There is a gargantuan poster hanging in our local movie theatre of Reese Witherspoon looking a bit sassy in a very New York black turtleneck, with the words SWEET HOME ALABAMA stamped across it, advertising the upcoming motion picture from Touchstone Pictures. As soon as I saw it, I thought, Oh Lord, he we go again, another patronizing movie about the wild and wacky local color of the South. I decided not to make my full judgment until I saw the previews, though. Who knows, maybe they were doing something interesting. After all, all you can see on the poster is a huge image of Reese Witherspoon’s head.

Well, OK, I saw the trailer. Apparently this ill-conceived romantic comedy was the product of combining two premises:

1. Intelligence and sophistication are signs of vice.
2. Fortunately, neither of these unhappy characteristics are to be found in the South.

Reese is a stylin’ jet-set New York City fashion designer who has everything that the big city has to offer. She comes back home to her ol’ Alabammy home, surrounded by the requisite cast of crackers, rednecks, and a droopy-faced smell-hound. Along the way we have the required jokes about bugs, Civil War re-enactors, and Yankees cluelessly tramping around trying to understand the curious habits of the savage natives.

So here we go again, with a bunch of folks from New York and L.A. making yet another insulting flick in which my home state is reduced to one big expanse of cartoonish stereotypes of white country bumpkins. From what I can tell, this movie is going to have all the subtle grace and sensitivity towards its subjects as a minstrel show; Rastus and Uncle Tom and Aunt Jemima have merely been replaced by Bubba and Lurlynn and Bobby Ray.

There is good news on the electoral front in the effort to end the US‘s insane war on people who use certain kinds of drugs.

In Georgia, Bob Barr has lost his seat in Congress. Because of redistricting, Barr faced another House incumbent, Rep. John Linder, in the Republican primary, and lost in a 2/3 – 1/3 massacre. Bob Barr is one of the worst drug warriors in Congress, particularly known for his assaults on democracy in Washington DC in order to deep-six a successful medical marijuana voter initiative. A Libertarian candidate’s ad targeting Barr for his sadistic zealotry against medical marijuana may even have played a significant role in Barr’s defeat.

Across the country in Nevada, a ballot initiative will be appearing in November which could completely reshape the drug war debate in America: Nevada already has a provision for medical marijuana; Question 9 would legalize the selling of medical marijuana and completely eliminate arrests for use and possession of up to three ounces of marijuana. A victory for this initiative would represent a dramatic rollback of drug prohibition and the first major strike against the cooperation between feds and state governments in the Drug War. According to recent polling data, the initiative is in a dead heat: 48% support it, 48% oppose, and 4% are undecided. With on-going organizing and campaigning, Nevada has a very good chance of rolling back prohibition this November.

These state-by-state, grassroots victories are just what is needed to win. Medical marijuana initiatives across the country are already rolling back state restrictions and greatly taxing the resources of the DEA. As the campaign expands into more states (one, two, many Vietnams…) our low-level victories are reaching the critical mass at which the government’s ability to carry on its sadistic drug war will simply collapse. Onwards.

Take Action!

You can help Nevadans for Responsible Law Enforcement with a small contribution which will allow them to run hard-hitting ads in favor of the initiative in the days immediately before the vote. Your contribution will help them push their campaign over the finish line.

A while ago I was looking for some good pages to reference about some of psychiatry’s more barbaric procedures. Along the way, I stumbled across the Washington Post’s peculiar profile of Dr. Walter Freeman, the pioneer of the ice-pick lobotomy and one of the most controversial figures in the past few decades of clinical psychiatry.

For those who aren’t familiar, Freeman performed thousands of lobotomies on people suffering from depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, mental retardation, and other disorders. Sublimely apathetic to the fact that there was no actual evidence that his treatment worked, he carried on mutilating people’s brains–knocking them out by electroshock or anesthesia, and then hammering an icepick through the tear duct and swinging it around in the frontal lobe to destroy the connection with the thalamus.

