Guns and Mental Illness: Tragedies in Waiting

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Patricia J. Williams | August 8, 2012

Consider these scenarios. A popular college student leaves his fraternity house one day, stark naked. He walks three blocks to a stranger’s house, enters, turns on the TV and falls asleep. 
Moments later, the owner of the house finds him, takes aim with his Glock and kills the young man before he ever wakes up.

Or: an 18-year-old high school basketball star calls 911 to report child abuse because he can’t find any Chinese food in the house. When the police contact his mother, she rushes home to find her son sobbing on the front porch while a confused sergeant stares, watching his tears flow like rain.

Or: a young woman in Nebraska disappears the night before her parents’ thirtieth anniversary celebration—a surprise party she’d spent months planning. Two days later, she is found in Singapore, where she’s been picked up for shoplifting. Though Singapore has some of the harshest criminal penalties in the world, it also has some of the best mental-health care. So, rather than receiving a caning, the young woman is retrieved from a first-class hospital, diagnosed and medicated, her equilibrium restored.

Mental illness in the United States is misunderstood, criminalized, stigmatized and insufficiently covered even by so-called Cadillac insurance plans. If you think you don’t know anyone coping with psychosis or depression, you’re wrong: 58 million Americans (one in five) have some form of mental illness. If most of us don’t realize its prevalence, it’s surely because we’re afraid to talk about it. We’re a nation of fundamentalists about personal agency, and we’re skeptical of mental disorders as “real.” When a friend’s son wrote his family that he just wanted to lie down and die, one faction sent him Bible passages and told him to pray harder, while another sent him a copy of Ayn Rand’s Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology and told him to “take responsibility” for his life.

The insistence that the mentally ill are rational actors informs public policy, too: Jared Lee Loughner, who shot Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Arizona, received treatment only so that a court could declare him competent to stand trial. Since 2009, states have slashed more than $1.6 billion from mental-health programs. There are no savings to be gained from such cuts. They simply transfer the costs elsewhere: nearly half of all state and federal prisoners and approximately one-third of the nation’s homeless are mentally ill. Since much mental disease can be treated, this represents a human rights crisis as well as a spectacular waste of human resources.

Indeed, the comments on websites discussing James Holmes’s massacre in Colorado look right past its very bizarreness. “He just wants attention” is a typical remark. Any recognition that Holmes’s acts were terribly sick is accompanied by the assumption that his state must have been immediately obvious to everyone around him, as well as an underestimation of how hard it is to intervene or hospitalize an adult who does not voluntarily seek help.

The New York Times Magazine recently published a piece by Jeneen Interlandi chronicling her family’s struggle to help her father when he developed bipolar disease. She describes the gut-wrenching vigil for someone slowly transforming into a different person, as well as the near impossibility of procuring treatment if the sufferer “presents well” to psychiatrists or police. To commit her father involuntarily, she states, “he had to be an imminent danger to himself or others…in practice, it seemed to mean that he had to be standing on the ledge of a building, or holding a knife to someone’s throat.” The family ended up “locked in a game of chicken: waiting for my father to do something clearly dangerous; praying like hell that it would not be his suicide or accidental death or the death of someone else.”

Tragedies like the one in Aurora always prompt calls for more regulation: that schools be sued, psychologists lose their licenses,
hospitals lock more people up. This implies some recognition that untreated mental illness is a public concern. Yet there’s no willingness to reconfigure our insurance system as a public good, or to fund any services that might alleviate the problem. So we are left with narrow remedies like lawsuits after the fact, inadvertently creating incentives for employers to fire mentally ill workers and for schools to expel those who need help the most—or, even worse, to overreact by “taking no chances.”

Risk assessment is an imperfect science, and our extraordinary level of violence only adds to the problem. We legitimize our trigger-
happiness by imagining our polity as a war zone, “standing our ground” and girding our loins for the apocalypse. After Holmes’s slaughter, gun sales in Colorado leaped by 40 percent. There are those who insist that gun ownership rates have no causal relation to the rate of gun deaths. It’s a pitched argument (gun ownership is even mandatory in some US towns), unlikely to be settled by the numbers. But can we at least agree that there’s a kind of madness in peddling guns to every American (the NRA sells baby bibs featuring its logo) while decimating our mental health system?

