The Idiocy of What We've Become

plus a firsthand testimony

The difficulty lies in staying motivated enough to continue engaging productively with the nature of how our socio-political dynamic is unfolding, regardless of its level of absurdity and idiocy.

This is perhaps the most surprising aspect of how our current political climate and its accompanying discourse has evolved. 

One certainly might take for granted that the predominant direction of political action and inaction for decades has clearly been headed toward cruel autocracy, infected with a kind of religious nationalism. It seems to me this was clear enough for long enough, even though anyone who recognized it was routinely shamed by the mainstream for being too pessimistic… not hopeful enough, even as each defining action and reaction playing out on the national and global stage clearly indicated an unmistakable lean into an a-historical, anti-science, anti-human rights predominance across the spectrum of any number of political mechanisms all over the globe. 

It has been easy enough to associate this ‘lean’ with other periods in history in which violent and aggressive, enforced, subjugation was largely defined by racism and classism, and resource covetousness and robbery, and the reinstitution of varying versions of slavery. But the broad and perniciously promoted level of absolute idiocy, both the pronouncement of it as the primary feature of public discourse as well as its acceptance and enforcement as irrevocable truth by those who accept it as the truth, has been blood curdlingly stunning. It takes one’s breath away. As much as there seems to be no defense for it there can be no real debate against it, due simply to its absurdity.

This may be its fatal flaw, but it is also its intransigent and immoveable foundation. It seems so perversely self-destructive, but at the same time grossly unreproachable. It has rendered itself to be imbecilic, and by that it has surrounded itself with a wall of unreason against which there can be no winning argument, no rationale that delivers it and those who embrace it from its own pit of preposterousness.

Perhaps this is the source of its primary power, and, for those who have been sucked into its vortex, the fulcrum of that power… or at least the ludicrousness by which any challenge to it can be refuted. 

There’s a certain cartoonishness to its alleged rationality and the constantly proclaimed bizarre rationality of those who have taken the lead in making it the new measure of human social and political organization.  But then, humanity’s last pass through somewhat similar catastrophic circumstance may have appeared equally absurd to those who were forced to live through it and were spared the symptoms of its ludicrous contagion that swept the planet. 

Did that period of violent, racist, genocidal self-destruction come with a similar bizarrely cartoonish stupidity? So few are left who have firsthand knowledge of how living through such an era felt. Did the leaders who emerged seem as dimly comical as the ones that have surfaced now? We read the histories and are familiar with the dark characters that took the lead and the catastrophic outcomes, but are those final breathtakingly inhuman endstops in the parade of human propensity toward fomenting its own demise punctuated and defined by such similarly  outlandish preposterousness?

What is interesting is the nature and intelligence of the full spectrum of the schools of the absurd that came about as a direct result of the emergence of fascism, Nazism, Stalinism and Maoism. On the heels of the ruthless inhumanity of these waves of dictatorial excess and mass murder we were gifted with a full range of literature, philosophy and theatre that mercilessly and brilliantly exploded the absurdity of the underlying presumptions that gave these leaders and their power construct life. Even children’s cartoons, especially children’s cartoons perhaps, were given license to explode the misconceptions and the larger than life bizarreness of the kinds of ruthlessly absurd characters and streams of events. 

Of course, comics and court jesters have always been given the sometimes dangerous right to explore through laughter the terrible truths that existed at the core of almost every locus of power and privilege that has ever emerged in the species as it evolved. Comics, comedians, fools and jesters continue to shine powerfully illuminating spotlights on the ludicrousness of leaders whose greatest accomplishments and genius have been the ability to convince a large enough portion of the population to follow them regardless of their contempt for the humanity of those they pronounce only deserve dehumanization and scapegoating, the ones upon whose backs they build the foundation of their power. 

I think my question is, however, when do we cease engaging with this obtuse level of ridiculousness through a kind of stultifying humor and move to act against it with something more powerful and less appeasing… something more seriously challenging? When do we give up our claim of lack of power, or the nature of how our power has successfully been channeled into highly controlled and monitored virtual anger and declamation of outrage? When do we manage to shed the forms of hopeless unity we have been channeled into and through by the very forces that denude us of the power and actions of our righteous resistance?

I am tired. And this fatigue, I am more and more convinced, is one part of how good the level of official absurdity is at sucking the energy from any right-thinking people. Because we have been convinced that there is absolutely no way to rationalize with people whose conceptual framework and foundational beliefs are so completely preposterous, so ineffably stupid.  

