Earlier this month, supporters of flimsily convicted double-'murderer' Scott Watson held a number of rallies up and down the country in support of his innocence. What surprised me was not the fact that people were prepared to turn out on a cold and dreary mid-winter's afternoon to protest the outcome of a nearly two decades old court case (the evidence, after all, is reasonably clear-cut that several somethings went wrong with Watson's conviction); but rather the image which stole much of the media attention from the marches - that of a seriously and sulphurically vitriolic counter-protester shouting and swearing at Watsonites in opposition to their cause.
I penned an article on the subject a few days prior, and the reaction it got was much the same - dozens of softly positive responses that the case against Watson simply didn't stack up ... and the occasional adamantly convinced accusatory personage dead-set and dead-convinced that Watson was, indeed, the killer.
What underpins these occasional anti-iconoclasts is twofold. First up, that certain people become absolutely hidebound in their opinions when they feel challenged in them (a regrettable fact of political psychology which makes rational, reasonable pugilistic discussion a vastly overrated tool of public discourse); and second, a growing unease in the minds of many at the very idea that we might live in a society and a situation wherein the Justice System *can* get things quite severely wrong - potentially with fairly active police conspiracy and coagulation assisting to bring about the perverse outcome in question.
Particularly in scenarios such as Watson's wherein the only real way for the case to be re-examined with any serious chance of a different outcome eventuating is to have the Government of the day fairly directly intervene ... it's not hard to see why Elite-intransigence as to the system they preside over being potentially iniquitous represents a fundamental barrier to hoped-for justice occurring.
But that's just the thing. We've already seen in several high-profile cases that the Police and Courts CAN and DO get it wrong from time to time. Teina Pora stands out as a substantive modern example of both in action. Earlier, Arthur Allan Thomas was something of the Ur-Instance of same - except in his case with fairly active Police malfeasance in the planting of evidence to secure a manifestly false and repugnant conviction.
Instructively, in Arthur Allan Thomas' case, despite his conviction in two trials he was eventually exonerated when then-Prime Minister Sir Robert Muldoon (who had taken a personal interest in Thomas' proceedings) ordered an inquiry which eventually uncovered the manifest deficiencies in the case and conviction against him.
But the fate of a man facing potential life imprisonment ought not hang largely if not entirely upon the mere fact of whether or not a Prime Minister is favourably disposed towards him!
Whether in Thomas' case, or the more recent set of proceedings surrounding David Bain, it would appear that in many cases the only thing standing between a potentially flawed or faulty conviction and the utter finality of a lengthy jail-term is the forthright and strident efforts of Concerned Citoyens prepared to do a considerable amount of heavy lifting - both legalistic, journalistic, and financial - in order to fight their chosen man's corner against the overwhelming might of the State. If you're lucky ... you get a crusading All Black or other high-profile celebrity as your advocate-in-chief. If you're not - relative obscurity and maybe a few talkback callers shall comprise the decidedly rag-tag forces available to you.
There has to be another way.
And in the United Kingdom, there is.
There, they have something called the Criminal Cases Review Commission set up exactly and explicitly for this purpose.
Since its inception in the late 1990s, the Commission has referred literally hundreds of serious criminal cases back to the English judicial system, with the vast majority of these (somewhere around seventy percent) having a substantially changed outcome due to the resultant appeals. Obviously, in New Zealand, with our relatively smaller population, the numbers will hopefully be substantively lower. Although even so, it wasn't that long ago that former High Court Judge Sir Thomas Thorpe estimated that as many as twenty innocent men could presently be wrongfully imprisoned.
So why don't we have such an independent review body here at present?
Well, part of the argument against having one is that many people view the New Zealand judicial system as being sufficiently above reproach when it comes to corruption, incompetence or simple intransigence that such an alteration would be simply unnecessary. This is a dangerous attitude to have, particularly in light of a number of well-publicized instances of judicial, police and prosecutorial mishandling at every level up to and including the New Zealand Supreme Court. The small and highly interconnected nature of the upper echelons of New Zealand Society can also make it far harder to establish true independence of verdict on appeal cases - you're almost inevitably going to have at least some degree of connection to other actors who've had a substantive influence over the course of proceedings elsewhere in the community or legal system.
