A Colossal Wreck (48 page)

On a less portentous level, a big moment for me was Ike Turner’s set, also in the Blues tent, a day earlier. Ike of course has been in disgrace ever since Tina’s descriptions of his violent abuses.

Ike was terrific. Everything was wonderfully tacky, from the one-size-fits-all maroon suits of his band, looking like fugitives from a bad early ’60s movie about Billy Haley, to Ike’s own sequined, white, purple, and gold jumpsuit like a hand-me down from a late-Elvis wardrobe. His current Tina-like is (though you wouldn’t learn this from Ike, sparse with acknowledgement of his fellow musicians) Audrey Madison, gorgeous and with a big voice. Also a Tina-type wig. Some in the crowd thought this tasteless and left. Ike claimed that he’d just discovered her in Memphis three months ago. Jeffrey St. Clair heard him say the same thing in Portland, Oregon, back in 2001.

Ike was a great musician as always, on guitar and piano. Of course he sang “Rocket 88,” deemed by many the first rock ’n’ roll song, released in 1951 (and immediately covered by Bill Haley). By the end the act had the initially cool crowd roaring. Ms. Audrey, with her big voice, tumultuous bosom and increasing confidence, had a lot to do with it, though you wouldn’t know this from the guy in the band who roared into the mike during Audrey’s huge finale, “Ike Turner! Ike Turner!”

May 27

Discussing an Iraqi faker touted by the Bush administration, I recently wrote that “In atrocity stories there are some things that don’t ring true, even when dealing with such well-credentialed butchers as Saddam and his sons. Take the story, subsequently identified as one concocted by a Western intelligence agency, that Uday had put some of his victims through a wood chipper. Anyone using these chippers
knows the damn things jam if inconvenienced by anything with a diameter larger than that of a stick of asparagus, let alone an Iraqi human, however scrawny. Uday’s chipper, whose origin can probably be traced to a scene in the movie
Fargo
, just didn’t pass muster, same as the incubator story from the first Gulf War, first identified in this column as intrinsically preposterous.”

I was being slightly frivolous about the wood chipper, but the letters poured in:

Mr. Cockburn,

I imagine this will be but one of many, but what kind of piss ant wood chipper did you train on? I routinely use a medium sized chipper that will take up to 2′ to 3′ branches of green wood, and I don’t think it would have much trouble with a person’s arm, or even a leg. (And by the way, commercial wood chippers rarely jam.) Now whether you could get a whole human through one, I don’t know, but I’ve heard of really sweet guys putting small animals through them just to watch the spray, so I suspect that if you did a bit of selective drawing and quartering you might eventually be able to do a whole body. But what mess. And what would be the point, even for someone like Uday? You’re right, the idea is farcical. But asparagus as an upper limit is off by several orders of magnitude.

Nicholas Dykema

Cleveland, Ohio

June 1

I hate surprise parties and now the scientific evidence is in. Surprise parties can kill. To put the matter in scientific terms: Emotional stress can precipitate severe, reversible left ventricular dysfunction in patients without coronary disease. Exaggerated sympathetic stimulation is probably central to the cause of this syndrome. Or, in the words of the press release from Johns Hopkins:

Researchers at Johns Hopkins have discovered that sudden emotional stress can also result in severe but reversible heart muscle weakness that mimics a classic heart attack. Patients with this condition, called stress cardiomyopathy but known colloquially as “broken heart” syndrome, are often misdiagnosed with a massive heart attack when, indeed, they have suffered from a days-long surge in adrenalin (epinephrine) and other stress hormones that temporarily “stun” the heart …

The research team found that some people may respond to sudden, overwhelming emotional stress by releasing large amounts of catecholamines (notably adrenalin and noradrenalin, also called epinephrine and norepinephrine) into the blood stream, along with their breakdown products and small proteins produced by an excited nervous system. These chemicals can be temporarily toxic to the heart, effectively stunning the muscle and producing symptoms similar to a typical heart attack, including chest pain, fluid in the lungs, shortness of breath and heart failure.

