BACKLIGHT

An irresponsible McCain topped only by Cheney.

2008-03-29T11:36:00.000-07:00

I find it incredible that many Americans do not understand that our financial capacity is limited. No matter how productive we are, we will have to eventually balance our books. If your family overspends and is irresponsible about money, you are going to going to bankrupt yourself. We are blindly far along on the way.

Social Security and Medicare will soon run out of money. We have no practical health insurance systems, and millions of our citizens who deserve care, don't get it. Our infrastructure is a mess, with rotting roads and bridges. The air in many of our cities is dangerous. Rural parts of some states resemble a third world country, and nothing has changed there in 50 years. Our educational and health care system are far from the best in the world.

This dismal financial state derives in large part from the incredible past and ongoing cost of the misguided Iraq war. Our best SECURITY is a strong economy. No army can achieve this. The fortune our citizens have been led to waste could have transformed America. Instead many are losing their homes. Why is there not rioting in the streets?

Vice President Cheney his good reason for his insane smirk. He and his cronies successfully lied, created a war, and sold it to our modestly intellectually gifted, incurious and poorly educated President. The poor fellow doesn’t realize he’s been duped as badly as the rest of us. History is going to be astonished at what the American citizenry permitted in the first years of the new millennium.

Certain corporate fat cats have become astronomically richer -- while you suffer. Amazingly, people's finances may have been ruined and yet those same folks would still vote for the policies that have ruined them. Dicky and Donny lied when they said the war “would pay for itself.” It has only enriched a VAST army of “private contractors” and mercenaries with connections to the highest places in our government. Just the cost of repatriating our wounded for the next 30 or more years, would break a lesser country. No one counts the individual cost of the many thousands of emotionally damaged men returning to their families with virtually incurable PTSD.

Numerous documentaries on the lead up to the war, with video bites, appear now on television. FRONTLINE has presented a two hour PBS special which is overwhelming and heartbreaking. There's no arguing with its unbearable logic, because a history of blind stupidity flows from the mouths of those who perpetrated it. Every voting American should see it -- and then they did they might think ten times before voting for John McCain.

The tragedy is that while every single error was performed in public, in full view of cameras, and recorded for all time, no one paid attention. In a hundred years people will watch our arrogantly smiling president arrive on an aircraft carrier in full combat flight regalia to announce the end of a "war we had won” – and wonder if we had all lost our minds.

When recently confronted with the fact that 70% of Americans believe “Bush's war” is and was a mistake, Vice President Cheney’s response was, "So?" Many video clips are available in which he said with ABSOLUTE certainty that Iraq has, or soon will have nuclear capacity and that they are a haven for terror. What kind of psychopath could condemn this nation, in cold blood, to a ruined economy and 4 thousand useless deaths?

One wants to dress the cowardly, chubby fellow in body armor and shove him into the middle of a firefight. How far have we sunk that our second most important leader is so disdainful of the people he has been elected to represent? The man's hands are soiled with blood from our children who have died in his phony war, and he neither notices the red stain, or smells it.

Do we really intend our government to be run as Bush and Cheney tell us it is? Is it democracy that once we make a decision, we are in for four years of having our input ignored? Remember what happened in Germany when the citizens elected a group who cleverly disguised their purpose by naming their party "buddies." That's the Bavarian slang translation of Nazi.

An immense propaganda machine kept the truth from the German people until nearly the end of the war. Germany was finished, but when the aristocrat, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg failed to assassinate Hitler, a substantial majority of Germans were relieved. It is that easy to fool people! Bombs were destroying everything – yet they still believed they would prevail, because their insane and perverse leaders told them so.

Von Stauffenberg failed because he didn't have the courage to become a suicide bomber. He pushed his lethal briefcase as close to der Fuhrer, as he dared, then left the room. Hitler moved, unknowingly shielding himself with the heavy oak table. He survived and Von Stauffenberg and his fellow plotters were torn to pieces.

It is our job as citizens to make sure we are not again fooled, as Bush and Cheney’s government fooled us. To that end it is instructive to watch Senator McCain in action. Lost in acting out some ancient, tragic war between himself, his father and grandfather, he cares NOTHING for what his fellow Americans think. In a performance, seeking votes, he is cleverly beginning to shift his rhetoric towards the center. Consistency of his beliefs matter for nothing. He will shift again as is suits him. How can we believe such a man?

I believe justice is acting itself out in Cheney's lifetime. The man must live in a nightmare. Unlovable, remote and unloving -- frigid and unapproachable. The blank, self-satisfied smirk tells us everything. Just ask his wife and children. I had a father who was pathologically driven by money. He sits alone at 99, spending all of his still substantial mental energy creating denial around his ruthless crimes. My guess is that within days of being out of office Bush will be back on the bottle.

I received an e-mail a few days ago saying that Senator McCain's latest spending report, filed by his own campaign, shows he has spent in excess of $58 million -- a public admission by his own managers that he has broken the law. The senders of the e-mail say they have filed a formal complaint with the Federal Election Commission, and wanted me to sign-on for a second delivery of signatures.

But we have a far greater problem than the theft by McCain of four million dollars. The bedrock that has made this country strong is absolute separation of church and state. The terrific HBO series on John Adams reminds once again of the fortuitous coming together of brilliant, dedicated men, who wanted to create a new kind of country. Do we have today anyone in government approaching the love of freedom that Thomas Jefferson had? Had had a man of that quality appeared recently, he would have been torn to pieces by sociopaths like Karl Rove.

During the last 50 years the influence of the religious right has grown all out of proportion to common sense. We do not vote our financial self-interest, our social conscience, our environment or anything logical. We vote out of superstition and fear. This is exactly what got Germany in trouble in the 30s. The Nazis made a clever pact with the Vatican, which drew the substantial Catholic vote, and they also evoked Germany's mystical, spiritual heritage.

The Bush fiasco can be directly related to the votes of right wing religious fanatics. There is no middle ground with these people. They are not "Americans" -- using the term the way our founding fathers might have. If you're not with them you're against them. And God help you if you're a Jew. Who's God might that be?

At heart Senator McCain is one of these unthinking fanatics. He has repeatedly said he’d support the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Do the majority of Americans want such a man choosing our next Supreme Court Justice? We must not elect our leaders because of their superstitious beliefs. I don't believe President Bush who, no doubt, longs for a shot every day, is a religious person. It is not religious to have your hands reddened with the blood of 4000 young men. The "god" who tells him what to do has been leading him astray. I see no sign on his or Cheney's face of remorse. And, of course, we don't see Donald Rumsfeld anymore.

Since 1983 Senator McCain has cast 125 anti-choice votes out of 130 opportunities. Do you want your daughter having a ratty, backstreet abortion? It doesn't matter to these guys, they have money. If one of their daughters gets pregnant, they will ship her to where it's legal to get a safe abortion. Not so for the poor inner-city kid.

It gets worse. Senator McCain has never cosponsored or supported legislation that would prevent unintended pregnancy to reduce the need for abortion. We can’t allow John McCain become our next president if we value women's reproductive freedom!

Senator McCain is only "your friend" if you permit him to ship your kid overseas to be blown apart in an unwinnable war. He is only "your friend" if you agree, should your daughter make a common mistake and become pregnant, that she has to have an illegal abortion or carry the child to term. The psychological consequences for our country, and its effect this man could have on our young women, are beyond imagination. We don't have time or energy for another disastrous four years.

During a quarter century in Congress, that jovial looking fellow, hugging President Bush, and asking for your vote, has shown nothing but contempt for women's reproductive freedoms. We must stop him from taking his contempt for choice to the next level!

Then there is his ability, when called upon, perhaps under pressure, to make the correct decision. He is no doubt the most experienced candidate in foreign affairs. But that experience has led to a series of dangerous mistakes. Experience is only valuable if it is accompanied by good judgement.

In an article on March 23, 2008, in the LA Times, Bob Drogin analyzes John McCain's errors around the Iraq war. The Senator publicly predicted a quick and easy victory, supporting those who set up the mess we are in. This experienced warrior, a product of our finest military training, was clueless about what many knew would become a vicious insurgency.

Senator McCain joined those issuing warnings about Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction. But this powerful member of the leadership of the free world didn't bother reading the full 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that showed serious gaps in the intelligence. Neither, incidentally, did Hillary Clinton.

These folks were elected to protect us. Before aiding and abetting a decision to go to war, don't you think they might have done due diligence? You would certainly read the full contract before buying a home.

Though Senator McCain eventually criticized the Bush administration's management in Iraq and clashed repeatedly with Rumsfeld, he backed many of their same policies. He repeatedly urged backing Iraqi émigré groups, internal dissidents and other forces to overthrow Hussein. As a senior member of the Senate armed Services committee, which oversees the Pentagon, the old soldier’s views carried power. They would carry much more as president.

The LA Times article runs down a series of miscalculations and misjudgments by Senator McCain in the period leading up to the war. He told MSNBC that it is "possible, if not probable, that internal opposition forces can prevail over time." When asked if it wouldn't require 100,000 US soldiers as occupational troops, this highly trained military man demurred. "Oh, no," he said. "I don't think so at all." Sadam had a huge army keeping a lid on his divided country. We were somehow going to accomplish the same thing with a handful of troops.

Senator McCain was instrumental in supporting the administration’s decision to ignore the search for Al Qaeda’s chief to focus on Hussein. We now know that was a crucial error. Senator McCain supported the Bush administration in the lead up to the war. In September 2002 he told CNN that he expected "an overwhelming victory in a very short period of time." Yeah.

In October 2002 Senator McCain backed the administration when it sought congressional approval for a resolution to use force to disarm Iraq. He repeatedly warned his colleagues that Hussein was "a clear and present danger" to US security.

In the Congressional record, McCain is quoted as saying, "Sadam has developed stocks of germs and toxins in sufficient quantities to kill the entire population of the earth multiple times. He has placed weapons laden with these poisons on alert to fire at his neighbors within minutes, not hours, and has devolved authority to fire them to subordinates. He develops nuclear weapons with which he would hold his neighbors and us hostage"

What absolute, criminal garbage. These absurd notions are part of what railroaded us into an obscene war. In fact, none of these weapons existed and a Senator is powerful and knowledgeable as McCain should have taken the trouble to be certain, before he influenced a nation. After the invasion it became obvious that Hussein had abandoned or destroyed all of his weapons of mass destruction programs a dozen years before.

After the invasion Senator McCain told MSNBC that he had "no doubt" US forces "will be welcomed as liberators" in Baghdad. Naturally he changed his views after the insurgency began. After returning from an August, 2003 visit Senator McCain began calling for the deployment of thousands more troops. This set him at odds with the White House, his party and military commanders. So, he did something right when it was too late.

Recently Senator McCain's claim to expertise came under attack after he completed a two-day visit to Iraq, his eighth tour of the war zone. On at least two occasions he publicly charged that he Iran was training Al Qaeda operatives in Iraq. Totally wrong. He apologized after he was advised that Iran supports militant Shiite groups, not the rival Sunnis who make up Al Qaeda.

The man keeps talking about “no surrender.” He apparently believes that's a powerful buzzword for most Americans. I am more concerned than we will surrender our sovereignty through bankruptcy. There is nothing like blindness in a president. "I am confident about our current strategy," he declared. "I will stick with it under any circumstances, but I don't know if the American people will stick with it." I hope we are not so foolish to follow that path to our own self destruction.

Remember, this is the stubborn war hero who flew his bomber directly into a Sam missile rather than abort his run.

Here is what retired Four-Star General Wesley Clark, a genuinely knowledgeable and successful soldier believes -- “We must end the Bush Administration's reckless and irresponsible policies on Iraq, the economy, health care and education. And we must move America in the New Direction that our country so urgently needs.

100 more years in Iraq might be the Republicans' plan, but it should not be America's. Voters, consider -- this issue might bring us down.

“The Eliot Spitzer Syndrome.”

2008-03-21T15:12:00.001-07:00

During past weeks, New York Governor, Eliot Spitzer, the one-time "Sheriff" of Wall Street -- who campaigned on a promise to clean up state politics -- became embroiled in a sex scandal that forced his resignation. The man’s mighty fall is everywhere in the news, as are photos of his distressed and spaced out wife, whom, with his truly innocent children, we are told to pity.

According to a recent in depth New Yorker article, Spitzer was a cruel and unlovable character. He screamed at employees, was arrogant and outrageously demanding to those who served under him. What do those who touted him as a potential presidential candidate project he would be like if he had virtually unlimited power? One look at his face, trained from childhood in issuing commands, tells everything -- just as close observation of Senator McCain tells us what would happen to our nation were he to assume command. Beware.

Newsweek published a photo of Spitzer's old, benign looking parents. His mother, hunched and tiny, could not have been the source of torture to her infant son. Yeah, right. His father looked benign. The story was -- the extent of pressure on young Eliot was word games around the dinner table. Common sense and life experience tells us his pathology inescapably grows from much worse.

As Attorney General Spitzer extensively pursued and put behind bars the very same kind of people he was caught employing for his pleasure. I don't say sexual pleasure, because I'm not quite sure what acts pleased this hypocrite. Many of us would not classify them as sex.

According to federal records Spitzer met a prostitute named “Kristin” in the historic D.C. Mayflower Hotel. Franklin Roosevelt is said to have put the finishing touches on his 1933 Inaugural Address (“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”) one floor below their historic encounter. After midnight Kristin reported to her “dispatcher” that Spitzer had paid $4,300, including a down payment toward the next. Though the dispatcher had warned her that Spitzer had been known to “ask you to do things that, like, you might not think were safe,” she reported that the encounter “had gone fine,” and reminded the dispatcher that she knew how to “take care of herself.”

It does real harm to our society to pretend, as the Newsweek article does, that a social monster like Spitzer can be formed by merely pressuring a child. Spitzer hid his pervosity well -- there was even talk that he might run for president. But one does not pay $4,000 an hour for petting, and a few minutes of intercourse. Something vile and unreported must have -- MUST HAVE -- happened in Spitzer's early childhood that he needed to routinely re-create with young women, not his wife, for hire. In spite of what Jay Leno might think, Spitser's acts were not about sexual hunger.

If you are curious about what transpired that was not “safe” for the young professional woman, you could find out by having been a fly on the wall while the infant Spitzer was in his mother’s care. I believe the desire in a certain kind of man to torture and/or abuse a young woman arises from his early encounters with his mother. It would do Spitzer absolutely no good were he able to perform the same acts with a powerful woman near his own age. No doubt his wife would not let him, and she is no longer young. These acts are not sexual. They are about getting even

My old friend, Julie Motz, contributed the following statement (slightly rewritten by me) to the New York Times blog about Spitzer:

“Ex-Governor Spitzer's dilemma - like that of Bill Clinton in his dealings with Monica Lewinsky - represents a sad attempt to heal his sexual abuse history by acting it out in a way doomed to become public. If those victimized by childhood sexual abuse realized that it is the engine driving this kind of sexual, compulsive act – then their need to have it come out into the open could lead to profound healing of the wound.”