We are all so vulnerable. We are subject to mental disorder as individuals in a toxically stressed modern world. We are subject to disorder based on biological clocks we do not fully understand (most mental illnesses tend to manifest in early adulthood). And we are subject to disorder as groupthink, ideological puritanism and religious extremism.

As I prepare to file this piece, word comes that yet another “lone gunman” has entered a Sikh temple in Wisconsin and killed six people. The FBI has declared it “terrorism.” The Westboro Baptist Church calls it the “beautiful work of an angry God.” CNN’s Eric Marripodi has declared it an “unfair targeting” of Sikhs mistaken for Muslims (a presumably fairer target?). Wisconsin State Representative Mark Honadel declared it “craziness.”

Perhaps one day we’ll know.

For more information about mental disease–including definitions, current research, and local resources–please consult the following websites:  The National Alliance on Mental Illness, http://www.nami.org; The Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, http://www.bbrfoundation.org; the Treatment Advocacy Center, http://www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org; and The National Institute of Mental Health, http://www.nimh.nih.gov.

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Marvels, Madness, Medicine

by Patricia J. Williams

Released: 7 Oct 2010

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In the January 2011 issue of the Journal of Policy History, Susan Reverby, a historian at Wellesley College, will publish a paper detailing a particularly sordid moment in American history. From 1946 to ’48, the Public Health Service, with the assent of some Guatemalan officials, engaged in medical experiments on 700 Guatemalan soldiers, prisoners, mental patients and children. The documents Reverby discovered show that doctors intentionally sickened many of their subjects with syphilis, either by injecting infected fluids into their spines and under their skin or by supplying them with afflicted prostitutes.

Of course, this horrendous project arose from “the best of intentions” — to improve serological testing for the disease and to measure the degree to which penicillin and other medicines could act prophylactically. The US military was also interested in finding STD protections for soldiers that might be simpler and less painful than those available at the time. Ultimately, the observations in Guatemala were inconclusive because it proved harder than anticipated to infect sufficient numbers to constitute an adequate data set.

The doctor in charge of the two-year project was John Cutler, an assistant surgeon general who, in his later years, was a “beloved” professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health. It was in his archives that Reverby found notes and photographs documenting the existence of the project. Even before this revelation, however, Dr. Cutler’s long-term legacy was one of infamy: He was one of the main researchers in the Public Health Service’s Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which black sharecroppers went purposely untreated from the 1930s to 1972, when the project finally was exposed. In 1944, moreover, Dr. Cutler directed a study in which gonorrhea was injected into prison “volunteers” at the state penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. And in 1953, after returning from Guatemala, he resumed his experiments with syphilis injections, this time with prisoners in Sing Sing prison in New York.

Dr. Cutler’s experiments, while horrific, were not unique. Nonconsensual medical experiments were a prominent feature of South Africa’s apartheid regime. In America, we know about the military’s experimentation with atomic radiation on unwitting soldiers and patients from the 1950s to the ’70s and experiments with LSD in the ’70s. In the ’90s New York City foster children were used to test the effects of certain unlicensed drugs for AIDS. And let’s not forget all the “tests” done at Guantánamo Bay.

It’s important to understand how we repeatedly deceive ourselves into appalling forms of corruption by wrapping ourselves in the language of high standards. Reverby cites a telling quote from the 1967 autobiography of virologist Thomas Rivers: “I tested out live yellow fever vaccine right on my ward in the Rockefeller Hospital. It was no secret, and I assure you that the people in the New York City Department of Health knew it was being done…. Unless the law winks occasionally, you have no progress in medicine.” Rationalization has ever been thus: It’s humanitarian in the long run. We confuse, in other words, motives and means.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum posits three contexts in which nonconsensual medical experimentation took place in Nazi Germany: first, in military organizations, premised on rationalizations of security, exigency and defense; second, in the hunt for new pharmaceuticals and treatment methods; third, in conjunction with ideologies of racial, ethnic or religious superiority in which “common sense” dictates that some humans are less valuable than others and can be sacrificed for the “greater good.” The moral lesson of the Guatemalan experiment ought to spur public conversation and review of all these areas. My list of topics would include:

1. Despite more encompassing interpretations of the Biologic and Toxin Weapons Convention, we are increasingly converting academic research facilities into biodefense containment labs. A 2004 American Journal of Public Health article points to “inadequately characterized risks,” as well as concern that the program is informed by a “political rather than health agenda.”

