothemia, I did stop to mention that nearly ubiquitous functional illiteracy even among college graduates makes it difficult for me to communicate at my own level with others.
I noted disturbing parallels between recurring plot-lines of some very good science fiction and definite historic and horrid incidents, trying to keep the focus on Focus and how people might get rich or powerful from that, and how scruples might not matter to some people. Then, noted in passing, an article that points out that the death-rate from kids on Ritalin is nearly octuple that of accident victims in the same population group.
I then felt it necessary to point out that the Modern Western Way isn't the only culture that deals with small-time recurrent criminals by marginalizing them as mentally ill and then forcing them into "treatment". In Haiti, in part due to their budgetary constraints preventing them from building a prison and jail system as proportionately immense as that of the US, and in part due to the ethnic and cultural origins of the Haitians as well as the history of their arrival on that island, the approach is really disturbingly similar, yet somehow here in the US, we fear the very name of Zombi. First, before I get started in on anyone else's religious beliefs -- which I suppose I might do in the next segment, when I may mention that you can practice Vodun or Santaria but don't practice it on me -- let me make mine clear: I am what you might call a "non-theological earth-friendly neo-pagan". In a lot of ways, I'm not too far from the Wiccans.
My theology isn't the same as theirs. Indeed, such limited theology as I internalize comes mostly from the JudeoChristian tradition as does the majority of my moral system, but really I am very much a hardcore Deist. If the universe has a creator then that which surrounds us and of which we are a part is an artifact of intention, and in that which is created are clues to the creator, even if those clues aren't stamped with the date of manufacture and a serial number and brand name. To discover the intentions of the creator, study creation. We have tools for that... philosophy, and science.
Yet I believe that it's good to have a periodic and recurrent ceremony of reflection and expression of devotion, and I believe that if the universe has a creator, when I give my devotions and sacrifices, I'll be as close to nature as I may be when I make those devotions. To That which created the stars themselves, all of the space to contain them, the time through which all move, and the laws by which all are governed: to That alone do I give my worship, and my thanks for letting me be a part of it all.
I keep imagining that sooner or later I'll wind up in handcuffs in the back of a squad car, trying to explain wandering around my backyard at midnight on a moonlit night, smoking a cigarette and throwing bread and sloshing beer all over the place. And I keep imagining, in this very bad dream, that I forget to mention the Constitution of the United States, as Amended, and the Constitution of Maryland and the part where it says that a person should worship their creator "as they see fit". And I imagine that somehow I wind up as an unconscious admission to the local jail.
As a therapist at the Montgomery County Correctional Facility, she deals with a steadily growing stream of inmates with mental health issues.
In some cases, the facility is like a revolving door. When inmates with mental illnesses are released back into the community, there often is not a strong support system of family or public programs to help them, and they revert to their prior behavior, she said.
The ones where treatment works are not likely to return.
"This is not the most cost-effective way to treat mental illness, and it also is not the most humane," Shaffer said. "This is a jail environment and not a mental hospital."
A new study released earlier this month showed that a growing number of inmates in jails nationwide have serious mental health problems. The study of more than 20,000 men and women inmates by the nonpartisan Council of State Governments' Justice Center and Policy Research Associates found that 14.5 percent of men and 31 percent of the women in jails suffered from serious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia.
"I don't feel overwhelmed, but it saddens me," Shaffer said. "It's not the way we want to treat those with an illness."
This may be looked at in a variety of ways.
Could it be that mentally-ill people are more inclined to criminality than those who aren't -- only for example -- schizophrenic? Research done in past years has found that the mentally ill are no more likely to be criminal than those who don't share that affliction. Indeed, with many classes of mental illness, especially those along the depression axis, it's far more likely that rather than harm another, including by stealing, they'll kill themselves. Imagine that: mentally ill, and they'd rather kill themselves than be a criminal.
Could it be that the population of the jail is really a mirror of the population at-large, and that an increase in the proportion of mentally-ill inmates merely reflects an increase in mental illness in the population at-large? There is some support for this notion, in another article in the Gazette:
While the economy soured, the number of neglect and physical and sexual abuse cases in Montgomery County increased over the last two years, a trend that could continue to worsen, say child welfare officials.
