The Good Ol' Days

Yet another short story... This one I wrote around October or November 2013. I should say something about it. It is set in 1981 during the Springbok Rugby tour of New Zealand (I was two years old at the time). Because there should was a sporting boycott on South Africa, New Zealand anti-apartheid protestors took to the streets and sportsgrounds to agitate and otherwise to try to prevent the tour going ahead. This is the context of the story

I shold also say something else about it. In my stories I can be subtle, perhaps oversubtle. This story is also concerned with lead pollution, with the fact that in the later half of the last century there was very probably widespread brain damage associated with lead in paint and petrol. This theme is so subtle that it can be easily missed. If you are interested in the lead epidemic of the twentieth century, check out "Lead: America's Real Criminal Element" on Mother Jones or listen to the song "Gaskrankinstation" by the Headless Chickens, a great New Zealand Band from the 'eighties and 'nineties.

The Good Ol’ Days

The paint was fraying from the banister. Terry picked at it while he waited for Kathy to arrive and thought about the general decrepitude of the house – the peeling wallpaper, the empty beer bottles scattered across the floor of the lounge, the dishes gathering mould in the sink. The hot water cylinder was broken. Terry’s flatmate Brian had asked the landlord to do something about it; the landlord – a fervent Tour supporter who thought the protesters were all hippies and had burst capillaries all over his nose - had looked around pointedly, thrust out his chin and asked sarcastically if they wanted to go to the tenancy tribunal. Terry thought about all this while he stood on the deck and waited for Kathy to arrive with the car. He had a headache, a dull pounding behind his forehead. He didn’t think it could be withdrawal. You couldn’t get addicted to heroin if you’ve only tried it once.

            Headlights swept across the garden, picking up the bamboo and then Terry, standing in his leather jacket and black jeans on the veranda. Terry was skinny to the point of emaciation and emanated a kind of sickly, wasted aura. There was a Sex Pistols sticker on his jacket but that was Terry – always five years behind the times. When Kathy stopped the car, he ran around the back to get in. As he ran, he caught a whiff of exhaust from the idling car, a sweet smell that he’d associated with petrol stations ever since childhood and which he had always quite liked. He arrived at the side door, opened it and climbed in the passenger seat.

            The stray thought, “It hurts!” passed through his brain.

             “Have you got everything?” asked Kathy.

            “I think so.”

            “Good. Let’s go!” she said. And then screamed for no reason.

            Kathy was twenty-two, the same age as Terry. They had met a year ago at a Ban the Bomb march on Queen Street, found that they had a couple of mutual acquaintances and had started hanging out on an weekly basis. Neither one of them enjoyed very many friends and their alliance was partly based on convenience, partly on desperation. Terry looked sidelong at her. Ordinarily Kathy would be listening to the current top ten but tonight she had the radio tuned to the news. Kathy was wearing a denim jacket, a short leather skirt and had her hair gelled up in spikes. Terry often entertained romantic thoughts about Kathy, and frequently lusted after her in his private moments, but the times he had made sexual advances towards her – an arm around her shoulders walking away from a gig, a hand on her knee when they were sitting at his place listening to a Clash record – she would flinch and shift away. Seriously, he thought she might be frigid. Still he continued to hang on and hope. Tonight, he knew, though, would be the same as any other night they went into town: an aimless drifting from bar to bar interspersed by jugs of cheap piss and conversations about politics until one or both of them would have to excuse themselves and go vomit in the bathroom.

            The car flew through the night on rain-slicked streets. It was very cold.

            “Are you going to watch the wedding?” asked Kathy.

            “Probably not. All this Royal bullshit makes me nauseous. People bowing and scraping to a bunch of rich inbred tossers in fancy clothes. The fact that we’re still ruled over by a Queen is ridiculous. It’s just stupid.”

            “I’m going to watch it,” said Kathy firmly. “I want to see what Diana is wearing. Even if the monarchy is an obsolete institution and an historical anachronism.  I hear that they’re planning to honeymoon in Gibraltar.”

            The news muttered away in the background. Apparently there had been a riot or something in Wellington, a street battle between anti-apartheid demonstrators and the police, but Terry found it difficult to concentrate on the report as a consequence of his headache. He decided to wait until tomorrow and read about it in the paper.