2. The weakened condition of the FDA means that many drugs have been inadequately vetted before coming to market. The scandals involving Vioxx and Avandia are great failed experiments inflicted on a trusting, unsuspecting public.

3. Pharmaceutical companies and venture capitalists are investing in miracle drugs and testing by seeking out very poor people as “volunteers” in exchange for “medical treatment” or for token amounts of money that are dwarfed by the health risks involved.

4. Our consent procedures must be scrupulously overseen and updated, particularly where “volunteers” are used in places like prisons, mental health institutions, foster care or orphanage settings or on populations living under oppressive regimes. (As Reverby points out, Guatemala in the ’40s was essentially run by the United Fruit Company.)

5. Germ line therapy and genetic manipulation will increasingly implicate future generations. We must ask ourselves if our present zeal for “transhuman,” “gen-rich,” “enhanced” versions of ourselves is but a vast experiment in narcissism.

Scientific revolution always tempts us with blinding hubris. How else could Dr. Cutler engage in experimentation at the same time as and of the very sort for which the United States was prosecuting Germans in Nuremberg? So while President Obama and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton issue formal apologies to the people of Guatemala, we must interrogate our own freighted contemporary moment — of economic desperation, of rising nativism, of promises of hellfire to come, of soaring incarceration rates. These are divisions that have never been exploited to any good or decent end.

Patricia J. Williams, a professor of law at Columbia University and a member of the State Bar of California, writes The Nation column “Diary of a Mad Law Professor.” Her books includeThe Rooster’s Egg (1995) and Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race (1997).

Copyright © 2010 The Nation — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 07 October 2010

 

bring your genes to cal….

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Freshmen Specimen

Patricia J. Williams | September 9, 2010

The school year at the University of California, Berkeley, began with a swab. In a program called Bring Your Genes to Cal, 5,500 incoming freshmen were asked to provide samples of their saliva in an experiment designed to bring the student body together in the same manner that reading To Kill a Mockingbird might have in the past. The more than 700 students who responded had their DNA analyzed in Berkeley’s (uncertified) labs, assessed for susceptibility to alcoholism, lactose intolerance and relative metabolism of folic acid. The exercise provoked an international debate about the ethics of the assignment. Ultimately, the California Department of Public Health barred the university from dispensing individual profiles on the grounds that genetic analysis is correlative only and is neither necessarily predictive nor diagnostic at this point. A collective comparison of the class’s genetic data was permitted, however, and circulated in “anonymized” form at orientation.

There are several reasons that Berkeley’s undertaking should give us pause. The first and most obvious is that of privacy: this information reveals more than we can yet interpret at the singular, embodied level of human identity. DNA decoding will become infinitely more precise in the near future, and with that growing precision in familial tracking and biological identification, “anonymizing” results by removing names and Social Security numbers will mean less and less.

Second, Who owns, or ought to own, these data? Although the Berkeley experiment is framed as an exploration of a vast genetic commons, this information is the subject of intense commercial speculation. And the degree to which specific gene sequences may be patented is quite contested in the law. Should you, as the biological vessel of a particularly exploitable bit of genetic material, receive any remuneration? Are your genes to be valued, in purely pecuniary terms, as akin to a deposit of oil beneath your land? Once genes are patented, can rival researchers be barred from working on the same material?

Another problem with Berkeley’s DNA swabbing is that it perpetuates the assumption that DNA analysis is as good as or the same as personalized medicine. Despite large gaps in understanding and the astonishing absence of standards, the results of genetic research are often held as being far more definitive than yet shown. The mere phrase “genetic correlation” is heard as a 100 percent infallible guarantee of whatever follows. This assumption is often implicit in the advertising of some direct-to-consumer companies like Navigenics and 23andMe. Indeed, both companies were hired to analyze the results of a medical school class’s “spit party” at Stanford University recently.