The ability to suck the resistance out of those who know better and who, in the end, have a better grasp on the historical precedents and evolution of the nature of how we have arrived where we have arrived as a species is perhaps the most threatening and even the most bizarrely smart aspect of what those who have elevated themselves and their puppets and cohorts into positions of absolute power have been able to accomplish, even if they elevated themselves upon that backasswards genius through mere happenstance and as a  by-product of their dedication to the ridiculous.

In the US this is perhaps most clearly demonstrated in a political system that has worked for years to narrow the span of what can and cannot be considered legitimate approaches to intransigent and potentially catastrophic eventualities. The narrowing of political discourse and range of voice and speech was codified spectacularly and openly (codifying what was an undercurrent reality since the founding documents were written and enacted) through the Citizen’s United ruling that made money equal to speech… which in effect made money MORE equal than speech. How could anyone misunderstand that ruling as anything other than the formal proclamation that handed the full reigns of every aspect of government over to the wealthy and their puppets in the legislative houses and courts and administrative bodies?  

Oh… I feel like I talk and think about Citizen’s United incessantly. And this is a large portion of the nature and ingredients in my motivational fatigue as it relates to the erosion of any amount of hopefulness that we will be delivered from this juggernaut of millionaires and billionaires with all our “We the People” faculties intact.  

I am tired of saying and thinking these things, despite the absolute necessity of staying aware and vocal and active in any way I can. I feel old too. 

I feel as if the rest of the air has sucked out of my optimism balloon... like a lost balloon that shrinks in the days after the party. But when was the party? 

I was always convinced that we would have to face this tumble into a kind of negative anarchic despotism sooner or later. I just didn’t think it would be so loudly and proudly pronounced and paraded through town with such stupidity.

But really…  some of my ensuing hopelessness is entirely a product of my privilege, my privilege as a white man. The fact that I, like most people, exist somewhere outside the Venn circle of strict heterosexuality hardly moves me outside of that privileged position… even if I am only two generations past a family legacy of the sorely dehumanized working class.  

I’m not sure kicking myself when I feel that lack of motivation take hold does much good, but if I really want to get real with myself I have to take seriously the history of the entire spectrum of people whose whole histories are replete with forced and violent submission, genocide, slavery in all its many guises, and real and figurative rape and lynchings. How can I bow out of forcing myself to stay alert and aware and vocal regardless of the consequences when so many before me, so many in my time, even so many of my own ancestors, could neither afford to adopt complacency or passivity?

This is not easy stuff. And I struggle daily with it, with my own role in resisting, staying educated, passing on knowledge and history to those younger than me who will be forced to survive times that may be worse than these. 

You know, I could almost understand appeasement, including the overwhelming appeasement from the alleged political opposition that we are witnessing now, if I thought it was anything  but lazy… if it was anything other than an admission that the nature of what is being done to dismantle the three masted ship of state will not have any real personal impact on those appeasers. 

But again: this was expected. For years. It has been clear for the entirely of my lifetime that despite all indications that the country… and the world… was at its best or at least headed toward its best due to the kinds of post-war economics and social awareness and historical reckoning that was taking place, there has been a barely repressed infantilized protest among the elite of the elite that they would be required to redistribute their hoards… and they have been working hard at ways to turn back the clock since I was born. Actually, since before my father and mother were born. Their hoards, never accumulated by anything other than racist prerogatives, violent suppression, outright resource robbery, and establishing and maintaining a slave class in whatever ways they could, are not theirs… not really. They are akin to the great art looted by the Nazis and the gold, silver and diamonds, and even the bananas that are literally showered with blood.

I’m going out to the garden.

***


It seems to me a counterpoint, of sorts, is required here. Not so much to lessen the impact of our very real drift into authoritarianism discussed above, but to reinforce the reality that this is by no means a sudden emergence. It has been building for decades. It seems to require a more personalized perspective.

My own experience of this phenomenon, and my awareness of how it has taken hold and become accepted as normal, has largely been demonstrated through my work in the publicly funded healthcare field over the past thirty-five years.  

It is important to continue to recognize that what is happening now is the logical outcome of a corrupt academic and political conceptualization of the way economics systems should work and who should benefit most.  The current predicament we find ourselves in is not new and we do ourselves and the victims of its cruelty no favors by accepting a discourse that exempts any portion of the elite that have accommodated these alarming outcomes. The level of appeasement and accommodation of the increasingly powerful and ignorant rightwing Christian nationalism by the elite neoliberal left only exposes their active and ongoing link to the same perverse economic and political theories that failed the vastest majority of the population, and failed the earth and its ability to sustain life as well.

