If you bite the groomer, you'll have to take meds

I have a 2-year-old Airedale Terrier named Spensur who weighs about 93 pounds. Big dog with no real manners, and we don't know everywhere he's been, he's a rescue. Trying to get him groomed, which should be done every couple months, has become an interesting project. One place after another has said no, they won't take him again, he doesn't cooperate and (just imagine!) nobody wants to get bitten.

The most recent groomer, Paul, called me after Spens had been at his place for about an hour last week, and told me to come get him, he couldn't get him into the washtub. I went in and tried to get him into the tub and also gave up. When a large dog growls or snarls at you, you just back off. Paul said well, maybe we could try again in a couple weeks, and maybe he'd give my dog half a Valium or something. I didn't like that idea, but we've got to get this beast cleaned up.

I called the vet, and explained the situation. Dr. Kramer said there's a "chill protocol." It's about four different meds, and you dose the dog once the night before grooming and once again, about an hour or two ahead of the appointment. So I got the prescriptions filled, and figured I'd test it one time before I took Spensur back to Paul. A cookie with peanut butter to disguise seven pills, plus a little cheese and a bit of turkey was the perfect contrivance, and the pills went right down.

The next morning, Spens was slow. He acted more like an old dog, not a puppy. I only gave him part of the second dose because I thought if I'd done the full protocol, he might not even get in the car by himself, and I wouldn't want to carry him. This was a Saturday. The drugs wore off slowly, and the dog seemed suspicious of me for most of the day, like, "Dad! What the hell was in that cookie?" I didn't like it. I left a message for the vet to call me, I had some questions.

You can count on a vet who practices in Chicago's North Shore suburbs to be pretty solicitous: they charge a lot more than makes any sense, and they want that business. Dr. Kramer listened carefully to my concerns, and ultimately suggested that the fine-tuning of the meds should consist of one less tablet of two drugs the night before, and then the full dose in the morning. I think he's right, and we'll probably do it that way in a couple weeks, to hopefully avoid the resentful attitude which might be a side effect of the meds wearing off. I really do not want Spensur to bite Paul, and he has to get groomed before he looks like a full-on, gnarly monster. So I'll try to reason with him, and explain the deal, and maybe get him less sensitive to somebody pulling on his facial hair or putting him in a washtub, before I take him back in.

Veterinarians are a lot like psychiatrists in that their solution to bad behavior is drugs. If dogs are well behaved, they can be easier to get along with and more lovable than some people. But they're also easier to drug and easier to kill when they behave badly.

Damn, I love this dog, and I don't want him to be afraid or upset, or to think that I don't respect him. I really want him to learn that the groomer is OK. I should be able to teach him that. The meds probably aren't very good for him, and it would break my heart to hurt him.

But like all the rest of us, he has to get presentable in society, and he can't bite the groomer.

Barry Smoot on Peter Neumer and Kwame Raoul

Illinois' Attorney General and the Inspector General for the Illinois Department of Human Services recently announced a triumphant victory against sexual abuse of disabled people. Barry Smoot sent me the January 30, 2023, article from RiverBender.com, perhaps with the idea that I could find a good civil lawsuit in the story.

People reasonably believe that I am interested in bringing lawsuits because, like other attorneys, I want to make money. Well I do, and I really should, but... many people would also say that I am insufficiently motivated by financial gain for my own good. I am motivated most of all to "burn Atlanta and march to the sea." It's a long, total war of attrition against coercive psychiatry. I want to win it before I die, as the single most necessary effort to preserve human dignity and freedom.

The thing about litigating against a state bureaucracy is, the defendants never know they have lost unless somebody has to write a check big enough to require a special act of the Legislature to cover it. If that means millions to me, fine. I'll put it all back into the war effort anyway. I don't even worry that by revealing myself about this here, I might inspire fiercer defense against my clients' civil claims. That's because no individual in any position of authority faces any apparent existential threat: they are all complicit in criminal abuse, but only as little, tiny cogs in the wheels of a large machine which they believe is a perfect hiding place against responsibility. Regular prosecutors are rarely very interested in going after them. They're much like the Nuremberg defendants who only obeyed orders.

They don't even worry about anything happening to them if the machine is finally made to stop: their pensions are protected by the Illinois Constitution, so it's all on the taxpayers.