On July 22, however, the Government Accountability Office issued a report that advised consumers of the scientific uncertainty of individual results, in which assessments of risk varied widely from company to company. The GAO also found “10 egregious examples of deceptive marketing, including claims made by four companies that a consumer’s DNA could be used to create a personalized supplement to cure diseases. Two of these companies further stated that their supplements could ‘repair damaged DNA’ or cure disease, even though experts confirmed there is no scientific basis for such claims…. Two other companies asserted that they could predict in which sports children would excel based on DNA analysis, claims that an expert characterized as ‘complete garbage.’ Further, two companies told GAO’s fictitious consumer that she could secretly test her fiance’s DNA to ‘surprise’ him with test results—though this practice is restricted in 33 states. Perhaps most disturbing, one company told a donor that an above average risk prediction for breast cancer meant she was ‘in the high risk of pretty much getting’ the disease, a statement that experts found to be ‘horrifying’ because it implies the test is diagnostic.”

This is not to say that genetic testing shows nothing at all, but the results inform only at the aggregate level or as a set of probabilities. This explicitly aggregate data collection has been the subject of yet another controversial program, called Gopher Kids, conducted by the University of Minnesota at the annual state fair. At a booth adorned with balloons and a cute animal mascot, researchers offered free T-shirts and amusement park rides to parents and children willing to submit saliva swabs and answer a lengthy questionnaire about lifestyle. The university advertises participation as altruistic, a contribution to public health and human knowledge. The problem with this is that, again, the law is not settled about whether our genetic makeup is more the property of the excavating mind of the scientist or the individual property of a particular identified body.

Finally, there is the question of motive. Spit parties are boosted as ways to get to know one another in the social realm—as though it were a collective séance or a big, slimy Ouija board. But the real reasons that so many companies market swabbing kits is not entirely altruistic: there is huge money to be made in expanding the data sets as broadly as possible. The predictive probabilities involved in reading genes for disease or physique or ancestry can become more precise only by sifting through data of whole populations and then correlating frequencies of particular conditions with particular genetic clusterings. This, it is thought, will be very valuable in devising and marketing pharmaceuticals, as well as in forensic identification technologies.

As we enter the genomic era, we should be more thoughtful about the ends for which our bodies are being mined. The redemptive thrill of being co-creators of some medical miracle must be measured against the possibility that we are rendering fungible that which most profoundly distinguishes us and, in the name of a gift, enabling a commodity exchange in which important aspects of our identities will be sold to the highest bidder.

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Senator Edward Moore Kennedy

My family’s debt to the Kennedys’ America

Edward Kennedy was one of the ‘north east elite’, but his commitment to fairness and opportunity meant he was loved across the usual divides of class and colour

• Patricia Williams
• The Observer, Sunday 30 August 2009
• larger | smaller

When I woke up to the news that Senator Ted Kennedy had died, I was taken by surprise; I had been so irrationally certain of merciful miracles. The railing of August cicadas rose shrill and unbearable. My head throbbed. It was a vivid green morning, the air muggy and sad.

It was 10 years ago this summer that John Kennedy Jr’s body was pulled from the sea off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, the island from where I now write, his ashes returned to the sea days later. I feel a commingled grief; so much promise lost; the end of a legacy.

Flags fly at half-mast. The cardboard signs welcoming Obama to the island are amended to include messages of condolence to the Kennedy family, as well as defiant messages of support for universal healthcare.

There isn’t anyone who grew up in Massachusetts who doesn’t feel personally touched by the life of Kennedy. There’s the family legacy. His maternal grandfather was the amiably colourful mayor of Boston, John Francis Fitzgerald, the child of immigrants and the first Irish Catholic to achieve such power in the then-English – or “Boston Brahmin” – dominated-political landscape of New England.

The election of “Honey Fitz”, as he was known, was significant because this was the Boston of Henry James and the Irish were very much looked down upon. I remember my grandmother describing signs in the windows of certain establishments that read: “No Irish, no coloured, no dogs.”

Years later, when Mayor Fitzgerald’s daughter, Rose, married Joseph Kennedy, the son of a competing Irish politician, Honey Fitz saw to it that his grandsons grew up aiming to break the same barrier at every level of government, even the presidency.

