The Invention of Sanity, Bauer, October 2014

The Invention of Sanity 

Robin Williams’s passing has affected everyone within our ‘sane’ society. As a result, maybe those Victorian definitions of sanity really need to be re-questioned - after all the Victorians invented ‘sanity’. I consider myself to be bonkers, but I know that’s only measured by what the rest of the world sees as sane. And let’s face it Homosexuality was still considered a mental illness until the 1970’s – after that date, I have no excuse.

“Williams had everything and he was just so… funny... but I suppose depression is an unknown disease….” 

Roll on the great morality debate as the world continues to pathologize Williams’s mental state. This misunderstanding tells us more about the ignorance surrounding issues of ‘other’ mental states than a failure to recognize them within ourselves. Hence my refusal to personally cite “mental”, illness, disease or health.

Cocaine rots the brain and destroys the nervous system. Not the best way to die, but who cares when you’re approaching hypernormality? Let’s collectively condemn the evil users right now for screwing up the world. Phew, doesn’t that make you feel saner already?

But apparently this isn’t a legal or moral issue, so we’re still left with the questions of what ‘mental illness’ actually is.

Here’s the easiest scenario; Robin Williams had fallen off the wagon after 30 years sober. He didn’t want to go through that withdrawal again so he made the choice to die instead. A personal choice that he couldn’t disclose. And to fail is a felony.

Thirty years earlier he would have also been arrested for having a toot backstage to get him beyond the curtain where, after the first laugh, he would have been flying on adrenalin.

Brain frying drugs and criminality aside - lets go back even further. The chances are that Robin Williams was something of a show-off at school - making everyone laugh as a mini version of the buffoon he eventually became.

Today they call it ADHD or something or other but either way we were (and still are) forced to change. The biggest change happened when it became illegal for teachers to beat the crap out of kids, thus permitting the drug companies to step in and dish out amphetamines to hyperactive children like M&M’s.

My generation never had that that amount of Pharma intervention, so many self-medicated themselves into the world of sanity with rapid cyclicals – speed rather than weed. Of course it would have been easier to let everyone just be, (suggesting that we were sane to begin with) and to let us live our lives creatively while supporting the lows and the highs - the only real De facto currency of the creative. 

A raft of media personalities have spoken publically about their ‘mental health’ and bipolarity - Stephen Fry and his university mate Tony Slattery to name but a few. And I’m not throwing in all things gay here but we also have to include the ‘close to genius’ Alexander (Lee) McQueen into the same mix.

Stephen Fry has made television programmes about his bipolarity, interviewing the likes of Robbie Williams – someone else on the hit list – and someone else who has taken grandiose quantities of that evil cocaine stuff. But it’s not fair to say that they were merely ‘addicts’, or that they ‘repented’ via recovery - that’s just another Victorian package. And some say they deserve such a crash for being rich, successful and having more money than sense. But contrition aside, nobody still admits to ‘using’ as a product of their own self-regulated boyhood.

...nobody still admits to ‘using’ as a product of their own self-regulated boyhood...

Lee McQueen’s passing would not have been a knee jerk decision. Perhaps, like Robin Williams, he had been planning that departure for most of his adult life – perhaps also to be delivered from the isolation and pain of the imposter genius. A wandering child waiting in order to avoid the consequences of his actions on the one person he loved most, the protector who understood him as a child and even more so as an adult. It’s no coincidence that within a week of his mother’s passing Lee McQueen was also dead - the genius voided.

Let’s take Robin Williams, McQueen and everyone else I’ve mentioned back to kindergarten and watch them through the window unobserved. Do they look like normal kids? You bet your sweet ass they don’t. They look and act like kids that knew there were no barriers. Kids who believed they could do anything.

But not long afterwards, these naughty kids began to have their sanity questioned. As usual, because they knew them best, the parents fail to see anything wrong with their child and so defensively lock horns with the authorities - while maintaining a private discourse of support with their child.   
Nevertheless, in the big world the child begins to interpret their own creative behavior as disruptive and so begins a process of self-regulation to fit in with the ‘normal.’  Their lost identities now appearing before them as a self-neglect – as a lie to the self. It’s easy to jump forward to 2014 and observe the hugely wealthy, much loved comic genius Robin Williams feeling as if he’s been dying from the same neglect.

The ‘loony bin’, as a system of ordering the sane, creative or disruptive into boxes is no more. Maybe we should also abolish the Victorian labels and judgments surrounding ‘addicts’ while we're at it.  Or, for that matter, Pharmaceutical decisions by interventionists whose only real motor is a big payday.

