The Charlotte News

Wednesday, February 11, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: "Strategy" recognizes the position of the Allies now as being clear: defend until strength can be built, before taking the offensive. The editorial questions the strategy by way of suggesting that had the Russians done as the British and Americans were doing at this time in the Pacific, Hitler would have been by this time toasting his generals inside the Kremlin (instead of their slowly disappearing over Germany in air accidents or elsewhere by sudden heart failures, having been called home after the October debacle).

The editorial, however, blinks for the moment the fact of the considerable aid done for Stalin's armies by the early winter, the coldest since the turn of the century. It also overlooks the heavy toll to the Russians, some two to three million men--nobody has ever determined accurately the losses--in performing that heroic 1941 six-month stand and counter-offensive, in two months pushing the Nazis away from the Moscow suburbs back to Smolensk and recapturing parts of Leningrad, as well as pushing the Nazis back in the all-important oil-rich Caucasus. It also does not take into account the psychological factor that the Russians were fighting for their very homes within their own country, the added imperative of which was working only for the Filipinos fighting under MacArthur, the Dutch in N.E.I., and the Australians. Neither the Americans nor the British, the bulk of the fighting forces in the Pacific, had that incalculable incentive. Nor did Roosevelt, Churchill or the British and American joint military command want upon their shoulders the prospect of millions lost in the war.

Thus, the British-American respect for life had led to delay while munitions and armament were brought to superior numbers before launching into an offensive.

Although it was not apparent here in early 1942, the strategy by 1944 would clearly begin to pay off. America would lose 256,000 men, the British, in all six years of the war, 452,000, large absolute numbers, larger for the Americans than all previous American wars combined, but considerably less than the 7.5 million lost by Russia, the 2.2 million lost by China from 1937, the 1.5 million lost by Japan, also from 1937, and the 2.85 million lost by Germany from 1939.

"Shoot First..." tells of the perilous air spaces above the United States in and around military bases during this tremulous time in the country's defense effort. The policy after Pearl Harbor was to shoot first and make identifications later of any unexpected birds in the air spaces near military posts. Watch where you're flying, Mr. Lindbergh.

And the page again, despite the imminent fall of Singapore, despite things looking bleak for MacArthur in the Philippines, despite a Japanese invasion armada in the Dutch East Indies threatening Australia, despite Rangoon and with it the Burma Road appearing ready any day to fall, performs what was perhaps an Afghanistanism in reverse, call it a Morgantonism, ducking most of this bad news from the front and instead concentrating on the insane asylum at Morganton, near home--rather than the ones so far away, in Berlin and Tokyo.

The first piece in the column assures that Tom Jimison stood by his reports, despite a couple of newspapers, while still calling for investigation of the conditions cited, in varying degrees questioning his veracity. The piece admits that perceptions may be colored and skewed by experience, especially subjective experience, but offers supportively that Mr. Jimison was in a much better position than anyone outside the facility to report accurately the conditions.

The Burlington-Times News meanwhile lauds the series, reminds that Jimison had no financial motive in the writing, and suggests that any routine inspections of such a facility would find the place only feigning its Sunday best manners and dress--indeed confirmed by some of the letters to the editor from former patients, including the one on the page of this date. The piece therefore suggests impromptu, unannounced inspections.

The Raleigh News & Observer calls for special committees in the House and Senate of the State Legislature to perform a thorough investigation of the Jimison charges.

The letter writer tells of her torturous seven months in the facility, after she was committed there by someone, she contends, with a grudge against her.

So, were, as The News piece offers the option rhetorically, Mr. Jimison's claims all merely the product of some nefarious incubus, some implanted misperception within a sincere but confused mind?

Or, short of that, were they the result of emotional reactions, both to personal mistreatment and humiliation and that of others in his midst? Adults, after all, have a low threshold to public humiliation, even when in the best of mental health. When already in psychic pain, to be further reduced in dignity would be unbearable. Was the series merely an attempt to retaliate for that kind of enduring pain?

Does the woman's letter of the day speak of a cruel, inhumane staff, inflicting mental torture on someone they believed to be suicidal to the point that she nearly was in fact suicidal? Or, is her viewpoint colored by her own subjective emotional pain from the beginning? Is such a person to be trusted? not in the sense of veracity but in terms of judgment and sufficient stability to make proper assessments of the surrounding environment. Was she there because she was in fact suicidal? Were the staff attempting through unconventional methods to save her from herself? When she describes barring the door and threatening to cut the staff with glass, was she justified in saving herself from genuine cruelty, or does she tend to justify the staff in taking steps to isolate her, in taking steps even which seem in a vacuum to be cruel and hateful? Was she paranoiac? schizophrenic? manic depressive?--the standard diagnoses. Or was she simply young and rebellious, the victim in fact of someone who had her committed in retaliation for some quite normal behavior?