Social workers are responding to more cases involving unattended children, home overcrowding and abuse, said Agnes Leshner, Director of the Montgomery County Department of Child Welfare.
"Unfortunately, what happens is mom and dad are working and leaving the children home alone," Leshner said. "This has lead to our increase in neglect against children reports because the children are babysitting their siblings all hours of the day."
Historically, cases tend to spike in May, Leshner said. In May 2007, child welfare investigators responded to 257 cases, which increased to 290 cases in May 2008. There were 307 cases last month, she said.
Yet there's another, and easily more-believable explanation: that public services out in the community are not reaching their intended clients.
There could be a variety of reasons for that, but two immediately spring to mind.
Either (or possibly some degree of both) there is insufficient funding to serve the needs of that community, or the services offered -- or the conditions of the offers or way the services are offered -- are so unacceptable to the clientele that they would rather decline the services. As discussed elsewhere, I am about as crazy as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs, and for about the same reasons.
Long long ago, Montgomery County issued a contract for outpatient mental health-care services to some corporation constituted to that end. I was having problems that seemed to me might indicate depression. Without any real testing, the contractor's physician prescribed a fairly low dose of a fairly strong anti-psychotic drug. This did nothing whatsoever to treat the underlying thyroid disorder.
Elsewhere, far from Montgomery's sway, another doctor did actually do tests, and prescribed thyroid suppliments, and wow did I get better, very quickly indeed. I became the person I really was, rather than the victim of an increasing shortage of hormones.
Interestingly enough, about one-third of people treated with anti-depressant medications will say almost the exact same thing.
All I know is that about 100-percent of people with hypothyroidism will find that the appropriate dosage if thyroid is effective.
I can reasonably estimate that about 100 percent of people treated with antidepressants or antipsychotics for thyroid deficiency will not get better.
Quackery and malpractice do not constitute treatment, or at least don't constitute medicine. The Astute Reader -- those who aren't among the two thirds of college graduates who are not deeply literate, according to the National Endowment of the Arts and other institutions of actually literate academics -- doubtless is wondering what the hell this has to do with increasing numbers of the mentally ill filling up the county jails.
Look at it this way: With a schizothemia -- a long digression involving a personal reminiscence -- I am giving you an example. You may, or may not, wish to draw from me arguing by anectdote, from the individual to the general. That's very fallacious if you include it in an argument, but you can always go do some surveys and take polls to see if that one individual reminiscence, or elements thereof, are experiences common to other individuals.
But wait, I'm not done yet. To continue to digress -- schizothemia aren't that unless they're long -- let me mention that when I returned from the place where I had finally gotten the right diagnosis, I was destitute and dirt poor.
One nice thing about Montgomery County: generally speaking, social programs were well-funded. This was a center of civilization and not far from being a center of socialism.
So, trying to get on my feet and into my own place, I ran into a certain problem.
Montgomery County had integrated its social services such as mental health-care into their general poverty outreach systems.
What this meant was that if they had a record of you ever being a recipient of mental health-care, until and unless you were receiving mental health-care, no other services were available to you.
Trying to get food, they told me to get the people contracted to provide mental health-care to sign off on a form.
Trying to get medical care for illness or injury, I was told to get the people contracted to provide mental health-care to sign off on a form.
Trying to get on a list for low-income assisted housing, I was told to get the people contracted to provide mental health-care to sign off on a form.
Trying to get into vocational training, I was told to get the people contracted to provide mental health-care to sign off on a form.
Talking to the mental health care contractors, I was told that I would take their medication, and give blood weekly to prove compliance, before they would sign off on these forms that everyone else requested.
They prescribed Zyprexa, which has since been implicated in problems with diabetes, obesity, and sudden death as well as other things that are less than fun. In particular, it's noted for the number of people who go psychotic, or more psychotic, and also go violent after taking it.
When I took it, within 72 hours I was, um, not to put too fine a point on it, out of my goddamned mind. At about 6 days into it, I was, to put it mildly, contemplating violence. And then the newspapers were suddenly full of the news that about a mile down the street, some poor bastard on Zyprexa had axe-murdered his family, reportedly under the delusion that they were vampires.