            When the man had come over the other night, the three of them – Terry, the man and Brian– had sat around the lounge for a while and made small talk. The man was a paid-up member of the Communist party and expressed strong opinions on a number of subjects. They’d talked about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and exchanged theories about why the CIA might have assassinated Norman Kirk. Terry had picked at the yellow foam spilling from a tear in the sofa and watched a mosquito buzzing between the corner of the room and the bare light bulb in the centre of the ceiling; the whole vibe felt slightly awkward and forced. There they were, the three of them, going through the motions of pretending the man was there on a social visit when really they all knew he was a dealer come to negotiate a business transaction. Eventually though he’d come to the point. I’ve a special sale going, he said, for virgin users who want a good time.

            “Shit,” said Kathy suddenly.

            “What?”

            “I think I’ve left my purse behind. Can you check the back seat for me?”

            Terry turned and rummaged around the back.

            “No. It’s not there.”

            “Shit. We’d better go home so I can get it.” Kathy indicated and executed a sharp u-turn.

            Kathy lived with her elderly aunt in a state house in Kohimaramara. The aunt had taken her in during the spring of the year before when Kathy’s mother had committed suicide, an overdose of sleeping pills. The front curtains of the house were open and light spilled into the garden. Terry suggested he wait in the car while Kathy recovered her purse.

            “You might as well come in,” said Kathy. “You can say hello to my aunt.”

            Kathy opened the front door – it was unlocked – and Terry followed her gingerly into the house. In the sitting room, Terry saw, the aunt was hosting a small gathering, a man and woman as old as she was. The three old people were sitting on sofas around a small table, on which sat a plate of wine biscuits, balancing china cups full of tea in their knees. When she saw Kathy, the aunt’s creased face lifted in a smile that exposed the gold fillings in her incisors.

            “Kathy! You’re back early!”

            “I’m just here to pick up my purse. I left it behind.”

            “We’re not staying long,” said Terry quickly.

            “That’s fine, dear! Don’t mind us.”

            “I’ll go get it from my room,” said Kathy.

            Kathy often saw auras, especially in the months since her mother had committed suicide. Walking to and from her job at the garments factory, the people she passed seemed surrounded by radioactive clouds, shifting prismatic halos in blue or yellow shot through with vermilion and magenta. For some reason, she related these auras to health. She seemed able to see how healthy people were. But more and more these days, the people she saw when she walked seemed sick; it was as though a great pall of illness hung over the city, a fog of sickness compounded of beer fumes, car exhaust, ignorance and stupidity. It seemed to her that the illness was spreading. The world was broken and nobody was prepared to fix it.

            “I’ll just be a minute,” she said.

            “Why don’t you sit down?” said the aunt to Terry. “Albert, Anne, this is Terry, a friend of Kathy’s. Terry, these are my old friends Albert and Anne Galbraith.”

            “Say hello to Terry!” said Anne loudly to her husband. Albert grunted inarticulately.

            “You can do better than that, Albert!” She leaned forward confidentially. “Poor darling had a stroke last year. He hasn’t been quite the same since.”

            Now that Terry had opportunity to look at him properly, he could see that one side of Albert’s face seemed to sag in such a way that, even though he was obviously trying to smile in an amiable way, the effect was as though an unseen puppeteer was lifting one corner of his mouth with an invisible string. Terry perched uncomfortably on an armrest and looked around. He’d never liked Kathy’s aunt’s house. To him the place always seemed to have a kind of antiseptic quality, a feel and smell he associated with rest homes and hospitals. As always the air in the house carried a hint of boiled cabbage; he could just about taste it. He massaged his forehead as if he could knuckle away the headache.

            “Do any of you know anything about some kind of incident in Wellington?” he asked tentatively. “Some kind of riot or…”

            The aunt batted aside his question.

            “We’ve been talking about the Royal wedding! We’re all quite obsessed by it. It’s so heartening to think of that nice young man Charles finally getting married. And to such a sweet looking girl too! A kindergarten teacher…”

            “It’s like a fairy tale,” said Anne. “That’s what it’s like.”

            “I think it’s wonderful. You know, there are some people who think we should get rid of the royal family. But I think they’re just ungrateful. We’re British after all. Personally…” The aunt paused for effect. “Personally I’ve always found it such a consolation imagining Elizabeth and Phillip up there. Looking down over us. Such a reassurance.”