Taking the subjective viewpoint of these patients, how would anyone ever improve the abject conditions, if indeed abject they were, except by voicing accurately from anecdotal experience what the conditions were? And if they were to be dismissed for the fact of being patients in the facility, how would such an institution, degraded by its own failure of qualified staff, ever be changed for the better? Would any of the staff earning $20 to $40 per month ever be expected to step forward from a degraded job in a degraded rung of society and elucidate the wrongs? especially if they themselves were complicit in the conditions. Would they, in speaking out, risk social ostracism, ignominy, obloquy, to the point of being deprived of other employment on already scanty skills by which to secure income?

And, just who is to say, on a given day, who is sane and who isn't? Whose perception qualifies as the one which is acceptable? Who is to distinguish long-term aberrant behavior from one particular set of transitory circumstances resulting from extreme distress not resulting in any harm to anyone? Plainly, if someone seeks overtly and by clear physical acts to injure themselves or others, that is a standard of determination which might, if shown by a large and indisputable quantum of evidence over time, suffice. But how much evidence is enough? What if the evidence is susceptible to more than one explanation and interpretation? Who are the witnesses collecting the evidence? Do they have it in for the person sought to be committed? What if some insensitive cracker judge says, "You have an explanation for everything, Mr. Brewster, like so many who come before me: away with you to Happydale," as he refuses to listen to anything Mortimer has to say in his own defense?

Take the woman letter writer's behavior again: when she cut herself numerous times to make suicidal gestures in order to be removed to a bearable ward and away from the conditions she describes, being forced to go barefoot with only a cotton mat on the bare floor on which to lie, the floor washed down every day, was that the reaction of an abnormal, insane person, or was it the act of a person extremely stressed by inhumane treatment, the likes of which any prisoner of war might be found to be a hero in performing to confuse and outwit the enemy?

Would American and Filipino P.O.W.'s about to be marched in the spring of 1942 by the Japanese along the Bataan Peninsula be faulted were they to turn on their wards, bar the door of the cell or hut to which they were confined, and threaten to rub broken glass in the guards' faces?

Oh, but that's different, one might say. How so, and to what degree, if the conditions were in fact as the woman described? That she wasn't taken out on the roads and marched at gunpoint, starving, until she perished? Recall the testaments of the other letter writers who describe a woman dying from pneumonia contracted while being transported on a cold day with her hair still wet from the baths across the yard, of the stories of starvation to death--and those stories not from patients but from friends and family members of patients, people who had no reason to lie as they exposed themselves to remonstrance for having allowed their friend or loved one to perish in such misery.

Well, as we say, fortunately such cruel and outrageously operated institutions, both among mental health facilities and prisons, have largely, if not fully, disappeared from the American landscape since the 1960's when lawsuits were finally brought to a willing Federal judiciary to see that such outrageous conditions violative of basic civil and human rights were eliminated. That is not to say that all such facilities are pristine manors, exemplary of the most modern forms of penology or mental health care today, but the worst of the lot at least no longer are usually to be found.

Or, are they? Simply because we don't hear about it doesn't necessarily mean something doesn't exist. Do we blink the facts still and perform the Afghanistanism by looking at the past and saying, by relative improvement, that all is well today?

We ourselves saw the Moorman photograph periodically for 42 years before one cold night in December, 2005, on blow up of it, finally consciously noticing that something is very wrong with the top portion of that Polaroid, the most critical Polaroid ever taken in history. Does that make us sane or insane? How about you? Take the test.

Are you behind the walls of Red Wing or in front of them? Who's the prisoner, whose the guard?

If what we just imparted makes you want to seek us out and destroy us, then you may be ripe for being behind those walls. Be careful. You may be tested when you least suspect it.

Incidentally, congratulations to the Tar Heels for their win tonight in Durham. They were not crazy tonight. Every cloud has a silver lining and for Duke it is the fact that they can still get them in Chapel Hill, their home away from home. As for you, men, don't let it go to your heads. March is yet to come. You see now what we meant by insisting on those push-ups and laps you did last month. We said you would thank us. Just remember though that all is relative: in 1942, the Appalachian Mountaineers beat the Boston Celtics by three points. Can you match that?

Framed Edition

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