Of course, many rituals in our society have a furtive homicidal intent, most notably those fraught sessions known as family reunions. Grandpa and grandma drive to the event, get mildly looped, head for home and are wiped out on the Interstate by a semi when grandpa pulls out of the rest stop. Father keels over when he opens the front door to see a plump faced man vaguely resembling the daughter who left home all those years ago saying in a throaty voice, “Hi, dad.”

So please, no surprises.

July 9

The terrorists’ desire is to show the enemy precisely that they—the terrorists—are sane, but implacable. When the Conrad-era French anarchist Émile Henry carried a cooking pot filled with explosive and 120 bullets into the café Terminus near the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris in February, 1894, touched his cigar to a fifteen-second fuse and strolled out, his plan was to kill ordinary, relatively humble people—shopkeepers, clerks and salesgirls—having a beer and listening to the band.

“Not ‘innocent,’ ” he claimed later. “These beer-drinkers, petty bourgeois with a steady salary in their pockets, are the ones that always line themselves up on the side of the powerful, ignoring the problems of the workers. They hate the poor more than the rich do!” Many anarchists promptly repudiated him. “At least have the courage of your crimes, gentlemen of the bourgeoisie,” Henry declared to
the court that condemned him to the guillotine, “and agree that our reprisals are fully legitimate.” Reprisals for what? “Are these not innocent victims? Children dying slowly of anemia in the slums … Women turning pallid in sweatshops … Old people turned into machines for production all their lives and then cast on the garbage dump and the workhouse when their strength is exhausted.”

July 10

A jury has found against a South Carolina doctor who referred a patient for electro-shock treatment that left her permanently impaired. The patient, Peggy S. Salters, is a sixty-year-old former psychiatric nurse. She was subjected to thirteen electroshocks within the span of nineteen days. The jury awarded her $635,177.

The jury found that her loss of thirty years of memory and cognitive impairment—which are demonstrable symptoms of brain damage—was due to ECT. Maybe this decision will give shrinks pause before they send the next poor soul off to get battered on the head with an electric club. A press release from Linda Andre, President of Committee for Truth in Psychiatry (CTIP) adds that 100,000 patients in the US undergo electroshock annually—many against their will.

As Andre writes, “ECT is dominated by medical cowboys who push the limits of intensity of electric shock as they please. In his deposition (May 24, 2005) in Peggy Salters’s case, Dr. Fink defended the administration of thirteen intensive ECT treatments in nineteen days stating: ‘There are no absolute limits on the low side or to the high side if you’re going to give a patient a treatment … I have personally treated patients twice a day. And there was a time when I gave patients eight treatments in one sitting, you know, on an experiment [!!] that we did many years ago. So, yes, I have treated patients with eight seizures in a morning … It was called multiple monitored ECT. It was a government-supported project in an effort to find out if we can speed up the response.’ ”

Wouldn’t you describe Fink’s tone here as one of ghoulish glee?

Leonard Frank outlined the economics of ECT succinctly in testimony: “ECT is a money-maker. An in-hospital ECT series can
cost anywhere from $50,000–75,000. Using a low figure of 100,000 Americans who are electroshocked annually, most of whom are covered by private or government insurance, ECT brings in $5 billion a year. ECT promoters are its stakeholders—they include device manufacturers, hospitals and practitioners.”

The malpractice verdict was against the referring doctor, Eric Lewkowicz. The jury could not return a verdict against the other two doctors because of one holdout vote for acquittal. The hospital settled its liability for an undisclosed sum early in the trial.

Former patients have reported devastating, permanent amnesia and cognitive impairment since ECT was first invented in 1938, but that has not hindered the treatment’s popularity with doctors. The first lawsuit for ECT amnesia,
Marilyn Rice v. John Nardini
, was brought exactly thirty years ago, and dozens of suits have followed. While there have been a few settlements, including one for half a million dollars, no former patient has won a case until now.

In fact, defiant ghoulishness seems to be a stock in trade of the ECT lobby. “For forty years,” Dr. Milton Greenblatt told a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Miami in 1976, “the therapeutic value of convulsive therapy has been recognized. My personal recollections go back to 1939 shortly after the introduction of metrazol when, as a medical student, I was allowed to inject metrazol into chronically ill patients at Worcester State Hospital—against their terrified and frightened resistance, which, I might add, was overpowered by several burly attendants. In those days we required only the approval of next of kin for the procedure, and had few qualms about proceeding against the patient’s resistance.”