            “It’s what we fought the War for,” said Anne briefly. “Albert got gassed during the War. In Greece. They say they didn’t use gas but really they did. Didn’t they Albert?”

            Albert grunted once more, presumably in confirmation.

            Terry rubbed his forehead again. The stray thought, “It hurts!” passed through his brain.

            “Excuse me,” he said. “Do you mind if I use the bathroom?”

            “Of course not Terry.”

            Terry stood and walked out of the living room into the corridor. On the door to the bathroom hung a yellowing calendar showing bucolic scenes of lambs frolicking in lush English pastures. Terry opened the door and went inside; the medicine cabinet was on his left going in. After Terry had urinated, he pulled ajar the door of the cabinet and started furtively rummaging through the contents. He felt a little guilty about ransacking the aunt’s mediation without her permission but what he wanted, what he really needed, was something to kill the pain in his head. The inventory of the cabinet was a glossary on the ailments of the old - in addition to band-aids, bandages and disinfectant, he found cough syrup for bronchitis, cream for lumbago, antacids for indigestion, pills for gout and constipation and even a bottle of cod-liver oil that had obviously not been touched for years as the lid was crusted shut - but what he couldn’t find, in fact, was any analgesic stronger than Aspirin. Did the aunt never get a migraine or a head cold? At last he decided to take an Aspirin, washing it down with a glass of cloudy water from the tap, and returned to the sitting room. The pounding in his head felt stronger than ever.

            The aunt and her friends were still talking about the War.

            “Do you remember the rationing?” said Anne. “I remember how hard it was to find a tub of butter. And you couldn’t get a leg of lamb for love nor money.”

            “I remember when the Americans would drop anchor in the harbour and the sailors would come into town on shore leave,” said the aunt. “Such strapping, fit young men all done up in their uniforms! They would come to the dances when the big bands played. You know, there was one of them took a fancy to me but, of course, I was stepping out with George at the time. I look back at myself and I think ‘what a silly young girl’.” The aunt laughed a little partly out of embarrassment and partly out of remembered lasciviousness. “But of course that’s the story of youth. Missed opportunities.”

            If Terry were to be honest with himself, he would have to admit that most of his political attitudes had been shaped by a desire to impress Kathy. Even when he had attended the Ban the Bomb rally, that time they had first met, it had been more because Brian had persuaded him that it would be a cool thing to do rather than out of any deep solidarity with the cause of nuclear disarmament. It was Brian who had introduced him to the punky looking girl with the anti-Muldoon placard. Since then Terry had become much more politically active and had even started showing up to Union meetings that he had no particular interest in but which he made sure he told Kathy about afterwards. He had joined the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and started volunteering at the City Mission. He had even become a vegetarian for her sake. It seemed like a lot of effort to go to for a girl who was probably frigid.

            “Have you any idea why Kathy is taking so long?” he asked the aunt.

            “Of course, Charles has served in the military himself,” said the aunt to Anne, ignoring him. “He’s a Commander in the Royal Navy. I shouldn’t be surprised if he attends the ceremony in his naval uniform. Don’t you think that would be splendid?”

            “I’m not so interested in what Charles wears,” replied Anne. “It’s what Diana wears that I want to see. I want to see her dress.”

What with his headache, Terry found it difficult to remain patient with all this talk. After all, why should anyone care what the hell some stupid posh bitch wore to her wedding? It was all beside the point. Perhaps, Terry thought, this was what hell was like: an eternity spent trapped with a bunch of old women gossiping about upcoming Royal nuptials in a small room smelling of linemen and boiled cabbage.

“I’m just going to see what’s keeping her,” he told the aunt.

After he and Brian had shot up, they had lain on the floor of the lounge for a while. Terry had felt fantastic, as though he was levitating.  After he’d lain there for a while, he’d decided, for some reason, to have a shower. The hot water felt fantastic and he had suddenly developed the strong impression, while standing in the shower, strangely but not unpleasantly, that the top of his skull had lifted off his head and was floating six inches above his exposed brain. He felt fantastic and wanted only to feel this way forever. He tilted his head back to allow the water to rain into his mouth. And then screamed for no reason. That was the night the hot water cylinder broke.

            When Terry arrived at Kathy’s room, he found the door ajar. He pushed it open. The light was off so he fumbled for the light switch and switched it on. Kathy, he saw, was lying, fully dressed, with her face down in a pillow, in bed.

            “Kathy, are you alright? What are you doing in bed?”