A dressing down. Gscene Magazine August 2014

The ongoing end of privacy

The bastard brother of the ‘end of privacy’ (August 2013 article) seems to have become the new age of the 15-second celebrity. Everyone will be now be famous for as long as it takes to create a vine or write a response comment in a ‘Comments are free’ section of a national blather-reel. I mean, this is the breeding ground of dissent is it not? But while everyone purges their rhetoric away online, White Papers regarding privacy and corporate surveillance and tracking are slipping through parliament unnoticed. Not the first time. Thatcher did it with the Falklands war, just as Reagan followed with Grenada. Then they started their reelection campaigns to tally in with the assured victories. But as we post, while we all think that the readership are taking note of our well-crafted often hilarious comments and, while thinking that we’re contributing to a greater debate; ‘meta laws’ keep rolling on in the background.

Do you feel better now that you’ve vented in your favorite paper? Good. Well, you might as well treat it as therapy because unfortunately nobody is listening. Perhaps what your outpouring is actually doing, is keeping you away from any real engagement in the issues you care so deeply about. For example, across the spectrum of the main US recent news, and although the imagery of the occurrences in Gaza were exploited endlessly, they somehow failed to show the extent of the protests taking place around the world. This could mean that you are more likely to post a comment on a quasi-liberal digi-broadsheet than participate in any physical show of unity. Ah, well. Looks like another day I can stay at home on my own and view it all through the telescreen -yet still have my say. And be hilarious.

It’s amazing the catharsis we feel by just pressing the return key and heading for a celebratory cup of Horlicks.

Here’s an example of a permitted comment:

In a study of 397 gay, lesbian and bisexual men and women they discovered that problematic alcohol and substance use were positively related to shame and internalised heterosexism. There are probably other determinants of harmful use of alcohol and other drugs, but I'm guessing shame, poor self-esteem and lack of confidence play a significant part.

This is linked to an academic journal, which you will never read to check the data. This was probably written by the postee under a pseudonym and seen as a way to disseminate their own research. This example no doubt relies on cross sections of a banging gay bar culture in a major city, a random sample of which does not equate to gay culture unless all of ‘gay culture’ lives in the same gay bar.

But perhaps the worst crime from a government to its people is when they piggy-back terrorist acts in order to set an extreme agenda on the over-compensation of surveillance.  It is here that they cite that, all of us – yes, even that old lady in the care home - could be potential terrorists. Then as happens, every liberty is stripped and we are humiliated into these new ‘protective’ laws. 

Then, as happens, every liberty is stripped and we are ‘humiliated’ into these new ‘protective’ laws.

Only last month, at an international airport, I stood behind a woman accompanied by her twelve-year-old daughter. The girl was in tears as we waited in line at the newly installed full-body scanner. When it was her turn, the girl held up the line and the security guards grew restless, the mother lost her cool and dragged the now wailing girl up the steps to the scanner. The scene was quite odd. As the girl stood cruciform behind the Perspex shield she dropped her head in shame. Not only the ‘secret’ room who scanned her digitally naked body but the airport staff and customers did the same to the clothed version on the pedestal before them. After a few seconds she crept down from the booth, sobbing, to collect her iPod and the too-old for her holiday shoes from the plastic tray - with the weight of a hundred eyes upon her.  

But we have to concede, since there have apparently been jihadi much younger than this girl, I’m sure everybody felt a little more secure on the flight.

Here’s another post that proves my point:

…Any anti Surveillance law will be upheld by royal prerogative (as the dispossession of the Chagos islanders was). The stakeholders in the status quo need a Stasi to mitigate the risks of networked democracy; in the age when protests can go viral, it's vital that the security services are able to disperse protest movements and detect potential troublemakers before they can cause trouble and have the means to bring very precise amounts of force to bear against them as soon as they start doing something; hence mass surveillance.

Right track, wrong argument. The real issue here is that of Chagossian diaspora and their apparent treatment by the Queen. Nevertheless, since this person is only online packaging his real gripe into a collective dolly mixture of vent and anger, people still are still agreeing - tick the like box, they just forget it as a confirmation of their own views. And the postee has his 15 second fix of acceptance. 

As the world heats up, so do the unleashing of newer surveillance laws. France, home of Foucauldian Panopticism is objecting strongly as are many European countries - but not Britain and the US. They are passing legislation by stealth while we’re all Wikipedi-ing, WTF the Chagos Islanders actually were.

There, it's already midnight and we’ve all missed the protest.