This represented a somewhat smaller problem back when New Zealanders still had access to the Privy Council located over in England (which potentially helps to explain why David Bain managed to get a better semblance of justice by going there rather than relying in exclusivity upon the New Zealand system); however since we've ditched that for the far more localized NZ Supreme Court, that avenue is obviously now lost to us.
In its absence, we have the situation as it presently stands with Watson. A lack of serious judicial options to pursue, and high hopes for political intervention to be brought about by mounting public pressure.
I wrote the article about Watson whose response kicked off this thought-pattern in large part because I wished to add to that pressure. Even a cursory examination of the evidence in Watson's case reveals sufficiently large holes in the official narrative to be able to sail a two-masted 40-foot ketch through.
But while it's great to see a growing and mounting sense of momentum behind efforts to overturn the Watson verdict, the fact remains that a potentially innocent man has languished behind bars for a period of almost twenty years. In this instance, as with a number of others, quite a length of time and an insurmountable amount of suffering could have been largely avoided had there been an alternative pathway towards exoneration and review of problematic cases.
It therefore seems, particularly in light of the National-led government's far more risk-averse approach to political involvement in the judicial process (c.f then-Justice Minister Judith Collins forum-shopping for a favourable report which would avoid the fallout associated with compensating David Bain), that the force of public opposition to the status quo cannot simply be channeled into individual cases if we are to genuinely seek change.
Instead, alongside advocacy for individuals, there must also be a substantive push to change the system itself by adding an independent and politically/socially/establishmentarily unencumbered review body capable of doing what hitherto only Prime Ministers and Privy Councils have been able.
That is - fixing the mistakes which fairly inevitably crop up from time to time in an imperfect justice system administered by and catering to actors and arbiters who are ultimately only human, all too human.
People-power is great, but we deserve to live in a system which doesn't require such heavy weighing-in of public opinion in order to secure the right outcomes.
Monday, August 22, 2016
Sunday, August 14, 2016
Sex, Drugs & Electoral Rolls Part XVIII: On The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy To Take Back Auckland
The late, great Terry Pratchett had a number of choice things to say about conspiracy theories. One of the best was a slightly-skeptical sounding extended paragraph of prose which basically boils down to asking the key question: if governments are generally questionably competent pretty much everywhere else ... then how do they manage to keep the really big stuff - like the existence of aliens - such a successfully guarded secret.
This is a fairly legitimate question, and one which we can equally apply to just about all areas of public life when some great, vast and leviathanic Conspiratorial Agenda (tm) is implied to both exist and be running a fairly large swathe of our political affairs.
In the New Zealand Experience, at least - and particularly as applies the quagmitic morass of Local Body Politics - there are often two answers.
First is, that when it comes to keeping grand and sweeping secrets ... "They" don't. Most of the Cthulhean hidden agendas and clandestine initiatives of our recent past have, eventually and one way or another, come out. We know, for instance, that Roger Douglas conspired with business elites to crash the value of the New Zealand Dollar in order to make his hard-right economic reforms all but inevitable. We're well aware that the Government uses an ineluctable combination of the state's intelligence services and pliant, pliable media sources to attempt to embarrass or otherwise discredit political opponents. Shadowy American media executives met up with our Prime Minister to demand wholesale changes to our labour laws. One of the nation's best-read political bloggers was caught out red-handed working with members of a failed Mayoralty campaign to attempt to force the occupant of the largest executive office in the country without its own army to prematurely resign. The Office of the Prime Minister refuses to supply compelling information to prove (or otherwise) that John Key isn't a shape-shifting reptilian overlord.
I could go on at some length, but you get the idea.
The general response and reaction to any of the above (except that last one) of semi-sullen or actively-aggressive indifference from the body politik brings us on to the second way by which these sorts of overwhelming conspiracies are kept in the main 'submerged' from view within the public consciousness.
This means that when information which reveals what's *actually* going on in our country seemingly inevitably comes to light ... the impact of such disclosures is so sufficiently diffused that it hardly seems to make any serious sort of difference.