I've known Julie for over 40 years and in that time she has grown into one of the most advanced thinkers in the field. She's had an enormous influence on my ability to become painfully aware of my history, and use my growing freedom from the past to inform others. So many of us have been abused in our early childhood and have mistakenly buried it. Who among us was not beaten as a child? Abuse is so common that when we see powerful men acting out in insanely destructive ways we attribute it to some failure in their character.

There is no unconscious failure operating here. Spitzer knew what he was doing. He desperately needed whatever interaction he was paying so much for. I have experienced insanely destructive behavior, so I know. It feels as if an unnamable impulse is driving you. Some remote part of your mind knows that what you're doing is crazy, but response to the impulse brings a sense of excitement and pleasure. I don't do drugs but I suppose it’s like taking that first hit of cocaine after six months being sober. The experience of breaking the rules is thrilling and you delude yourself that this time it will be different, though you really know you are in for a long spiral down.

What we must learn to accept is that the educated and thoughtful conscious of a 50-year-old is no match for the underlying, primitive unconscious drives of the two or three year old who is really running things.

That's right readers --the perverted crap that was done to you that you don't remember, that happened before you could speak, may be what is running you. It is the conflict between these two parts of his psyche: the present and conscious, and the primitive and unthinking, that drives men like Spitzer to be violently aggressive, hateful and enraged at those about them. They then turn the rage on themselves in consciously destructive ways.

Julie goes on to write, “In my practice as a healer I see this kind of tragic behavior all too often. Bringing the sufferer to an awareness of his past, rather than merely judging him is the key to transforming this. Hopefully we won't need too many more public scandals of this nature to wake people up. Prostitution like pornography is a demand-side, not a supply-side problem. The way to end the demand is to recognize the childhood wound underlying it and address that.”

Spitzer needs to be in a form of nonverbal therapy which will allow him to relive the forgotten torture of his early childhood, lodged in his unconscious, which has virtually destroyed his career. Julie’s simple but profound ideas, if put into practice would transform our society.

In a recent Los Angeles Times article, Josh Meyer writes that were it not for the suspicious financial transactions Spitzer allegedly orchestrated to pay for his trysts -- like nearly all clients of high-priced call girl services, he probably would never have been caught. Authorities don't have the resources or manpower to go after ultra-expensive prostitution rings like Emperors’ Cub. Conviction would require elaborate undercover operations.

But the Patriot Act has recently equipped the government with the right to look at bank records for unusual money movements. Those involved in qualifying practices go on a watch list. A serious of coincidences, described in the Newsweek article, around transfers of money, which looked superficially like laundering, gave the alarm. Had Spitzer been content to withdraw a few thousand dollars in cash and pay with this, he would never have been caught.

The article quotes a Detective Mark Gilky, who ran an undercover storefront operation in Washington D.C., in which police were able to see credit card receipts (who but a madman would use a credit card to pay for illicit acts?) for various prostitution rings, including the names and the invoices. "It was shocking," he said. "The amounts of money were staggering and the people involved were movie stars, celebrities, well-known political people and star athletes.

But in the sting that followed the client’s names never became public. "It's a circle you have to be in," Gilky said, "where there is trust and you're introduced into the network personally." The 47 page criminal complaint and affidavit filed against the alleged leaders of the Emperor's Club provides a richly detailed understanding of how these games are played.

There is a powerful coincidence between prostitution and politics -- sex, money, and power are overwhelmingly exciting to many. To understand how certain men run amok, we must accept that their intelligent, thinking wives, women like Silda Wall Spitzer and Hillary, knew on some level from day one what kind of devil they were hooking up with. Internally motivated, profoundly disturbing drives cannot be hidden past the first few dates.

Silda gave up a high-powered career as a corporate lawyer to raise three daughters and support her husband as he sought elective office. Time and again, she found herself encouraging him during critical junctures in his public life, while regretting that he had chosen to put their family in such an unpleasant place. In 1994, after Spitzer made his first, unsuccessful run for New York State Attorney General, his wife told a former colleague from the world of corporate law, “Well, now he can go back and get a real job.”

According to friends, the governor’s time in Albany exacted a profound psychic cost from Silda, who was not able to embrace her role as first lady. “I think the whole period of his governorship hasn’t fit her,” a friend of the Spitzers said. “It strained the marriage.” I'll say.

Denial runs deep. A day after she learned that federal investigators had identified Spitzer as a customer of a high-priced prostitution ring, Silda urged him not to resign. Friends of the pair said that they believed she took that stance because she was not aware that the government complaint against the prostitution ring stemmed from an I.R.S. inquiry involving Spitzer’s bank records.

A few days later, as allegations exploded across front pages and television screens, the couple sought the advice of colleagues and friends. Many were reportedly flabbergasted, but as a group supported Silda's idea that her husband should not resign. He promptly did, quite likely because he knew things that his family and friends did not.

Silda is as profoundly in need of the right kind of therapy as her husband, because she must suffer from similar emotional disturbances. We marry what is familiar to us, even though it be disguised. She has been described as the only person whose approval he values so much that she has even been able to take the edge off his abrasive, often hateful style. A Harvard educated lawyer, she quit prestigious and high-paying jobs in 1994, the year the youngest of their three daughters was born, and the year of her husband’s first run for attorney general. This woman believed in her man. Grateful or not, his needs finally overpowered him.

The two met as students at Harvard Law School and were married in 1987. Silda grew up in Concord, N.C., population of 20,000, and a graduated from Baptist women’s school in her home state. In 2006, she said that one of the things that had always attracted her to her husband was his “close relationship with his parents.” “I can always tell when Eliot is talking to his mother or his father on the phone,” she told friends. “He just sounds different.”

I cannot imagine a more disingenuous statement. It reminds one of the Stockholm Syndrome and we are not sure just how he sounds different. My father's whole personality changed profoundly around his mother, in a way that confused the hell out of me as a youngster. I have learned these kind of dramatic behavior changes give clues about the infant's psyche. The answer to that "difference" would teach us quite a bit about what brought Spitzer to this pass. After years of torture oftentimes the victim develops a kind of attraction and fascination with the torturer.

Since Spitzer began his term in Albany, his wife has lived in New York City, where their teenage daughters attend school. In 2006, when Silda showed a reporter around their apartment on Fifth Avenue, she proudly declared that only artwork made by members of the immediate family was allowed to hang on the walls.

One multicolored drip painting, in a den that the family calls the Adirondack Room, had been signed “Spitzer Wall,” because the two of them painted it together early in their courtship. “Eliot and I had been to the Whitney and were looking at a Jackson Pollack, and he said, ‘I could do that,’ ” Silda said, imitating the braggadocio tone that brought him into the governorship, taught to him no doubt by his father. “So I said, ‘Let’s see you try,’ and then I helped him.”

Oh, the arrogance – the unbelievable, clueless arrogance of such people.

It might be helpful to briefly examine here some other sex scandals involving politicians in the United States. For every one who has been caught there are probably five others in the closet.

Idaho Senator Larry Craig was publicly admonished by the Senate Ethics Committee for improper conduct after his arrest in a sex-sting operation in a men's toilet in June 2007. He then famously appeared in public, with his goggled, groggy wife, to announce that he was not gay.

The confused fellow unwisely had pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct after he was caught in an undercover investigation of lewd behavior in a men's room at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. His guilt must've gotten the best of his common sense because the police didn't have a case. He later tried to recant saying, he had agreed to a misdemeanor charge without consulting a lawyer and in hopes of quickly disposing of the case. We are not well served when a man like this remains in the Senate.

Louisiana Senator David Vader, a famous conservative, apologized and admitted "a very serious sin" after he was linked last July to a Washington escort service. Vitter said his misdeeds occurred several years previously and he had dealt with them in "confession and marriage counseling." He remains in the Senate. Good man. Confession and marriage counseling, that's the trick to dealing with ancient wounds when they blindside you.

There is no conventional counseling which will deal with the deep, unending drives controlling Senator Vitter. The man lives in hell on earth. One of the more dangerous notions is that being religious and "confessing" is part of a cure. These wounds remain and will torture the fellow the rest of his life, unless he does something about them.

Mark Foley, from Florida, famously resigned from the House of Representatives in 2006 after it was disclosed he had sent sexually explicit text messages to teenage boys who served as interns in the House. Many believe he did more than that with these young fellows. The revelations of misconduct led to charges that Republican leaders tried to cover up the matter.

New Jersey Governor James McGreevey stepped down in 2004 over a gay affair with a totally unqualified man whom he hired in 2002 to head the state's Homeland Security department. Here we see how blindness to what lurks in our unconscious endangers the society around us.

McGreevey's wife, who claimed she knew nothing of his homosexuality when she married him, now says she believes that the only reason he married her was because he needed a wife and children in order to become elected. Does she want us believe that she didn't suspect from the first day that there was something odd about the fellow? She looks intelligent, happy and liberated on television, but were she able to reveal the early paralleling situation in her childhood, it would help many women who "mistakenly" marry the "wrong" guy.

President Bill Clinton apparently had sexual relationships while he was married and in public life, with perhaps dozens of women. In this he was not different from other high placed men before him. His relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky, then 21, led to impeachment after accusations he lied about it under oath. The only proof was an inconsequential bit ejaculate on her dress. A man who did not wish to be caught would have destroyed it. Clinton survived impeachment and was able to serve out his term -- but his presidency, which ended in 2001, was badly damaged.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich admitted he was having an extramarital affair while leading the impeachment charge in Congress against Clinton. The word hypocrite has no meaning in the higher levels of government and business. It's whatever you can get away with.

Senator Bob Packwood, from Oregon, resigned in 1995 after 26 years in Congress. He had been accused of sexual misconduct with 17 women, among other charges.

Representative Barney Frank, from Massachusetts, who is homosexual, was reprimanded in 1990 after it was learned that one of his lovers had run a prostitution ring out of his Washington apartment. Things do get curious, just like in "Alice in Wonderland."

Senator Gary Hart, from Colorado, saw his second presidential bid end in 1987 when it was learned he spent the night on a yacht, the Monkey Business, with a woman not his wife. Prior to this he had blatantly demonstrated willingness to have sex with party girls and professionals, as often as he could. These guys do this until they get caught. So one must examine the role "getting caught" plays in their life.

Representative Dan Crane, from Illinois, and Representative Jerry Studds, from Massachusetts, were censured in 1983 for illicit affairs with underage pages. It's amazing they didn't go to jail. But high office has its privileges. Crane, who had had sex with a teenage girl, was voted out of office -- but Studds, who had had an affair with a boy, was returned to office many times. Some American constituencies are willing to overlook the odd statutory rape or two.

Representative Wilbur Mills, from Arkansas and chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, was caught in 1974 with stripper Fanne Foxe, who performed as "the Argentine firecracker." Foxe leapt from Mills' limousine after it was stopped by police and jumped into the Tidal Basin. In those relatively unenlightened days, Mills rescued himself by going into treatment for alcoholism and retired two years later.

Representative Randy "Duke" Cunningham, from Rancho Santa Fe, a genuine and famous war hero, was plied with prostitutes by private contractors seeking government contracts. But that only came out during his lengthy prosecution on unrelated corruption charges. Hero or not he went to jail.

Dick Morris, a top adviser to President Clinton, resigned from his reelection campaign in 1996 after a tabloid newspaper published photographs of him with an elite prostitute on a Washington hotel balcony.

Randall Tobias, the top foreign aid advisor in the State Department, resigned two years ago after acknowledging that he patronized the elite escort services of "D. C. Madam" Deborah Palfrey. After federal authorities charged palfrey with operating a prostitution ring, she threatened to disclose the names of potentially thousands of wealthy influential and famous clients.

"The tentacles of this matter reach far, why and high into the echelons of power in the United States," Palfrey wrote in one court filing, vowing to subpoena all of her customers in an effort to prove that her employees provided only legal massage services. That scandal quickly went away.

In Los Angeles, a succession of Beverly Hills and Hollywood Madams has kept the press busy, and the American public titillated, throughout much of the 20th century. And as mentioned above, in Washington several high-ranking congressmen have been caught having relationships with women, or men, half their age in exchange for money, favors or ghost jobs.

Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was observed and recorded by the FBI in flagrante with women not his wife. This has had no effect on his deification.

Senator John McCain was apparently unfaithful to his first wife with his second, before he divorced one and married the other.

And lest we forget, our beloved President Roosevelt, General Eisenhower, and perhaps dozens of other officials had mistresses and girlfriends, leading up to the great womanizers of them all, John F. and Robert Kennedy. In this they were brilliantly imitating their father. One observes what effect a hyper religious Catholic mother has on such young men.

What are we to make of this not so hidden tragic flaw in our society?

“In Treatment” should be in therapy.

2008-03-11T08:46:00.000-07:00

On February 29, 2008, Lynn Smith, Los Angeles Times staff writer published an article about HBO's half hour daily soap, "In Treatment." The show, which purports to take us into the intimacy of talk psychotherapy, is based upon an Israeli television series. In this talking heads show dialog is everything, yet apparently what we hear is largely translated from Hebrew.

I've made a number of films in Israel and communication is often difficult. It’s a Middle Eastern country peopled by the descendants of Jews from all over the world and more Arabs than you might think -- by definition a culture clash. Because they live under threat, Israelis can be aggressive. It is the only place where a driver tried to push me off a mountain road for daring to pass.

Hebrew adds to the confusion, because it’s an ancient language with nuance suited to life in a desert tent. Almost everyone in Israel speaks English, but emotions often do not translate. I briefly went out with a former Miss Israel and can attest. Considering the conflicting meaning of words between the two languages, basing a show on Hebrew dialogue is reaching pretty far down into the barrel.

It cannot be determined from the credits if anyone in charge of the show has experience with what can be healing in verbal therapy. The apparent naïveté of the producers leads to a misleading and often confusing presentation. Even if talk therapy in Israel is practiced in this manner, the words don't translate into therapy that has a chance of succeeding. It's all about clever "interpretations" and entertaining emotional battles that would never take place in even the most mismanaged therapeutic environment.

There could not be a presentation that better confirms my aversion for exclusively talk based therapy. What we see here is “wordplay,” spouted rapid fire by terrifically smart actors, sitting face-to-face -- reading more from each other's faces than the spoken words could possibly convey. How confusing for the poor patient, who is in therapy because he or she is confused enough. If the actors are familiar with therapy that heals, working on the show must be excruciating.

"In Treatment" presents the brilliant Gabriel Byrne, playing Dr. Paul Weston. I assume the doctor has substantial malpractice insurance, because much of how he treats his patients is cockeyed, and some of it is dangerous. He lives in a nice house in a nameless suburb and works in a highly personalized room, cluttered with artifacts. Just crap to confuse his patients. All that's missing is the common pre-cancer picture of Sigmund.

To add to his patient’s confusion, Paul’s office, is also his sometimes bedroom. His patients unrealistically get up and use the bathroom in the middle of a session. A young patient attempts to commit suicide with pills he incompetently left in his medicine cabinet. After that I would think about going into some other profession.