Considering that I was thinking about the same thing, and taking the same free quack pills, I flushed them down the toilet and probably saved the lives of my entire family, including myself. Now, years later, I take only thyroid, and I do in fact drink beer, and I smoke cigarettes. Other than that I don't do drugs.
I saved my money, constantly upgraded my computers and internet connection, taught myself the bare bones of UNIX, and educated myself to the point where I got hired by a company or three or five where I worked under some of the best people in the industry, and whatever I hadn't taught myself, they helped me learn. That is how you deal with poverty. That is how you deal with mental illness. That is how you give people a hand up, not just a handout.
You leave people alone who are doing no harm. You don't give them drugs that they don't need, drugs that -- at least in my case -- cause a mixture of mood-swings, psychotic ideation, and murderous intentions. You feed them if they are hungry, and if you can get them work, do that. If you can help them learn something that will get them paid better at their job, while keeping them in that job, you do that.
What do you NOT do?
You don't tell them that they can't be fed, nor housed, nor work, unless they're taking antidepressants that do nothing for 2/3rd of people taking them, or put them on semi-experimental antipsychotics that have an immense and nasty number of side-effects which include a deepening of psychosis and predilection to eruptions of violence.
And you don't tell them to take dope when you know that dope isn't what they need, and that your previous malpractice was just epic in its gross negligence and incompetence.
Or maybe you do... if you're trying to hide that mistake by mandating that they can either go mad under inappropriate medication and kill themselves -- the main witness to the malpractice -- and do it quickly, or starve slowly and homeless while being refused job after job and all opportunities for training. All I can say is that if anyone else has had comparable experiences from Montgomery's mental healthcare and social services contractors, it's likely that they too have decided to let nature take its course. And as some people are teetering on the edge, making that decision could land them in jail as the actual madhouses are full and have been for years.
Or perhaps the County contractors were so odious that people went without care, but desperation forced them to crime, shoplifting to survive, and when arrested for trying to eat, the contractors exerted their long reach to and throughout the County systems, and added yet another statistic -- one who refused their services -- to the long list of reasons why they need more money.
Because, after all, if those programs had more money, less crazy people would wind up in jail.
Then I decided that -- as is proper form in all good Rhetoric -- I should Digress, with an actual schizothemia, no less, that being "digression by means of a long reminiscence". Yet bracketing that schizothemia, I did stop to mention that nearly ubiquitous functional illiteracy even among college graduates makes it difficult for me to communicate at my own level with others.
I forgot to mention that me being located a little bit on the autism spectrum probably doesn't help. Just try to keep in mind that I am not an idiot to be managed. See also Amendment 14 Section 1, US Constitution as amended and a long train of SCOTUS decisions.
And lastly, I mentioned disturbing parallels between recurring plot-lines of some very good science fiction and definite historic and horrid incidents, trying to keep the focus on Focus and how people might get rich or powerful from that, and how scruples might not matter to some people. Then, noted in passing, an article that points out that the death-rate from kids on Ritalin is nearly octuple that of accident victims in the same population group.
Push the play button, and listen as you read:
In his excellent 1985 book (read the reviews) the Serpent and the Rainbow, ethnobotanist Wade Davis explores how the combination of culture, society, faith, and a toxin -- Tetrodotoxin (as well as other interesting plant-source psychoactives -- all combine in Haitian tradition to create "Zombi".
Leaving aside, for now, the religious elements, the long and short of it is this:
Small time criminals, shiftless losers, and the sort of people who beat their spouses or children or elders excessively, are drugged near to the point of death. Then after a great deal of ceremony above-ground, the victim imprisoned is left to stew in a mixture of their own belief system and suggestibility and the effects of a variety of potent hallucinogens, not the least of which is the near-death coma of near-fatal tetrodotoxin poisoning.
Upon release from the buried box, the clearly addled victim is taken away for additional inculcation into their new lot in life: a brain-damaged laborer. How, exactly, this will differ from our modern American system of public mental healthcare?
Really, only in the choice of the drugs used.
In Haiti, serious crimes are punishable by death, and the least serious crimes are punished mostly by a whipping or a fine. There is a vast gulf of possible misbehavior in between, and little degree of punishment between a fine and a guillotine. Some additional penalty had to evolve to fill the gap, and the most shiftless and recurrent of repeat offenders get sentenced to become zombi.