And so they did. This past Thursday, when Senator Kennedy’s funeral cortege wound the 90 miles from the family compound on Cape Cod up to Boston, it made its way through a landscape littered with memorials to his siblings, his parents and his grandparents: Lt Joseph P Kennedy Jr Memorial School; the Kennedy Federal Building; Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway (which is built over the old John F Fitzgerald expressway); the Robert Kennedy School; the JFK Presidential Library.

The particular struggles of the Irish in Boston is largely forgotten today; indeed, the Kennedys are often characterised as part of “the north east liberal elite”. But the origins of their family success are rooted in a fight that spans all aspects of a broader civil rights movement that stretches back to the 1800s and included not merely African Americans but Irish and Italian immigrants, the descendants of indentured servants, the poor, the labouring classes.

In addition, Mayor Fitzgerald was one of 12 children, only three of whom survived to adulthood, an experience that marked his career by a particular commitment to bringing medical access for all.

It was a legacy that he passed on through the generations. It is no accident, therefore, that his granddaughter Eunice Kennedy Shriver founded the Special Olympics. It is no accident that Edward Kennedy helped pass Medicare and called universal health insurance his “life’s work”.

It is true that the senator’s life history was one of great human complexity. And just as the healthcare debates have been disrupted by an astonishing amount of hateful speech, so the national blogosphere is filled with bitter, ungenerous commentary about the time he cheated on an exam at Harvard; or how he called his political advisers before he called paramedics when his car plunged off a bridge on Martha’s Vineyard, leaving the body of Mary Jo Kopechne, a young campaign aide, submerged for nearly nine hours; or whetherhe drank to excess.

But here in Massachusetts, it is the political commitment that counts. It is his public service that means the most and the regional allegiance to this man crosses all partisan boundaries. The Boston Herald, a local tabloid that spilled oceans of ink denouncing him in life, remembered him with uncharacteristic mistiness.

Virtually all the callers to the normally right-wing, shock-jock local radio stations made tearful testimonials that began: “Although I disagreed with everything he stood for…” and ended with: “They don’t make men like him any more.”

Edward Moore Kennedy was a dogged player at the game of constituent politics. Flawed as he was, he never ever forgot the people with whom he came in contact. When my great aunt died, he sent a large bouquet of flowers. She had worked as a maid at Harvard when he was a student.

She adored him. He was “a good man”, by which she meant that he was a man who treated her – that is, people of colour – with respect. She became a lifelong campaign volunteer for every political race he entered. Yes, in all probability, someone in his office sent the flowers, but at her funeral we all wept harder at the very gesture. Aunt Sophie was no doubt smiling down from heaven, just bursting her buttons with pride.

As I write, President Obama is giving the eulogy at Senator Kennedy’s funeral. To African Americans, Obama is “our Kennedy”. I wept when I discovered that the funeral was to be held at the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. Although many in the national press cite the church as one close to the hospital where his daughter Kara was treated for lung cancer, or one that is in a neighbourhood once inhabited by Irish immigrants, it is also in the neighbourhood where I grew up. It is in what most Bostonians know as a black neighbourhood, a “dangerous” neighbourhood, a neighbourhood “in transition”.

These days, it reflects the demographic that both Kennedy and Obama represent: a new generation of the American dream. It is a neighbourhood filled with hopeful immigrants from the Caribbean and West Africa and Bosnia and the Middle East. It is on the cusp of gentrification – a neighbourhood of college students and the underemployed, of medical technicians and starving artists.

There’s a black barbershop next door to the church, and a pizza joint and restaurant that serves Jamaican food. If some reporters were surprised when they set up the satellite feeds, those who knew anything about Ted Kennedy and the tradition from which he came were not.

There was a quote from Tennyson’s Ulysses that Senator Kennedy loved, a quote that he read at his brother Robert’s funeral, and one that is now being read as he is laid to rest: ” I am a part of all that I have met… ” begins the stanza. Senator Edward Kennedy lived his life precisely at the crossroads of all that he encountered – at the intersection of statesmanship, of history, of moral purpose, of tragedy, of compromise.

