Postcards from the Fourth Reich (the concise version)

Postcards from the Fourth Reich (the concise version)

DRAFT

The following are excerpts from a true story.  It happened in America, in the second decade of the twenty-first century. 

* * *

When the lawyer at the agency heard my name, she knew all about my case.  “It is the police who wanted you in the hospital here,” she said.  “And you must not talk about it, because if you do, they will do it again, and then they will keep you for a long time.”

* * * 

I had recently returned from studying philosophy in France;  I had decided to become a writer; I am a person of strong opinions who considers himself a man of the left, though I was not then, and am not now, very much of, a political activist.  And the man I had been staying with, the editor of an online magazine that had published one of my film reviews, had tried and succeeded with a provocation in starting a fight.  He called the police, they listened to his story and not mine, and took me to the hospital.  I was not handcuffed but taken in the rear of an ambulance, while a fire fighter of about 35 told me an improbable story about studying in France and writing on the events of May 1968. 

When I first entered the Emergency Room, I was ordered by a young white male nurse at the desk to give a urine sample.  I had not drunk anything all day, so that proved difficult.  I returned to say that I could not.  He replied that if I did not give him the urine sample, they would insert a catheter to take it from me by force.  Obviously, he had been told that I was a disobedient person (is crime disobeying authority in America today?).  I call this medical violence: the use of a medical instrument to inflict bodily pain or injury. 

I was told a series of lies in order to engage my willing compliance.  Soon, not telling me that I was being incarcerated, a security guard demanded I surrender my laptop, which I had with me.  He did not say why, and no one told me what was actually going on.  When I refused on principle, he lunged forward and quickly grabbed the laptop from me, and I was swiftly thrown to the ground by a group of personnel who had emerged instantly out of nowhere.  They poked me all over, especially in my midsection and groin, and then held me up twisting my arms behind me.  My plea that I was not resisting them and they were hurting me was obviously taken as an indication of resistance authorizing them to continue and increase the pressure.  I angrily tried to speak to a female doctor, who returned my anger by making it clear that I was the bad guy and she would not hear what I wanted to say.  Then I was taken into the examination room. 

“You are speaking with an accent.  Are you not an American?”
I should perhaps have said that I had just recently returned from living in Europe, but I found his question so bizarre (for what did this have to do with his trying to decide whether to incarcerate me on medical grounds?  Was I being accused of an un-American personality? — a curious contemporary variant on the McCarthy’s era’s “un-American activities”?)

“ I am a U.S. citizen.”

At this, he stretched wide his arms and leaned forward.
“Well then, I welcome you to be American with me.”

I was stunned.  It was as if he were a petty Christ, saying, “Suffer the little children to come unto me.”  Show me yourself in full innocence, and open yourself so that I can penetrate you with my benevolent interventions. 

I said nothing.  He then said, “You are feeling anxiety.”  I mistook this for a question.  It was not.  In fact, I think he was cuing me to give him an account that would fit his judgment of me as in an emergency mental health crisis, which I would have been doing if I had detailed or tried to explain any feeling of anxiety.  

I denied it, undoubtedly a mistake.  My response was sincere; I said, I can certainly recognize when I am feeling anxious, and at the moment I would not say that.  I realized later, it wasn’t a question, but a statement. 
 
It was a mot d’ordre, an order-word.  I was being ordered to acknowledge, or think about, myself as anxious, and whatever I said would be written down and used in verification.

There is nothing of his questions to me, nothing of his behavior or that of any of the other professionals I encountered, in any of my medical records.  And of course, before entering the examination room, with no one else present, all of my possessions were taken from me, so that, among other things, I could not record, such as on my cell phone, what he was saying.  They do not record anything they or anyone else there does or says, only what you say or do in response, which is treated as if it simply comes from you and expresses your own deviance.  In this way, a patient’s speech and behavior will likely appear all the more irrational, since their context has been deleted. 

The anxiety he wanted to document would have expressed my concern about what they might do, and that would be attributed to me.  It would serve as explanation for the criminal disposition he thought he already knew I must have, since that is what a finding of mental illness, in what has already been framed as an individual state of emergency, amounts to.  I would be anxious about something unpleasant that might happen, and that would either be attributed to me, or that I would be presumed to feel the desire to do something criminal about.    

* * * 

The scene with the security guard and the others would later be repeated when I was punished for seeming to persist when I asked a nurse as usual for more writing paper, and she demurred momentarily.  Surrounded by a group of nurses, I was informed, “Yes, indeed, you do have the right to refuse treatment, but you must take this medication now.” 