I have told parts of this story before, but I think it might be worthwhile to try to put the segments of my experience in the public health system together as reinforcing evidence of how the appeasers and privatizers from any point along the short line between right and left in American political discourse have cooperated. While there’s a good cop/bad cop aspect to their presentation, they are largely outfitted in the same uniform of motivation through the  dehumanizing dictates of commerce and ruthless profitization. 

I think my primary point is that the push to privatize these public systems of care and make them conform to economic models that never consider that provisions for  basic needs in a society may include those who cannot participate in the dictated means of self-support that conform to what is considered to be profitable. They never consider that some aspects of a democratic system will cost money and never be able to make money in any way that fits into the economic models that demand them to… all the while relegating large portions of the eventually disenfranchised populations invisible or criminalized, and creating and exacerbating disabling mental health conditions in people left bereft of successful systems of support that would resolve underlying issues that are at least co-determinants of the symptom sets that further exclude them from the economic systems that demand fealty while they relegate those unable to participate in those systems to the suffering of social invisibility and otherness.

Here goes.

1.	The idea that people with catastrophic mental health issues should be afforded the rational option of being treated in their home communities, near their friends and families, was a good one. Initially the impulse and actions as they became a reality were creative and highly innovative. 

2.	But the forces in control of how these community programs would be structured and funded were immediately infected by an urge to make them profitable or at least as inexpensive as possible. Setting them up to be routinely “mined” by urges to redistribute public wealth to the elite.

3.	The actualization of what was a good and therapeutic idea became highly politicized and infused with the idea that community programs must cost less than treatment modes that came before them. The manner in which the community models of care were delivered came in the form of numerous independent, private, agencies all dependent on funding from the state, often in the form of Medicaid. Many of the programs, over time, were unavailable to anyone who was not eligible for the most basic forms of Medicaid. Each of these agencies, and the separate private agencies that were put in charge of how those Medicaid funds were distributed, had their own Board of Directors and competitively remunerated administrative staffing.

4.	That being said, less than half of what was spent on the state-run systems of mental health care largely anchored by the asylum system, before the community care model was adopted, was ever spent on those community care models.

5.	The cuts in funding were constant as the community care model became the single threshold of passage for anyone who was beset with crippling mental health conditions that were considered life long, and often resulted in joblessness and potential homelessness and loss of income or abject poverty.

6.	Many, if not most, who worked hard to keep their heads above water as they navigated the nature of their symptom sets, as well as an increasingly complex system of access to any state supported and funded care, found themselves alienated and in a spiral of institutional dehumanization not dissimilar to how they were treated in the asylum system.

7.	A huge impediment to access to a complete spectrum of care was instituted in Michigan when access to funds by the case management agencies that oversaw access to treatment modalities and the process of hospital admissions, was capitated. This had several disturbing impacts, although it was sold all the way down the line as a way to prevent hospitalizations, especially long-term hospitalizations that were not covered by Medicaid. Hospital care was further considered to be a negative outcome, in subtext not so much out of concern for the individual needs of those who might require it, but because funding the costs of expensive long term hospital stays were required to be taken from the now capitated funds allotted to each community mental health cost center, negatively impacting their overall operating budget and the ability to provide a fullest spectrum of care options and treatment. People who would benefit from in patient care were delayed in receiving it until their symptoms worsened and/or their safety was threatened.

8.	Meanwhile housing and meaningful daily activities provided by state funded resources continued to be degraded by both Republican and Democrat governing bodies (I recall housing subsidies at one time were determined to be income and because of this many people saw their food stamp allowances reduced by alarming amounts. Trips to the food pantries became regular and necessary). The push to privatize all manner of services continued, while many services shrank they were broadcast through the systems of care as counter to what was being called “person centered care” and consumer self-determination… yes, it’s true, those who found themselves forced to navigate through these care models were being identified as consumers.

9.	The Medicaid expansion continued this boondoggle, despite the in-system propaganda that proclaimed it would be the savior of the constant funding woes of all aspects of the mental health system as it continued to be split into more privatized parts and slowly defunded, with more administrative staffing needs, and more clumsy inept communication issues due to the wide variety of individual service agencies and their divergent cultures each “consumer” was forced to navigate.

10.	Initially, when it appeared that the Medicaid expansion would be a reality in Michigan, once the legislative philosophical wrinkles were worked out in state legislative bodies, the mental health agencies were promised the expansion would finally solve all their monetary woes and they could even re-entertain thoughts of various wish lists that had been stored, unrealized, deep in the recesses of the community care model many years previously.  

