(For A.H., whose belief in my courageousness gave me the courage to write what follows, with my apologies to all for how long it took me to write it.)
THE STRANGE STORY of Patrick McLaw, the novelist and language-arts teacher who was seized by the police
and at this writing is involuntarily confined in a Maryland mental
institution, warrants our continued attention – and not only because of
its frightening suggestion the authorities may now be using
mental-health facilities as extra-constitutional prisons. While the Gestapo-reeking circumstances of McLaw's detention remain unclear,
the one absolute certainty is the state's claim he is mentally ill has
ruined his life beyond any rational hope of repair. The fact he is
African-American in a nation that is again becoming infamous for its bigotry merely underscores the finality of his doom.
McLaw's
case is significant because brings together the issues of class
warfare, racism, the expansion of police authority, the theft of our
constitutional rights – and adds to them a topic I know by heart but
seldom have the opportunity to explore: the hatefulness and brutality
that characterize U.S. attitudes toward people who are mentally ill or
mentally disabled. As the authorities' treatment of McLaw demonstrates,
and as innumerable studies confirm, mental illness in the United States
of America is the penultimate nadir of pariahdom. Only child-molesters
are more publicly hated and feared. It makes no difference at least 26.2 percent
of the U.S. adult population is mentally ill in any given year. Only
the Ruling Class rich – those who are wealthy and powerful enough to
stay out of the social-service system entirely or to bribe its
bureaucrats to secrecy – escape the stigma.
Meanwhile,
locked away as he is, McLaw's captors have successfully reduced him to a
non-entity. His personhood is hidden from us, which means we can only
guess what he might be thinking and feeling. But given how my own
talents were forever nullified by the odium of mental illness – the
clinical depression inflicted by the fire that destroyed my life's work –
perhaps by retelling my own story I can at least portray the magnitude
of troubles with which McLaw is likely to be afflicted if and when he is
ever released.
McLaw's
education and chosen occupation suggests he invested a great deal of
time and effort in becoming who and what he was. So did I. Though my own
journey differed from his – for example, poverty kept me from a
bachelor of arts degree until I was 36 years old – I suspect the
passions we brought to our arts were very similar. Our greatest
differences – the fact I am a Caucasian male, with all of the
presumptive socioeconomic advantages, and the fact I have never been
institutionalized – are eliminated by our common plight. Neither race
nor gender provides any defense against how an official diagnoses of
mental illness or disability destroys everything you were and might have
been. Nor does it matter, in the eyes of the public, whether you were
institutionalized or not. In-patient or out-patient, you're now damned
as a “crazy”– and so you will be for rest of your life.
Some
of you already know my story. In the spring of 1983 I returned to New
York City, assuming my birthplace and the home of my early childhood
would again be the permanent home of my adulthood. I was traveling
light. At the invitation of the late Helen Farias, a dear friend who had
inherited a two-storey pioneer farmhouse near Alger, Washington, I had
boxed up my files and other possessions and stored them in one of her
unused second-floor bedrooms. When I found a suitable apartment in
Manhattan, I would send her the money to ship these pre-packed items to
my new address. But instead there was the fire, and now there was
nothing left. The house and even its adjacent outbuildings were reduced
to heaps of smoldering ash. My friend's work – Helen too was a writer
and editor – escaped the flames only because her office was elsewhere.
Her cats were not so fortunate; they died in the fire.
The
loss of my work was the most wrenching shock I have ever known. My
grief was overwhelming. It was profoundly intensified by the fact the
fire's casualties included abook of photographs and text that had begun
as an entry in my 1959 journal and was at long last seemingly on the
brink of major publication. Titled “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” it
argued that the Counterculture which had grown out of the 1950s Beat
Movement and crested during the 1960s was exactly what it claimed to be,
a “revolution in consciousness” – and that its rebelliousness, the true
nature of which was obvious in its music and art, was amongst the first waves of a global revolution against patriarchy.
I
knew my hypothesis was radical and perhaps even inflammatory, no pun
intended. It had generated substantial controversy when I presented it
for academic scrutiny during the final year of my bachelor of arts
program at Fairhaven College. Despite the decades of research I put into
its text – the quest to name what I was photographing was as important
as the photography itself – I never imagined “Dancer” would be more than
a volume of pictures accompanied by the photographer's reflections on
his odyssey toward understanding. But the late Cicely Nichols, longtime
friend and former editor-in-chief at Grove Press, convinced me “Dancer”
could be shaped into one of the most important books of the 20th
Century.