In other words, this is a state of emergency, and you must obey our orders, or else we will hurt you.  I take a perverse pride in what I then did, though it surely was imprudent, given the way these people have patients like me framed as liable to violence, or what they will call by that name. 

I lunged forward rapidly and grabbed the cup of water from the hispanic female nurse’s hand, crumpled it, and retreated.  I did not touch anyone, or say anything else. 

The response was swift, though the nurse who pronounced me “violent” was uncertain enough about this judgment to repeat it three times.  She even repeated the argument: I had spilled water on the nurse’s trousers.  My “violence” was symbolic.  They understood that, as I did.  And they knew they had to respond in force.   

The main enforcer was a six-foot-six black man.  He threw me to the floor in a hand lock on my neck.  Then I was taken into what I call the punishment room.  There this man, from a distance, shouted at me with a rage that seemed to me a true hatred, to shut up.  Shut up or else what?  Would this man try to kill me?  When I complained about it later to an outpatient doctor, she dutifully wrote in my record that I had accused a black nurse of using violence, and so was obviously racist. 

A female nurse, also black, ordered me to run, pointing to the 15 foot long corridor extending from where we were standing to the wall.  She said, otherwise, I won’t be responsible for what I do.  Later she said to me, very nastily, so you say you are a writer; what have you written?  (You’re not a writer, you’re just a crazy loser.  That’s what we have got you here to prove.)   

* * *

On the unit, there was a tall, avuncular man, who let me know he was Jewish.  I will suppose that his speech was part of a role he was playing, and I will call him (I do not recall his name) the Kapo.  In a tone of admonition, as if he were taking me aside, to give me some wise counsel, for my own good, he decided to share with me some of his political opinions. 

First, it would have been better if the ‘Whites’ had won the Russian Civil War, because that would have kept things from getting really out of hand.  

Secondly, the Communists in Germany were to blame for the triumph of Hitler.  Because of course Nazism only came to power because the German (and international) bourgeoisie favored it over the Communist threat. 
 
Finally, one should be careful not to do what Julius Rosenberg did.  What do I have to do with that?  Of course, I said nothing.

* * * 

On another occasion, I was gaslighted with the participation of a roommate, a young black man who didn’t like me.  The story about how this happened is a tale in itself, and I have written about it elsewhere.  The roommate had earlier begun threatening me.  He said I said that hurt his feelings, and made it clear that for him this was a racial injustice.  He managed apparently to get a copy of the key to my room, and when I started running out of money to buy things (or do laundry), he started stealing my clean shirts.  I found them in his bedroom closet after he moved out, later.  Something had happened with my communications so that I apparently could not get emails to people, and at one point I noticed my computer being interfered with: I would type something, and some mysterious agency would cause what I typed to be rewritten to say something that I would not have wanted to say.  I was prevented from working (I am a freelancer who works at home on my computer), and eventually I had to leave and go somewhere, because I ran out of money.  By this time I had run out of food and of my medications, which help me sleep.  Someone wanted to get me in a position where they could say I was crazy.  

The remarkable thing is that I probably cannot tell the story of how all this happened without getting that reaction from most readers.  There is a huge prejudice in our society to the effect that certain kinds of things that can and do happen to people cannot be described, because people will just say, in an almost automatic gesture, that is paranoid, it’s impossible, the person must be crazy.  And then, of course, they deserve whatever the authorities tried to do to them, and in particular to be locked up by them on the (false) supposition that they are crazy.  I was gaslighted; whatever appearance of madness I may seem to have exhibited was manufactured, and it would become obvious in time, this was organized and managed by the NYPD.  That is who I have to thank for this.  

Shortly before my departure, I received a mysterious letter from my father.  The envelope had no postage stamp, and it was delivered by being slipped under the door of my bedroom.  Inside the envelope was no letter, but a brochure.  It was a brochure from my father’s retirement facility on advice for hard of hearing people.  The advice was to speak clearly and carefully, so that you will be understood.  On the brochure was a little yellow post-it note written in my father’s handwriting, saying: “This is not top secret; it’s just FYI.” I supposed that he was telling me what he thought I should do in the situation; he must have been told that I was in some trouble, and he thought to tell me to “communicate” to get whatever help I needed, but be very careful in doing so.  Later, I asked him about it; he did not remember.  But someone must have gotten him to send me that strange message, unlike any I had received from him ever before or since. 

I went to a hospital to seek renewal of my medication.  I had few other options.  I could not stay in my apartment, under the watch of the roommate who had apparently been enlisted as my jailer.  