Barry says the reason the AG and the IDHS Inspector General don't protect "patients" at EMHC from abuse is, they consider that their jobs are really about protecting unionized state employees from lawsuits. The case which the article details is about a prosecution of a non-union, outside agency-contracted guy. That prosecution was a show. It was, "Hey, look over there, it's the Goodyear blimp! We'll show you some bad guys, but don't look at our people, they're mental health professionals."

As far as OIG is concerned, the only kind of employee who ever deserves to be punished for, or deterred from, sexually abusing involuntary mental patients is a non-union employee. If you're a member of AFSCME Council 31, then you're one of the owners of the slaves and you can do whatever you like with your property. 

Peter Neumer and his predecessors did precisely nothing to protect Ben Hurt, Mark Owens, Mansoor Abdul-Hameed, Angelo Rotunno, Kevin Johnson, Sean Gunderson, Gustavo Rodrigues, Paul Olsson, Shanovia Fowlkes, Marci Weber, Mickey Russell, Michael Dopson, Jennifer Coleman, and various other current and future plaintiffs, from staff sexual abuse or staff appropriation of their sexuality, and all the trauma and dehumanization which results from that. 

And Kwame Raoul runs his Office of the Illinois Attorney General, using huge taxpayer funded resources, paying enormous taxpayer funded salaries, to protect the abusers from the Plaintiffs. 

It's corrupt. But throw taxpayers a bone like Larry Vancil once in awhile, find a scapegoat, and dues paying members of the right club can get away with it. Kwame Raoul can say, "Instead of insuring a safe environment for some of our most vulnerable residents, the defendant chose to instead violate the rights of an individual that did not have the capacity to speak up and protect themselves. I am committed to holding individuals accountable for taking advantage of people they are responsible for protecting."  

No, he's not committed to that. He's committed to protecting the racket.

Dr. Schmidt's astounding statement (and Joe Pierre's glib freedom)

I recently heard a psychiatrist say something in a staffing that absolutely astounded me: "Part of my job is to not write anything down that will hurt you with the court."

First of all, I'm pretty sure she meant anything untrue... because of course, if she in fact perceives an EMHC "patient" to be suicidal or threatening, or symptomatic of psychosis, it would certainly be part of her job to write that down, even though it would probably convince the court to deny requests for privileges, or release.

My question is: Why didn't it occur to the "doctor" to specifically clarify this? As a forensic mental health professional, she may be in a peculiar category of "experts" who are occupationally disabled from knowing what is true or untrue. They pretend to be medical professionals; courts like to think their opinions are minimally scientific and objective. But in mental health, we certainly aren't talking about "medicine" in the same sense as that term applies to oncology or cardiology. "Diagnosis" of mental disorders is bullshit; and "treatment" (if that means psychiatric drugs or shock) is useless or worse.

Each and every one of Dr. Schmidt's "patients," as a slave on the Elgin plantation, has frequently had untrue statements written down about them which did hurt them with the court. I often sue EMHC clinicians for exactly that, when I think the untruth can be objectively proven. 

I could be very impressed by Dr. Schmidt's proclaimed intention to get people out of EMHC who can be gotten out. She almost sounds like a closet abolitionist, like she really believes the slaves should ultimately be freed! And I really want to believe her, but 20 years of experience warns me that maybe it's just a tactic.

What the slaves and their captors have in common is incessant lying, especially to themselves. The former say, "Sure, I believe I need the meds..." and the latter say, "He's sick, and I know best how to make him better." They all have short-sighted, cynical motives to lie.

I shouldn't mind. Lies are creative, they enable games. If we couldn't lie we'd all be bored as hell.

But most lies in "mental health" are too little. So the games suck.

Dr. Schmidt, I believe, is not an actual employee of the plantation. She's an outside, agency contracted psychiatrist. (There are more of them than in the past. The state can't keep people on the payroll, so many EMHC doctors are not the regular union guys now.) That status may enable a little more independence, especially if she has a substantial outside practice where her patients come willingly, or mostly so.

One interesting example of independence in psychiatric opinion might be my X (née Twitter) friend, Joe Pierre, a UCSF psychiatrist and author who recently penned an article in Psychology Today harping on the old comparison between mental illness and a broken bone. Joe seems to be so independent in fact, that he doesn't even need to consider an obvious and very practical contrast between these two "medical" situations: broken bones regularly and predictably get completely fixed; but mental illness (virtually by definition) is never cured.

My wife broke her arm long ago, and no disability remains. If she had been called schizophrenic by a psychiatrist, she would still be considered mentally ill, and all the implied social disability and oppression would continue to impact her life.