Greenblatt goes on to describe how ECT was initially hailed as a marvelous substitute for metrazol, since there were no “awful preseizure sensations” and patients “were fortunate to have a period of amnesia after the treatment.” It’s like saying bleeding via leeches was a big step forward from opening a patient’s vein and having his blood splash all over the bed.

The 1950s found Dr. Greenblatt overseeing research into LSD, in a program funded by the CIA.

August 24

These are triumphant hours for Pat Robertson. His standing as America’s senior ayatollah is becoming firmer as Billy Graham and even Jerry Falwell yield the prime-time pulpit to the smooth-tongued maestro of the Christian Coalition.

A decade ago CNN would sooner have given half an hour’s air time to the leader of North Korea, but last week Wolf Blitzer poked a stick through the bars, and nodded respectfully as Robertson raved on about the End Time:

BLITZER: You see what’s going on in the world today in Pakistan, in India, Afghanistan, an earthquake, maybe 20,000 people dead, maybe twice that number; we don’t have a count. Hurricanes in the United States and around the world, a tsunami a little bit less than a year or so ago in Southeast Asia. What’s happening?

ROBERTSON: Wolf, I might say you’re very perceptive to pick up the key in this. If you read back in the Bible, the letter of the apostle Paul to the church of Thessalonia, he said that in the latter days before the end of the age that the Earth would be caught up in what he called the birth pangs of a new order. And for anybody who knows what it’s like to have a wife going into labor, you know how these labor pains begin to hit.

I don’t have any special word that says this is that, but it could be suspiciously like that. These things are starting to hit with amazing regularity.

Blitzer wagged his head like a mental hospital attendant placating a noisy inmate, and then poked his stick through the bars again:

BLITZER: But what does that mean? Explain that in more simplistic terms so I can understand what you’re driving at?

ROBERTSON: Well, what was called the blessed hope of the Bible is that one day Jesus Christ would come back again, start a whole new era, that this world order as we know it would change into something that would be wonderful that we’d call the millennium. And before that good time comes there will be some difficult days and they will
be likened to what a woman goes through in labor just before she brings forth a child.

More placatory nods from the hospital attendant:

BLITZER: So you think we’re at that moment right now perhaps?

ROBERTSON: It’s possible, Wolf. I don’t have any special revelation to say it is, but the Bible does indicate such a time will happen in the end of time. And could this be it? It might be.

BLITZER: All right. Let’s move on to something that we perhaps can understand a little bit better, which would be Harriet Miers.

After chiding James (“Focus on the Family”) Dobson for hyperbolic language, Robertson closed out the interview a few minutes later by claiming that Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez, whose assassination he had recently recommended, was building a nuclear arsenal and had sent Osama bin Laden a million dollars after September 11.

The sobering part of all this is that all the same words could have come out the mouth of the President, whose relationship to Jesus and expectations of the End Time are probably more intense than Robertson’s, since the latter is a seasoned professional, rather than an inspired amateur.

Reagan used to talk about the End Time equably too, once stressing that it could occur in “our lifetime.” Journalists like Blitzer should raise the issue more frequently, both to ayatollahs of the Apocalypse like Robertson and to the President. It would give press conferences a certain gloomy zest.

The only mystery is why, given his Apocalyptic expectations, Robertson fusses about the threat of Chávez and calls for his murder by the CIA. He surely cannot think that the Venezuelan leader will be spared the Lord’s coming wrath, when the saved rise up in the great celestial spiral and the damned are consigned to the pit. Why ask the CIA to do what the Almighty will soon take care of?

August 27

Each time some loudmouth calls for the CIA to murder an inconvenient foreign leader, the tut-tuts of the State Department get more and more casual. When Pat Robertson called a few weeks ago for a CIA hit on Venezuela’s Chávez, the best the State Department could manage was a softly murmured “inappropriate.” Maybe it’s finally being acknowledged that, just like torture, assassination has long been standard US policy.