It was a cold day in early January.  I was looking for a place to sit down and call my father, before finding myself at the hospital for lack of other options, I had walked into a bar only to see a big black man staring directly at me from a spot alongside the bar counter, and wearing vinyl gloves. 

I could not reach my dad.  I tried to call my cousin, and the phone line turned to static. 

* * * 

The “social worker” the officer in the ER directed me to was a man seated in this small room.  I entered and he closed the door.  He asked me if I had been abroad.  I said, yes, I had recently come back from living in France.  “There are some nice French restaurants in this city,” he said.  “Yes,” I affirmed.  “But dangerous.”  “Huh?”  “Well, I mean the terrorist threat.”  “What are you talking about, at French restaurants in New York?” 

This matter did not get clarified, and he passed to other topics.   I told him I wanted to see a psychiatrist (I was out of the medication that had been helping me sleep), and he replied that actually he would not advise that.  That, he said, “would be appropriate only in case of a life or death matter, and then it would be a matter of elimination.”

The officer calmly told me I should go to the police station in my precinct with the matter of the scary roommate.  He added that after it is over, “There will be a clean-up operation.”   

* * *

One of the men on the ward was apparently a maniac who said nothing but would periodically jump up suddenly in his bed to the position of an erect torso.  It was as if he were a wind-up instrument of some kind.  And presumably now he was ready, to do what I did not know, and he did not say.  There were no security cameras in the rooms.  I imagined a man like him could kill me with his hands, and think nothing of it, as if it were a just job he had been given to understand he should perform.  A maniac with some inexplicable rage. 

When I complained about the maniac, they moved me to a room with a black man who loudly protested that he would not share a room with a white man.  When I complained about that, they first put me in a room with four men, two speaking Arabic with each other, and one young black man with a Bob Marley t-shirt who just stared ahead, saying nothing, always looking at me when I was around, with a look that seemed to me a cold and studied hate.  When I complained again, the black nurse in charge gave me to understand that the fact that these men were black meant that if I were afraid of anyone, I’d be treated as the bad or fall guy.  She also threatened me with the isolation chamber, which was represented as the only other place to put me.  

* * * 

I was able to call my father on the phone while on the unit.  The previous time he had helped me get out; this time, he seemed to want to use the opportunity for his own purpose.  He was certainly angry at me, and kept trying to get me to see how much in the wrong I was, though he never said how or why he thought that.  I later figured that what it was was that bothered him was that in the run-up to my incarceration on medical pretenses, I had been unable to earn much money.  He was angry at me because of that. 

Family are often like this, and I suppose the authorities in these places know they can expect this from them.  My sister started telling me I was talking too fast, something she had never said before or since.  But they got me there as a crazy, and if you’re in that situation, your family, which doesn’t know any better, will very likely see it as an opportunity, wonder what is wrong with you, and get their own licks in while they can.  That may not be what they are consciously thinking, but it is what they may do.  

Whenever I was on the phone, the nursing staff would always harass me.  No sooner had I started talking then they were demanding I get off the phone.  Either I was talking too loud or too long, and they would tell me other people are waiting to use the phone, even though I had only been on the call for a few minutes, and there were two pay phones, the other one was not being used, and there was no line for the phone. 

Basically, in these places the nurses harass you; they seem to understand that that is their jobs, and the relationship between nurses and patients is typically adversarial, much like between prisoners and prison guards, whom they in fact very much resemble, though with a lesser degree of violence.  Maybe my “white privilege” is to have been incarcerated as a merely “potentially criminal” crazy person, since that is how psych patients are regarded from the outset; that is the understanding that psychiatrists and other mental health workers clearly have of their patients, and that prejudice drives most of their behavior towards them.  They are certainly not interested in helping you be more successful in your creative life; their business is abnormal psychology, which means that they are worried that their patients will commit crimes.  That is what it really means to be supposed “mentally ill” in America.  And that is why the nurses are trained to use violent force to subdue patients whose imagined violence they are constantly worried about.       

* * * 

In what turned out to be my next to last day there, the social worker, a young hispanic woman, gave me for the second time in a row a set of blank sheets of paper for writing, in response to my request.  This time it was fewer sheets than before; it was explained to me that they have austerity and paper is expensive, amounting to what I suppose is a fairly small amount of the $2,000/day that they would try to bill me.  When I got back to my room I noticed that there was writing on the other side.  It was a complete description of the procedures for involuntary admission to a long-term psychiatric facility in my father’s county in Virginia.  She had in fact also called him, I later learned, and ‘informed’ him that I might need that.  I took it as a threat.  Whatever I was being warned to do or not do, the sanction if I failed the test might be that I would be sent to what in effect would be a hospice.  Where, while fully in possession of my intellectual and ethical senses, I would be painstakingly cared for physically while I could only slowly die, since of course everything I have wanted to do in this life and all of my interests, and friends, and loves in the film and art world and elsewhere, would be taken from me.  