The
fire's devastation was thus all the more intense because of my newly
heightened expectations. I am not an optimist; raised as the unwanted
child in a painfully dysfunctional family, I have never been given to
unrealistic expectations, but after Nichols' enthusiastic response to my
photographic portfolio and a few samples of my writing, for once in my
life I actually dared be hopeful about my future. But now, as if in
cosmic retribution for my folly, I had no future at all. The flames took
not just the rough draft of “Dancer” but all its 24 years of research
notes and pictures; all my other photography including hundreds of
prints and thousands of negatives and color transparencies; two other books in
progress that existed only as photos, notes and outlines; nearly all my
other unpublished writing; clippings and tear-sheets of all my published
work; all my journalistic award certificates and letters of
commendation; paintings and drawings – literally all the creative
efforts of my life dating back to my 12th birthday and my first camera, a
used Kodak Brownie Reflex given me by my father.
Worse
still was the eerie timing of the fire, which occurred on 1 September
1983. It started at the exact moment Nichols and I were meeting to
finalize the agreement that would presumably bring “Dancer” to print.
The time of ignition was revealed by the heat-welded hands of a clock at
the fire's point of origin. First attributed to arson, then
mysteriously changed to fire “of undetermined origin,” the blaze began
at 4:30 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time, which three time-zones to the east
is 7:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time – exactly when Nichols and I began
our work-and-dinner session. Regardless of the fire's cause, its timing –
which turned what might have been the best day of my life into what was
indisputably the worst – was too exact to be coincidence.
Though
I had been targeted as a suspected subversive by the U.S. government on
three occasions that I know of – once in the Army, twice in civilian
life (USian fascism is nothing new) – I never imagined my personal
politics might result in the destruction of my life's work. But the
fire's timing is typical of the “plausibly deniable” acts with which
undercover operatives – especially those skilled in psychological
warfare – torment their victims. Because of this – note again the
waffling of some (perhaps easily bullied) rural fire-marshal – I cannot
doubt the fire was arson, most likely government arson at that. Who but
some telephone-tapping agent of the national secret-police apparatus
could have known when to light the flames with such hurtful precision?
And the message itself was unmistakable: I was opposed by forces so
relentlessly powerful, it was futile to resist. Thus I learned what is
obviously the central lesson of my life: that hope, at least for me, is
not audacity but imbecility.
It
took the resultant depression almost exactly three years to drive me
out of my beloved Manhattan. For most of my adult life I had recognized
the City as the place for those who have something to offer the world.
But now after the fire I had nothing to offer anyone, not even myself –
and given the malevolence of my enemies, it was obvious I would never be
allowed to develop such offerings again. Thus in late 1986 I returned
to Washington state, a place I disliked for the notoriously xenophobic
small-mindedness of so many of its people but where I had paradoxically
fallen in love with its light and its water and how its mountains plunge
directly into the sea. Believing periodic contact with nature would be
healing, I had been putting some of my New York City earnings into a
tiny piece of rural Washington real estate – probably, in retrospect, an
act that was itself symptomatic of how befuddled I had become – though
for nearly a year after my return that place would be my only sanctuary.
I
already knew there were few journalistic opportunities in Washington
state. A decade earlier the local mainstream-media editors had shown
themselves to be as xenophobic their as readers. The late Henry MacLeod,
then managing editor of The Seattle Times, told meEast Coast
experience “doesn't count out here,” and suggested I hasten back from
whence I came. A managing editor named Fowler at The Bellingham Herald was more blunt: “we don't like your kind here,” he said. “Do yourself a favor: catch the next flight back to New York City.”
No
matter. I could no longer dependably write or photograph; the
associations with the lost work were too painful. Hence I would fall
back on my secondary skills, work as a commercial fisherman or a laborer
or maybe a commercial printer and perhaps eventually freelance a bit on
the side. But unemployment remained high due to the Reagan recession. I
was unable to find any job at all, and my mood worsened until some days
I could hardly muster the energy to get out of bed. At last recognizing
the nature of my affliction, I went into therapy, but it was too little
too late; my economic circumstances were already becoming desperate. My
therapist, Dr. Arthur Budke PhD, formally diagnosed my condition as
post-traumatic depression. He said it was severe enough to qualify me
for welfare and began insisting I apply for it. Finally, in the late
spring of 1987, so impoverished the only alternative was homelessness, I
did as he demanded. Like McLaw, I was now trapped in the system – and
so began the process that destroyed my life.