Professor Davis's book -- available to the public for over 20 years now -- gives excellent historic references and citations to earlier works. It is his easily supported position that the institution of the zombi inevitably evolved out of the means of control by which the coastal West African slave trading people kept their far more numerous prisoners in line: drugs. Nasty horrid drugs.
Professor Davis gives excellent and really quite gentle and friendly coverage to Vodun (also known as "Vodoun" or "Voodoo") and also to the history of Haiti, including the rather worrisome first night or two of the Revolution. His coverage of the evolution of the African native faiths involving the veneration of Orisha is both comprehensive and comprehensible.
Particularly enlightening are the bits of priestly practice which migrated into the Americas to become other religions, such elements of subculture as the "coup l'aire" ("striking through air"), the "coup-poudre" ("striking with powder") and even such things as Goofer Dust.
Folks should read this book... and all of the footnotes. And then research the plant-source chemicals from which many -- if not most -- of our modern psychoactive pharmakin is derived... many of which are well referenced in the footnotes of this scholarly work by a Harvard graduate.
And then they should go down the the public mental healthcare clinics in even the most upscale jurisdictions...
And then tell me where, exactly, is the difference between the "modern scientific pharmacological regiment" and the rural herbalists of Haiti, when both produce the exact same thing: drugged-out unskilled labor... that can barely get up in the morning, and has less functionality than the average brain-trauma victim.
As Dr Vinge is a leading developer at the forefront of many convergences of science and society in the cutting edge of information systems and biology -- he's best known for his creation of the concept and term of the Singularity, also referred to as "the technological singularity".
To summarize briefly, the technological singularity occurs when artificial intelligence is developed which is at least weakly superhuman, and begins generating products, systems, technologies, concepts, and activity which surpass those within the capabilities of unaltered human beings. What will happen to humans -- and to human society -- is debatable. Some characterize the results of the application of superhuman technology to human beings as being Post-Human, Trans-Human, or even Super-Human.
In any case, it's not controversial anymore among the techological intelligentsia that the Singularity is Near. We in the technical fields believe that it is, absent active restraint, inevitable.
Some people believe that it's already begun, that we are in the process, and that it's not happening so much by design, as by accident; and, that even without the hypothetical influence of weakly superhuman artificial intelligences rapidly engineering themselves into deeply superhuman intelligences motivated mostly by a desire to enhance their own capacities, it's bound to happen.
The simple advance of human technology and the unintended consequences of unintended uses of that technology will hasten the day. Back when I was a lowly clerk and technician at the Federal Communications Commission, helping to process applications for the Rural Cellular and Text Pager services in the Land Mobile, Common-Carrier division, we mostly thought that we'd be making it possible for stranded hikers to call for rescue with their cellphones, no matter how deep in the canyons of the Rocky Mountains they might be. We envisioned rapid rescue response directed to specific locations, and so-forth.
We also thought that ubiquitous access to text-message pagers would be helpful, and generally "in the public interest".
Everything at the FCC is driven by that phrase "in the public interest". We were tasked by our charter to utilize the electromagnetic spectrum in the public interest, and it is a fact that if the FCC heard about utilization of the electromagnetic spectrum in ways that were not in the public interest, the FCC would go to extremes to end it, with measures ranging from sending in agents -- we were a division of the Department of the Treasury, which also is the parent organization of the Secret Service -- to levying fines against "pirate radio" stations of as much as a quarter-million dollars per day.
Nobody at the FCC, in the late 1980s, ever thought that the ultimate result of our development and deployment of ubiquitous cellular and text-message service would be Smart Mobs, or the peoplesdirt.com slander and defamation website primarily accessed by Montgomery County MD teenagers via texting cellphone, nor did we much ever think that one of the most penalizable crimes in 2009 would be that of teenagers creating and distributing child pornography to other children through the epidemic act of "Sexting" While Driving.
We certainly never expected that Sexting would emerge as both motivation and payment for Smart Mobs, organized through the private message features at peoplesdirt.com. And people out there actually still deny that the Singularity Is Near.
Probably it's the same people who deny Global Climate Change. Dr Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky had a really scary -- genuinely terrifying -- plot element.