There are many who think that his passing means the end of an era. When I look at the unparalleled outpouring of those he met, whose world he touched, I am confident that the work he began lives on not only in the politics and presidency of Barack Obama, but in the dreams he ignited in so many, many others.

• guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009

Metalinguistics of The Health Debate

Reverse Nazism and the War on Universal Healthcare

Diary of a Mad Law Professor

by PATRICIA J. WILLIAMS

This article appeared in the September 14, 2009 edition of The Nation.

August 26, 2009

The spinmeisters of the right have done quite a job with what used to be straightforward English etymology. Thanks to Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, “integration” was inverted to mean “takeover” and “colorblindness” is code for abandoning the advances of the civil rights movement, which itself is synonymous with an “industry” of exclusion. It’s no surprise, then, that whenever a piece of progressive legislation comes to the table, the same manipulations come into play from right-wing pundits who shamelessly profess their desire to see the Obama presidency fail. Thus it is that America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 is being turned upside down as the neat equivalent of Germany’s Bankrupting Forced Death Act of 1939.

If you are watching the healthcare town-hall ruckuses with only common dictionary meanings in your head, you will be struck by the protesters’ general incoherence and outright nonsense, bearing no rational connection to the actual draft of the healthcare bill. As Representative Barney Frank demanded of one constituent who likened the bill to Nazism, “On what planet do you spend most of your time?”

But if you listen as though deciphering pig Latin and realize that this demographic is speaking from a well-managed, near-hypnotic looking-glass world where every word from the mouth of a Democrat (or a liberal, or a Latina, or a Canadian) is a lie, a betrayal… then it all makes sense. Their world truly has been turned inside out, by the election, by the economy, by the precarious conditions that threaten us all. But for those whose sense of identity has been premised on a raced, masculinist, conservative Christian hierarchy of American power, the world must seem even more emotionally terrifying than any actual facts would indicate.

So reversal is key to understanding what’s going on. It’s not just “lies”; it’s the expressive angst of people whose felt power relations have been turned upside down. It’s not factually accurate, but this is how they feel. Obama is Hitler! Health insurance for all means euthanasia for me! “My” country is suddenly “their” country.

Of course, there are special interests who profit from the magnification of these fears. Betsy McCaughey, a former shill for a medical instruments company, is the original source of the “death panel” rumors. From the beginning, big pharmaceutical and insurance companies, with an almost inconceivable amount of money to spend, have been muddying the waters. Think about the recent revelation that Merck secretly financed the publication of a fake medical journal that was designed to look objective but merely touted the supposed benefits of its products–and included “paid advertisements” for the company’s drugs. What is truth in such a corrupt hall of mirrors?

But what does the bill actually say? A quick summary of the most contentious point: the act would provide reimbursement if you seek medical counseling about end-of-life decisions. This option allows you to plan what you would like to have done in the case of catastrophic or terminal illness–nothing forced about it. All extraordinary measures will continue to be used to resuscitate someone whose wishes are unknown: feeding tube, intubation, cracking ribs to defibrillate, whatever it takes. By contrast, it is private, profit-motivated insurance companies–which deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions and restrict one’s choice of doctor, medical treatments and length of hospital stays (based on actuarial tables)–that bear the greatest resemblance to a mulching euthanasia machine. When nearly 50 million US citizens live without any health coverage, how on earth could a purely voluntary public option be considered throwing people under the bus?

Let me acknowledge the genuine ideological and moral misgivings behind some of the protests. Many libertarians hate anything the government does, no matter how monopolistic or quasi-governmental the power of pharmaceutical and insurance companies. But they are a minority and not generally the bloc using the language of reversal and code. Similarly, there are those with genuine moral or religious qualms: “prolifers” who, if they believe that life begins at the molecular moment of conception, could also think that any end-of-life consultation is against God’s will. This would be the same line of reasoning followed by those who wanted Congress to keep Terri Schiavo on life support no matter what. While I can certainly respect that as a belief, it is clearly even more of a minority position than libertarianism. In addition, it requires strong-armed government intrusion over the wishes of patients or family; and it is totally unsustainable as national public policy.