            “I was looking for my purse and I couldn’t find it and so I thought… I’d just lie down for a moment…”

            “You couldn’t find your purse? Look, it’s right here – behind the door.”

            Kathy didn’t answer. Terry moved across the room and kneeled by the bed.

            “What’s wrong, Kathy?”

“I don’t know.”

“Look,” he said. “If you don’t want to go out tonight anymore, that’s all right. I’ll uh… I’ll find my own way home…”

            Kathy turned her head to look at him. He saw that her face was streaked with tears. She was very beautiful.

            “Terry, do you think things will ever get better?”

            Terry hesitated. He didn’t know what to say.

            “Yeah, well,” he said at last. “I’m sure things aren’t going to be this way forever, I mean…” He lifted his hands, helplessly, giving up. “I mean, I really don’t know.”

            From that night on and for the rest of the tour, after the events at Molesworth Street, the protestors took to wearing helmets to protect their heads from the nightsticks of the police.

Corruption in The Mental Health Services

I loath psychiatrists. I have yet to meet a psychiatrist who was smarter than I am. More than this, though, the mendacity and bogusness of the psychiatric profession makes me deeply angry and frustrated. Many of the people who work in the Mental Health Service are good people, true, but the whole edifice is built on a lie, on bad science, and consequently fraudulence and hypocrisy are rife within the psychiatric community. In this post, I want to give some examples from my own life that demonstrate this.

In 2007, as I have discussed in earlier posts, I suffered a psychotic episode as the result of a brief period volunteering at a student radio station. I was admitted into the Mental Health Service as a voluntary patient and put on 2.5 mgs of Rispiridone daily. I did not want to take medication at all but felt I had no choice. I was terribly paranoid. My first psychotic episode lasted the rest of 2007, about six months. In 2008, I was, more or less, well. I never stopped taking the medication during this period – I believed that I was only on it temporarily and I truly thought that at some point someone would allow me to stop taking it. I went back to university again and studied some papers in philosophy. Around December 2008, I became psychotic again - indeed for the first time I started hearing voices. (For a description of my first experience hearing voices, see "Me and Jon Stewart".) Despite my illness, I went to another university to study Computer Programming. Although I was hearing voices all the time and was dealing with terrible paranoia, I found I was quite capable of writing computer code. After all, I didn't have to interact with other people. Around August 2009, my psychotic symptoms having become unendurable, I finally convinced my psychiatrist to allow me to discontinue the Rispiridone by threatening to kill myself. He panicked and allowed me to reduce it by 0.5 mgs a week over about a month and a half. During this time I became concerned that the drug had affected my testosterone levels; I was referred to an endocrinologist. My belief that my testosterone had been affected was, I recognize now, a delusion born of psychosis. After I succeeded in getting completely off the Rispiridone, I was well for about a month - and then, quite suddenly, became ill once more. (Again for a fuller picture, see "Me and Jon Stewart"). I still hadn't successfully escaped the system and the distress of the previous nine months had proved traumatic. Towards the end of the year, I agreed to start taking a different drug, Olanzapine.

This is not what has been set down in official records about me. In early 2014, I was put under the Mental Health Act and I was the subject of a Judicial Hearing. It was said in the report about me used at this hearing that my worst period of illness was 2008 and that I had frequently discontinued my medication during this year. This is bullshit. It was also said that I had been well in 2009 and had discontinued the Rispiridone because of "side effects" - there was no mention of suicidality at all. Presumably my psychiatrist , Tony Fernando, didn't want it made public that his misdiagnosis of my condition had nearly driven to kill myself. At this first Judicial Hearing, in 2014, I told the Judge that I was most ill in 2009. He said, in some surprise, "Not 2008?". I said, "No, 2009". I am not entirely sure why this significant error in my medical history was put forward to the judge. 