In this novel, a certain human colony had been infested with a virus or fungus (or an organism somewhere between both) that infected the nervous system. It was, in the story, called "the mindrot". From the Wikipedia article:
[...] The mindrot virus originally manifested itself on the Emergents' home world as a devastating plague, but they subsequently mastered it and learned to use it both as a weapon and as a tool for mental domination. Emergent culture uses mindrot primarily in the form of a variant which technicians can manipulate in order to release neurotoxins to specific parts of the brain. An active MRI-type device triggers changes through dia- and paramagnetic biological molecules. By manipulating the brain in this way, Emergent managers induce a state they call Focus, in which Focused persons become completely obsessed with a single idea or specialty, essentially turning them into brilliant appliances. Many Qeng Ho become Focused against their will [...]
"Brilliant appliances"?
Actually, in the novel, none of them exactly volunteer. The "Emergents" -- those from that doomed colony world -- deliberately infect the Qeng Ho ("Treasure Fleet") interstellar trader party as a ploy to gain control of the extremely advanced and numerically superior Qeng Ho expedition to an interesting and potentially exploitable planetary system. Rockville, Maryland, is the site of a massive industry doing cutting edge research in biology and biotechnology. If the Singularity Is Near, there's an exceptionally good chance that when it erupts, it will erupt in Rockville, in Bethesda at NIH, or in the string of research facilities strung along I-270.
Most research is governed by the regulations to be found at the US Office of Government Ethics. Although many people, after long years of the Bush II Administration, may have come to regard "government ethics" as an oxymoronic phrase, the fact is, those ethics are there and legitimate researchers can get in exceptional trouble by violating those ethics.
But considering that such games as industrial espionage -- concerned with being the first to the patent-office, or to market -- are very high-stakes, especially with biotechnology and pharmacology, you can't expect all that much in terms of ethics.
History tells us that misguided individuals, and misguided organizations as small as clinics and as large as nations, are perfectly willing to engage in vivisection.
If people are willing to do that, why stop at doing illegal trials of experimental pharmacological drugs on human subjects, or for that matter, why stop at doing illegal trials of drugs in novel applications?
It certainly never stopped the CIA... And it never stopped anyone else's intelligence community, or transnational organized crime, either.
Then I decided that -- as is proper form in all good Rhetoric -- I should Digress, with an actual schizothemia, no less, that being "digression by means of a long reminiscence". Yet bracketing that schizothemia, I did stop to mention that nearly ubiquitous functional illiteracy even among college graduates makes it difficult for me to communicate at my own level with others. Yet it was not always this way here in America. Our schools used to produce graduates of high-school who were in the majority literate; and in the modern day, the majority of collage graduates are not deeply literate.
Yet despite their illiteracy, yet these people seem to think that their college degree -- in physical education, I suppose, perhaps with a minor in marching band or cheerleading -- confers upon the an infallible right to judge other people, and abuse them with surreptitiously administered doses of dangerous drugs.
Although my parents' upbringing and general lack of skill -- all combined with too many other things to do to -- meant that we as a family did not much play cards, I had an aunt who had led a rather adventurous life abroad with her husband, following along with his military and diplomatic career.
She could play cards.
She could make 'em walk across the table and do tricks, and she could deal 'em off of the bottom of the deck and sort 'em out from the middle. If you've ever seen those stage shows of prestidigitation and "magic" you've seen about half of what my aunt could do.
My hands aren't much good for that, being more the sort that are meant to hold large tool handles, but between watching my aunt like a hawk anytime she was in town, my eyes got pretty good at not merely watching my aunt's hands, but to seeing what she actually did with them. She noticed that I noticed, and tried to teach me, but as I said, my hands aren't much good for that.
But what did come out in the wash, so to speak, was that while the hands are quicker than the eye, you had to have hands as fast as hers, for your hands to be quicker than my eyes. And how fast were her hands? How fast can a cat swat you if you annoy it? A cat could not swat my aunt, and it can't swat me, either. I'm just no good at cards. On the other side of the family, they say that my dad's mom was one of the best musicians in Kansas until she got religion and decided that it was sinful to play except at worship. They also say that she could pick a house-fly out of the hot summer air faster than you could blink. She pretty much gave up playing guitar and banjo, so they say, but didn't seem to think it was sinful to let the flies pile up on the porch and then sweep them off at the end of the day.