Consider: did the Fourth Labour Government find itself rolled in 1987 for daring to implement a secret and scurrilous economic agenda for the previous three years? How about voters failing to punish National in 1993 for harboring a clandestine cabal responsible for Ruthanasia in direct violation of their electoral promises in 1990. In both cases, nothing happened. If there was a perceived gun held to the head of the governments of the day ... when the polling-trigger was pulled, all that happened was a small flag emerged bearing the legend "Bang!".
A similar thing's happened with each conspiracy that the present party of Nats has been caught out in. Dirty Politics, trading laws for flashy foreign elites, and conspiring to bring down what had otherwise been a reasonably popular Mayor ... in all of these instances, the only people harmed were the intended targets - not the blue-hued perpetrators.
But at least in local body politics, something may finally be changing.
Consider the instructive example of Auckland Future. I'll cover the highly entertaining fortunes of this National-aligned local body ticket in a future feature piece, but the basic run-down is that a rebranding exercise for the Nat-ACT satellite group "Citizens and Ratepayers" (or, as it's now known, the slightly more cuddly-sounding "Communities & Residents") turned into a somewhat frenetic splinter-group effort as the result of competing-faction powerstruggles inside its parent National Party.
The net effect of this has been arguable utter electoral chaos on the (center-)right here in Auckland going into the 2017 Local Body Elections. First you had the complete lack of co-ordination which saw both National-aligned tickets seeking to stand competing candidates in the same tight battleground electorates. Then Auckland Future got a bit careless/sloppy and announced it was standing C&R stalwart Christine Fletcher as one of its own candidates. Needless to say, this came as questionable and unwelcome news to Fletcher, who moved to clarify her longstanding C&R allegiance. It is presumably the mark of a highly questionable campaign ticket when 'victory' apparently consists of contesting candidates rather than constituencies.
Matters continued to complicate as The Hunt was announced for a right-wing Mayoral candidate to take on the formerly Labour-aligned Phil Goff. Mark Thomas, an ill-starred National candidate in the 1996 General Election immediately put his hand up. He got no support from his erstwhile comrades, and appears to be running a principled, highly competent independent bid for Mayor. John Palino, the National-backed candidate from 2013 is also attempting a comeback, as a sort of Ghost of Meddling Past. Victoria Crone, meanwhile, a businesswoman with an evident dearth of political experience, found herself in confederation with National Party power-broker Michelle Boag (herself one of the plenipotentiate driving forces behind Auckland Future ... and, in an earlier life, John Key) to try and take the mantle of "official" Right Wing candidate.
What this effectively created was arguably even worse for the Right than the three-headed counter-race it initially appeared. Crone appeared to have a bit of a political tantrum at anyone else daring to contest her anointed territory, and started threatening to refuse to turn up to debates which also gave Thomas a panel speaking slot. In other words, the Right Wing was beginning to actively pour far more energy into savaging its own ideological cohorts than it was into seriously contesting likely electoral juggernaut Phil Goff's comparatively straight line to the Mayoral Chains.
The Shadowy Tendrils of National, in other words, are all tangled up - rather than fixed about our collective throats.
This worrying (or, dependent upon your perspective, highly enjoyable and entertaining) trend has continued with the finalization of nominations. Now, not only are Auckland Future candidates going head to head with C&R candidates in a number of wards ... but thanks to an arguably imbecilic Auckland Future errant local board contender filling out the wrong nomination form, Auckland Future is now running against ITSELF for a single Council position in the Maungakiekie-Tamaki ward. Ex-United Future, then-National-C&R, now-National-Auckland-Future candidate Denise Krum narrowly took the seat with a tight margin of 900 in 2013. With this seat now a three way contest - and two of those contending for it from Krum's own ticket - it would seem fair and safe to say that the Natellites' already-precarious position in local body politics may very well become almost entirely untenable.
This is a pleasing irony, given Auckland Future was set up in the first place for the explicit purpose of aiding and availing National in taking back the control of Auckland's local democracy which it haltingly lost after instituting the changed apparatus of the SuperCity (which, itself, was created and empowered for much the same reason in 2010).