After starting to take Olanzapine, I was on 10 mgs for a little over the next two years. (Appropriate dosages vary from drug to drug.)  I recovered from my psychosis in the early part of 2010. On the first of February, 2012 (a couple of days after the Laneway Festival) I had my last appointment with Tony Fernando. I  had asked to be discharged from the service. At this time, I asked if I could reduce my medication from 10mgs to 7.5mgs and was allowed to. Because I felt so well, I took it upon myself to reduce my medication to 5mgs. During this year, 2012, I completed a Masters of Creative Writing at AUT University. During this year, I was almost completely free of psychotic symptoms. Early in 2013, I asked my GP if I could reduce from 5mgs to 2.5mgs. She suggested I alternate between 5 and 2.5. A little later in the year, before Easter, I again started to experience a psychotic episode. I believe that this episode was the result of the fact that I hadn't made sense of my own life and my mistreatment by the Mental Health System. I became a voluntary patient of the psychiatrists again, this time asking to see any doctor apart from Tony Fernando. During this year, the psychiatrists tried to convince me to increase the dosage from 5 back to 10mgs but, because I no longer believed in the efficacy of antipsychotic medication, I refused. In the early part of 2014, I was put under the Mental Health Act and started receiving Compulsory Treatment.

Again this is plainly not what was said about me in my records. At my most recent Mental Health review it was said that my dosage was increased from 10 to 12.5mgs in early 2010. This is a complete lie. Furthermore it was said that I had been on 12.5 mgs right up until 2013 and had decreased my dosage from 12.5mgs to 2.5 mgs without consulting anyone. All this is also total bullshit. I was on 5 mgs for almost all of 2012 and 2013. Why would I reduce from 12.5 mgs to 2.5 mgs all at once? Even when I was experiencing psychosis, I was never that irrational. In fact, up until the end of 2013, I always took the dosage of the drug that had been deemed appropriate by either psychiatrist or General Practitioner.

The only explanation I can find for all this, for these significant errors in what has been reported about me with respect to medication, is that I have been the victim of a coverup to protect my first psychiatrist, Tony Fernando, from charges of something amounting to criminal malpractice.

This description of my life, particularly with its focus on medication, may seem involved and hard to understand. The point is that psychiatrists and the general community subscribe to a simple maxim: "Take your drugs and you're well; stop taking them and you'll get sick". This is all bullshit.  The whole system is founded on a fiction and people are willing to lie to protect this fiction. The truth is that antipsychotics only work if the patient believes they work. Antipsychotics are a placebo. More than this, I believe that antipsychotics can actually prevent people from truly recovering. This may seem an extraordinary claim but in a future post I shall try to back it up.

I believe that the corruption of the Mental Health System runs deeper, in my case, than just falsehoods told about how much medication I was taking. I believe I have been misrepresented in other ways as well but I have little direct evidence of this. There is a good deal of what is effectively institutional sadism in the psychiatric community and I strongly suspect a lot my suffering can be laid at the door of my first psychiatrist Tony Fernando. I once wrote a letter to the newspaper describing him as a sociopath; in my world, a sociopath is someone with no respect for the truth and I believe this is a fair description of this man.

I feel I should say again that there are many well meaning people in the Mental Health Service but so long as people continue to subscribe to theories of psychosis that are bogus, mistreatment will continue.

For other posts on this subject, I recommend "Why I Hate 'A Beautiful Mind'" and "The Reverse Placebo Effect".

A Recap

One issue with writing a blog is that a person does not sit on an entry for any length of time before publishing; sometimes a person publishes an entry when one should wait a while, reread it, check for spelling mistakes and revise it if necessary. One wants the instant satisfaction of having a few readers and this can result in slight errors. Recently, for instance, I have been writing posts in the middle of the night – a post published at five in the morning may not be of the highest quality.

This is the case with my most recent post, "Me and Jon Stewart Part 3". The gist of it is accurate but I wish I had expressed myself more clearly. Sometimes I go back to posts and edit them but I feel, with this particular post, that I cannot do that. It just has to stand as it is. One specific error I included though really does need clarifying - I said in this previous post that I recovered from psychosis by talking about my experiences. This is not quite true. I described some of my symptoms to some people but, when I was experiencing psychotic symptoms, I told no-one, especially not anyone in the Mental Health Services. People are assholes and I would have been misunderstood. It would have been used against me.

Over the last year, I have written between fifteen and twenty posts. When I started writing, the aim of the blog was to expound a particular theory of narrative. The theory I devised has utility and merit, and I wish it could receive greater attention.  As the blog went on, however, I stopped talking exclusively about literary theory and broadened its subject matter to include other concerns. For instance, I started including short stories, talking about writers rather than their work and discussing schizophrenia a little, a topic I am obviously interested in. The post about A Beautiful Mind is another short essay which I feel probably should be revised. I am no expert on John Nash but my view of aspects of his condition may have been inaccurate or badly expressed - but then the film was much worse.