Freeman made his fame, and a great deal of money, by refining Egas Moniz’s techniques for human lobotomy and touring the country evangelizing its use to psychiatric hospitals. Because lobotomy succeeded in making some trouble-making patients more docile, it was widely adopted by psychiatric hospitals after presentations by Freeman. It didn’t seem to bother them that most patients suffered severe losses of functioning after the procedure, that adult patients ended up pissing on themselves and having to be re-taught how to eat. It didn’t even matter to them that Freeman had forcibly anesthetized patients in order to carry out his assault on their brain whether they wanted it or not. What mattered to them was that patients were docile and manageable, not whether their humanity was being respected or their underlying mental conditions improved. In the period of Freeman’s greatest activity, between 1936 and the late 1950s, somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 Americans were subjected to lobotomies.

Along the way, Freeman managed to kill several of his patients in surgery and to try bizarre experiments to refine his technique, such as a case where he followed the lobotomy of 14 patients with an injection of hot water into the brain, in which he was prepared to accept two fatalities. Prior to his career as a lobotomist, he had also personally introduced electroconvulsive therapy and insulin shock therapy to the hospital in which he worked.

A few of the incidents are recounted by the Post:

When the day arrived, Mrs. Hammatt tried to change her mind when she found out that her head had to be shaved. Freeman and Watts promised to spare as much of her hair as they could, before forcibly anesthetizing her. Later, Freeman recorded that her last words before surgery were, Who is that man? What does he want here? What’s he going to do to me? Tell him to go away. Oh, I don’t want to see him, followed by a scream.

The Post doesn’t bother to point it out, but what Freeman and Watts had just done was to cut into a person’s brain against her will, committing a bizarre and wantonly cruel surgical assault. Later in his brain-slicing career, he committed what could only be called murder from depraved indifference to human life:

At Cherokee State Hospital in Iowa, he accidentally killed a patient when he stepped back to take a photo during the surgery and allowed the leucotome to sink deep into the patient’s midbrain.

We’ll leave alone the question of why he was never put in prison for his crimes; so many atrocities against mental patients have gone unpunished. But why is it that the Washington Post has decided to portray Dr. Freeman, whose wanton disregard for human life and barbarous procedures should put his medical influence alongside that of Dr. Josef Mengele, as some kind of unheralded psychiatric innovator? They conclude their profile by writing:

Lobotomy also raised high hopes in its day. During the late 1950s, when the new tranquilizing drugs had grown popular in state hospitals, Freeman wrote letters to his psychosurgical colleagues around the world, praying for a time when brain operations would again gain wide favor in the battle against mental illness. It didn’t happen in his lifetime.

Now that it might happen in ours, Freeman’s presence is unwelcome. He flits around, a pesky spirit looking for the recognition he believes he is due, an unwanted ghost causing sighs and regret.

Poor Walter Freeman! As to the reason for these sighs and regret, the Post writes that The answer lies in the complex tangle of Freeman’s personality and motivations, and in the public’s fear of past abuses.

Perhaps the Post should reconsider the possibility that Freeman is discredited not only because of a grating personality and lingering public hysteria. Maybe it also has something to do with the fact that he was an irresponsible, sadistic asshole who killed several people and ruined the lives of tens of thousands more with a procedure that was completely useless, cruel, and barbaric.

Of course, methods which are not much more refined are carried on today–the ice-pick lobotomy was replaced with the chemical lobotomy of tranquilizers and other disabling psychiatric medications. The article would have been no more responsible if it had stridently condemned Freeman but uncritically endorsed these modern methods. But I really have to wonder what could have blinded the Post to something so thoroughly obvious as the evil that Freeman perpetrated on innocent people. It’s a fucking ice-pick driven through the skull. Even some of his psychiatric contemporaries, who regularly used electroconvulsive therapy and insulin shock, fainted at the sight of Freeman’s procedure. Can’t we expect at least that much sympathy out of those of us who have lived to have the benefit of hindsight on the horrors that Freeman wrought?

(link courtesy of Max [2002/08/15])

One of the things about this crazy postmodern age is the absolutely insufferable number of people who think that they are being clever and naughty but are actually just being stupid and hackneyed.