* * *

My medical records include the repeated declarations by the doctors who saw me, very briefly, that I was a “danger” to myself and others and “needed” incarceration.  They do not say in what way they thought me dangerous.  They do not cite any evidence.  They do not supply any reason.  Just the judgment.  Apparently their professional licensure makes their statements true by authority.  The rest of the records say a few things of supposed interest, not much, about me, but include no information relevant to the point about my supposedly violent character. 

* * * 

I handed her the papers, face up, and said, “I think you must have given me these by mistake.  For I do not need this.”  That is what I should have said.  

I was let go the next day.

* * *

I showed a draft of this story to a number of people.  What I found outrageous was that most people seem not to care.  Either (a) injustice in this country, or anywhere else, is so common, we don’t understand why anyone would be upset about it; or (b) because I mentioned the race of some of the people I encountered, the only meaning of this story — even if it is true — must be that I am a racist; or (c) they don’t like my writing style, and want to talk about that, while the actual injustice that I describe is to them of no account; or finally (d) being upset about what happened to me must mean that there is something wrong with me, and doubtless that I am crazy, and that justifies how they treated me. 

I sent this story to a prominent left-wing magazine, and they wrote back saying “We don’t think this piece is right for us.”  A friend said they probably figure I make black people who are nurses look bad.  My father read it and became vehement, angry that I seemed angry, and even worse, that the version of the story he wrote included too much of my own commentary, and therefore was too long; he was outraged not by what had happened to me, but because I did not like my literary style.     

I wondered about the possibility of something happening to a person, that has apparently been deliberately organized by a hostile party, in this case the police, presumably the NYPD’s anti-terrorism unit (whose targeting of me is of course an absurdity), and the events transpiring in such a way that they can assume that you will be unable to talk about, and get anyone to believe you.  People will just say: that is impossible, and you sound paranoid; therefore, you are crazy, and they were right to lock you up for that reason.  And you know: the situation was obviously staged at a number of points so that you will be unable to talk about it and be believed.  And anyone who knows about it will assume the truth of exactly their false claim about you: that you are crazy (and that that justifies their harassment, and their threats against your life and liberty).  I think their purpose was to scare me.  I am a writer, and I am on what I consider to be the moderate left.  They mentioned that I am a writer; it obviously is part of what they did not like about me.  Had they succeeded, and done what was ultimately threatened by that social worker, my career as a writer would be over.  This is what our government will do to people who criticize it.  

So shall we suppose that people who are angry about an injustice are the problem; the supposed injustice cannot be?  Who cares about injustice?  It happens all the time.  Not our problem.  

I wondered how Holocaust victims, or people who have been raped, tortured, or threatened by officials in their country’s government must feel if they try to tell their story and no one wants to hear it.  (I certainly felt violated.  I admit that my country is not as bad as Nazi Germany, by measures of quantity and extent, though I do doubt that that comparative moderation is really very much of a recommendation.).

This happened in America, in the second decade of the twentieth century.  I do not believe it happened because our government then was too much in the hands of liberal Democrats, or conservative Republicans.  Either way, they may think that political writers are terrorists.  Disagreement is violence; anger about injustice is insanity.  Welcome to America.   

Now, there is supposed to be something wrong with me because injustice makes me angry.  And I think that people could think that is even more of an outrage.  

My beloved father, who is right-wing, used to joke that, while he certainly believes that people should obey the authorities “because inmates cannot be permitted to run the institution” (society is a prison, and should be; I suppose because of original sin), he does not think that the people in charge of the country, even if they are soldiers, should throw rebellious youth to their deaths out of airplanes, as was done by the Argentine colonels in the 70s (people were, in fact, “eliminated,” just as that undercover cop, choosing his words carefully, had intimated).  We are civilized; we don’t go to such extremes.  

Ecclesiastes says there is a time for everything.  Is there a time or a place for a story such as mine?  I know what it is for people to not care.  Remember: Silence = Death? 

Worse, your silence can be useful in guaranteeing mine, which will be a retribution or a punishment.  That’s what they were threatening me with: being silenced by being sent to a hospital where I would be cared for but deprived of my liberty, contact with my friends and interests, and, of course, the ability to write.  There I would be able to do nothing except — die.   

It is not always wrong to be angry.  Sometimes it is wrong not to be.  Indifference to injustice is injustice carried to a higher power.