When the office toilet doesn't work and a patient arrogantly demands to be allowed to enter his house and use the toilet there, he stammers helplessly. Doesn’t this supposedly highly analyzed fellow know how to say no? Not even when saying no would benefit his patient. His dissatisfied wife hovers, knocks on the door, leaves for Rome to have an affair. They have children off in other rooms who sometimes appear mysteriously in his office when the doctors is not there. Lately Paul has been having semi-realistic heart to heart talks with them.

We are told Paul is the product of an "Institute" referred to in once a week sessions with his “supervisor,” played by the always believable Dianne Wiest. What kind of institute could this be if in every session we see Paul with his patients and Paul with his supervisor, crossing every conceivable human boundary? The so called therapy presented to us is a confused mess -- barely worthy of criticism. Humane people don't treat each other like this, even if they aren't in therapy.

In couple’s therapy with Paul’s supervisor, we never learn anything about the source of his wife’s rage. She seems to be saying that her husband, with his highly practiced, know it all “analyst ways,” is distant and inadequate. But why should she accept couples therapy with her husband's therapist -- someone with whom he has had a long relationship, not involving her? There is enough suspicion and confusion in couple’s therapy without adding bias. They need someone neutral who could stand up to his attacks.

In couples therapy Paul is pathologically controlling. This man’s working personality could not be the result of arduous years of competent therapeutic training. We learn nothing of what must have been his disturbed childhood. It would not take long to fill us in, but the series producers probably don't know themselves. His wife flits rapidly between being seductive, confused, irrational, and feeling inadequate. Michelle Forbes, the actress playing her, presents these confusing and inhumanly conflicting emotions beautifully.

The couple is confronted by a wall of "knowing," in which, based upon her prior intellectually incestuous working relationship at the Institute with Paul, Dr. Wiest smoothly, and at great length articulates her "understanding of the problem." These scenes do a terrible disservice to what can be accomplished in skillful and healing couple’s therapy. Her hammering simply alienates. When will we learn that simply "explaining" to the conscious, has almost no effect on the unconscious that is causing the problem? My conclusion is that the producers don't have a clue to what heals.

To further confuse the audience, Paul is hostile, all-knowing, and contradicts almost everything his supervisor says both alone and in couple’s therapy. We have seen him be reasonably capable with the young gymnast who is his patient. No trained therapists, even a poorly trained one, could be this unaware of himself.

Years ago I was in psychoanalysis with a conventionally trained young analyst -- probably one of her first full scale, four times a week patients. She was attractive, confident and tiny. When sitting in her chair, something I rarely saw, because I was lying on the couch, her feet didn't touch the floor. She unfortunately crossed many boundaries. I know that she and her officemate actually painted the place themselves before they moved in. Later, her office was in a small, rented home filled with white furniture on white carpets. Her kids continually damaged her car so I could trace the course of our work by the wreck it eventually became.

As I said in another blog she got me to finance a screenplay she wrote with an associate. Substantial money changed hands, and the screenplay went nowhere. Yet, clumsily, laboriously, taking what seemed forever, she did help me. Had she been better trained in today's methods she might have helped more, faster. But my substantial check every week must've been very welcome.

I learned the value of not being able to read your therapist’s feelings on their face. It's hard enough dealing with your own emotions, without dealing with your therapist’s. When Paul gets fiercely angry at two of his female patient’s abusers, his feelings deprive them of getting in touch with theirs. It made me wince. Therapy is not a conversation between equals. How dare he make himself righteously comfortable at his patient’s expense? Worse, his anger sidetracked the path they should be on, back to the original abuser.

Operating here is what one might call it the "Oprah Syndrome,” OS. In it, an adult patient remembers terrifying, relatively recent abuse in vivid detail. I've heard similar stories many times, and I'm not a therapist. I lived with such a woman for years, who in spite of excellent psychoanalysis was never able to get in contact with the primal abuse in her infant life. In the OS, the story is -- a stranger on the street, a janitor, a neighbor, an uncle -- raped or abused them in their teens or early 20s. Working through this remembered material should allow the patient to relieve their symptoms.

If they had been binge eating and yo-yoing up and down in weight, it should stop. If they had been uncontrollably promiscuous and destructive in their relationships with the opposite sex, that should begin healing. If they had been incapable of having a pleasurable sexual relationship, they should now be able to have one. If they had been incapable of feeling joy about their bodies, that should end. If they are unaccountably and endlessly depressed, even without medication, the depression should lift. If they are men, they should be able to cease destructive womanizing.

More often, if you suffer from the OS, superficial talk therapy changes nothing. Working through the recent memory, real vivid and painful, does not bring about complete healing. Then assuming he or she has the training, and it's not so common, the therapist must go deeper into what the recent abuse has been masking. This is most likely early pre-verbal abuse from a parent. Tragically, this might have affected as many as half of us.

Some of the drama in "In Treatment”, as viewers know by now, derives from the human and common weaknesses of Dr. Paul. Failures that in a friend or acquaintance would be harmless can be devastating in a therapist. Gabriel Byrne must struggle with the incompetent they have created for him to play. My training in the Actors Studio in New York, and years in the theater, taught me that it is impossible to play a role you do not believe in. You don't have to love the person, but it is the writer's responsibility to write someone plausible.

Paralleling the story in the show, I had a chance encounter with a beautiful patient of the incompetent and probably mentally ill Psychiatrist I saw in my early 30s. I mentioned him in a previous blog. To remind you, he was an M.D., Associate Clinical Professor at a major university.

It was easy prying out of my therapist everything I needed to know about her, including his proud statement that she was “in love” with him. This male therapist and his lovely female patient fulfilled the standard cliché. At least my therapist had the brains and training to not say that he was "in love with her" also. And even if he was "in love with her," I think his training was sufficient that he would never tell her.

Paul makes the same claim about Laura, the beautiful, dissatisfied woman we meet in the first segment. We soon discover that she “loves” him and he “loves” her. Don't the folks making this show know that the so-called "love" one encounters in therapy is not love at all? It is a product of transference and counter-transference that even a modestly competent therapist should not be confused by.

Melissa George, plays Laura with a fine seductive flair. Her unique, plastic face allows her to play emotions with her lips alone -- perfectly capturing the deep, old need to control and manipulate men of the early abuse victim. Marylin had it, as do many stars, male and female. It's not even about physical looks. The need -- the deep unfulfilled need -- is what draws one in -- and can be confusing for the object. The moment you take them up on their promise -- it disappears.

Laura tells Paul everything he needs to know so that he might avoid making a devastating life path error for both of them. She is disdainful of his patient she seduces and tells him about in detail. She is spiteful in her description about how the poor fellow made love. She admits she is usually inorgasmic and ends up masturbating, humiliating the man, by rubbing against his leg.

The writers have made it clear -- for good reason, Laura hates men. For her flirting is exciting and sex is agonizing. She makes sure it's the same for her partners by not responding -- or responding only superficially. Too many married men experience this nightly. Do none of the producers understand that her symptoms and the display presented, match exactly those in women suffering from PTSD from early childhood sexual abuse?

Laura eventually describes a teenage encounter with a much older man, a friend of her father, claiming that she seduced him. She says her father was in the room next door and later tells her he was aware of what was going on. Perfectly normal in the best of families. I am waiting for the show to get to what happened 20 years earlier with her father, but since they are working with words therapy only, and it happened before she could speak: we will probably never know.

By week six Laura has left therapy. But she arrives at Paul's, in time for her appointment, all dolled up, hot to trot. In an excruciating scene we see him violate this tragic young woman's boundaries by sitting next to her on the couch. She's smart enough to comment on this. Some part of her does want be healed -- wants it more than mediocre sex with another middle-aged man. Then Paul takes advantage of her concern for her father (what if he dies before she can confront him?) and takes her hands in his. It's so lovey-dovey.

This woman's was raped repeatedly as a teenager. Was probably raped previously in her infancy -- perhaps more than once. She doesn't need to be taken advantage of again by someone whom therapeutic transference has placed in the position of a loving and caring father. It is not loving and caring for Paul to hug, caress and embrace her -- or any other patient. It is not loving and caring for him to confess to her his confused and agonized feelings of "love." Are the producers going to show us the devastating and inevitable aftermath of this stupefying breach?

Proof of her damage -- as soon as he says he cares for her, she turns on him. How dense can this poor fellow be? She's told him she doesn’t orgasm easily -- if at all. Considering how we bring up girls in this country, that's not uncommon. Does he imagine that in a few hours of loving her he will transform a lifetime of empty sex? Unfortunately, it just don't work that way – though lots of men wish it did. Thankfully Paul comes to his senses and leads her out the door.

Earlier, in the most cockeyed writing I've seen in 20 years, we see poor, paralyzed Paul arguing with his supervisor, trying to get her approval to have an affair with Laura. He says he simply cannot understand, after all of his (what one must assume is psychoanalytic) training, why such an affair would destroy them both. This in spite of endless anecdotal history dating from Freud about the physical and practical disaster of allowing counter-transference to overtake the therapist. I know women who have married their therapist. The guy lost his license and the marriages were disasters. What in the hell are they up to in Israel?

Paul, dear fellow, this "love" is the very basis upon which what ever good there is to be derived from therapy comes about. Should you succeed in your wishes, you’d be out of business and she'd run off, half mad -- after having seduced her father, and or his best buddy, again. This would certainly end whatever good any kind of therapy might ever do for her, and it could conceivably kill her.

To return to the tale: my therapist’s patient was a resident at a major hospital, heading for a terrific career. She was as beautiful as models I had foolishly been dating and was brilliant. We had a year long emotional friendship, during which we were intimate only a few ecstatic times. My therapist had told me that having pleasurable sex with her would be impossible, based on the expurgated truth about her life she told him. He thought he knew how she made love. Pure, inhibited and sweet. Boy was he wrong. I never told him anything. Some good came of it though. Within a short time both of us broke off our therapy.

The Los Angeles Times article says that some therapists are addicted to the show. Who could they possibly be? It is an affront to their profession. Perhaps the purest treatment depicted is that of Paul and a young, hostile, terrified, suicidal gymnast. In the first few moments a conscious viewer realizes that the gymnast is a product of early sexual abuse by her father.

We are soon told that she acts this out by having sex with her middle-aged coach and any boy who wants to. She tries to get Weston to undress her, but he wisely refuses. We learn that sex for her is a means for getting even, but her descriptions of the act are so vague it makes one wonder if she's not making them up. A sure sign of abuse, she has no pleasure in it. It is inconceivable that the producers do not make it clear to us that the therapist knows this too.

The article says the show has become a guilty habit for those familiar with the subtext of therapy. Reportedly, among the most addicted are therapists who admit to intense feelings, pro and con, about the drama. How could they have feelings, other than horror, because most of the therapy depicted is classically wrongheaded, intrusive and incompetent?

Apparently some analysts scheduled an "In Treatment" panel for March 9, with show runner Rodrigo Garcia and others, on "Responding to Erotic Transference" at New York's Mt. Sinai Hospital. Another New York group was supposed to have held a "psychoanalytic salon" to discuss issues raised by the television show. Please, folks, have you nothing better to do? Perhaps you should organize a group reading of all of Alice Miller, Melanie Klein and Heinz Kohut.

There is only one way to respond to erotic transference. The therapist must treat it as the figment it is. Only an utter incompetent would acknowledge his feelings about a patient, no matter how strong they may be. What do a therapist’s feelings have to do with healing his patient? The patient’s feeling as are confused enough as it is. Even feelings of hatred and disgust must be masked, otherwise how is the patient’s superego to redevelop itself in a healthy, nondestructive way? You may read more about this in Melanie Klein.

Years ago I routinely sent friends to the Los Angeles Wright Institute, an outstanding institution where therapists in psychoanalytic training treat those in need, under close supervision, for low fees. It's made a difference in thousands of lives. Curiosity brought me to know some supervising analysts. This led to parties where I saw that therapists were as vulnerable as anyone to human frailties of ego and greed. Their social life was largely made up of other therapists. In a short while endless jargon became boring.

As a filmmaker, I was invited to speak to the Board of Directors of one of the major Psychoanalytic Institutes of Los Angeles. Together we created a team whose goal was to interview all of the prominent analysts in Southern California. These early interviews were some of the most fascinating I've ever participated in, because they revealed the deep personal schisms in the Southern California therapy profession.

In one interview, an eminent analyst, who is married to an eminent analyst, wept openly at the pain his "theoretical" conflicts with his fellow analysts had caused him. If analysts can’t get along, or agree on how to practice their profession, what chance has the rest of us? Power struggles within the group disillusioned me, and I dropped out. If these interviews continued they have created a priceless archive.

The leader of our team spoke freely about his belief that it was necessary for him, as a psychoanalyst, to reveal to his patients if he was sexually attracted to them. He spoke of treating one woman in particular with this method. I wonder what happened to her. I later videotaped a raucous meeting where he presented a carefully written paper justifying his complicated theories around his “method.” A hundred or more angry, out of shape therapists shouted him down. You would not believe that those folks, who’s life work is to sit calmly in chairs, could become so agitated. I understand, now that I've experienced different forms of therapy, how dangerous the depiction of Paul Weston is.

Another of Paul's patients is an Americanized version of what probably was an Israeli fighter pilot who mistakenly fired rockets into a children's school in Palestine. Not a single sentence that passes between them could be called therapy. The pilot displays almost no human traits whatsoever, and is almost completely masked. Far from narcissistic, he's invisible. Nobody's home. From sentence to sentence he contradicts himself. I've known lots of fighter pilots, and being inhuman does not come with the trade.

The pilot speaks only superficially about remorse -- and clever as Blair Underwood is, I never got the feeling he even knew how to fly. He says words, but they aren't his. The confusing character he plays is also pathologically controlling and manipulative. Early on he forces a complex and expensive coffee maker on his therapist, insulting him in the process. Paul seems helpless to define the space between them. In any language this is BAD therapy.

One of the goals of therapy to teach your patients the boundaries that their parents failed to do. There is only so far you can allow them to go in acting out insane rage from something hidden in the past. No competent therapist would've allowed the coffee maker to remain. Later, Paul observes the pilot, outside his office, being seduced by his own love object, Laura. One can see the producers chuckling. What fun!

However, to make this kind of nonsense work, the therapist has to be an absolute ninny. It is impossible for Gabriel Byrne to play an idiot, and he chaffs at the restraints. His emotions flow all over the place, as the dialogue forces inhuman contradictions from moment to moment.

In one episode, the pilot, claiming some higher, insanely implausible intelligence source, confronts Paul with the fact that his wife has run off to Rome with another man. The pilot taunts him so viciously that poor Paul is driven to physically attack a vastly more fit, younger man, throwing coffee in his face.