Citing
my therapist's findings, the welfare bureaucrats categorized me as
“mentally disabled” and enrolled me to receive a state check for $314
per month plus about $75 in food stamps. The stipend was labeled “GA/U,”
which stands for “general assistance/unemployable.” It is colloquially
known as “nut money”; its recipients are officially called “clients” but
are colloquially known as “welfare crazies” and “nut cases.”
GA/U
was supposed to be paid on the first of each month but was often late,
sometimes as much as a week and frequently with catastrophic results,
invariably because welfare funds were arbitrarily withheld to maximize
the interest earned by state deposits – a prime example of the official
attitude toward welfare recipients in general. As for GA/U, its
bureaucratic overseers were the most condescending and vindictive
officials I have ever encountered. They made no secret of the fact they
regarded us as subhuman. And they behaved as if their sole purpose was
to punish us for our poverty, which they did at every opportunity.
I
was on welfare through the winter of 1989, a reality in which the
mundane disguises horrors that are incomprehensible if you have not
experienced them firsthand. I was too distraught in those awful years to
trifle with metaphor and simile, but now in retrospect it comes to me I
was like some shell-shocked refugee captured by a flood and swept away
by its irresistible current. Its water was brown and treacherous and
toxic and alligator-infested and it raged through kudzu jungles and
cottonmouth-moccasin swamps and it allowed me only two choices: I could
yield to to its undertow and drown or I could grab onto some piece of
flotsam and fight to keep my head above the torrent. Obviously I chose
the latter. I had not even the faintest hope I might be washed up onto
some shoal or sandbar, but eventually I discovered – perhaps a gift of
my Celtic ancestry – I possessed a seemingly congenital inability to
surrender. Since this is probably the sort of choice that's now
confronting Patrick McLaw, I can only hope he chooses wisely.
***
Innumerable
studies document the U.S. attitude toward mental illness as the
harshest and most unforgiving in the developed world. Indeed mental
illness in the United States is feared as if it were a fatal contagion,
something you might catch from mere proximity to a mentally ill person
on a bus or – horrors – use of a toilet-seat upon which a mentally ill
individual has recently sat. Yes, the prejudice is that extreme. But
why? The sociologists with whom I have discussed it say they suspect
that in the de facto theocracy that underlies the cult of U.S.
“exceptionalism,” mental illness is subconsciously viewed as divine
retribution. I agree; the Abrahamic god, the death-dealing deity of
Judaism, Christianity and Islam, is undoubtedly the most sadistic god in
human experience, and the hostility directed at people with mental
troubles is “exceptional” indeed. Mentally ill persons are shunned as if
they are accursed – fingered by god as hate-objects – and in extreme
cases they become the human equivalents of sacrificial scapegoats. But
the influence of religion on U.S. society is woefully underestimated.
Hence even in the secular realm of journalism, no career-minded editor
will dare hire you if you have ever been officially labeled “mentally
ill” or “mentally disabled” – never mind your diagnosis or the brevity
of your affliction. Even beneath the gloss of enlightenment, the
conditioned fear of the divine lightning bolt often remains tyrannically
compelling.
The
oppressive commonality of such prejudice is why I feared life as I had
known it would end forever the moment I was labeled “mentally disabled” –
an apprehension soon confirmed in every dreadful detail. Hence at the
same time I applied for nut money, I applied to the state's Division of
Vocational Rehabilitation for help finding some new career – work that
would be insulated against the climate of loathing but would utilize at
least some of my visual, verbal and analytical skills. Here though I
encountered a succession of mysterious obstacles: DVR psychologists
declared me a top-notch candidate for vocational retraining, yet I was
repeatedly denied access to all DVR programs.
Initially,
the DVR bureaucrats contented themselves with “losing” my paperwork.
After the third such loss, Dr. Budke, who was still my therapist,
intervened to get my application processed. But the bureaucrats rejected
it again, claiming my entire work history was a lie or a delusion or
both. They demanded I provide them names to attest its reality. I did;
the bureaucrats obtained confirmation of my achievements, but the
questions they asked my former supervisors and colleagues made it
obvious I was on nut money. Now there was no question my journalism
career was dead. Yet once again the bureaucrats found a litany of
reasons – so many I cannot remember them all – to deny me rehabilitative
services.