All of this together leads me to a potentially uncomfortable realization. We can't rely upon the righteous wrath of voters to recoil in anger against an exposed conspiratorial agenda at the polls. This has not historically worked. Instead, the best antidote to conspiracy - the thing which appears to keep the clandestine, smoke-filled back-rooms of this country in at least somewhat of a check - is, perhaps surprisingly, other clandestine operations stepping on each other's toes. Indeed, one could argue that this is exactly how electoral party politics appears to work to begin with.
I've previously heard it said that much of what happens in New Zealand Politics (or, for that matter, politics the world over) is fairly invariably the direct and calculated result of clandestine conspiracy. Perhaps this is accurate. Maybe voters and general phenomenal chaos also get a say.
Either way, the definitive thing about houses of cards and tiddlywink towers of Babel is that fairly inevitably, when they reach a certain height and complexity, they implode.
That appears to be what we're starting to witness as applies the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy To Take Back Auckland.
This is a fairly legitimate question, and one which we can equally apply to just about all areas of public life when some great, vast and leviathanic Conspiratorial Agenda (tm) is implied to both exist and be running a fairly large swathe of our political affairs.
In the New Zealand Experience, at least - and particularly as applies the quagmitic morass of Local Body Politics - there are often two answers.
First is, that when it comes to keeping grand and sweeping secrets ... "They" don't. Most of the Cthulhean hidden agendas and clandestine initiatives of our recent past have, eventually and one way or another, come out. We know, for instance, that Roger Douglas conspired with business elites to crash the value of the New Zealand Dollar in order to make his hard-right economic reforms all but inevitable. We're well aware that the Government uses an ineluctable combination of the state's intelligence services and pliant, pliable media sources to attempt to embarrass or otherwise discredit political opponents. Shadowy American media executives met up with our Prime Minister to demand wholesale changes to our labour laws. One of the nation's best-read political bloggers was caught out red-handed working with members of a failed Mayoralty campaign to attempt to force the occupant of the largest executive office in the country without its own army to prematurely resign. The Office of the Prime Minister refuses to supply compelling information to prove (or otherwise) that John Key isn't a shape-shifting reptilian overlord.
I could go on at some length, but you get the idea.
The general response and reaction to any of the above (except that last one) of semi-sullen or actively-aggressive indifference from the body politik brings us on to the second way by which these sorts of overwhelming conspiracies are kept in the main 'submerged' from view within the public consciousness.
This means that when information which reveals what's *actually* going on in our country seemingly inevitably comes to light ... the impact of such disclosures is so sufficiently diffused that it hardly seems to make any serious sort of difference.
Consider: did the Fourth Labour Government find itself rolled in 1987 for daring to implement a secret and scurrilous economic agenda for the previous three years? How about voters failing to punish National in 1993 for harboring a clandestine cabal responsible for Ruthanasia in direct violation of their electoral promises in 1990. In both cases, nothing happened. If there was a perceived gun held to the head of the governments of the day ... when the polling-trigger was pulled, all that happened was a small flag emerged bearing the legend "Bang!".
A similar thing's happened with each conspiracy that the present party of Nats has been caught out in. Dirty Politics, trading laws for flashy foreign elites, and conspiring to bring down what had otherwise been a reasonably popular Mayor ... in all of these instances, the only people harmed were the intended targets - not the blue-hued perpetrators.
But at least in local body politics, something may finally be changing.
Consider the instructive example of Auckland Future. I'll cover the highly entertaining fortunes of this National-aligned local body ticket in a future feature piece, but the basic run-down is that a rebranding exercise for the Nat-ACT satellite group "Citizens and Ratepayers" (or, as it's now known, the slightly more cuddly-sounding "Communities & Residents") turned into a somewhat frenetic splinter-group effort as the result of competing-faction powerstruggles inside its parent National Party.
The net effect of this has been arguable utter electoral chaos on the (center-)right here in Auckland going into the 2017 Local Body Elections. First you had the complete lack of co-ordination which saw both National-aligned tickets seeking to stand competing candidates in the same tight battleground electorates. Then Auckland Future got a bit careless/sloppy and announced it was standing C&R stalwart Christine Fletcher as one of its own candidates. Needless to say, this came as questionable and unwelcome news to Fletcher, who moved to clarify her longstanding C&R allegiance. It is presumably the mark of a highly questionable campaign ticket when 'victory' apparently consists of contesting candidates rather than constituencies.