I'm kind of clumsy, and can't do that. But that isn't to say that I can't see the fly coming. When I was a kid, testing in the schools turned up something interesting.
It would be very easy to discount my early test scores as an expected result of being taught how to read before I arrived in first grade. Yet the gap between me and the unprepared kids didn't narrow once they learned to read. Of course, I wasn't the only one, and we "smart" kids often wound up hanging out with each other more than we did with the other kids.
A lot of the other "smart" kids fit a stereotype of being scrawny or wearing thick glasses, etc. Not me! I still got picked on a lot, though.
"Smart" kids, as anyone would expect (who bothered to think about it) learn rather quickly. As fast as the bullies learned a new technique, we figured out ways to defeat it. What I am trying to carry to the Astute Reader is the understanding that we all know how to spot this sort of stuff. What we can do to stop it generally depends on two things, our own moral restraints -- which, curiously, we have, though obviously the bullies do not -- and our willingness to take advantage of the same loopholes in either the law or its enforcement, which bullies like to exploit. "... I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." Thomas Jefferson, one of our great Founding Fathers of both our Constitution and the ideology of personal liberty, wrote that.
I rather suspect that Mr Jefferson might object to people trying to assume control of the minds and lives of their fellow citizens who have committed no crime, but are merely said to be "crazy".
If calling someone crazy grants legitimacy to trying to drug someone into slavery, there's a lot of incentive to call people crazy.
Can we thus logically suggest that some people just want slaves? And their intended victims' sanity has little to do with it, because the imputation is easy to make, and difficult to disprove... especially if you've already got the drugs into them. Personally, I think this sort of thing is morally insupportable and cannot be allowed.
It's because I like to take the moral high ground -- and I will do as I will if it causes no harm, under my own moral system, but clearly this is deeply harmful! -- that I don't simply reciprocate in kind. Yet under both law, and morality, that would be me making myself only another criminal, with the issue in question no longer being a question of kind -- criminal, or noncriminal -- but of degree, meaner and more successful, or less so.
A lot of my fellow intelligentsia, many of them successful enough to afford any remedy they can imagine, find themselves in the same moral bind. Why? Mostly it's because most of us understand that it's not the fault of stupid people that they are stupid, though you may certainly blame those who are both ignorant and proud of their ignorance as well as being unwilling to become non-ignorant.
Part of our moral bind is this: before we may consider a course of action, it is necessary to discern whether we are dealing with ignorance, or stupidity, when people bother us. And in the time between when first notice a problem and when we make our decisions on how to proceed, a great deal of suffering may have to be endured.
And often, we have observed that many of our fellow intelligentsia don't tolerate suffering well, and tend to get... a little crazy.
But we've also noticed that they come right back to normal pretty quickly -- and we need them, and need them normal if we are to get our work done -- once the suffering ends.
And because we do need our intelligentsia -- and need them more every day, and need them to be on as even a keel as is possible without applying undue interference -- what can we do to ease their suffering?
Sometimes there are fairly direct methods.
Sometimes all you have to do is give them an interesting job.
Sometimes you have to apply many heads being better than one to help them solve problems that reach out from their neighborhoods or home life that come into their careers and keep them from being able to stay on task.
And sometimes, exceptionally misguided people try to apply bizarre street theater and twisted psychodrama and a little bit of manipulation of their mindset with peptides such as oxytocin and other things such as pemoline or others substances generally not discussed on InterNet to try to induce Focus...
And occasionally those misguided people discover that this is rarely a good idea.
And I left with a brief interlude, a link to some great music from a band named with a word I have learned to fear and to despise: FOCUS.
The Astute Reader may have noticed that despite the occasional typographic error -- or errors in construction which might best be attributed to being a bit tired after typing all day, and being less than perfectly attentive in pre-post editing -- I can and do write at a level which is best characterized as "deeply literate".
The National Endowment for the Arts -- a bastion of literacy if ever there was one -- bewails the status of literacy (PDF) in America, following on the heels of their eariler reports which indicated that only about one third of college graduates are "deeply literate". That means that only about one third of college graduates are capable of actually grasping the totality of what I'm trying to say here, and that regards only their capacity to decode the grammar, and be sufficiently familiar with vocabulary so as to not have to spend all day using wikipedia as a codex to decipher my rather plain, if occasionally circumlocutory English.
