Sunday, September 20, 2009
Time for Titicut Two
Reprinting something I wrote three years ago:
With the Phillip Paul incident focusing our attention on the total incompetence of today's insane asylums and the total failure of deinstitutionalization, this would be an excellent time for a new documentary. Won't happen, of course, because the joyfully deceased Emperor Teddy was a major leader in the movement toward 'human rights' for lunatics, and no journalist will ever question a movement that Emperor Teddy supported. ¶ 9:41 AM
This still points to a significant problem that our long-term Leninist infiltration has generously given us. Over the last forty years, the push for 'human rights' and 'equality' has moved crazy people out of institutions and onto the streets.
I remember seeing the documentary 'Titicut Follies' (which launched the whole campaign of deinstitutionalization) when it first came out in 1967, and I remember being appropriately, um, shocked by the terrible way the inmates in that Massachusetts asylum were treated.
In the ensuing years, I mostly lived in the lower-class neighborhoods where the 'freed' crazies lived, and knew several of them. I watched them suffer, watched them cause suffering for the non-crazy neighbors, and watched them tie the police in knots, because even when fully crazy the 'freed' inmates know their special privileges forward and backward.
'Titicut Follies' was shown just once in recent years; I think it was 1992 on PBS. I watched it then and was inversely shocked. By comparison to the folks I've seen and known on the streets, the schizies in the 1967 asylum were obviously happier, healthier, safer and more comfortable.
Moreover, those inmates weren't creating confusion for law enforcement. It's an unfortunate fact that some crazies have a compulsion to imitate violent events they see on the news. As in pouring out white powder in public places when anthrax is in the news, or driving forcefully onto a ferry with firecrackers in your car when terrorist threats to ferries are in the news.
Presumably somebody at PBS must have realized that the documentary now served an inverse purpose, which explains why they never repeated the film again.
With the Phillip Paul incident focusing our attention on the total incompetence of today's insane asylums and the total failure of deinstitutionalization, this would be an excellent time for a new documentary. Won't happen, of course, because the joyfully deceased Emperor Teddy was a major leader in the movement toward 'human rights' for lunatics, and no journalist will ever question a movement that Emperor Teddy supported. ¶ 9:41 AM