I hope no viewer believes such a nutty scene could ever take place in the real world. Dear Paul, there are things you may not allow your patients to do. They may not threaten murder without being reported to the police. They may not hug you, kiss you, stroke you, or stand too close. They may not bring you outrageous presents and plunk them down in your already too cluttered office. They may not eat, smoke or compulsively use the bathroom. They may not verbally assault or spy on you.

Dealing with these manipulations for what they are, would be healing -- but you do not. If a patient invades your privacy, that’s the sign to show them the door. While you're at it get a restraining order so this crazy pilot can never come near you again.

Paul discloses so much about himself and crosses so many boundaries that he becomes an unbelievable character. He allows his patients to be pathologically aggressive and resistant, never even attempting to point this rage at where it belongs. His supervisor is less compassionate than he. Perhaps because of their history together, she is far too intrusive and critical to be helpful. But then Paul is desperate. After 20 years of working at being a therapist, has he nowhere else to turn? Has he no close friends?

The reported interest in the show by therapists and their confusion about it, illustrates the said state of therapy. The show is nonsense, so why even try to make therapeutic sense of it? It has hardly any viewers because, brilliant as all of the acting is, the show is painful to watch. It's directed according to a weird syntax of screen direction I’ve found impossible to decipher. Often times the why of where the camera is placed is, to me, more interesting than what the people are saying.

Yet, as the article says, in a time when pharmacology has “gained ground” in treating problems, what happens in intimate therapy still has the power to fascinate. I take exception to the notion of gained ground, because pharmacological treatment comes with side effects which may prevent forever the patient being able to discover the source of his problem.

Alarmingly, the article says some therapists try to make sense of the nonsensical dialogue. One says he has noticed "parallel process" in Paul's mimicking Laura's complaints in his sessions with his supervisor. My guess it's a coincidence. The article says that therapists may plan to use clips of the show in postdoctoral courses to illustrate professional issues that arise in real-life sessions: Should therapists make coffee? Or start a couple's session when only one person has arrived? Or have wild sex with an attractive patient in a nearby hotel?

In movie and television psychotherapy, dramatic convention calls for the patient to dramatically recover repressed, emotionally cathartic memories. I had such an experience and it was nothing like that. In fact my therapist was almost completely unaware of what was happening to me until I described it – weeks later, after I had processed it on my own. I am appalled by books like “Prince of Tides,” which, though beautifully written, present a totally cockeyed image of what tragedy arises from broken therapeutic boundaries.

The article says that part of Paul's struggle comes from the sort of therapy he's shown to practice. It comes out of an old tradition in psychotherapy where 'the customer is always wrong.' Whatever the patient says is suspect. So on the one hand, Paul caringly gets them to open themselves up to him, and then he plays gotcha. But the problems go deeper. It seems that no one associated with the show knows how to write dialogue appropriate to real therapy. Meaningful chat will not do.

At one time I considered doing a television series called "The Impossible Profession." I had a list of the brilliant analytic advisers who would help write it. I now know that by adding the latest developments in nonverbal therapy we would have had an even more fascinating series. Real therapy is amazing when it works. The results are physical and immediately visually apparent. My book "Backlight" is about this. Too bad the waters have been muddied. “In Treatment” is a lazy and careless presentation of an important human interaction that is precious and healing. Though brilliantly acted entertainment, it does not serve the audience well.

Senator John McCain is not your friend.

2008-03-01T10:53:00.000-08:00

A story by Los Angeles Times staff writer, Peter Wallstein, on the front page of the Saturday, March 1, 2008 issue, prompted me to write. It revolves around the cleverly misleading commercial (but then aren't the most dangerous of those cleverly misleading) running about a “ringing phone in the White House.”

I made commercials back in the days when Barry Goldwater was attacked by showing an atomic bomb seeming to destroy a little girl sniffing a daisy. At least that's how I remember it. I knew the guys who created those false images, and they didn't believe they were being cynical at all.

The story goes on to say that in recent days, Senator John McCain of Arizona, the Republican nominee, has accused Senator Barack Obama of misunderstanding the role of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Perhaps he thinks if he repeats confusion and lies endlessly they will become truth. It's not pertinent here to discuss our president’s suggestion that it would not be appropriate for Senator Obama, were he president, to meet with foreign dictators. Talking never killed anyone.

How many American are dismayed by our Cuban embargo? Does it make any of us more secure to impose hardship on a people because of a corrupt government. If that were so we would have to cease communicating with half the world. The way to change the government of Cuba is by getting close to the people and showing them we are their friends. Then they might be more likely to copy us. A bully never wins.

When, so long as money and power was involved, was immorality ever a detriment to any president playing footsie with corrupt dictators? Hell, we created Saddam Hussein because it suited our notion of apportionment of power in the Middle East. Videos of President Bush walking hand-in-hand and kissing the vicious, anti-Semitic religious demagogues who run Saudi Arabia are disgusting. We know the direct role that country played in 9/11 and its human abuses, especially to women, are obscene. These are not nice guys.

Senator Obama provides the absolutely correct response. In the decision to invade Iraq, President Bush and his government filled with brilliant advisors, gave the wrong answer and led us into a debacle. There is also massive evidence they lied to us about the need for war. The Army, led by brilliant military minds, and "Donny," created the situation we now face by failing to plan for an occupation.

At least now the Generals get it and are restructuring the Army, creating training and capacity within it to provide "nationbuilding." The new Army field manual, FM 3-0 offers what it calls a "revolutionary departure from past doctrine" creating a third core mission besides offense and defense. Stability operations. It was not enough to blow Iraq apart, we need the skills to help those remaining put it back together. President Bush and his government hires are directly responsible for our failure to do that. Now the mighty US Army realizes it must rethink its mission. This is the president Senator McCain believes in, and presumably respects. This is a war with no possible military victory that he supports.

I spent 2 1/2 years as a young lieutenant making training films all over the country for the Army signal Corps. It was the best film school anyone could want and I thank the Army for it. I showed up somewhere with my five man GI crew on VOCO (one of them later became a successful Hollywood cameraman), checked in with the commander and started shooting -- in 35 mm no less. After 10 years in the reserve I "graduated" with the rank of captain. I am reminded of this whenever I check my automobile insurance with United Services Automobile Association. They call me Captain Brown. Really!

After leaving the Army, my old friend Daniel Tamkus and I spent a year making a film for General Westmoreland (the consummate Vietnam war liar) about the "modern volunteer army." We interviewed soldiers from the highest to the lowest, all over the world and assembled them into an hour film that apparently was shown only to top generals. Even though, under pressure from my client, I fudged the cutting to favor the army establishment, the conclusion was that for most soldiers, the military was not something, that had they known its faults, they would've volunteered for. Changes would be necessary and perhaps this film influenced them

We had and still have a military to be proud of. Every evening, while shooting, I would marvel at the young men, from all over the nation I had met that day. The generals I interviewed, who ran the Army, would be the last to claim that experience is all that is necessary to be a good soldier. They were of a moral caliber which were do honor to the leadership of any major corporation.

In talking to them I learned that soldiers in command make terrible mistakes, not necessarily because of lack of experience or training, but because of failures in character. The history of our wars is filled with examples, and Iraq is no exception. It is character we should be looking for in our president, self-control, lack of ego -- rather than so-called "experience." If it is character we are after we must look to the life experience of each candidate. What kind of husband, wife, parent have they been and are they? We do not want a leader with a "famous temper."

Our film advisor, appointed by the office of the Chief of Staff of the Army, was a handsome, young West Point light colonel who had also been a Rhodes scholar. He exemplified the very best, but told us that after the film finished shooting he was leaving the Army.

In a handheld, pre Steadycam, tracking shot through countless rows of American graves above the Normandy beaches the colonel spoke about the dozens, perhaps hundreds of high ranking officers in the German military, who upon refusing to murder Jews, were murdered themselves. This madness (Stalin also suffered from the disease of killing his best officers) crippled Hitler and led to shortening the war.

The colonel reminded that no one above the rank of captain, and only one of those, had put his career on the line (not his life) to protest atrocities committed by our military in Vietnam. Military experience is only useful if it is backed by temperance and morality. I tried, but this material never got into the finished film.

For Senator Clinton, being the wife of a president is no sort of training to be one, Any more than by being her husband he learned to cook, sew and raise children.

What is all this flap about “national security”? We are in no danger of foreign invasion. Al Qaeda is not going to take over our country. This is not going to become an Islamic state. Terrorism is absolutely not going to bring us down. We have the most sophisticated, intelligent weapons in the world and they are reliable. We have the best army --and it's all volunteer. We do not need more nuclear weapons, we already have enough to wipe out most of the world. We do not need a hyper expensive national missile defense system, which would only benefit the fat cats who run the companies that would build it. It is dubious if it would work anyway. We be better off spending the money on our children's education, because it is there we are falling behind.

Other blunders, such as a useless and wasteful war, and economic blindness are more likely to bring us down. The worst that could possibly result from terrorism would be a series of tragic and insane acts which kill Americans at home. The death toll will be a fraction of those killed because we are too foolish to teach our children how to drive properly -- a fraction of those killed by alcohol, because we love to advertise booze. Terrorism would be tragic, but it's not going to end life in America as we know it. Stupidity about how we choose our president will.

Those of us in the abuse business are trained to observe speech. It's our highest function as humans and the one most likely to be affected by early child abuse. Among sure warnings of post traumatic stress are: nail biting, stuttering, inability to look into another person's eyes, excessive shyness or aggression – and “mechanical speech."

We must avoid having a president again who was an early child abuse victim. We must avoid presidents who are enraged at their father or, more dangerous, in competition with them. Both our current president and Senator McCain had powerful, overwhelming fathers that they have spent their adult life in competition with. In Senator McCain's case the ghost of his heroic grandfather was also ever present.

Compulsive womanizing, alcoholism, religious fanaticism; are warning signs of a man we should not allow to lead us. Unfortunately they are so common as to be regarded as normal. Sadly, religiosity is considered important by many Americans. It is hard to find a positive resulting from extreme religious belief. It led to – among other religion induced human disasters , including 9/11 -- the Inquisition.

John McCain has the smoke around him of someone who had a difficult early life. He comes from a line of powerful, courageous, and successful military men. One never hears anything about his mother, but she must have been a compliant military wife. In such an early environment it is likely he was beaten. It seems that he isn't present, that some part of him is hidden behind the terrible torture he has endured, and all the smiling and gesticulating is a mask.

Our current president has a similar emotional affect. His smile is as false as his bravado. Propped up by the power of his position, he might seem to some an effective leader. But one sees on television a blank look appear, followed by one of terror, when he is asked to simple question he cannot answer. Dangerous stuff.

Senator McCain has a history of irreverence and opposition, as a young man, to authority. He apparently was quite the cutup in his youth, but thrived. It takes extraordinary courage to fly a military jet in combat. Without the experience you cannot comprehend the skill and information processing talents required. One of the worst qualities a military pilot can have, however, is blindness in the face of obvious defeat. When you run out of bullets or fuel – turn for home.

Senator McCain's anger at authority came to its climax when, we are told, on a bombing run, all set to drop, he saw a Sam missile coming up at him. These things are not invisible; they look like flying telephone poles and have a distinctive radar signature. Apparently, with his radar screaming warning, he could have avoided it. But that would have meant aborting his bombing mission. So stubborn, heroic to a fault, he toggled his bomb where he was supposed to, and the Sam blew his wing off.

This was not the act of a war hero; it was the act of a tragic figure seeking to outdo the phantom of his father. It is not much different from that of a fanatic suicide bomber. Senator McCain was ready to kill himself rather than abort his mission. Will he be willing to take us all with him the next time?

Planes and pilots are fantastically expensive. Senator McCain's training cost our government more than his airplane. He was trained, and experience told him, to save himself and his plane for the next mission -- but anger and intemperance rose above all. "I'm going to get those bastards." This is how far experience rose above poor character.

That is not the mentality we want in our president. Just as we don't want a president who was a crafty draft dodger, alcoholic and personal coward. The next stage of John McCain's career was spent under the most unimaginable circumstances. The tale of his heroism, and refusal to accept special treatment as the son of an admiral, has oft been told. Most men would have given in or died. Not most, virtually anyone. These acts, enduring torture were super human. One wonders what his illustrious father thought of his son’s half mad sacrifice that did none of us any good.

But being able to sustain the unimaginable does not necessarily make for a good president. Senator McCain was stubbornly rebelling against a memory, more powerful than anything in the present. A memory of being a tortured, helpless child. -- even if the torture only took the form of having a father and grandfather who were impossible to beat war heroes.

Our president suffers from this. It haunts his every waking moment. His recent public exclamation about what a “tough guy” he is, spoken through the face of an adolescent frat boy, was telling. It is said McCain has dramatic anger management problems and a history of allowing revenge to overpower his common sense. Dangerous characteristics in the president of the most powerful country in the world.

Watching Senator McCain one is struck by his tortured face, a product of six endless years spent in hopeless, unimaginable conditions. When he speaks about that time he seems to have worked the resulting PTSD through. That in itself is heroic, and rare. He had cancer and that has added to the psychic burden his unconscious must carry. He’s made unfortunate personal choices and those probably weight on him, as they weigh on us all.

But the “tell” – the dramatic and obvious “tell” -- is Senator McCain's incessant use in public speech of the expression, "my friends.” One must beware of what is behind automatic speech. "My friends," is placed in the Senator's conscious brain by his unconscious to conceal and cover up rage.

In the most stressed out period of my 20s, I was married, raising two small children, and trying to build a film company all by myself. I was incapable of having a friend or associate or of asking advice from anyone. I was unconscious of the reasons I was so isolated. The fault lay with my inability at that time to recognize what had been done to me as a child -- which led directly to that place. I was angry and did not know why. The slightest thing set me off. I blamed everyone else, because I could not place the blame where it belonged; on my parents -- and especially on my beloved father.

Then I began speaking automatically. My communication was littered with a series of repeated phrases which were so practiced that I did not stutter when I said them. The repetition comforted me, creating a wall against my unhappiness and terror. Whenever I hear anyone mechanically repeating a phrase, I think what great sorrow lies behind this?

"My friends," tells me that John McCain has no friends. That he is a man flying blindly into a speeding missile, and doesn't give a damn. We don't want him taking our country along with him. He hides his rage behind a mantra of friendliness and reasonableness. His self control is skin deep and we are told those close to him know it. Were he in real power the skin would fall away.

With his hundred year war Senator McCain presents a terrifying prospect for America -- one similar to that faced by Tojo and the Japanese government at the end of the Second World War. It didn't matter that the war they started was ill-conceived and unwinnable. It didn't matter that hundreds of thousands of Japan's finest young men had been killed. Bombs were falling. People were starving. No weapons were left. It didn't matter that they had blundered into something their obsolete Samurai ethic blinded them to. They were facing an invasion that would have killed half of their remaining population, who were commanded to fight to the death with farm implements. Echoing John McCain's words -- it only mattered that there be no surrender. We know the result.

Senator McCain would have our nation repeat again, the same casual disregard for the obvious as when he ignored a flying telephone pole with a bomb on its tip. The oft referred to experience with foreign affairs and protecting our country, which may be valuable intelligence for our next President, is only useful if it is filtered through a neutral conscious.