That's probably why all Dr. Schmidt's "patients" would prefer a broken bone to mental illness. For a broken bone, their doctors wouldn't be able to keep them locked up.

Writing down "broken bone" never hurts anyone with the court!

A couple pages of history

The following is an excerpt from pages 139-142 of The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964 (The Beginning of the "Sixties), by Jon Margolis (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1999).

__________

    Thanks to his engaging manner, his eagerness to please, and his velvety voice, radio host William B. Williams was master of most that he surveyed. He was the host of The Make-Believe Ballroom, the radio program created by Martin Block, the one-time shoe salesman who had become the world's first disc jockey. 

    That position made William B., as he called himself, first among equals of the disc jockey world. His program on WNEW, 1130 on the AM dial, could be heard all over the New York area, but its impact spread farther. William B. was unique among DJs because he didn't just spin platters. His show was so popular that the stars actually came into the studio to chat with him. Frank Sinatra came--later on Williams was the guy who first called Sinatra "Chairman of the Board"--and so did Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, and even Louis Armstrong.

    William B. would never have invited the Beatles. He referred to "I Want to Hold Your Hand" as "I Want to Hold My Nose" and played only a few bars of it before telling his engineer to switch over to some real music. Other disc jockeys, who were less restrained and sophisticated, were shamelessly promoting themselves and their stations as the most Beatle-crazy in anticipation of the group's imminent first visit to the United States. This wasn't William B.'s style. He promoted himself--calling himself "William B." was part of the promotion--but he did it quietly. His vanity, like his music, was tasteful, and although he knew enough to cozy up to whichever entertainer was hot at the moment, he would never slavishly link his entire persona to one singer, or even four of them.

    On the other extreme, Murray Kaufman had no such inhibitions. He labeled himself "Murray the K," a hot rod sort of a nickname. His show on WINS, 1010 on the dial, was "Murry the K and his Swinging Soiree," and he had glommed on to the Beatles fad quicker than anyone, promoting himself as their biggest fan, their biggest booster, even--audacious as it was--"the fifth Beatle." That was the new way of doing things.

    By then, even Jack Gould might have been wondering whether this British rock group had more staying power than he thought. It wasn't just that the first two single releases of the Beatles--"I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "I Saw Her Standing There"--immediately sold more than a million records and had been number one all over the country for almost a month. Nor was it simply that teenage girls sat enraptured next to radio or record player as the songs played, It was that the teenage boys were sitting there, too, and if the look in their eyes was not quite the same, it was nonetheless the look of an addiction.

    It got even worse when American boys started trying to look like the Beatles. The barber business suffered throughout much of the country as teenage boys  began to let their hair grow, the better to look like John, Paul, George or Ringo. Family harmony suffered, too. In thousands of living rooms, kitchens and dens, parents pleaded, urged, cajoled,, bribed, and finally commanded their sons to get a haircut.

    Most complied because they didn't have much choice. In 1964, fifteen-year-olds did as they were told... or else. But compliance was only scalp-deep; beneath millions of skulls, a rebellion brewed. Not that there was anything new about rebellious, long-haired youths. That's who the Students for a Democratic Society was composed of, as well as the group of University of Wisconsin students who sponsored an "unmilitary ball" to compete with the annual dance of the Reserve Officers Training Corps chapter. "Swords optional" was the motto of the rebels, who seemed to be having some impact. All over the country, ROTC enrollment was down.

    The kids who were trying to look like the Beatles weren't longhairs. They weren't even in college. Most of them were high school students who weren't active in politics. The few teenagers who belonged to political groups were more likely to be folk song fans, their group was the Weavers, not the Beatles. The Beatles fans were white middle-class suburbanites.

    Some of this "Beatlemania," as it was already known, sprang from teenage boys who were trying to make themselves attractive to teenage girls. But that explained only part of it. The Beatles had tapped into something, and if nobody was quite sure what it was, a great many people were sure that they didn't like it.Even at the beginning, there was the sense that this wasn't just a fad. It was an uprising. It was as though millions of well-bred. well-groomed suburban teenagers were rejecting, implicitly but unmistakably, everything their parents held dear.

    Some of these parents reacted. Anti-Beatles groups sprang up around the country. One, in Detroit, asserted that its purpose was to "stamp out the Beatles." The more popular the group got with the teenage set--four of February's top hits were Beatles tunes--the more upset their elders got.

   Even so, there weren't very many of these ant-Beatles organizations, and they weren't very big.Furthermore, they were moderate compared to the parents who had tried to ban performances or broadcasts of "Louie, Louie." Nobody was trying to get a law passed against the Beatles.