I
will never know the true source of these obstructions. One possibility
is they were inflicted by the same nameless, faceless but obviously
malign sorts of individuals who destroyed my life's work and so annulled
all my lifetime efforts. Another possibility, perhaps underscored by
the bureaucrats' efforts to confirm my resumé, is the obstructions were
vengeance for the anti-DSHS investigative reports I had written during
the late 1970s and early 1980s. A third possibility – the one I still
think is the most likely – is that I had run afoul of the legislatively
prohibited (and therefore secret) gender-quotas for which the Department
of Social and Health Services was then becoming infamous.
Angered
by the endless delays, bolstered by yet another evaluation that found
me “exceptionally well qualified” for vocational rehabilitation, I
contacted a pro-bono lawyer and threatened legal action against
DSHS. I had hoped this would force DVR to admit me to a job-training
program; I knew DVR endorsement was now the only way I could neutralize
the mental-patient odium enough to get myself back into the workplace.
And for once the bureaucrats responded quickly: they changed my
diagnosis, branded me “permanently unemployable” and forced me onto
Social Security/Disability, thereby destroying forever my ability to
earn any sort of living at all.
Note
here the disturbingly Orwellian parallel to the McLaw case: first the
Maryland authorities publicly announced he was detained because of
alleged threats they claim are implicit in his fiction. Then, when
McLaw's extra-constitutional detention raised a national storm of protest,
the authorities quickly changed their story. His novel and his use of
pen names were no longer the cause of his incarceration. Now they are
claiming he was involuntarily committed because of “mental health
issues.” Obviously, whether on the East Coast or the West Coast, the
government officials will say whatever is necessary – truth be damned –
to justify their egregiousness and protect themselves from lawsuits.
As
I noted before, I have never been institutionalized. Though I did not
realize it until years later, during my struggle with the welfare
bureaucrats I was obviously protected by Washington state's admirably
strict laws against retaliatory commitment – a fact for which I remain
ever thankful. Had the bureaucrats been able, they would probably have
tried to bury me forever in some piss-reeking DSHS Bedlam. But being
forced onto Social Security Disability Insurance was bad enough, and
from the bureaucrats' perspective it was no doubt a triumph: the “M”
they had metaphorically branded on my forehead ensured no employer would
ever again take me or talents seriously.
Theoretically,
you can return to work while receiving SSDI stipends, but the
ubiquitous animosity toward mental patients makes continued employment
highly unlikely once your disability is revealed as mental.
And such disclosure is unavoidable because your employer is an
essential participant in the review process by which the Social Security
Administration evaluates your employability. Nor does the Americans
with Disabilities Act offer any real protection – note again the
above-linked report. From the perspective of the truly needy, ADA is
like all other U.S. social-welfare legislation, intended mostly as
propaganda and therefore more about deliberate deception than actual
amelioration – yet another example of how the so-called American Dream
was never more than a Big Lie.
Yes,
the fire and its ruinous aftermath was a long time ago. I was 43 years
old when it occurred, 49 in 1989 when the bureaucrats forced me onto
SSDI and slew whatever might have remained of my socioeconomic
prospects. I am now 74. Though my depression ended long ago, my
existence has seldom risen above a desperate and often humiliating
struggle against poverty, isolation and loneliness. Again we see the
relentlessly unforgiving nature of capitalism, which teaches that those
felled by misfortune are victims of their own folly and are therefore to
be brutalized accordingly, whether by deliberately murderous cutbacks
in the social safety-net, wildly increasing attacks on homeless people
or egregious denial of our constitutional rights. That's why, if I
believed in a just and loving god – perhaps the most absurd notion of
all time – Patrick McLaw would be at the top of my prayer list.
***
Strangely
enough – or perhaps, in terms of Jungian synchronicity, not strangely
at all – on Saturday night, 6 September 2014, I was confronted by a new
and painful realization of all that was taken from me. And much as it
had been 31 years and five days before – though without any of the
original crippling intensity – it was an occasion of happiness turned to
sadness. But this time the resultant anguish had a positive effect: it
solidified my sense of situational kinship with Patrick McLaw. And a
moving compliment from a stranger gave me the courage and determination
to write of the circumstances that once bedeviled me and now bedevil
McLaw – and anyone else caught in the treacherous clutches of the U.S.
mental “health” and “welfare” bureaucracies.
The source of this interplay of Yin and Yang was a reunion of people who had been associated with The Seattle Sun, an alternative weekly founded by professional journalists and therefore equal in quality to the original Village Voice and in some aspects – especially visually – no doubt its superior. The Sun, of which I was the founding photographer, was
published from July 1974 through January 1982; it was driven out of
business by a longstanding advertising boycott organized by the local
Ruling Class, which was implacably hostile to the truth-telling
reportage that was the paper's award-winning forté.