The prospect of Senator McCain as president should terrify us all. He cares more for staying on his flight path, and dropping his damn bomb, than he does for the fact that the Iraq war is bankrupting America and closing enormous pain and suffering for almost every American. It is the direct cause of the depression we are heading for.

This is to say nothing of the families of the men killed tomorrow -- and the tomorrows to follow. They are the greatest tragedy -- because the Iraq war was created by some disturbed, gray haired men’s notion of money and power -- and now it is all for nothing. It is disconcerting to see on television some of our finest young men parroting their indoctrination that they are in Iraq because of 9/11.

We abandoned the pursuit of known terrorists in preference for flashier, but impossibly ambitious “nation building.” The president's ego got the better of him. And there was the “oil.” This has been an imperialistic war, one that in the 21st century most of us are ashamed of. You would be hard-pressed to find an informed commentator or military expert who does not believe that the Iraqi war has created many times more terrorists than it ever killed.

According to a Los Angeles Times article, retired General Merrill McPeak, a prominent backer of "Obama for President" said: "If you want to know what kind of commander in chief Barak is going to be, why don't you compare the campaigns that have been run here? Is it a panic situation? Crisis driven? Are you firing people? Are you loaning yourself money?"

General McPeak sums up what I have written in the previous pages with a comment he once made to Senator McCain: "You don't get to be a hero by getting shot down, you get to be a hero by shooting then other fellow down." General George Patton said much the same.

How to save our courts – and us as well.

2008-02-29T00:57:00.000-08:00

In an extraordinary article for Parade magazine, February 24, 2008, once Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor spoke out about the danger of politicizing our judges. In her work she was required by the Constitution to fairly and impartially apply the law -- not the law as she wanted it to be, but the law as it was. How many present Federal or Supreme Court Justices share that view?

Obviously she was also required to be free of personal prejudice toward those who stood before her. It should not matter what the race, religion, or personal appearance of those who argued their cases was. That's a powerful demand to make of oneself. Every one of us is influenced by those things. But her work was based on the notion that a judge must be above that.

I have a friend who works as a judge in arbitration cases. He is one of those obsessively fair and impartial people we are fortunate to have in that position. He once described to me that the portion of his training that affected him the most was that having to do with impartiality. A judge is taught, and this may be the most important part of his training, that he must subvert ego and his personal prejudice.

Justice O'Connor wrote that she is concerned about the manner in which politically motivated interest groups are attempting to interfere with justice. We have barely survived a period in which the Executive branch has systematically subverted the rule of law and attempted to load the federal bench with severely right wing judges. The Supreme Court has been affected it in a way that we will have to live with for at least a generation.

For the past seven years lobbyists have run amok in Washington, doing all sorts of mischief. The baseline of influencing corporate malfeasance, including interference by a Congressman with our environmental laws, has been raised to such a level that it takes an act of massive corruption to wake us up. The past four years in Iraq, as we tried ineptly to administer a country we have no business being in, have been illustrative of how corrupt we have become. Billions have been mislaid and lucrative contracts were given to inefficient but connected companies.

The American public must accept the importance of having our next president be free from crushing corporate ties and obligations to lobbyists. John Roberts is on the right track, and Senator Obama is not far behind.

The rule of law includes statutes and provisions. It involves precedent. Justice O'Connor says good judging requires taking ingredients and procedures used successfully in the past and adjusting them to the case at hand. Any lawyer will tell you it's what they teach you in law school.

If a judge comes up with a new way to apply the law, or obviously is personally prejudiced, that opinion may be reviewed by appellate courts to ensure that it is correct. Would that were the case. Lawyers tell me, and I have painfully observed that consistent decisions by appellate courts support and uphold decisions made by lower court judges. No matter how cockeyed, prejudiced and irrelevant -- their first inclination is to affirm the lower court judge. He or she has to be totally around the bend to be reversed. This leads to a certain cynicism in the public, which is deadly to justice.

I have been living through a striking example which is the subject of my first nonfiction book. The case, involving striking injustice to a single mother, is in progress, so it's too soon to write publicly about it, but it is a microcosm of everything wrong with courts all across America. Justice is threatened when judges ignore settled law and make decisions according to personal or public preferences. It is further threatened when appellate courts uphold them because of a form of cronyism. The notion that there is a Supreme Court in California is misleading. They are so overwhelmed that only life and death matters will be considered. Read the book when it comes out.

Justice O'Connor writes that the judiciary currently is experiencing unprecedented pressure from interest groups to make decisions based on politics. She says that the majority of law is state law. 95% of litigation takes place in state courts. Unsung, local judges have the greatest responsibility to bring justice to cases about divorce, property rights, employment, product liability and medical malpractice.

Perhaps many of them are just, but more than 89% of state judges are elected. Many of those elections become full-fledged political battles fueled by growing sums of money spent by candidates and special interests groups to attack, defend and counterattack. Where is the poor citizen left in all of this? Standing in court with an often inept lawyer, bewildered at American justice.

Justice O'Connor wrote that Sue Bell Cobb spoke to a reporter the day after she won election to become the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. The first question she was asked was: "How does it feel to be the victor of the second most expensive judicial race in US history? How will you convince the people of Alabama that the campaign's contribution to your election will not impact how you rule?"

In every locality, so long as lawyers contribute to the reelection campaigns of judges there will be questions. Justice O'Connor wrote that Illinois Supreme Court Justice Lloyd Karmeir won the most expensive judicial election in American history in 2004. That race cost the candidates $9.3 million. How can people have faith in such a system?

At 28 years old, by mutual agreement, I separated from my first wife. We had had two small children, who I was able to see frequently. At first, other than missing my children, and them missing me, everything went fine. We created a simple separation agreement with the help of two lawyers, who never met. Everything was done on the telephone. My lawyer, who didn't even charge me, was a friend impressed by my rising film career. Before signing, I noted in the paperwork there was no provision preventing my wife from taking my children out of state.

I had been enormously affected when my uncle, Mende, lost his children to an ex-wife who took them to California. A fall down alcoholic, she was the sister of a prominent show biz celebrity. My nieces were brought up by their grandmother and I am certain abused by their uncle or others in that fleshy California household. For most of their childhood Mende saw his daughters only for two months in the summer, when he took them to Fire Island. I only became aware of the abuse when I got to know them as adults.

But even before that, seeing my uncle’s profound distress and disappointment, I determined that would never happen to me. One day my wife told me she was taking the children to California with her new, younger boyfriend. In hindsight I realize this would never have happened, but at the time it panicked me.

Then my older daughter, who was around six called to tell me that the witless boyfriend had shown her and her sister his genitals. That's not the word she used or how she put it, but I drove in a panic to see them and chased the guy out of the house. It was actually sort of funny; we danced around pretending we had achieved a great victory. I then waited with them for hours until their mother came home.

My older daughter had developed asthma and my wife seemed unable to keep the house dust free. My younger daughter broke her arm and I received another panicky phone cal,l because apparently their mother was unable to take her to the hospital. I rushed over and even though it wasn't my visitation time, I picked both children up. We had the arm x-rayed and placed in a cast. I asked my daughter what she wanted to do. She said she wanted to come back to my apartment and rest. Late that evening their mother showed up with her brother and took the children back.

I had been seeing a highly trained and recommended psychiatrist, discussed in a previous blog. After these experiences this guy, who had no children, convinced me that I must, as a good father seek custody of my children. No matter how bad things were, it soon became clear that involving children in the court system of New York City was unconscionable.

It did have some good results. Child Protective Services entered the equation. Their mother had to be a lot more careful. The downside was it drove her into a panic -- she might lose her children. My psychiatrist recommended quite possibly the worst lawyer in New York City. Here is the danger -- a young man under the influence of an ignorant therapist, no matter how fine his training or intention, can make terrible mistakes. Though I thought I had good reason, the trial put terrible stress on the children and their mother.

I had by that time placed both children with superb child therapists, but since their mother would not take them, we only went on my weekend. Later on, as I remember, she relented. This is a long-winded way around to tell you about two amazingly incompetent judges in the Supreme Court of New York City.

Our first judge was named Telesford. My lawyer didn't tell me we could bypass the guy. His reputation was that the Adam Clayton Powell machine in Harlem had cruelly arranged for him to be a judge because of his race. The poor man literally did not understand a single thing said to him. Perhaps at one time he had been sort of a lawyer, but by the time he became a judge his mind had completely failed. Trial days were partially taken up by sycophantic lawyers parading through showering the dim witted judge with flowery praises. He ate it up.

The judge made our lives a nightmare. His insane decision -- almost as if he was responding to another case entirely, and perhaps he was -- was reversed, after months, in the Appellate Court. The many cases Telesford had reversed cost the citizens of New York a fortune. Again I took someone's bad advice about hiring an appellate lawyer, and got two lunatics in the middle of dissolving their partnership. Somehow we prevailed. In those pre-Internet high-speed copying machine days, one had to literally publish a book of the transcript of our trial.

Our next judge, Irving Saypol, had been the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York and the Chief Prosecutor of the Rosenbergs. Saypol graduated from Brooklyn Law School and quickly rose through the ranks of the United States Attorney's office. He was an experienced prosecutor of Communists, as he had convicted Alger Hiss, William Remington, Abraham Brothman and others. Our judge arrived on the bench a celebrity.

Part of his success was attributable to a sincere belief that he was punishing evil. His success in the Rosenberg trial accelerated his career, and he was appointed to the New York Supreme Court just months after the trial. He was proudly part of the government team that fabricated evidence against the Rosentbergs so they could be murdered by our government. That exemplar of honesty, Roy Cohn, was a junior member. I was to later encounter Roy Cohn face-to-face. That's a story for my book.

Sorry to digress, but this is irresistible. In my early twenties, before I got the courage to go out on my own, I worked for my father as a dramatically underpaid cameraman/director/editor, shooting little documentaries. When my parents divorced, more than ten years later, I learned the already wealthy man had made a substantial profit on my labor.

One day I was called upon to shoot with a Judge Irving Kaufman. When I got to his office with my father – that was our crew, my father and I – I learned from a plaque on the wall, Judge Kaufman had presided over the trial and sentenced the Rosenbergs to death.

The seemingly wise and gentle judge observed my useless father’s bullying, as I set up. He saw what was happening -- I worked, my father badgered. Finally he told my father to shut up and leave me alone. I was stunned. That was the first time anyone had protected me against the man. But in another life, Kaufman, Saypol and Cohen, was a team made in hell.

People said Saypol had at least one homosexual son and lived in a nightmare marriage. While I was painfully testifying, he interrupted and asked if I loved my children so much, why I was getting a divorce? I stuttered too badly to tell him that our divorce was not unilateral. It wasn’t a whim or that we were in love with others. With a Judge like that the case could not turn out well, and the result was that I and my children were worse off after than if had done nothing. Regrettably my children had been damaged.

Toward the end of his career Saypol behaved so badly that he was indicted for taking bribes and removed from the bench. Years later when my leg was badly broken in motorcycle accident, my visiting nurse was also attending to Saypol in his last months. She thought he was a great man.

This country can only remain great if the principle which sets it apart from the world remains intact. We must keep religion completely separated from government and we must choose our judges based upon their capacity to be fair and impartial. This is a matter for each individual state. In Colorado and Nebraska an independent commission of knowledgeable citizens recommends candidates to the governor who appoints one of them as judge.

After several years the judge's name is submitted to the electorate who vote on whether he should keep his position. This method decreases the importance of money and politics. We must also educate our citizens about what makes a good judge. We must come to value their ability to be fair, impartial and competent. We must not choose the judges based upon race to fulfill some notion of equal opportunity. We must we weed out the obvious egomaniacs who once they don the black robe lose their humanity.

It happened again!

2008-02-21T19:02:00.000-08:00

On Valentine’s Day, at 3 p.m., a former graduate student at Northern Illinois University, Stephen Kazmierczak, pulled a gun from a guitar case and fatally shot five students, then himself. The florid details have been emerging in the news, so there is no need to repeat them.

It was the fifth fatal shooting in a week in United States. Like many shooters, the man was walking time bomb. One professor's comment was telling. "We are surrounded by corn. I am shocked that this happened on our campus."

There had been a week of graffiti, including racial slurs posted on dorm walls. A scrawled note was found which described last year shooting at Virginia Tech, which left 32 students and faculty dead, as unfinished and warned of major changes to come at Northern Illinois.

When the assailant was found dead by his own hand, both of his handguns still had ammunition in them. Gun magazines were scattered across the floor. At one point his rage ran out and he had nowhere to go.

On the previous Friday a woman shot two students to death and killed herself at Louisiana technical College in Baton Rouge. On that same day a man shot his wife, a teacher, in an elementary school in Portsmouth, Ohio. A few days later a high school student in Memphis, Tennessee was shot, allegedly by a classmate, during gym class. A15-year-old, who had recently proclaimed himself gay, was shot at a junior high in Oxnard, California and has been declared brain dead. The murderer, apparently the child of an angry alcoholic father, has been charged with premeditation.

As evening fell in Northern Illinois local police officers were frenzied. While more than a foot of snow fell, they were shooting at ghosts, searching for bombs that didn't exist, and stopping anyone who looked suspicious.

People reacted in horror when Seung-Hui Cho attacked Virginia Tech University last April, and grief gripped the nation for several days. On this Valentine’s Day almost no one batted an eye. It felt like a bad horror movie we had seen before. Some took note; a few grieved and a lot just didn't notice. As time goes on, and this becomes more common, more people will ignore it more.

We don't know much about Kazmierczak He wasn’t as helpful as Cho, who made a video of his hatred and rage. On February 16 Stephanie Simon, a mother, published an article in the LA Times about her “quest for answers.” She detailed a series of mass murders from Columbine High School in 1999. The only similarity between incidents was the use of easily available guns.

I wrote Ms. Simon and she replied she would watch this blog to “read my insights.” Only one matters. Look to violence and abuse in the pre-verbal history of the shooters. This is a tough answer, because those who know about pre-verbal abuse to these unfortunate killers are likely to have been the perpetrators.

There are 280 million guns in the hands of civilian America. The Constitution grants this right, and though many of us have no interest in guns the political climate makes it unlikely there will be any change in our laws. A country that is flooded with guns has to be particularly careful about violence to children. My “insight” is that those abused children will soon become our next shooters.

A recent article reports that Mel Gibson’s twin sons, like their father, have recently been in expensive rehab. They reportedly also have fought violently. My first thought is that they had been assaulted in their childhood by their father, much as Gibson was probably assaulted by his. Only their mother can answer this. An answer would help us all.

Tatum O’Neil writes that her father beat her brother and at least once, hit her full in the face with a closed fist. She seems to take such violence as a matter of course, and seems unable to connect it to her abusive marriage to John McEnroe and her subsequent life with men. We know that Ryan O’Neil’ son was involved in and perhaps responsible for the death of Frances Ford Coppola’s son. Violence travels far from the hand of the hitter.