A case in point is the promotional materials for the upcoming film, The Rules of Attraction. It’s bad enough that it is being made by Roger Avary, and based on a novel by Bret Easton Ellis–virtually guaranteeing it will be too smarmily hip for its own good. But did they really have to make a poster and a trailer which are about nothing at all, other than how naughty they are being?

Here’s a hint boys: you’re not actually "corrupt minds;" you’re just boring little hipsters playing at epater les bourgeoisie, and there is perhaps nothing in the world that is less edgy or interesting than that.

So let’s say that you’re a mother in Florida, who has gone through with the achingly difficult decision to put your child up for adoption. It’s a situation no-one would want to be in, but apparently Florida legislators have taken it upon themselves to make it even harder [CNN]. Under a law passed last year, Florida women putting children up for adoption are required to print an advertisement detailing their sexual history in their hometown newspaper.

Yes, that’s right. The bio-mother must publish a newspaper advertisement trying to find the bio-father of the child which lists the woman’s name, age, and description, along with descriptions of any men who might be the bio-father of the child. The ad has to be run in papers in every city where the woman has lived or traveled in the year before giving birth where the child might have been conceived, which is to say, her hometown and possibly the hometown of all the relatives and friends she went to visit. Privacy? What privacy? The law does not even make exemptions for survivors of sexual assault; unless you’re in Palm Beach County (where you are protected by a local court ruling), you will have to list your rapist if he is possibly the bio-father of the child.

This is one of those laws that is so utterly bizarre and senseless that it cries out for further explanation—how did anyone actually come up with this bill? Who thought it was a good idea? What committee put it forth as a step forward for the state of Florida?

The genius behind the bill is Democratic state senator Walter Skip Campbell, who has been described as the ultimate male chauvinist pig. It was claimed [SP Times] that the bill was introduced to clarify the rights and responsibilities of all parties involved in an adoption so that cases such as the custody battle over Baby Emily would not happen again. In the Baby Emily case, the bio-father of Emily, a convicted rapist, filed suit to contest her mother’s decision to place Emily up for adoption. It took three years of court battles for the Florida Supreme Court to finally rule that he would not have received custody. And when they did rule against him, they based their decision that on whether or not the bio-father had met technical requirements for abandonment of the mother under Florida law. They held that it did not matter whether or not Emily would be worse off from being placed in the custody of a convicted sexual predator; all that mattered was whether or not the bio-father could exercise his supposed biological rights to custody of the child.

Supposedly, this is supposed to prevent protracted court battles by establishing a process and a time limit for the bio-father to come forward. But, Christ, people. In order to avoid situations such as this, they could have:

1. Passed a law which says Rapists can’t contest the other bio-parent’s decision to put the child up for adoption
2. Passed a law enabling men who think they might be the bio-father of a child to submit their name into a registry so that they can be notified in case of adoption proceedings. The state could then ask the woman for names of men who might be the father and check it against the registry, without forcing her to publish this information in the newspaper.

Of course, even if they created such a system, the basic idea behind the Baby Emily case—that a bio-father can just come forward after years and assert a right to tear the child out of the home she grew up in, just because he happens to share 50% of her DNA, is bullshit. The Father’s Rights movement believes otherwise, of course. I suggest that they get over their mental roadblocks by chanting this daily mantra: My DNA is not a license of ownership; my dick is not that important. While we’re at it, I also suggest: I care about my child’s welfare, not my fatherhood rights.

The fact is that being a bio-father or bio-mother of a child means very little in the grand scheme of things. Who cares whether or not your reproductive organs work? Who cares whether it is the bio-mother’s fault or the bio-father’s fault that the bio-father wasn’t involved in the decisions about the child’s future? That may be a reason to take legal action against the bio-mother, but it’s no reason to tear the child out of her home and send her over to the bio-father who never had any relationship with her. What matters is the established relationships that the child has grown up in, and her welfare in a given home environment. If more people would realize this, then we’d need a lot fewer regulations of adoption in the first place.