    But it was definitely an unprecedented phenomenon. Older folks had ridiculed the early "bobby-soxers" who swooned over Sinatra in the 1940s, and more than a few observers feared the raw sexuality of Elvis Presley's country rock songs in the 1950s. But organizing in opposition to a few pop singers was bizarre, as though people thought differences in taste were political.

   It turned out that they were. The fervor gripping so many teenagers over the Beatles did have social, and therefore political, ramifications, though exactly what they were did not become clear until the Beatles actually got here. And they got here to pandemonium. When Pan American Flight 101 landed at the recently renamed John F. Kennedy International Airport on the morning of Friday, February 7, Paul, George, John and Ringo were greeted by several thousand school-skipping teenagers and scores of reporters and disk jockeys.

   Murray the K was the most successful, or the most shameless. Somehow he managed to get right down in front of the low platform where the singers stood. He was wearing a crumpled porkpie hat. He shouted questions, talking to the Beatles, who'd never seen him before, as though he were an old buddy.

    Finally, John Lennon shouted, "Everybody shut up!" and the questioning began:

    REPORTER: Why do you sing like Americans but speak with an English accent?  

    LENNON: It sells better.

    REPORTER: Are you in favor of lunacy?

    MCCARTNEY: It's healthy.

    REPORTER: Do you ever have haircuts?

    HARRISON: I had one yesterday.

    STARR: It's no lie; you should have seen him the day before.

    REPORTER: How do you account for your great success?

  LENNON: If we knew, we'd form another group and be managers.

    REPORTER: How about the Detroit campaign to stamp out the Beatles?

    MCCARTNEY: First of all, we have a campaign of our own to stamp out Detroit.

    Poor William B. It must have been the fondest hope of all the Beatle-phobics that the singers would reveal themselves as semiliterate dunderheads, easily dismissed as beneficiaries of a shrewd publicity campaign. They were that, but they were also witty and irreverent. These four young men represented an affront to authority, which was all the more dangerous because it seemed so benign. They were mildly iconoclastic without being contentious, so suburban teenagers who didn't give a hoot about politics could express the unease they felt about school, neighborhood, and parental control simply through their taste in music.

    As if to rub in the undeniable reality of Beatlemania, on Sunday, February 9, two days after the Beatles arrived, 73 million people watched them open and close The Ed Sullivan Show. World Series games and the Kennedy funeral had attracted more viewers, but this was the biggest audience for any entertainment program.

    Just how many people found all this upsetting was never  very clear. Even at the time, some observers found it easy to ridicule grown men and women who let themselves be bothered by nothing but the popularity of a few young singers. But it was more than that. The Beatles phenomenon did not occur in a vacuum. To the traditional-minded, the late winter and early spring of 1964 were full of vexing events in politics, entertainment, the arts, and even sports.

__________

I was recently in a staffing at EMHC, when I mentioned this sixtieth anniversary of the Beatles' arrival in the U.S. and the Ed Sullivan Show performance. A social worker whom I've known for some years remarked that she had really, really loved the Beatles. It occurred to me that this woman is probably about my age, and I imagined her being among the screaming teenagers in that audience on February 9, 1964.

I remember my mother showing me a picture of the Beatles in the paper, perhaps trying to test out my adolescent reaction. I had never heard of the Beatles before that moment. But I looked at the picture and read the article, thinking to myself that somehow my mom was a little too interested. I was suspicious of her purpose for inquiring, for observing me like some kind of specimen, or like she was thinking something about me that she wasn't saying.

Of course, it was no more than a few weeks later, when I and every kid my age were singing four different Beatles songs constantly. Our parents' skeptical inquiries were futile; ultimately we converted them to our tastes, maybe sometime after Sergeant Pepper... in what had so quickly become an entirely different world.  

My children have said they are occasionally jealous of their parents, because we lived in such an exciting time, and nothing as big as the Beatles ever happened during their youth. Yah, fine, we could have said the same thing to our parents, they of the so-called Greatest Generation (nothing as big as WW-II..?). Every  generation has its stories, and each is as great as its dreams. The stories are told by musicians and the dreams are dreamed mostly by artists. 

Surely, the dreams of generations are not dreamed by forensic psychiatrists or psychiatric plantation overseers. They're the kind of people who get converted to the dreams of others, that's their upside.

If my social worker friend remembers once being a screaming teenage fan, she can probably still get a more honest job.