If you would like to read one of my short stories, I recommend 69, A Refusal to Mourn or Starlight. If you want something more intellectual, I recommend Meiongianism and the Phenomenology of Knowledge. If you are curious about my narrative theory, I suggest Applying Predicate Calculus to Literature as perhaps its best expression. My favorite post is Concerning Kafka and Wilde - although if it is Kafka you are interested in, you should also read the follow up Some More Thoughts about Kafka. If you like James Joyce, read Exhuming Joyce's "The Dead'. And so on.

On a personal note… in 2012, during the year I was discharged from the Service, I completed a Masters in Creative Writing, during which course I wrote a film script. I have just found out that the embargo on it has just been lifted, so that anyone can go to the AUT Library and read it if he or she wants. I had high hopes for that film when I wrote it and perhaps, one day, I can revise it into something that can be made. I don't know why I feel compelled to say that the embargo on it has been lifted - I suspect that it may be significant to my life that it has been made publicly available and this is why I feel I shoud mention it.  

Me and Jon Stewart Part 3

In today's post I am going to talk a little about Jon Stewart. Trust me, it will be interesting. The best way to read this post is to read, first, the posts Me and Jon Stewart, Me and Jon Stewart Part 2 and The Disease of the Left to provide some context.

In the previous posts, I said that I started to watch The Daily Show in 2008. Jon appealed to me immediately for his humor, his moral integrity and his intelligence. More than that you can sense that he genuinely loves people, and wants to loved. This is why he tells jokes. In particular, he loves the downtrodden and the victimized. There were certainly people he hated. He hated Bush and Blair for the Iraq war, and he hated racists and bigots of all stripes.

There is a downside to being a lover though. There is always a possibly that love might get mixed up with sex. Jon certainly loved women, but his way of defending himself against the possibility of 'tainted love' with men was to divide the world into gays and straights and, I think, to avoid or at least be vigilant around gay men. I have no evidence of this: I just intuit it. Certainly he liked making jokes that ridiculed people he thought might be gay. I remember, for example, his glee after the Larry Craig scandal broke: "Closet homosexuals in the Republican party!"

The Daily Show didn't screen in New Zealand between the summer of 2010 and the beginning of 2014. When it started screening again, I had just been put under the Mental Health Act; I felt, as I said in the earlier post, that my imaginary friend, had returned to help me when I needed him. What I believe is that in 2013 and 2014, and starting perhaps earlier, Jon suffered something like a crisis of sexual identity or slight psychotic episode - I know this an extraordinary claim that probably plays into the hands of idiot Republicans but I believe it to be true. In the first episode I saw Jon ran a blow job joke; a later segment, for instance, was titled "Jon Stewart puts his hand in your pants". Jon had always done sexual jokes but now he was directing the Gay jokes at himself. Perhaps he found it cathartic.

The big issue of these years was Gay marriage. In one episode Jon talked about the views of "ordinary heterosexuals" - I think Jon was clinging to the fact of his heterosexuality but felt he could no longer truthfully describe himself as an ordinary one. In another episode he told Seth MacPharlane that Seth was "beautiful" - I don't think Seth quite knew how to react. Generally, though, Jon stuck with his old self. When he interviewed Tom Cruise, he tried to gently cajole Tom into coming out. Tom took offense and retaliated by asking if Jon had 'experimented' when younger; Jon replied by saying, "I was too busy chasing girls!"

Now, I have, despite myself, some sympathy for Tom Cruise. I was hearing voices at this time and, that night, I suggested (via telepathy of course) to Tom that he get in touch with with The Daily Show and tell Jon that he knew Jon's secret. A little later Tom reappeared as a guest. Early in the episode Jon did a bit where he was asked by his correspondents if he would "Love, Fuck or Marry" previous male correspondents, such as Steve Carrell and Stephen Colbert. "Oh, I fucked them all!" and mentioned something about especially liking to nuzzle into Stephen's neck. When the interview with Tom Cruise happened, it was much more cordial.

Thing reached a head shortly before his last episode. He did a full piece supporting Gay marriage and you could sense how conflicted and messed up he was about this issue; after I saw the episode I told my mother that I was worried about him. He quoted the Bible: "If a man lies with another man, they both shall be stoned to death". Ostensibly he was pillorying the religious Right but I think there was a part of him that believed it. Later in the episode, he turned to camera and said, "My friends - we live in trying times, but we are blessed." This had special resonance for me. The girl I was in love with for a long time, the one I call Jess, is really called Elizabeth which means "Blessed by God."