Matters continued to complicate as The Hunt was announced for a right-wing Mayoral candidate to take on the formerly Labour-aligned Phil Goff. Mark Thomas, an ill-starred National candidate in the 1996 General Election immediately put his hand up. He got no support from his erstwhile comrades, and appears to be running a principled, highly competent independent bid for Mayor. John Palino, the National-backed candidate from 2013 is also attempting a comeback, as a sort of Ghost of Meddling Past. Victoria Crone, meanwhile, a businesswoman with an evident dearth of political experience, found herself in confederation with National Party power-broker Michelle Boag (herself one of the plenipotentiate driving forces behind Auckland Future ... and, in an earlier life, John Key) to try and take the mantle of "official" Right Wing candidate.
What this effectively created was arguably even worse for the Right than the three-headed counter-race it initially appeared. Crone appeared to have a bit of a political tantrum at anyone else daring to contest her anointed territory, and started threatening to refuse to turn up to debates which also gave Thomas a panel speaking slot. In other words, the Right Wing was beginning to actively pour far more energy into savaging its own ideological cohorts than it was into seriously contesting likely electoral juggernaut Phil Goff's comparatively straight line to the Mayoral Chains.
The Shadowy Tendrils of National, in other words, are all tangled up - rather than fixed about our collective throats.
This worrying (or, dependent upon your perspective, highly enjoyable and entertaining) trend has continued with the finalization of nominations. Now, not only are Auckland Future candidates going head to head with C&R candidates in a number of wards ... but thanks to an arguably imbecilic Auckland Future errant local board contender filling out the wrong nomination form, Auckland Future is now running against ITSELF for a single Council position in the Maungakiekie-Tamaki ward. Ex-United Future, then-National-C&R, now-National-Auckland-Future candidate Denise Krum narrowly took the seat with a tight margin of 900 in 2013. With this seat now a three way contest - and two of those contending for it from Krum's own ticket - it would seem fair and safe to say that the Natellites' already-precarious position in local body politics may very well become almost entirely untenable.
This is a pleasing irony, given Auckland Future was set up in the first place for the explicit purpose of aiding and availing National in taking back the control of Auckland's local democracy which it haltingly lost after instituting the changed apparatus of the SuperCity (which, itself, was created and empowered for much the same reason in 2010).
All of this together leads me to a potentially uncomfortable realization. We can't rely upon the righteous wrath of voters to recoil in anger against an exposed conspiratorial agenda at the polls. This has not historically worked. Instead, the best antidote to conspiracy - the thing which appears to keep the clandestine, smoke-filled back-rooms of this country in at least somewhat of a check - is, perhaps surprisingly, other clandestine operations stepping on each other's toes. Indeed, one could argue that this is exactly how electoral party politics appears to work to begin with.
I've previously heard it said that much of what happens in New Zealand Politics (or, for that matter, politics the world over) is fairly invariably the direct and calculated result of clandestine conspiracy. Perhaps this is accurate. Maybe voters and general phenomenal chaos also get a say.
Either way, the definitive thing about houses of cards and tiddlywink towers of Babel is that fairly inevitably, when they reach a certain height and complexity, they implode.
That appears to be what we're starting to witness as applies the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy To Take Back Auckland.
Monday, August 8, 2016
Sex, Drugs & Electoral Rolls Part XVII: Mental Health & Politics: Tarred, Feathered & Straightjacketed
Earlier this week, I encountered a piece on the Washington Post which purported to attempt to explain the behavior, rhetoric and general political persona of one Donald Trump as being the result of a traumatic brain injury. This joins previous pieces from both the same outlet and others which have sought to psychoanalyze from behind a keyboard the man who could possibly be the next President, and explain away Trump's eccentricities or extravigancies as being the result of one or more cohabiting personality disorders.
This matters. And not just because of the obvious potential impacts of associating all concussion sufferers - or a swathe of personality disorder people - with the onerous burden of political and temperamental association with Donald Trump.