11.	But first, two years before the state legislators finally okayed the Medicaid expansion, access to the states’ general fund by mental health agencies was prohibited. That money had been routinely employed to pay for “consumers” who came into the system with no insurance. As many of these devastating conditions of extreme thought and mood emerge in the late teens and early adulthood, a good proportion of those requiring treatment were uninsured or with limited insurance that covered very little of the expensive emergency care and medicines. For two years this prohibition ate into agency coffers. And a good proportion of those who required care were ineligible for Medicaid due to income accrued in the year prior to their loss of employment due to the most serious and disruptive symptom sets. Initially there was a bit of patience with this process from the agency administrators, having been promised that with the advent of the expansion, these problems would go away. But…

12.	Once the expansion was put into place, restrictions on who could access community mental health services were quite limiting and alarming. Almost completely opposite to the information circulated about the eventual impact of the expansion once it took hold. Many clients who had benefited from access to the general fund due to the limits of any insurance and/or income that made them ineligible for Medicaid were suddenly “cured”. Only the lowest income group, mostly those who relied on Supplemental Security Income (SSI, available to disabled people who never or minimally contributed to social security, amounting to less than 15K annually) remained eligible for the program in which I worked… the most intensive community service. As a result, about a third of the “consumers” we served were somewhat miraculously and unceremoniously “cured” and referred to less intensive services in the agency or other private psychiatric offices… often enough they were not accepted by those offices due to nature of their symptom sets and the limits of the range of services provided by those agencies, or merely those offices’ refusal to treat people with more complex presentations. We also lost one licensed professional staff person.


So… there you have it.  On wonders what is happening in these programs as they face the draconian Medicaid cuts that seem to be in the offing.

Toward the end of my work in mental health I often found myself and those I worked with feeling relief when one of our “consumers” ended up in jail due to symptom related behavior. There was no housing to speak of, and jail seemed to be less problematic, even safer, than homelessness. This I found I could not abide and was a primary reason I left the field, retired quite early. There was also the phenomenon, one that continues to this day, that results in waits of days for an emergency psychiatric bed to become available somewhere in the state, which entails waits of up to four or more days in an emergency room, and regular re-assessments that must be undertaken every 24 or 48 hours (if my memory serves) until a bed is found. Transportation to these   hospitals that were often hours away, was provided by ambulance of sheriff deputy. That in itself was a hardship for EMS service provision and county law enforcement in rural small-town areas. Consider this: one of the larger counties in my area, one of the largest in the state, only had one sheriff on duty most weekends. If there was a required transport to a psychiatric hospital bed, hours away, it represented significant costs and potentially dangerous absences in those communities.

Even if the entirety of the big beautiful bill now waiting for senate revision or approval is not passed, one can be sure that any expected act of appeasement or compromise will still make these situations much worse and more common. 

That this eventuality has been building for decades makes it entirely unsurprising to me, though it is tragic and terrible for the people I worked with to help battle through their extreme states of being over the thirty-five years I worked in the field. 

I’m afraid, as it is happening now and has been, the criminalization of mental illness will return us to an era of institutionalization of the mentally ill, only this time in prisons and jails, cellmates with their criminalized homeless neighbors, political protesters, and the people escaping violence and threat in their countries of origin. Adding even more participants to a lucrative system of privatized incarceration that already jails a greater percentage of the citizenry than any other country.

It is hard not to blame the elite along the entire narrow length of the spectrum of the post Citizen’s United political class for this catastrophic, cruel, dehumanization. Hard not to blame them for creating a society in which mental illness is a byproduct of their insistence on the profitization of every aspect of community. Mental illness that they, in turn, appear to be completely ignorant of or remain stubbornly unwilling to build communities in which support and even a kind of civic duty and love is readily distributed without qualms about costs… particularly when the elite have been able to live so gratuitously enriched by the same forces that impoverish so many others.

Are we that segregated? Has the entire project of neo conservatism and neo liberalism been largely about making a permanent class of the impoverished, the homeless, hungry and deeply disturbed invisible to the tiny proportion of the community that lives and dreams separately from those who are impacted most drastically by their insouciant neglect and hoarding?

I would like to think it is the product of an ignorance largely created and maintained by segregation, by utter unfamiliarity… but that is a hard sell, isn’t it?  How does one willingly build and participate in systems that more and more rest on a foundation of cruelty and the relegation of others to a state of the inhumane, and all the while remain innocent?