After reading her heartbreaking book, I wrote Ms. O'Neill, suggesting that she try to get into some kind of therapy which would deal with post traumatic stress disorder resulting from what I believe to be early childhood sexual abuse by her father, or someone else. She has all the symptoms. I received no reply.

Anderson Cooper appeared on CNN seemingly totally bewildered as to why for the second or third fourth time in a year, someone has picked up guns and randomly shot people in a University. He says with great assurance we will never know what drove him. Andersen, we know.

This kind of irrational behavior does not respond to rational understanding. It is significant that these men killed themselves. It is significant they are men. The recent explosion of rage lasted only two minutes, during which the killer injured many and killed five. When the infant’s short term rage was spent, he killed himself. Almost all the shooters participate in acts of public suicide, as protests against wrongs buried deep in the psyche of the shooter.

The killer was also calling attention to himself – as Cho did in his videos. Unable to tell the world how he had been tortured, he acted out what had been done to him. Parents who have been treated violently are often violent toward their children. It takes a monumental effort to change this. But change we must.

At thirty, in the midst of a painful separation, with two small children, I began therapy with a world famous Psychoanalyst. He was English, older, elegant, smoked filter tipped Benson & Hedges cigarettes, rode on the back of my motorcycle, and was entirely clueless about what had happened to me.

He did ask to see my parents and encouraged me to tell them about my childhood. Amazingly they joined us. When for the first time I confronted them with how I had been brutally beaten in my childhood. They said they were “surprised.”

My father, of course denied all knowledge. He “hadn’t been around” after all. Too busy making a fabulous living, which benefited mostly him. I have a letter from this period in which he apologizes for my mother’s crazy behavior, saying if he had known about it he would have done something. Not likely. The beater, my sister’s nanny, was also his lover – and quite likely my mother’s also.

But it was my mother who stunned me. She said I was an overactive little boy who needed to be beaten to bring me under control. This seemingly loving woman covered up her guilt with an insane rationale. We never spoke of it again. On her death bed she swung wildly, still trying to strike back at those who had abused her so long ago.

Our problem as a nation is that we believe in violence to children. Many religions encourage it. Ask your neighbors. Most likely they believe it's okay to hit their kids. A good smack once in a while keeps them in line. A good parent disciplines.

A national dialogue is necessary because we have not publicized the connection between child abuse and violence. We abuse and torture animals routinely, because we have been deadened to the suffering of other creatures and our fellow humans -- in the same way Nazi concentration camps were run by deadened soldiers.

I propose the government spend a couple of bombs worth to do research through our vast prison population and find out what percentage of inmates has been beaten or abused. What would it cost? A few million dollars? The result would absolutely show us that virtually everyone in prison has been tortured as a child. Those who commit violent crimes have ALL been victims of violence themselves.

Publicize this. Eliminate it. And our society will profoundly change.

To that end we must move toward greater ethical standards. We have been deeply damaged by a government which lied to get us into an illegal war. This too reflects in growing public violence. Colin Powell, if he would stand up and become a national hero, could tell us what happened. Hundreds know about the creation of the deadly falsehoods that at least one presidential hopeful still stands behind, and are silent.

There is hope -- but it’s late. A message of accountability for Bush/Cheney has finally resonated on Capitol Hill. The House of Representatives took a major, tangible step towards holding them accountable. A vote on the House floor demanded action to enforce the law and our Constitution, and hold former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten in Contempt of Congress. This is the same Meyers who our president wanted to nominate for the Supreme Court.

Bolten and Miers have amazingly ignored congressional subpoenas for nine months and thumbed their noses at Congress and the American people. Executive privilege does not permit officials to avoid appearing altogether when subpoenaed. This behavior is unprecedented and outrageous. Now, these two renegade officials must face up to their blatant disregard of the law and constitution.

Pending legislation allows Congress to bypass the Attorney General, who stated that he would not enforce contempt, and immediately take action in the courts. Congress finally defended the Constitution and its rights as an equal branch of government. But don’t hold your breath. Did you read about this in the news?

Either of the Democratic candidates is going to make immediate, sweeping changes in the moral basis upon which our country is run. We need a justice department that is not politically biased -- that serves justice -- not some perverted version cooked up in the minds of a coupole of wealthy old men in power.

Lawlessness by top officials is reflected in the rise of incompetent and corrupt judges all over America. Corruption among lawyers is typified in jokes by virtually every comedian. We detest lawyers and yet seem helpless to create a society that is not so dependent on them. They represent the single greatest waste of our resources. The law is set up to allow them to churn cases endlessly, and an incompetent judiciary encourages this.

I recently was the recipient of a demand letter from a law firm that was based on falsehoods that were all easily punctured. Lawyers should be held responsible for what they do and write. It is their responsibility to make sure their client can demonstrate to them that he is telling the truth. Bar associations must enforce this sense of morality among lawyers.

In order to hold Judges accountable we must remove laws that prevent citizens from suing them. Judges must be liable for cruel and inhuman treatment. One cannot count on our Appellate Courts which often seem to be there to protect the Judges and not the petitioner. Bar associations have to become more than a rubber stamp for incompetent lawyers.

I take it as a good sign that we are elevating someone entirely fresh and new to the position of possibility being president. I like it that his wife honestly says this is the first time she has felt proud of being an American. As an old soldier, I am proud also. We appear to be standing up and taking our country back. Maybe it took years and years of harm and cronyism to become so frustrated that we will take a chance on a man untested and untainted by a past in Washington.

There is no such thing as an “accidental drug overdose.”

2008-02-14T11:58:00.000-08:00

The Sunday, February 10, 2008 LA Times Calendar section opened with an article about the death of actor Brad Renfro on January 15, 2007, at age25.

It referred to Heath Ledger, Brittany Spears, River Phoenix, Eva Mendes, Balthazar Getty, Ben Affleck and Juliette Lewis; asking, “Has Hollywood become an incubator of [drug] abuse or a mirror of society? Or are we all just more aware of its troubled denizens because of the hyper 24/7 coverage?"

The article quotes Dr. Drew Pinsky, who appears on VH1’s “Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew.” "I think what we see in young Hollywood is reflective in what we see happening in young

America

-- the pandemic of drug addiction." He says we are losing ground to pharmaceutical drug addiction. Apparently overdoses kill more people than guns and are second only to car accidents. The man is unquestionably an expert in pharmacology, but his input offers no answers about why Heath died.

The article contains intimate details about Renfro's life just before he died – but nothing about why. “Why” seems to have mystified the writer. I tried, but could bear to watch only a few minutes of some Dr. Drew shows. They hovered in a misty area of group therapy, concerning the recent past. Unlike Dr. Phil, he is free of rant and rage, and seems like a humble physician with a genuine desire to heal.

But I saw on his show nothing of what I would call "treatment," just a lot of painful and convoluted talk. I wanted to step in and ask questions which might at least lead the participants on the terrifying journey back to where their addiction began. As did the writer of the LA Times article, he offered no actionable idea about why so many attractive, talented and successful people are falling prey to “accidental" drug overdose.

Heath Ledger was videotaped at a party taking drugs. According to Dr. Drew, who saw the video, Ledger seemed highly intoxicated, extremely guilty and agonized -- concerned that his wife and daughter were upstairs. This speaks again to the non-accidental nature of his death. He was out-of-control, and no one was helping, because no one really understood what was going on. I can find no information anywhere about the nature of Ledgers early childhood.

Dr. Drew says he has a treatment for drug addiction and his treatment works. He says he's treated 10,000 patients and can absolutely cure addiction. He sounds like he knows what he's talking about, but how many of the 10,000 remain cured? You cannot cure addiction with drugs. But that seems to be all Dr. Drew understands. I know a young man hooked on legal methadone -- as addicted to that as to heroin. How is he being helped?

Perhaps there are people, otherwise mentally healthy, who become addicted by mistake, who have no abuse history or personality tendencies towards being drug addicts. Perhaps those are the ones Dr. Drew can cure. Perhaps using more drugs will cure patients from needing to take them. But I believe any such cure is only superficial. You cannot treat addiction without treating the underlying cause. The premise of these blogs is that it arises as a result of early childhood abuse.

By my definition an accident is something entirely unforeseen and unpreventable. The recent Heath Ledger tragedy was no accident -- any more than it would be an accident if any of the satellites revolving around Britney Spears or the star herself, were injured or killed. Heath died from a combination of powerful prescription drugs, painkillers and tranquilizers that suppressed his respiration -- drugs he should never have been taking together. It was a willful act of a man in terrible pain.

The Veterans Administration is finally waking up to the fact that soldiers abused in their early childhood are subject to far more powerful, and difficult to cure, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder than those raised in a supportive, loving environment. Though we are not in combat this fundamental medical finding applies to each of us. Our ability to surmount loss of love, unpleasantness, disorder, frustration and disappointment seems to be directly related to the conditions of our early childhood.

There is no way to prevent job failure, relationship breakup or divorce. But my belief is that our reaction to severe emotional stress as adults, which none can avoid, is conditioned by our prenatal environment and first six years of life. When I physically absorbed and mentally understood and what had happened to my mother while she carried me, my ability to cope with a challenging life path dramatically improved. In a lifelong process of healing I've encountered only two therapists, thankfully recently, who understood this.

There is no way to have an automobile accident without getting in your car. There is no way to overdose on prescription drugs unless doctors prescribe them, or you get them illegally. In Ledger’s case no one doctor could have prescribed what he took. He apparently did not take the trouble to understand how the combination of drugs, possibly prescribed by more than one doctor, might have affected him. He apparently had a drug abuse history. Others knew about it. Does a sane Doctor prescribe powerful and dangerous drugs to someone who also has or had a major drug habit? Again -- no accident.

Did any one of these doctors consider before prescribing poison, that this young patient consider a safer course of treatment? Probably not. It is much easier to arrogantly prescribe a miracle drug custom designed to put a bandage over a festering wound -- than to seek inside and laboriously heal it.

If a doctor decided there were other treatments available for a young man who could sleep only an hour at a time and thought he required heavy-duty painkillers, where would he turn? How many therapists are able to treat emotional disorders like the one that probably was the underlying cause of Ledger’s death? The training most therapists receive precludes their understanding the importance of early life emotional injuries, or being able to treat them. How many doctors are aware of the usefulness of Somatic Experiencing, Craniosacral, EMT and Acupuncture therapies?

Even now the therapy most therapists must receive in order to become therapists rarely deals with their early trauma. From the days of Freud therapists have been unwilling to look at their own pre-birth and early life conditions. Updated versions of "The Drama Of The Gifted Child" carry Alice Miller's reaction to this common therapeutic failure. She is furious that her therapists consistently tried to talk her out of memories of childhood abuse -- convincing her they were fantasies.

Perhaps emotionally and psychologically oriented prescription medication is not dangerous of itself. Perhaps there are reasons dangerous drugs must be prescribed by an ingrained and blind medical community, with an eye cocked to the bank account. Sorry to be cynical, but I've been on the receiving end of too much careless medical treatment based on doctor’s money hunger. I do not believe FDA approval of dangerous drugs makes them safe. Too much lobbyist’s money changes hands. Clearly the pharmaceutical industry, in its greed, killed Ledger.

You will not find Dr. Drew saying this on television. By the time a severely damaged adult, without a clue to what is driving him, arrives at the psychiatrist's office he is desperate for anything to ease the pain. And it must work quickly. So it falls upon the prescribing physician to make sure he is not subjecting his patient to unnecessary risk. Used with care, guided by consistent and informed medical attention, and other competent therapy, psychotropic drugs may be lifesavers. But experience tells me there are other ways that produce a satisfactory results without risk.

Is an investigation underway to determine how many doctors were involved in Heath’s death? Did each know about the prescription medications of the others? Did they consider the possibility that this troubled young man might take a lethal combination, and warn him strongly? I've been the victim of many doctors with troubled emotional equipment, who were in too much of a hurry. The waiting room was full and the cash register was clicking.

Heath must have been in unbearable emotional pain, unable to sleep, and struggling to survive each day. He was young and suddenly famous. No one could say no to him. That’s intoxicating in itself. He had separated from the mother of his child. Perhaps this was the first time he had encountered the psychological material which produced the overwhelming feelings he was trying to suppress with drugs. I've been in such pain and I know how difficult life becomes from minute to minute. Just breathing in and out seems impossible.

It did not matter that my films were successful, I had plenty of money and glamorous friends, or that every day was filled with excitement and adventure. It did not matter that I was tall, attractive, and physically fit. I had beautiful, custom-made clothes, motorcycles, fast cars and airplanes. I moved fast and with style! Yet my soul was crushed and still. It did not matter that I derived enormous satisfaction from talents that were gifted to me from birth. It did not matter that virtually every film I made received praise. I would go outside my door in the morning and find storyboards for fabulous television commercials, with no-bid offers, outside my door.

But I derived no pleasure from any of this. I was half dead. Crippled. My hidden inner self was in excruciating agony, struggling back in the time when I was being physically tortured and in actual danger of being killed. I was in therapy with an eminent therapist, who made it worse. The therapist, I later learned, was so caught up in his own ancient wounds that he could not heal.

The danger to people like Heath Ledger and Britney Spears is: connection to “forgotten” old abuse can pop up unexpectedly, out of nowhere. In order to become a reasonably successful adult I had to suppress all memory of my first three years and most of the subsequent three. Every therapist I saw early in life failed to treat the original wounds. The recovery process, even under guidance of a skilled and compassionate therapist, later in my life, was arduous and debilitating.

This is what happens. One marches along, superficially happy and successful. Heath fell in love with his costar, fathered a child, acquired dozens of fascinating friends, was on his way to a huge acting career. Then events triggered old, suppressed memories. Memories his parents, those who were there and experienced with him, are not likely to bring forth. The physical feelings and images lie in waiting, hidden under the soil of every day life, like a land mine. Then fate intervenes.

Fairly recently circumstances led me to a woman, a control freak, who had suppressed bisexual tendencies. We had a short, unpleasant relationship. After we broke up, she began sleeping with women. To my shock it tore me apart. I had feelings associated with her that didn't exist while we were going together. I didn't love her. We had known each other only briefly and had, I thought, almost no emotional relationship.

Soon after, in the middle of writing “Backlight” 10 or 12 hours each day, I was at the dog pound in Camarillo (a place that brings out the most vulnerable in us all) wandering around in terrible pain, talking to myself for hours while my new girlfriend and I chose dogs to foster. Compassionately, she acted as if nothing was happening. I was experiencing a full-blown psychotic break during what should have been a joyous and productive time.

Within days, events I only dimly remembered came to me. When my sister was born, I was a year and a half old. My parents hired a nurse for her, who sexually assaulted, beat and tortured me. I was black and blue half the time and my mother "didn't notice." I recovered these memories while writing “Backlight,” and because I could flow them out through my fingers and voice (and was seeing a properly trained and compassionate therapist), they passed. The agonizing experiences found their way into the novel and give it some of its power.