The burden of stigma is something which just about everybody who's a bit "not right in the head" for whatever reason comes into contact with eventually. It can lead to people eschewing seeking a proper diagnosis and treatment due to serious (and occasionally quite justified) concerns that having an official three-letter-acronym or whatever after their name on their medical file can detrimentally affect their future life-choices or career.
One area in which this is often particularly pronounced is in that field of human endeavour known as Politics.
The reasons for this ought to be plainly apparent.
People already presume that at least half their elected representatives are unofficial sociopaths anyway, so tend not to have any especial overwhelming desire to place anybody of more obviously questionable sanity or faculties anywhere near the levers of political power. This goes doubly so for a position - such as the one Trump's vying for - wherein one of those levers comes in the form of a big red button capable of unleashing nuclear armageddon. (Although the fact that masses of voters in both the UK and US somewhat inexplicably chose to re-elect Tony Blair and George W. Bush respectively despite revelations that the voice of the divine was apparently directly dictating Atlanticist foreign policy decisions to each - in specia the impetus to invade a certain oil-rich Middle Eastern country ... has me scratching my head. Not so much at the alleged sanity of these heads of government, but at their respective voter-bases in each country as well. Perhaps voters really ARE more afraid of the labels of mental illness than they are of the symptoms)
The issue with what is happening when journalists and columnists patently inaccurately "diagnose" in typeset Trump (and really, how on earth can you properly psychiatrically assess somebody from afar through media interviews and appearances while never being alone or perhaps even in the same room together) is that it makes it far harder for persons grappling with genuine mental illnesses or cerebral injuries to be taken seriously in public life.
We already, some decades ago, witnessed exactly what happens when a candidate for high office has their mental health history become a matter of public record. The brilliant young U.S. Senator Thomas Eagleton remains a cautionary tale. During the 1972 election buildup, Eagleton acquired the unenviable honour of holding perhaps the shortest Vice Presidential candidacy in American history at eighteen days. (I say "perhaps", because earlier this year Ted Cruz's VP pick Carly Fiorina managed to eclipse Eagleton's record by holding the position for a mere week. Although she may potentially not count, as unlike Eagleton, she wasn't actually on a major party ticket at that point - but rather only a presumptive in the unlikely situation that Cruz won the Republican nomination for President)
The reason why Eagleton found himself being dropped faster than high-explosive ordnance in the skies above Vietnam?
He'd suffered from periodic bouts of depression, and had previously been hospitalized for same. For this princely crime of having a psychiatric weakness which was readily exposable and exploitable by the Republican opposition (which, let's remember, was also at that time in the business of breaking into political opponents' psychiatrists' offices in pursuit of potentially explodable dirt) ... the Democratic establishment wound up putting severe pressure upon George McGovern to axe his running-mate.
McGovern initially declared that he backed Eagleton "one thousand percent" ... then folded on him some time later. Regardless of a battery of opinion polling suggesting that the votes of a majority of Americans would remain unaffected by Eagleton's mental health history, it seemed that a candidate with a prior record of mental illness was too fraught a possibility for the true decision-makers of the American electoral system to countenance.
But there's an obvious difference between what was done to Eagleton and that which is happening today. In his case, he actually had the mental illness in question. Yet when it comes to more modern situations wherein allegations of mental impairment are used to attempt to damage or discredit a candidate, this doesn't have to be the case. Instead, increasingly spurious and hackneyed conjecture from afar is deployed in a kind of baseless smear politics to attempt to put some distance between the hearts and minds of the electorate and the established public figure of a leader or politician. As an example, Vladimir Putin's stirling realpolitik foreign policy and burnished tough-guy machismo attitude seem altogether less compelling when they're thought to be the result of previously undiagnosed Autism - presumably explaining why a Pentagon report claiming exactly that was disseminated with such verve and vigour last year through the media at the height of the Donetsk crisis.