All of this is complicated but surely, with a bit of listening, comprehensible to the average citizen. So how do we connect the reality of our dismal life-expectancy and health-cost statistics to the hysterical sobbing of people who come to town-hall meetings furious that “the insurance companies won’t be able to make a profit”? Much of the epic woe is not about healthcare or public options. It’s about roiling resentments that need to be dressed up as something else, the coded mummery of Halloween monsters hybridized into new chimeras of hate. It’s about fear that precious resources are being transferred to “alien” others. Fear that the gains of others are ill-gotten, leaving the lonely patriot survivalist as victim, “thrown away,” trash. In these fiery monologues, even our president is figured as conspiratorially alien-birthed, from a galaxy far, far away, who’s just pretending to be one of “us.”

This morning I saw a picture of President Obama dressed as Hitler, complete with little mustache, tacked high on a tree trunk. At first it seemed jaw-droppingly ridiculous, sociopathically paranoid. But if the rule of reversal is what’s encoded in that image, all people of good will must worry that what’s really at stake for some of our gun-toting, demagogic fellow citizens is nothing less than America’s very own Weimar moment.

• Copyright © 2009 The Nation

Obama’s First 100 Days

 

 

The Looming Backlash

by Patricia J. Williams

April 29, 2009 | 3:18pm

Joe Raedle / Getty ImagesPresident Obama’s first 100 days may have been a success, but the forces gathering against him are only gaining steam.

The first 100 days of Barack Obama’s presidency have been as flawless as any transition of such complexity could ever be. He’s a brilliant man, and he’s made brilliant choices very much in accord with his campaign promises. But why the pressure to judge him after only 100 days? I’d give him the first 270 days. That’s the length of your average pregnancy and anybody knows it takes 270 days to give birth to something of significance. Obama has laid the groundwork for greatness, but remediation for problems of the scale he’s confronting will take time. An assessment of his impact now—whether on the economy, health care, the courts—is a little premature.

The real test for Obama will be in negotiating some degree of backlash. As the pain of reduced circumstances and unemployment touches more and more lives, the search for scapegoats is likely to become bitter. I’d like to see what happens in a few months as Karl Rove and Dick Cheney become increasingly vociferous on Fox News. I’d like to see how much more life pundits give to Texas Governor Rick Perry’s threat to secede, or Representative Michelle Bachman’s characterization of her service in Congress as akin to being a “foreign correspondent” behind “enemy lines.”

Long-term, much of Obama’s success is going to depend on what happens with the courts. Issues ranging from state regulation of discriminatory lending practices to the extension of key provisions of the Voting Rights Act will be decided by the Supreme Court in the near future, and the current court is quite conservative. Moreover, at least three-quarters of the entire federal bench has been appointed by Republican administrations. Obama’s policies will be constrained and challenged by this reality, and it’s unclear how or if he can work around it.

The clearest success of President Obama’s first 100 days has been at the symbolic level. By firmly rejecting policies on torture, he’s undone much of the negative image of the United States with which the Bush administration left him. He’s also given many of us hope for a new era in race relations. (At the same time, we must remember that it is just that a hope, not yet a reality. Our sense of promise should not be used to undermine civil-rights protections or to underestimate the racial divisions that remain unaddressed, whether disparities in disease control, incarceration rates, education, or homelessness.) Finally, the Obama family has modeled a refreshing kind of American elegance: fashionable, fit, and frugal. As parents, they have rotated the duties of family and career with equal devotion and equal accomplishment. As partners, they are equally well-educated, outspoken, and poised. They have incorporated a grandmother into the definition of family, put a basketball court in the basement and planted vegetables amid all those ornamental tulips. The White House has never been cooler; and it has never been warmer..

Patricia J. Williams is the author of The Alchemy of Race and Rights; The Rooster’s Egg; and Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race. She is a also a columnist for The Nation.

Science and Supposition

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Diary of a Mad Law Professor

By Patricia J. Williams

This article appeared in the March 30, 2009 edition of The Nation.

 

On March 9 President Obama signed an order guaranteeing “scientific integrity” in federal policy-making, specifically repudiating the propriety of ideological influence. Under most post-Enlightenment circumstances, such a directive would have been deemed tautological. But during the past eight years of the Bush administration’s Newspeak, scientific findings have been manipulated, corrupted and/or censored in service to commercial interests rather than reproducible results.