People with an interest in literate communication may wish to read this critique and analysis of education theory in early-level college English composition courses. Back in the 1980s, I worked downtown for an agency of the Federal government. I was an underpaid clerk and technician, but still made enough money to be issued a credit card by a major national carrier, something I would later regret. Sometimes I would use that credit card to buy dinner and/or drinks.
Ordinarily I did my drinking at various downtown neighborhood bars where I was known and had been known for a fairly long time. Or, it being legal back in the day to drink in public parks, I hung out and drank with a fascinating diversity of locals and carpetbaggers, fellow citizens and foreigners.
One night I decided to head off down another way to try out some bars that were new to me. Heading in the general direction of George Washington Circle, I pulled up a table at a bar which as it turns out was not far from GW University, and started drinking and chatting with other patrons, most of whom were barely old enough to legally drink in a bar.
The next morning I woke with a splitting headache at home back in Rockville, and called into work to take sick leave. I felt as if I'd been beaten with a baseball bat and then kicked up and down the block a few times.
And over the next few days, something came to me as if the recollection of a dream.
In the dream, a rather nice lady rode with me up an elevator to a strange rooftop, and we crossed a strange little bridge between that rooftop and another. And through another elevator door was a very nice apartment, and she plopped me in a chair and said something like "I have to make some phone calls", and I fell asleep and woke up in Rockville with a splitting headache.
Years later, I saw an obituary in the Washington Post. The face looked incredibly familiar, and the next time I was downtown, I spotted that unique double-towered roof structure, and remembered my dream, but also remembering that obituary, the dream made sense, my memories made sense, and that night made sense.
It seems that I had walked into a bar right across the street from both a major hospital, and a major psychiatric inpatient and outpatient upscale and private service-provider.
And evidently, after talking shop about the pending introduction of a new class of mobile communications services, and how this would likely drive entire new industries, some of the students called some of their friends on the staff of the hospital, and convinced the bartender to slip me a "mickey finn" to keep me mellow until an actual professional could be asked to drop in from across the street to decide whether or not I was one of her (or someone else's) escaped patients.
I wasn't. As a professional, she had enough sense to ask what I had been talking about, and to ask me where I worked. I have no idea what sort of words she had for the bar staff or for the students who decided that I was a crazy man babbling lunatic nonsense. She knew the difference between someone speaking technical -- and regulatory -- jargon, and the babblings of the untreated insane.
And I woke up in Rockville with a splitting headache, dreamlike memories that I understood only years later, and I never again will drink at any bar in the vicinity of 23rd and Pennsylvania NW. The difference between sanity and insanity is not to be decided by students in a bar, nor by bartenders. They may have their opinion, but dosing people is beyond the pale. These assessments are to be made by professionals in the field, and perhaps by the professional peers in the field of the person in question.
If, for example, someone overheard me in a bar, and I was holding forth on the relative merits of realtime single-core task prioritization versus non-preemptive multi-core task prioritization with adaptive resource allocation, they'd almost certainly think I was crazy... unless they were another internetworking engineer with some knowledge of chip hardware.
And unfortunately for me, the majority of people reading this blog may not even have heard of -- or have only the slightest concept of -- internetworking, engineering, or any of the things that make their 'puter do that online thing. So to them, it's just meaningless. To them, meaningless somehow equates with "crazy".
Then again, I hardly know the difference between a knucklehead and a panhead, but I know that when I hear people talking about that and related subjects, the people might be oddly dressed and not groomed to the standards of Young Urban Professionals or college students, or they might be... the point is, I don't assume that they are crazy, when actually what they are is mechanics. Noted in passing: I got dosed into a near-death coma for predicting that in the future, even people in the deep rural areas of the USA would be able to access massive global information resources via wireless devices that would be small enough to fit in a pocket.
And when I recovered from my near-death coma, suffered at the hands of pompous college graduates and overzealous bartenders, I went back to work at my job in the Land Mobile Common Carrier section of the Federal Communications Commission, and started entering applications for the predecessor services that became Rural Cellular and Text Message Service.