Its former writers, photographers, artists, advertising and circulation
staffers and its many friends and financial supporters gathered in
Seattle at an attractive facility on the Lake Union waterfront to
celebrate the 40th anniversary of The Sun's
first year of publication. (It is an aside, but part of Seattle's
unique physical beauty is its combination of salt-water and fresh-water
port facilities; Lake Union is part of the latter.)
For
me the reunion was a pleasant opportunity to briefly reconnect with
former colleagues and to view my own work as it is preserved in bound
volumes of The Sun's entire production, an invaluable
collection assembled by Carl Thorgerson, who was the paper's indomitable
advertising manager. Here were not just the best of my Sun pictures – the covers and section fronts – but all the other images I had made for it,
and suddenly I remembered just how many there were and how joyfully
proud I had been to make these pictures of histories whether personal or
political and large or small. And now for an instant it seemed I knew
again the solid feel of an M Leica and the quiet but decisive snick of
its shutter and the sharply alchemical scent of my darkroom and the
wizardly submarine quality of its amber light and the oddly comforting
odor of the Pekasol as I hung the film and how the tonal brilliance of
prints made on DuPont Varilure emerge in the Dektol with an
ever-so-subtle hiss and I thought of the countless times I said to
rightfully impatient editors as I was washing and drying the day's take,
“you can't rush the chemicals; you'll have the pictures as soon as
they're done,” and I smiled at the recollection.
It
was as if I were seeing ghosts or was perhaps myself a ghost reliving
scenes from a former life, and as I paged through Thorgerson's wonderful
archive, my body in real-time 2014 yet somehow for a long moment also
present amidst the equally real physical and olfactory sensations of
1974 or 1975 or 1976, it came to me these fading images on fragile
sheets of yellowed newsprint plus the few archivally processed
exhibition prints that had escaped the fire because they were in my
portfolio were all that remained of one of the most purposefully
productive and aesthetically fulfilling periods in a stolen life I had
never missed quite so forcefully as now. I had never seen so much of my
forever lost work gathered in one place, and for that reason I had never
felt quite so poignantly the actual dimensions of my loss. Suddenly I
was crushed by its awful breath-stealing weight, and I could not bear to
look anymore. There was nothing left for me to do but walk away, first
from the pictures, finally – as quickly as I could politely arrange it –
from the party itself.
In
deference to my former colleagues, and later in deference to the woman
with whom I attended the reunion, I maintained a pleasant countenance.
Obviously I have made peace with my circumstances, have somehow even
regained a bit of my former joie de vivre, and I channel my
emotions into productive outlets such as this blog and the local
campaign for a $15 minimum wage and the monthly newsletter I produce for
my fellow residents in the senior-housing complex where I live. But
there are limits to my endurance. Alone in my tiny apartment, I could no
longer avoid the reanimated woe of the fire and its aftermath – the
loss of the occupation that was my selfhood and the pictures that were
my identity and then my credibility and finally all my societal worth as
a human being and thus my ability to ever again build any other
identity or hope for any reality beyond used cameras and worn-out coats
and ragged blankets and the inescapable wretchedness of food-stamp
poverty.
For
a moment I floundered in self-pity, again overwhelmed by old and bitter
truths: that I will have no more second chances, no more lovers, will
undertake no more quests, will have no more expectations of yearnings
fulfilled or hopes realized, and because I know the viciousness of
capitalism, I know the only changes in my material circumstances will be
changes for the worse. But then – if I may fall back on my earlier
metaphor of a wayfarer trapped in a flood – I began once more to swim.
There is a terrible freedom in hopelessness such as mine, a freedom to
tell the truth without fear of the consequences, and I realized that
perhaps in an odd way – never mind the arthritis in my spine and
shoulders that now sorely limits my ability to photograph – I might
nevertheless once more carry on the truth-telling tradition that drew me
to The Sun and kept me there for as long as I could stay and
brought me back to Seattle 40 years later for an evening with my fellow
truth-tellers. I would write this story not just to assuage my own hurt
but to provide a living, breathing illustration of the plight of Patrick
McLaw, who is only 23 but is already suffering the loss of all his
hopes and dreams and facing the probability of an entire lifetime of
destitution. Perhaps, whether he reads these words or not, he will come
to understand, as I did long ago, that in such cruel times as these,
survival itself is an act
of revolutionary defiance.
LB/7-11 September 2014
-30-