I feel it would be graceless to talk about Jon without talking about myself. Starting in 2013, I experienced a psychotic episode that lasted most of the next three years. It resembles in some way a crisis of sexual identity. It started with an impulse to kiss men. I worried that I might be starting to find men attractive. Early in 2014, I had a couple of nightmares in which the women I was making love to turned into males. (These dreams stopped when The Daily Show started screening again.) The worst symptom I can only describe with reference to The Daily Show. In one show, Jon made a fun of a Mental Health program in the South in which they treated homosexuality as a treatable illness: "when the wind blows from the South-West, I feel an urge to give people blow jobs." 

It was awful. During all this time, I held onto my sense of who I was: there was no way I would turn gay at the age of thirty-five. I knew I was what I was experiencing were psychotic symptoms, that they came from the outside, and that eventually the episode would pass. I never acted on any of my impulses. Finally the symptoms went away. Partly, I think, this was because I managed to convince the Mental Health Service that I had been misdiagnosed (as I was, when I first came into the service). Partly it was through talking to people in my life about my experiences. I take an immense risk talking about all this but I feel I should, that it is important. The personal is the political.

Concerning Jon… Just to be clear, I am not suggesting that Jon is gay or a repressed homosexual. That would be fucking stupid. There is no such thing as a 'repressed homosexual'. I am suggesting, rather, that he may have had some kind of mild psychotic episode over those years and that, as it passed for me, it passed for him. I can't say what I think caused his episode without sounding like a flakey hippie but I know what caused mine. It was my treatment by the Mental Health Service.

The Disease of the Left

In today's post, I am going to criticize some ideas associated with the political Left in the US and around the world. I need to say right of the bat that I consider myself a Left winger. I support a Universal Basic Income, equal rights for all and, if I was American, I would vote for Bernie Sanders. But the Left is not perfect: there are problems with its world view that require discussing and addressing, and this is what I want to do in this post. The Left is not perfect. It just happens that the Right is far worse.

The issue I want to discuss is sexual politics. Leftists support Gay rights and fight to stop people discriminating on the grounds of sexual orientation; the Right, particularly the religious Right (although not so much the Libertarian Right) tends to despise and fear homosexuals. The Right's position is based on hatred and bigotry and the position of the Left is more concerned with love and compassion. In a way, ironically when you consider that most liberals are atheists, you could argue that the Left has adopted the more Christian standpoint.

But there is a problem with the liberal world-view, something I would like to describe as the disease of the Left. The Right hates all homosexuals equally; the Left draws a distinction between openly Gay people and closet homosexuals, supporting the former and censuring and ridiculing the latter. You can see this dynamic at work in episodes of Glee and The Big Bang Theory. Many liberals believe that all Gay people should come out, that homosexuals have a moral duty to come out. Recently, for instance, Matt Damon engendered a storm of outrage among Left-leaning commentators for suggesting that Gay Hollywood actors shouldn't have to come out if they don''t want to, that a person might not want to be defined by his or her sexuality. His comment met with immense opprobrium. Damon was called ignorant and homophobic - a charge which seems absurd considering he played Liberace''s lover in a film about the Gay composer. Yet Damon had failed the purity test. He had refused to subscribe to the idea that Gay people are always happier after they have come out.

The disease of the Left is the belief that the world is full of closet homosexuals. Sometimes this world-view can tip right over into paranoid schizophrenia. In fact, I believe this delusion (we could describe it this way) is often another kind of homophobia, a homophobia masquerading as progressiveness. One sign of it is that, if a person believes he lives in a world full of closet homosexuals, he is likely to worry that others might think he is one himself. Recently I saw Bill Maher interviewed by Stephen Colbert and you could sense, watching, that Maher has a touch of this paranoia. Maher's approach, his way of saying that he is straight, is to support Gay rights. This strategy is commonly adopted by heterosexual left-leaners. Conversely, liberals frequently view homophobia (incredibly when you think about it) as a indication of repressed homosexuality, as a a sign that the homophobe is in denial. For example, in a recent episode of Full Frontal, Samantha Bee suggested that a homophobic Fundamentalist pastor probably secretly jerked off to Gay porn in the middle of the night. The Left's way of attacking the Right on this issue is to say that homophobes are precisely the thing they so vehemently oppose. You are, they say, what you hate. This is of course ridiculous. It is like saying that racist rednecks hate African Americans because they are secretly black.