And while it might seem somewhat hard to muster up significant sympathy for men like Trump when they come under attack in this particular manner, spare a thought for the other candidates who've been swept up or outright disallowed on grounds of mental health issues - real or alleged. Actually-successful political figures like Abraham Lincoln with his depression, Winston Churchill with his bipolar disorder, as well as GandhiJi and Martin Luther King with their depression and suicidal ideation all managed to make an enduring mark upon this world - and in many cases arguably because of rather than inspite of their mental illnesses. By buying into the stigma surrounding the "potentially crazy" in public office, we deny ourselves access to incredible men of their impressive and self-evident caliber. Accusations like the ones presently being made against Trump, in other words, help to ensure that situations like Eagleton's keep happening even today.
Because that's the issue here. We like to think of ourselves as an enlightened, progressive and tolerant nation. In many respects, we probably are. Yet, as I can personally attest, there remains some considerable stigma attached towards people with mental health diagnoses pursuing serious careers in public life and office. I share diagnostic labels with several of the individuals mentioned in this piece (including the Bipolar (II) with which Senator Eagleton found himself afflicted). My medication regimen, amusingly, bore some close coterminity to that doled out to former U.S. Presidents Kennedy & Nixon (Even if I'm perhaps arguably more of a Marion Barry than either of them). One reason why I'm so incredibly open about all of this is because something similar to what was done to Thomas Eagleton once happened to me.
In the wake of this regrettable experience, I resolved to never let anyone be in a position to threaten to destroy me by disclosing information about my illnesses again. If the facts of my diagnoses were public knowledge, then this considerably reduced their potential for weaponization. People, in other words, would be more likely to see the real me - who I am, my record of service, and what I stand for - rather than the scary labels which might be insidiously deployed by rivals to act as a forcible, barbed barrier betwixt candidate and electorate.
The attacks which we've recently seen creeping back into our political press are the exact opposite of this in both spirit and effect. Not just because they're more regularly carried out upon people who are, in all probability, presumably largely sane. But because they hinge around a virulent re-stigmatization of mental health issues rather than the relative merits of the politicians themselves.
Let us be clear about this: if you're going to oppose Donald Trump or anyone else ... please let it be for actual, tangible reasons rather than motivated by a media-fostered fear and loathing of the victims of mental illness.
This matters. And not just because of the obvious potential impacts of associating all concussion sufferers - or a swathe of personality disorder people - with the onerous burden of political and temperamental association with Donald Trump.
The burden of stigma is something which just about everybody who's a bit "not right in the head" for whatever reason comes into contact with eventually. It can lead to people eschewing seeking a proper diagnosis and treatment due to serious (and occasionally quite justified) concerns that having an official three-letter-acronym or whatever after their name on their medical file can detrimentally affect their future life-choices or career.
One area in which this is often particularly pronounced is in that field of human endeavour known as Politics.
The reasons for this ought to be plainly apparent.
People already presume that at least half their elected representatives are unofficial sociopaths anyway, so tend not to have any especial overwhelming desire to place anybody of more obviously questionable sanity or faculties anywhere near the levers of political power. This goes doubly so for a position - such as the one Trump's vying for - wherein one of those levers comes in the form of a big red button capable of unleashing nuclear armageddon. (Although the fact that masses of voters in both the UK and US somewhat inexplicably chose to re-elect Tony Blair and George W. Bush respectively despite revelations that the voice of the divine was apparently directly dictating Atlanticist foreign policy decisions to each - in specia the impetus to invade a certain oil-rich Middle Eastern country ... has me scratching my head. Not so much at the alleged sanity of these heads of government, but at their respective voter-bases in each country as well. Perhaps voters really ARE more afraid of the labels of mental illness than they are of the symptoms)
The issue with what is happening when journalists and columnists patently inaccurately "diagnose" in typeset Trump (and really, how on earth can you properly psychiatrically assess somebody from afar through media interviews and appearances while never being alone or perhaps even in the same room together) is that it makes it far harder for persons grappling with genuine mental illnesses or cerebral injuries to be taken seriously in public life.
We already, some decades ago, witnessed exactly what happens when a candidate for high office has their mental health history become a matter of public record. The brilliant young U.S. Senator Thomas Eagleton remains a cautionary tale. During the 1972 election buildup, Eagleton acquired the unenviable honour of holding perhaps the shortest Vice Presidential candidacy in American history at eighteen days. (I say "perhaps", because earlier this year Ted Cruz's VP pick Carly Fiorina managed to eclipse Eagleton's record by holding the position for a mere week. Although she may potentially not count, as unlike Eagleton, she wasn't actually on a major party ticket at that point - but rather only a presumptive in the unlikely situation that Cruz won the Republican nomination for President)
The reason why Eagleton found himself being dropped faster than high-explosive ordnance in the skies above Vietnam?