Most public discussion of Obama’s renewed support of the sciences has centered on stem cell research, for which federal funding had heretofore been blocked–largely in response to religious conservatives, who view the fertilization and manipulation of embryos solely for research as akin to murder. While the Obama administration’s policy will indeed allow better-funded research in this area, technological advances have made the ethics of the debate somewhat archaic. Today it is possible to transform adult cells into an embryonic state, thus bypassing most religious questions of whether the embryo is a pre-born person. But the larger dimensions of this administration’s commitment have ramifications far beyond stem cells. The Obama policy also affects hiring protocols. Not only must scientific decisions be sheltered from political quarrels; science advisers are to be chosen for their expertise, not toadyism; whistle-blowers who report bad practices or questionable findings will not have to fear for their jobs. Moreover, the president has set up a Council of Advisers on Science and Technology who will report directly to him. 

In addition to stem cell research, the new protocols will have significant salutary influence on research into climate change, genetics, sex education, pollution and food safety. Under Bush, the budgets for the National Institutes of Health and for the Centers for Disease Control were all but frozen. The food pyramid was redesigned so as not to offend sugar manufacturers. Cattle ranchers were blocked from testing their own herds for mad cow disease, for fear of offending the beef lobby. Climatologist James Hansen of NASA was forbidden to speak to the media about his conviction that global warming was worsening. Despite lots of evidence about the public health rewards of education about condoms and safe sex, such information was muffled in deference to the disproved efficacy of “abstinence only” as the centerpiece of AIDS and STD prevention.

Bush supported positions that allowed pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions, based on individual religious beliefs instead of professional ethics. He opposed the morning-after pill and the vaccine against human papilloma virus (the virus linked to increased likelihood of cervical cancer). His White House engaged a lawyer who had once been a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute to filter, alter and edit reports produced by the federal Climate Change Science Program. And, of course, Bush weakened the Endangered Species Act by allowing a wide range of government mining and building projects to proceed without any independent or scientific review of their environmental impact.

President Obama’s reinstating the importance of independent scientific research has been underscored by his ferociously intelligent brain trust, chock-full of Nobel laureates. All this should lead to a more robust grappling with the life-altering crises facing our planet. And it ought to provide a good base from which to take on other, no less pressing but far less publicized issues of biotechnology. With the birth of Nadya Suleman’s octuplets, for example, public sentiment seems to have flipped overnight from calls for abstinence-as-the-best-medicine to calls for forced sterilization of poor and/or single women. There is also a complicated debate about free-market eugenics we will soon have to confront–the tip of the iceberg being in vitro fertilization clinics that advertise their willingness to try to weed out embryos with cosmetic traits that may be undesirable to parents, like certain hair or eye or skin color.

Similarly, untold sums are being diverted to policing and surveillance, including functional magnetic resonance technology, which claims, prematurely, to be able to deploy brain scans as lie detectors. This past September a woman in India was convicted of murdering her former fiancé after a court-ordered MRI showed what authorities claimed was her memory of the event. This conclusion was based on metrics that map which parts of the brain store the past, imagine the future or work harder when summoning pictures, hearing sounds or registering smell. And so the defendant was convicted based on which parts of her cortex lit up as the prosecution’s charge was read to her. In a few months, a number of start-up companies will commence broad-scale marketing of just such mind-reading toys in the United States. We must be prepared to ask what these developments mean for the notion we call “privacy,” to say nothing of the boundary against intrusion that “taking the Fifth” establishes. What does it mean when “I” say–and “I” believe–one thing, but my brain waves decide to incriminate me? Have I been invaded? Am I more than one mind? Am I mad?

On other fronts, the medical ethics of euthanizing severely disabled infants or terminally ill elders is re-emerging as a philosophically freighted issue for theologians and utilitarians alike. And a global transplant market has inspired interest in more “efficient” organ harvesting; this, in turn, has led to practices that in effect move up a patient’s time of death by redefining expiration as “cardiac death” rather than “brain death.”

We live in a geologic age so affected by the complexities of human activity that scientists have begun to call it the Anthropocene Era. President Obama’s directives recognize that any hope of repair depends upon wise political choices informed by independent expertise and repeatedly tested outcomes.