And so to whomever it is out there in Smoot, Wyoming, who reads this blog on their iPhone, I hope you appreciate the price I paid so you can do that. You've got coverage no matter where you are, and I collect a disability.
Considering what happened to me for talking tech in a bar, about 20 years ago, I'm probably lucky I never brought up the subject of Meteor Scatter. Or maybe I did.
And ever since, I've been really fixated and observant over the issue of people fucking with my goddamn drinks in bars.
I also don't have much to say to people in them.
God knows what can happen when I try to talk about any of the things that interest me, or even talk to other people using the level of English in which I do all of my thinking. I cannot believe that I'm incredibly intelligent. After all, I do not have a college degree. Then again, I am deeply literate, which can be said of only about one third of college graduates, according to no less an authority than the National Endowment for the Arts, which draws its statistics from comparable laudable and qualified institutions.
Yet the vast majority, even of college graduates, can't understand this:
It was scarcely possible that the eyes of contemporaries should discover in the public felicity the latent causes of decay and corruption. This long peace, and the uniform government of the Romans, introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire. The minds of men were gradually reduced to the same level, the fire of genius was extinguished, and even the military spirit evaporated. The natives of Europe were brave and robust. Spain, Gaul, Britain, and Illyricum supplied the legions with excellent soldiers, and constituted the real strength of the monarchy. Their personal valor remained, but they no longer possessed that public courage which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honor, the presence of danger, and the habit of command. They received laws and governors from the will of their sovereign, and trusted for their defence to a mercenary army. The posterity of their boldest leaders was contented with the rank of citizens and subjects. The most aspiring spirits resorted to the court or standard of the emperors; and the deserted provinces, deprived of political strength or union, insensibly sunk into the languid indifference of private life.
Or, perhaps more to the point (if you're deeply literate, that is):
Civil governments, in their first institution, are voluntary associations for mutual defence. To obtain the desired end, it is absolutely necessary that each individual should conceive himself obliged to submit his private opinions and actions to the judgment of the greater number of his associates. The German tribes were contented with this rude but liberal outline of political society. As soon as a youth, born of free parents, had attained the age of manhood, he was introduced into the general council of his countrymen, solemnly invested with a shield and spear, and adopted as an equal and worthy member of the military commonwealth. The assembly of the warriors of the tribe was convened at stated seasons, or on sudden emergencies. The trial of public offences, the election of magistrates, and the great business of peace and war, were determined by its independent voice. Sometimes indeed, these important questions were previously considered and prepared in a more select council of the principal chieftains. The magistrates might deliberate and persuade, the people only could resolve and execute; and the resolutions of the Germans were for the most part hasty and violent. Barbarians accustomed to place their freedom in gratifying the present passion, and their courage in overlooking all future consequences, turned away with indignant contempt from the remonstrances of justice and policy, and it was the practice to signify by a hollow murmur their dislike of such timid counsels. But whenever a more popular orator proposed to vindicate the meanest citizen from either foreign or domestic injury, whenever he called upon his fellow-countrymen to assert the national honor, or to pursue some enterprise full of danger and glory, a loud clashing of shields and spears expressed the eager applause of the assembly. For the Germans always met in arms, and it was constantly to be dreaded, lest an irregular multitude, inflamed with faction and strong liquors, should use those arms to enforce, as well as to declare, their furious resolves. We may recollect how often the diets of Poland have been polluted with blood, and the more numerous party has been compelled to yield to the more violent and seditious.
Everyone reading this should instantly recognize the style, and the content, and furthmore be able to critique it. This all used to be required reading in high-school, generally as a sophomore and junior class course. Almost every American over the age of 50 has read this. Under the age of 50, probably almost none have.
These quotes used to be considered the standard of literacy.
The modern standard of literacy seems to be more along the lines of "watup dawg, r u go see dj sho, ma boy bad a$$".
I keep asking "how did we, as a society, get to be so fucking crazy".
I personally think that it happened about the time when it started to be a hospitalizable offense, in the minds of apparently a lot of people, to talk like you had a broadbased education and a critical mind and were willing to hone it in a bar.
I think it started when we started enforcing stupidity as the common standard.