When I was four or five the nursemaid took me to see her girlfriend, leaving me alone on a dangerous street. I looked into the window and saw them doing something. I only realized later they were making love. I recovered this memory this while writing the scene for the book. From this raw material I recreated my childhood abuser, and placed her in “Backlight.” Before then I had been creating out of dim memory. She was someone foggy, who never came across as a real character. Now I had her (she even had a name) – and she leapt from the page, alive as she was then.

I continue to experience abnormal stress around being a creative person, who, as most of us have, has passed in and out of relationships. I have never been able to do it without enormous psychic distress. My career has been impacted because none of my artistic films were realized with my full, willing psyche. I only succeeded at making TV commercials, because, as I now understand, that did not conflict with the notion of my father being the only genius in the family.

So I sympathize with Ledger -- but am infuriated that apparently no one really sought to help him. Prescribing dangerous drugs and abandoning him is not help.

Ledger said his art came from a place of discomfort. "I like to do something I fear. I like to set up obstacles and defeat them. I like to be afraid of the project. I always am. When I get cast in something, I always believe I shouldn't have been cast. I fooled them again. I can't do it. I don't know how to do." Sounds familiar.

Facing the unknown, the film artist feels helpless. He must produce an ephemeral result, on-demand, on a schedule determined by hundreds of people, whose income depends on the success of a mysterious process. Famously, a painter or novelist who feels blocked can walk away and wait for the inspiration to arrive again.

Most artists feel helpless and uncomfortable, and perhaps it is what drives them to excel. One of the jobs of the director is to comfort, providing a stable, safe place from which to work. Elia Kazan understood this well. Creating anything original is a high wire act. We will probably never know, but the notion that Ledger was lethally distressed because of a part he had played in a film is absolute nonsense. More likely his separation from his wife and child and other relationships triggered an old and terrifying in him he was not able to contain.

My guess is that Michelle Williams could provide many of the answers, if she were willing to tell. In the interest of preserving everyone's privacy we can only assume. I write so you may consider what might have happened to Heath Ledger if someone capable had been allowed access to treat his original wound.

What is a "Therapist?"

2008-01-31T13:30:00.000-08:00

There is no more common word in English than "therapist."

The public sometimes prefers “counselor,” and refers to therapy as "counseling." But having a serious conversation and receiving advice about your behavior is not therapy.

We are a frail species that does not survive early childhood physical and emotional damage easily. A few moments of violent or improper behavior to an infant produces lifetime, often debilitating symptoms. Unfortunately, abuse is usually continual and hidden. It does not matter what may be in the mind of the adult who does the damage, because the infant has no intellectual knowledge. But its little body knows.

There is a vast difference between physical abuse to someone over 6, that can be remembered and talked about, and abuse to an infant. I know women who were raped once in their teens, who twenty years and much therapy later cannot fully recover. But abuse to a child before 6 is much more dangerous and difficult to treat. Forgotten abuse before three is the most problematic, because recovery is only accomplished by physically and painfully reliving it. For that to happen one must courageously work with an equally courageous and properly trained therapist.

For over a century we have evolved the notion that someone we call a therapist can somehow intervene in the present -- go back into the infant psyche, still active in the suffering adult, and heal the wound. You may judge the efficacy of this notion by the state of the world. The planet is in peril. Insane wars abound. Genocide is common. We torture innocent children and animals. We cannot stay committed in marriage. We are greedy and selfish. We do not know how to love, and are angry and confused. Because of this therapy has become a huge growth industry. Anyone of reasonable intelligence can become a therapist -- and the pay is terrific.

“Backlight” was written because, in addition to entertaining, I want to increase understanding of a genuine, healing therapeutic process that works. The novel presents a perfected notion of an enlightened and ego free therapist. We remain tragically confused over how to recover from even the simplest and short-lived attack on the infant's body -- to say nothing of sustained and sadistic abuse.

Philip McGraw Ph.D., a hugely successful TV personality, is an example of public figures who have added to the confusion. The title Dr., attached to the soothing diminutive of his first name, proclaims that here is a healer, a caring physician, a sensitive therapist. He is none of these. The man is a brilliant speaker, with a charismatic personality and genuine insight into human behavior. These of themselves do not heal. The fault lies not only with Dr. McGraw, but with his backers, sponsors and television network. The greed of all concerned has led him away from what might have been a TV show about healing.

Reportedly, a complaint has been filed against McGraw with the California Board of Psychology, who is powerless to discipline him, since he has not been licensed by them. It accuses Dr. Phil of practicing without a license when he “visited” Britney Spears at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, after her breakdown earlier this month.

He apparently went to the hospital, under the guise that he wanted to help her solve the crisis that brought her there; talked his way onto a floor housing fragile patients, and waltzed uninvited into the 27 year old woman's room as she was leaving. It's amazing what sheer will and self-confidence can accomplish!

The Board may conduct an investigation, build a case for practicing without a license, and turn it over to a district attorney. These charges might result in a misdemeanor conviction which could result in jail time. Unlikely.

McGraw is also accused of violating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. The complaint alleges Dr. Phil practiced clinical psychology without a license by talking to Ms. Spears (as, in effect, he does every day with relative strangers) and further violated doctor-patient privilege by discussing the pop star’s case with the media. That's his show!

These complaints will probably come to nothing, since McGraw is unlicensed and could not have had a “doctor-patient” relationship with anyone for many years. Of course he discussed her “case” with the media! It was clearly the purpose of his hospital visit. He was also planning a television circus “intervention” with her parents, who wisely withdrew. All of this he did sincerely and selflessly in the interest of preserving the mental health of a young woman.

On a recent Dr. Phil show I witnessed what seems to me a violation of laws against performing therapy without a license. It was also abuse of common sense and human compassion. It doesn't matter that the victim had no doubt signed a release holding the Dr. Phil Circus harmless. I saw a weeping, out-of-control, serial womanizer, who had injured his wife's feelings and destroyed his marriage – endure a screaming attack from Dr. Phil that bore no relation in its intensity, to the crime.

As Oprah did with James Frey, Dr. Phil pounced on the helpless guy, taking out far more anger than any legitimate therapist would do. He elicited that the man was currently in therapy. Then, most amazingly, McGraw gave instructions that were to be passed on to the man's therapist -- who, one presumed from the instructions, would not pass muster in the Dr. Phil pantheon. The poor fellow tearfully agreed. Brilliant Dr. Phil was collaborating in his guest's therapy!

If I were the man's therapist I would immediately report Dr. Phil and demand that the network remove him. McGraw then turned to the poor guy's wife and demanded that she confirm she would never have anything to do with her husband (or ex-husband) again. She nodded solemnly, agreeing to the obvious -- but I doubted she would follow instructions. The heart cannot be ordered around.

Dr. Phil did give good psychological advice (something he is not entitled to do under the law), since getting a handle on compulsive womanizing inside a marriage is extremely difficult, as Bill Clinton and millions of other men can attest. Womanizing is often resistant to talk therapy (or bullying) which deals with recent events: and in the opinion of some legitimate therapists, arises from pre-verbal abuse. It arises from the same place in this poor fellow as Dr. Phil's desire to browbeat his fellow man.

I wonder how well the TV "therapist/performer" would stand up under a similar angry cross examination about what might have been his predilections for young women in the past. I got the eerie feeling Dr. Phil was so out of control and angry, because some elements of the fellow he was ripping into reminded of himself. What would the 19-year-old girl who accused him of improperly touching her say if she were willing to appear on television? What could Dr. Phil's wife and children tell us about his personal behavior around women other than his wife?

Immediately after this "performance" a commercial appeared announcing that Oprah was going to appear on Dr. Phil shows the following week. Of course. She is an owner of this charade. How can this brilliant, charismatic woman associate herself with such inhuman and absolutely useless treatment. It cannot possibly do any good for anyone to have an overbearing, overweight, brilliantly verbal TV personality screaming at you about failings that obviously haunt you every day.

Of course there were many shots of women in the audience nodding approval, as the righteous Dr. gave this poor fool his comeuppance. More importantly, I never saw any examination of why this man's wife was drawn to somebody who must've displayed, before they were married, some signs of psychological damage.

The word "rehab,” which presumably involves treatment by "therapists," further compounds the injury to the public psyche -- since most rehab fails. Many therapists who work with rehab patients are not trained in dealing with post traumatic stress disorder resulting from early childhood abuse, and that (usually combined with a genetic predisposition) is inevitably what is behind substance-abuse.

A “psychotherapist” can be someone trained in Psychology. A simple master's degree in will do to get a license. In California that is a MFT (Marriage, Family Therapist). From state to state the rules differ, but usually additional training and supervised therapeutic experience is required to work with patients, as well as some hours of personal therapy.Tragically, in every state with which I am familiar, the amount of personal therapy required to treat any mental and emotional problem is so small as to be virtually useless. From my experience it matters not if the psychotherapist has a Ph.D. in psychology. I’d rather they spent the time in getting their own head straight.

Psychiatry is a branch of medicine that deals with the mind. One can receive an M.D. in Psychiatry, having (depending on the medical school) received very little psychotherapy. Being a psychiatrist brings with it the lucrative privilege of prescribing powerful psychotropic and other drugs. So psychiatrists don't just talk, they can take "action."

I was treated for many crucial years by a highly recommend M.D. Psychiatrist, who was an associate clinical professor at a well-known University. Not much good came of it. He was a repository of classic sexist information. He spoke inappropriately about another patient I had met in his waiting room. He did great harm by giving poor advice about how to live my life. A competent therapist is loath to give any advice -- something Dr. Phil knows nothing about.

Later, when I got to know my therapist, I discovered he lived alone in a tiny apartment with the windows painted opaque black and walked around on a floor covered 6 inches deep with crumpled paper. Unfortunately this was not the craziest therapist I have encountered.

Many psychiatrists are skillful physicians and could save your life in an emergency room or deliver your baby. That same physician can also receive a Masters or Ph.D. in psychology -- thereby receiving more education in what are supposed to be the workings of the mind. I cannot imagine anything more useless in the training of a good therapist than an expensive medical school. It numbs and judging by the personalities of many doctors, it may be a negative.

The “Psychoanalyst” is therapy’s King Kong. He may draw his lineage from Freud, Jung, Klein, or a dozen other brilliant thinkers and theoreticians on the workings of the mind. To become a psychoanalyst one has to have at least a Masters degree in psychology and attend one of the many Psychoanalytic Institutes (many featuring dramatically conflicting theories of the mind) scattered around the United States. Many Psychiatrists, after medical school, take additional training to also become psychoanalysts. It’s expensive, because in addition to years of training, becoming a psychoanalyst involves hours, weeks, perhaps years, of Psychoanalysis by a practitioner from the Institute.

By the end of such training even the freest spirit has been broken under the deluge of impenetrable theories and jargon. The Freudians feud with the Jungians, who feud with the Kleinians – a list of competing therapies would be longer than this blog. If you are interested in the process read, “How Analysis Heals,” by Heinz Kohut. Of course the acolyte has to repay what are almost always loans. Graduates are the folks who give you the $200 and up an hour, four days a week for 10 years, “talking cure.”

In my late forties and fifties, I benefited enormously from working with a brave, young psychoanalyst who unfortunately never realized how badly I had been abused. My guess is her unanalyzed shadow injuries prevented her. But, in the course of treatment, by chance and on my own, I was able to return to life-threatening psychic damage that occurred while I was nursing. I don't think my analyist understood the meaning of what happened, but as I evolved I realized that was the beginning of real healing. From that day on my stuttering began to end.

After having paid a huge sum for what I now see as minimal progress, toward the end of our treatment my psychoanalyst got me to invest over $100,000 in a screenplay and film project which she wrote with an associate of hers. It was a disaster. Even well-intentioned and well-trained therapists fall prey to the love of power and money.

Many other forms of therapy may be licensed. I briefly worked in couples therapy with an MFT licensed sex therapist. The additional sex therapy license came from what turned out to be one of the most corrupt institutions unimaginable. This woman broke every rule of psychotherapy by stridently siding with my troubled partner, who had been violently abused in her childhood by her war damaged father and a mother in denial. The therapist complained about her sex life and the incompetent man she was living with. She continually stroked an enormous pink quartz phallus on her desk that she reminded us had been carved by her son. It was a Robin Williams skit. The damage further drove us apart and we soon left. Complaints were unavailing, since the California Licensing Board doesn't care.

I have had excellent, healing experiences with is two RCST -- Registered Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapists. Training and a license are required for hypnotherapy, although most of these therapists are trained psychologists and are licensed in family therapy. I worked with a brilliant Hypnotherapist, a disciple of Milton Erickson, who against the background of my psychoanalysis created a dramatic breakthrough in which I remembered unspeakable events in my early childhood. Initially those were crushing, but after time became the foundation for healing what had happened in my infancy.

Some therapists specialize in child therapy and one may receive a Psychoanalytic degree for that. Not enough people, in response to the great need, specialize in adult and child therapy for recovery from emotional and sexual abuse. A new field is rising which promises to release stresses from pre-birth, birth, and childhood trauma.

Against this background it is astonishing that Oprah Winfrey, who knows the value of good therapy, brought us “Dr. Phil.” She apparently met him when he was hired as a consultant when Oprah was being sued by the Texas beef interests. His job was to help her spin the attack from a psychologically manipulative position -- play the mind game and win.

He had problems before which she must have known about. In the early 1970s Dr. McGraw reportedly left Topeka, Kansas ofter being accused of defrauding customers at his health spa business. In 2006 reportedly he paid 10.5 million dollars to dieters who claimed they had been bilked by weight loss products he fronted for. He was linked to a psychological treatment referral service that at least one therapist claimed was a blatant scam.

Dr. Phil has often said he was a "lousy therapist" because he lacked patience. His brilliant mind saw the problem and he wanted to "cut to the chase," without all that bothersome growth and self-awareness. Nothing to it. You just shout at the compulsively philandering husband and order him to quit. You deal with the obesity epidemic by ordering the compulsive overeater to cease stuffing their mouth. You insist your patient be reasonable and follow the righteous path. That apparently doesn't work on either Dr. Phil or Oprah. An attempt to see obesity as a result of early childhood abuse might be more helpful.

In Canada the code of conduct prohibits giving psychological advice on television. They recognize the lack of confidentiality and proper therapeutic relationship. Would it were so here.

Oprah must know Dr. Phil has never been licensed to practice in California, and is no longer licensed to practice psychology in his home state of Texas. She might have instructed that there be a posted disclaimer at the beginning of every show. “What you are going to see is not therapy as practiced by a trained and licensed therapist. ‘Dr. Phil’ is not a physician or therapist.” He is not licensed to practice any form of therapy anywhere -- except on television -- for a lot of money.

