From: kurt@eskimo.celestial.com (Kurt Cockrum)
Newsgroups: pnw.general
Subject: Re: quote of the day
Date: 30 Sep 92 17:00:28 GMT
Organization: >>> Eskimo North (206)-FOR-EVER <<<

In article <1992Sep28.163850.21685@tc.fluke.COM> witters@tc.fluke.COM (John Witters) writes:
>In article <MS-C.717452335.1103527590.mrc@Tomobiki-Cho.CAC.Washington.EDU> Mark Crispin <mrc@Tomobiki-Cho.CAC.Washington.EDU> writes:
>>	Whenever the left and the right agree wholeheartedly
>>	about any issue, the strong likelihood is that an
>>	amazing disaster is about to be jointly sponsored.
>>	That was true of the dumping of tens of thousands of
>>	mental patients on the streets of our cities.  The
>>	right wanted to save money by closing asylums.  The
>>	left imagined it was freeing snake-pit prisoners of
>>	the psychiatric bureaucracy.  Working together, they
>>	created much of the urban disaster that goes under
>>	the label of `homelessness.'
>>					-- John Leo
>
>Aha!  Another John Leo fan!
>
>I guess this is another example of "I'm from the government, and I'm here to
>help you."
>
>Of course, to pick nits, the hope was to shut down the huge impersonal mental
>institutions of the '50s, (many of which were indeed snake pits) in favor of
>small local clinics and halfway houses that could provide more personal care.
>Of course, lots of small clinics would have been even more expensive than
>fewer big ones, so the small ones never got funded.  I suspect that if the
>small ones were built, we'd have a lot of little snake pits now.
>
>Ever see "Titticut Follies," a documentary about a state hospital for the
>criminally insane?  It was banned in the U.S. for years.  I had to close my
>eyes through much of the movie.  I thought such places existed only in the
>(former) Soviet Union.  Ugh.

Sounds like a cult classic!  Are videos available?

What's really amusing is that the snake pits came from the government, too!
When the snake-pit inmates were released from custody, that was just a
switch of the shells in the old shell game that gets played on people who
value *security* more than they do *autonomy*, *freedom*, and *responsibility*.
The snake pits were a dumping ground for the *rejects* of society, those of
us that we were all too squeamish to deal with ourselves.  These days we are
still squeamish (that part didn't change) but the shell's a little different
in detail: the failures, rejects, crazies, social deviants simply become
homeless instead of incarcerated in the snakepits, which these days
are reserved for the druggies.  The jails are getting a little overcrowded
though, and the sheep are starting to grumble about the tax load.  Time
to start making more druggies *social* *deviants* instead of *criminals*, it
looks like, and hence the rise in civil confiscations as a means of control
and replenishing the pool of homeless.  It's just cheaper and more lucrative
to make them homeless instead of incarcerating them.  Of course, that's
just in a *local* sense; the costs to society in the large may not be bearable.
But that's long-term, and short-term motivations muddy the waters considerably.

The Russians were more honest in that they acknowledged that they considered
their political dissidents and offbeat visionaries to be insane, and
unceremoniously dumped them in the loony bin, uncontaminated by pomp and
circumstance, the litter of due process.  It didn't save them, though.
Nobody questioned that this wan solely in the service to ideology and
power, at least in the West.  "We" found it useful for the convenient
negative image, which saw service in cold war propaganda.  Those of us at
the helms of power at least know that the rejected ones are ostracized on
the basis of artificial criteria we formulated and developed (a continuing
program) and disseminated thru media and education on behalf of
government/authority with a view to maintaining, extending and consolidating
government/authority's power and control.

The planetary work-machine continues to grind, the world over, and nearly
everybody still believes in it, applauding their own screams and cries as the
they are devoured by the machine they nurture with their faith.
An optimal situation for the authoritarians and power-seekers, may they be
plagued with uncooperative, free, cynical, cantankerous, sensual,
eccentric, wild, feral, sovereign, self-centered individuals who fuck things
up, ridicule them, punch their buttons, besmirch their totems, soil their
flags, disrupt their pageants, ruin their days.  Let's drive *them* crazy!
Of course, ferals must realize this is risky business, and you can get
put away and/or killed for it.
-- 
kurt@grogatch.celestial.com (Kurt Cockrum)
 Nostalgic conservatives will soon be referring to the Bush Era as
 "those Halcion days of yesteryear".