He'd suffered from periodic bouts of depression, and had previously been hospitalized for same. For this princely crime of having a psychiatric weakness which was readily exposable and exploitable by the Republican opposition (which, let's remember, was also at that time in the business of breaking into political opponents' psychiatrists' offices in pursuit of potentially explodable dirt) ... the Democratic establishment wound up putting severe pressure upon George McGovern to axe his running-mate.
McGovern initially declared that he backed Eagleton "one thousand percent" ... then folded on him some time later. Regardless of a battery of opinion polling suggesting that the votes of a majority of Americans would remain unaffected by Eagleton's mental health history, it seemed that a candidate with a prior record of mental illness was too fraught a possibility for the true decision-makers of the American electoral system to countenance.
But there's an obvious difference between what was done to Eagleton and that which is happening today. In his case, he actually had the mental illness in question. Yet when it comes to more modern situations wherein allegations of mental impairment are used to attempt to damage or discredit a candidate, this doesn't have to be the case. Instead, increasingly spurious and hackneyed conjecture from afar is deployed in a kind of baseless smear politics to attempt to put some distance between the hearts and minds of the electorate and the established public figure of a leader or politician. As an example, Vladimir Putin's stirling realpolitik foreign policy and burnished tough-guy machismo attitude seem altogether less compelling when they're thought to be the result of previously undiagnosed Autism - presumably explaining why a Pentagon report claiming exactly that was disseminated with such verve and vigour last year through the media at the height of the Donetsk crisis.
And while it might seem somewhat hard to muster up significant sympathy for men like Trump when they come under attack in this particular manner, spare a thought for the other candidates who've been swept up or outright disallowed on grounds of mental health issues - real or alleged. Actually-successful political figures like Abraham Lincoln with his depression, Winston Churchill with his bipolar disorder, as well as GandhiJi and Martin Luther King with their depression and suicidal ideation all managed to make an enduring mark upon this world - and in many cases arguably because of rather than inspite of their mental illnesses. By buying into the stigma surrounding the "potentially crazy" in public office, we deny ourselves access to incredible men of their impressive and self-evident caliber. Accusations like the ones presently being made against Trump, in other words, help to ensure that situations like Eagleton's keep happening even today.
Because that's the issue here. We like to think of ourselves as an enlightened, progressive and tolerant nation. In many respects, we probably are. Yet, as I can personally attest, there remains some considerable stigma attached towards people with mental health diagnoses pursuing serious careers in public life and office. I share diagnostic labels with several of the individuals mentioned in this piece (including the Bipolar (II) with which Senator Eagleton found himself afflicted). My medication regimen, amusingly, bore some close coterminity to that doled out to former U.S. Presidents Kennedy & Nixon (Even if I'm perhaps arguably more of a Marion Barry than either of them). One reason why I'm so incredibly open about all of this is because something similar to what was done to Thomas Eagleton once happened to me.
In the wake of this regrettable experience, I resolved to never let anyone be in a position to threaten to destroy me by disclosing information about my illnesses again. If the facts of my diagnoses were public knowledge, then this considerably reduced their potential for weaponization. People, in other words, would be more likely to see the real me - who I am, my record of service, and what I stand for - rather than the scary labels which might be insidiously deployed by rivals to act as a forcible, barbed barrier betwixt candidate and electorate.
The attacks which we've recently seen creeping back into our political press are the exact opposite of this in both spirit and effect. Not just because they're more regularly carried out upon people who are, in all probability, presumably largely sane. But because they hinge around a virulent re-stigmatization of mental health issues rather than the relative merits of the politicians themselves.
Let us be clear about this: if you're going to oppose Donald Trump or anyone else ... please let it be for actual, tangible reasons rather than motivated by a media-fostered fear and loathing of the victims of mental illness.
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