I remember an episode of The Daily Show in which Jon Stewart discussed Russia's abysmal record on Gay rights with a guest. The guest, who had written a book on the subject, asserted the extraordinary claim that "99% of Russian homosexuals are in the closet". Consider, my reader, the risibility of this statement. How could someone possibly know this? Did he get this statistic from a survey among Russians that asked them "Do you consider yourself a closet homosexual?" Surely the definition of a closet homosexual is that he or she never tells anyone – so the statistic the guest cited could only have been made up, simply plucked out of the air. There is, logically, no way to know how many closet homosexuals there are in any country. It is indicative, though, that Jon Stewart simply accepted his guest's statement on face value. His way of summing up the situation is incredibly eloquent.  "The best disinfectant is sunlight". This is virtually poetry. It encapsulates up all the hypocrisy of the Left.

As readers of my blog will know, I like Jon Stewart very much but, on this issue, I believe he was totally wrongheaded.

The problem with the Left's position is one of language and ideology. According to most on the Left, people are born one way or the other – a position, incidentally, that is Jon Stewarts avowed position although I am unsure if this is what he really believes. Homosexuals start off "in the closet" and then, at some time or another, "come out". Some never "come out" at all. If a homosexual doesn't want to "come out", it must be because he or she is afraid of prejudice and stigma. Consequently (according to this ideology), it is the job of the Left to make society more tolerant, so that Gay people can feel comfortable "being true to themselves". Personally, I don't believe that people have authentic selves, and so I believe the whole issue has been misframed.

The whole notion of "coming out", when scrutinized, is more complicated than is realized. The liberal paradigm fails to encompass its complexity. For one thing, a person does not "come out" all in one go but gradually, in installments. It is rare for a Gay person to issue a press release that tells the whole world all at once. A Gay person comes out first to his or her lovers (of course), then to his or her friends, and then to his or her family. He or she might never tell some people at all, like his or her employers. Sometimes, as happened with the Australian swimmer Ian Thorpe, a Gay person can "come out" having never had any homosexual experiences whatsoever and after years of repeated denials. The process of "coming out" is incremental, rather than a single, world-changing event - arguably Gay people have to come out repeatedly all their lives, every time they meet someone new. A second problem with the notion of "coming out" is that often, when someone "comes out", he or she does it indirectly rather than explicitly. I have often been in situations  where I have thought a person might have come out as Gay to me but not quite been sure. These problems arise from the facts that the world is an incredibly messy place and that the ideology surrounding sexuality is, at best, an oversimplification and, at worst, a falsification. For one thing, these issues with the notion of "coming out" undermine the whole premise that there is a clear distinction between openly gay people and closet ones.

It would be helpful to have have clarity on what it means to "come out". A good definition is attributable to Barack Obama.  In his last State of the Union address, in his one glancing reference to sexual politics, he effectively defined "coming out" as the moment a Gay man tells his father. Generally, I admire Obama greatly, consider him an extremely intelligent man, and I think this might be the best possible answer.

The whole issue is hideously difficult. One problem is that the definition of homosexuality is uncertain - the Left, as represented, for instance, by someone like John Oliver, defines sexuality in terms of love. I think this definition to be bullshit but that it may be the preferable definition on pragmatic grounds. Furthermore, I don't think people are born one way or the other (although I used to think this). I think that, for some reason or reasons, people turn gay. And I think that, at least in the world we live in now, when someone turns gay, they don't come back.

I don't know how to cure what I have termed the disease of the Left, this notion that the world is full of closet homosexuals who should all come out. I think though that I agree with Mat Damon. A person shouldn't have to come out if they don't want to. Perhaps someone is simply thought to be gay but isn't (consider the example of Tom Cruise). Liberals should argue in favor of freedom whenever that freedom does not harm others - and people should be free to decide if they want to come out or not.

[NOTE: I found this post extremely difficult to write. In fact, I suffered a nose-bleed immediately afterwards. If you want some more insight into my views on this issue, I recommend the post "Concerning Kafka and Wilde". It is probably my favorite post.]