Reportedly, in the late 80s a nineteen year old former therapy client filed a complaint against Philip McGraw Ph.D., with the Texas State Board of Examiners of Psychologists, claiming he caused their relationship to become “inappropriate.” McGraw admitted giving the ex-patient a job but denied her claim that he “touched her.” Uncertain who to believe, the board imposed disciplinary sanctions on Dr. Phil for violating the basic therapist/patient relationship by employing her. He failed to follow the conditions imposed on his practice by their sanctions, which reportedly involved his undergoing therapy, and was officially reprimanded in 1989. Then he closed his private practice.

Oprah, who we count on for good taste and judgment, must have known all this, yet chose to allow the creation of a television circus around Dr. Phil which takes the form of "therapy." She appears to have a blind spot which prevented her from seeing through James Frey, the author who lied so dramatically in his best-selling novel about his drug history. Many in Los Angeles, and those I know who knew Frey personally, laughed at the illogical and unreasonable claims in his book. No one with any sense or experience with Fry or with drugs, believed the fantastic things he claimed.

Yet Oprah, a sophisticated media expert, with a large and diligent staff, took this fraud under her wing, and when there were more worthy novels, promoted him to the top of the best-seller list. She finally had the ecstatic experience (in an unnecessary confrontation) of lip trembling anger as she unraveled the poor fool in public. This obvious fraud duped her! I had the feeling during this incredible interview that it was some other man, some figure from her dim pre-verbal past that Oprah was righteously ripping to pieces. Frey, so greedy for publicity that he went on her show, was unable to defend his lies, and allowed himself to be destroyed. Any publicity works. His bogus book continued to sell.

The presence of Dr. Phil on television has done harm to the notion of "therapist." Many observe him bullying and posturing, demanding instant corrections for conditions resulting from ancient wounds, "throwing his weight around" -- and think they want nothing to do with therapy. He is an example of someone who is not what most people think of as a decent caring doctor, or a therapist. He is a carnival barker -- the lord of a moneymaking machine.

Those who appear on his show apparently sign a contract saying that "no doctor patient relationship exists," that what Dr. Phil does on the show does not constitute therapy -- they appear for "entertainment purposes only." Every show should open with an announcement to that fact. Announce that to an audience who may be led to believe that this is what competent therapy is like. His behavior would be considered unethical for a licensed professional. Do ethics matter when these folks are making millions?

Dr. Phil apparently received a Ph.D. in psychology from a university in North Texas. For that reason he is entitled to put doctor before his name. He is not a doctor as most people would understand that title. He cannot, without additional training, and a license, practice "psychotherapy." Most states have a requirement that before anyone can practice clinical psychotherapy they have to receive "therapy" themselves.

How much and what kind of therapy Dr. Phil might require, after comporting himself as he has in public, is something only his wife and children could tell us. Since much of his advice is to couples, one wonders how he could survive if his legal problems resulted in the failure of his highly publicized (and some say, troubled) marriage.

Training is not what makes a good therapist. It may not even matter, because the premise upon which most training available today is flawed to its core. Peter Levine’s “Somatic Experiencing” is closer to what works. That combined with elements of Psychoanalysis, Hypnotherapy, EMT and Craniosacral would be more like it. In a perfect world there should also be a greed filter and ethical imprints placed in all therapists. The therapy community needs to acknowledge that talk – even though it is the easiest on the therapist – will not connect with the injured pre-six year old who might need to be healed.

Real therapy is an entirely human matter: involving compassion, intuition, insight, self understanding (perhaps the hardest quality to find of all), emotional discipline, self-control and patience. It is also advisable to be free of ego and greed. Maybe therapists have to be non-human, since the qualities described above are so difficult to find any one person.

Perhaps, Dr. Phil, you would like to go back and relive where and when your arrogant bully was implanted and get some real help to heal that part of yourself. Once you figure that out you might pass it on to people like Bill O'Reilly. My guess is it resides in the same place in your psyche that is driving your weight up and down. Side effect – you will become once again forever thin. Multimillion dollars stakes for you, Opera and ABC prevent your show from being therapy, so for the sake of your karmic soul, stop calling it that or pretending that you help anyone in the long term.

Unfortunately, in my experience with therapists, I’ve encountered only a small percentage not driven primarily by money. The worst condition conceivable is to be a TV personality -- presumably trying to do good in the world -- but also responsible for making millions for yourself and your boss and your network. Within that framework common sense flies out of one's mind and one irresponsibly invades Britney Spears’ hospital room.

Dr. Phil has claimed he visited Britney at the request of "concerned family members." He said he planned to tape a show focusing on the serious issues surrounding her case. That's a surefire way to aid in her recovery. Later, he came to his senses, and decided to not create a public carnival on television around her problem.

Sources say that Britney's father, Jamie Spears, refused to be part of a public airing of what might possibly result in the emergence of more than he wants the world to know about his poor daughter's first three years. I believe you will not find a therapist who thinks that a man who is not a therapist and is not licensed to practice therapy, should interfere in the psychological life of a sick young woman. Dr. Phil must know, in some non-egotistical part of his body that he should not pretend that his interaction with the Spears family was for any reason other than publicity.

Ms. Spears will never regain custody of her children unless she heals herself. I see no sign that the people surrounding her are leading her on the arduous path to mental health. Where would be the fun in that? I have not read of any clinic she might attend that has any chance of accomplishing real healing. Those wishing to cover up blatant, early childhood abuse often call the tortured reaction of the damaged adult "severe bipolar disorder." An attempt to treat her with drugs, without getting at the underlying causes a dangerous and will result in failure.

Of course she's drinking and popping prescription meds. Of course her doctors are prescribing these because they don't know any better. I feel, from my own experience, the pain she is in. At some point she has to accept the pain, cease any efforts at alleviating the agony she is going through with substance abuse, and have the courage to go back into the nightmare it came from. I have already made a suggestion that will absolutely transform the course of her life. She will not listen because I am not a famous TV personality.

Outrageous Passion!

2008-01-25T12:34:00.000-08:00

What is the proper tone for a blog?

My guess is that blog writers, if they are also novelists or newspaper reporters, don't write their ideas the same way they do for print publication. The typical blog writer has no boss. The Internet feels like a medium without restrictions. The addictive attraction of blog writing is its freedom. Blogs should be a place to look for new ideas, some of which are not empirically demonstrable.

I've been reading experts on blogs, trying to find the proper tone. They say the best blogs are intensely personal and filled with passionate dialogue. In my novel and on this website I am trying to share what I have learned in a lifetime of attempting to heal myself. I believe the future of our species will be determined by dealing with our mental health. We are frail, easily delusioned, superstitious and violent. Sam Harris' books brilliantly set forth the dangerous future religion is leading us into.

My approach is to look at every irrational act (by what one might assume to be self controlled and reasonable adults) as resulting from unresolved infantile impulses which began before we were born. It is the only way to explain the madness of those among us. It's the only way to explain monsters like Hitler and Stalin. It is the only way to explain the millions who continue to believe these madmen acted correctly.

In a hundred years we may not have a planet if we do not start looking at what happens to us physically and emotionally from the moment we are conceived to six years old.

Jacob Weisberg has just written "The Bush Tragedy," in which he describes a pathologically rigid, tragically incurious President. He observes, as many have, that once Bush’s mind is made up, it is closed to rational discourse. Closed. How can that be in the man who was running the most powerful nation in the free world? How could a free electorate choose such a damaged person?

Picking through evidence, reading books, trying to understand alternative policy paths is beneath our President. The man seems to be hollow, as if his inner substance was long ago been drained away, and all that remains is a kind of buddy boy charm and a frat boy smirk. It is alarming that the powers behind the Republican Party ruthlessly picked what they thought would be someone easy to manipulate. This is not a political blog, but we must look at one of the most tragic results of child abuse and how it has affected those who govern us.

There is no way, of course, we are going to learn about the private early childhoods of our President, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Libby and Rice. As with JFK and Bill Clinton, all we can do is examine irrational, self-destructive behavior mature, undamaged adults would not indulge in. This tells us everything.

Bush, pathologically, does not solicit feedback from those around him, evaluate results, or easily hold people accountable. In spite of his MBA training he does not remotely perform like a competent executive. He cannot bear the subtleties of inconclusive debate. He sees reconsidering decisions or changing course as evidence of weak leadership.

This lethal stubbornness appears to grow from Bush’s parents doubts about him from the first. His mother nagged unbearably and his father was disappointed in the kid. In spite of the best connections and education, in spite of Yale and "Skull and Bones," our President often failed and drank. Yet, as governor of Texas there was little national or world wide harm he could do,

We have carelessly chosen a man with the absolutely wrong personality to be the commander in chief or our mighty military, even though information about this was available long before he was elected. No wonder the world is concerned. Throughout Bush’s history as an executive, criticism has had the opposite of its intended effect.

He must be right and he will not surrender. Old currents of blind rebellion run deep. And we're not dealing with an intellectual giant. His facial expressions tell us we are dealing with an angry child.

Our leaders are two of a kind. Cheney displays his pathology for anyone who wants to see. That his associates in big business have not noticed, tells us everything about why we cannot allow big corporations to have the power they have accumulated. Cheney bears a seductive, loopy smile: masking rage. Occasionally photographs surface showing his true character.

Cheney's face tells us everything -- yet we, the electorate, do not notice. A superficial smiling face goes over well in a boardroom where the main concern is how much money have we made today. We are the same folks who pour money into churches that make us feel good.

It is no surprise that such a man, in the interest of vast sums of money, would lie with no regard to how many lives or how much torment the lie might cost. Unfortunately there are too many doctors and lawyers, sworn just as Cheney was sworn, who do the same thing. We are living in an epidemic of psychological immorality where even religious leaders are morally corrupt. My explanation lies in our upbringing.

I was a soldier and am familiar with firearms. There is absolutely no way Cheney could have shot his lawyer buddy, unless Cheney was completely unconscious. Deep, ancient anger will produce this. For moments he wasn't present. He didn't even see what he was aiming at. He might have been firing shotgun pellets at some old memory he wanted to exercise. I do not believe the reason his daughter is a lesbian can be solely accounted for by genetics. No doubt the man is also a child abuser.

We are familiar with the schoolyard bully. Aggression and rapid fire diatribes mask cowardice, creating the "Bill O'Reilly" syndrome. No doubt O'Reilly and Rumsfeld shared the same brutal childhood, which turned them into little terrors once they got power. Get even with the torturer the little child inside keeps screaming. These are deeply unhappy, severely damaged men. Their wives could tell you, if they would.

Bush's refusal to get rid of Tenet, Rumsfeld, Rove and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, when it was apparent they were incompetent, has cost many thousands of lives and ruined our economy. It was the act of an angry, frustrated two-year-old, who needed what all small children need, and received nothing. In its extreme this anger produces a suicide bomber.

This blog sees these failings as a result of unpublicized early childhood abuse that has produced a ruinous pathology, leading to lies and perjury. I was struck by a CNN report from Iraq where more than one soldier proudly told the reporter that he was there, risking his life in a hostile environment, to run down the perpetrators of 9/11 and save our country from them. To his discredit the reporter said nothing.

These failures stem directly from Bush's old family drama -- creating a personality diametrically in opposition to his father. The collapse of his reason for invading Iraq led our President not toward a re-examination of his decision, but toward greater and greater justification.

These personality flaws were already in place and dangerous before President Bush was three years old. An adult, drinking heavily to mask the pain of failure in his battle to surpass his father, he began making decisions based on whim. Then he encountered the "Word of God." Rather than do the hard intellectual work necessary to understand himself, he resorted to what Melanie Klein calls "magical thinking." He surrounded himself with yes-men (and one pathetic woman) and amazingly, with so much at stake, when it was obvious he was wrong, refused to change course. This is a Shakespearean tragedy.

We can only do something about such deep rooted personality flaws in our leaders if we are conscious that they are lethally dangerous. I spent Christmas recently with friends in France who claimed the French prided themselves on not giving a damn about the personality or private lives of who they elected. Observe the result. This is still the most important country in the world. The character, personality and private life of those who we give power to is paramount. That's why it matters if one candidate, or their mouthpieces, purposefully lies about another.

We must pay more attention. It matters that we elected an otherwise brilliant president who was so driven that he had sex with a Mafia prostitute, and apparently other unfortunately chosen women, in the White House. Apparently both he and his brother, another brilliant executive, spent a great deal of their energy on sex outside of their marriages.

These comments are not about morality. We should seek common sense and psychological health in our leaders. It is to my mind more appropriate to choose leaders who are not damaged beyond conventional oral therapy by their early childhoods. A man running for president believes the Constitution should be changed to fit the moral dictates of his religion, in which he speaks directly to god. When confronted he denies he would impose his beliefs on anyone else. Really?

I wonder how much of an element early damage and beatings are in the rise of Evangelical Christianity, which seems to seek to block thought and feeling and substitute for it -- superstition.

What could be psychologically wrong with Don Rumsfeld that allows him to sleep at night knowing that his arrogant, failed policies have resulted in the death of thousands? He could have reversed course when he learned how ill conceived his plans for the military in Iraq were. But that would have meant admitting his amateur errors to Generals who, thanks to our President, he was position to bully.

Two absolutely ruinous mistakes, leading inexorably to our present disaster, were made early in the occupation by Paul Bremmer. Bush, Cheney and or Rumsfeld could've gotten rid of this incompetent and reversed course -- just as our President could have quickly chosen someone to better handle the aftermath of Katrina.

Rumsfeld should have been fired after Abu Ghraib. But as he did in his childhood, President Bush created layers of insulation from the painful truth that he was not anywhere near as capable as his father. His mother's early role in this is inescapable. In a man destined for a minor role, as Bush seemed to be, such personal aberrations would not be serious.

It matters that our president was an alcoholic for many years and may still drink. It may not incapacitate him, but it indicates he must dull some intolerable ache in his unconscious. Pay attention voters. Our President’s daughters have had substance abuse problems, no doubt for good reasons.

By contrast, overcoming failings in their marriage, there is no way that Clinton's daughter could have such a glorious, healthy expression, unless she had been brought up by loving parents. Whatever your political bent, being a loving parent, with healthy children, is a fine credential for leadership.

I was pleased with my first three blogs and thought they had achieved the right passionate, irreverent and original tone. One should not read in my blogs material that could be commonly found elsewhere. These blogs have launched me toward my next two books and invigorated me. Then I received an e-mail from my best and one of my oldest friends, also the finest writer I know.

“The website is more extensive than I thought it would be. My first reaction was, “too much, why all the past performance?” But thinking it over, I realize that it’s a kind of curriculum vitae and background filler that is appropriate for this book. It was good to see your commercials again. They do lend you stature and credibility, but they date mainly from the 60’s and 70’s, and that may seem dangerously “ancient” in today’s world. But…who knows?”

I am the son of a man so pathologically narcissistic that when I was in my 20s he took all of my film directing credits and placed them under his name in the Directors Guild of America directory. My father never was a film director, but the Radio Directors Guild, of which he was a member, had long ago been folded into the DGA. At that time I had not bothered joining because I worked essentially alone. No less a director than Robert Downey Sr., who gave his unfortunate son marijuana to smoke in his early teens, gleefully informed me of the theft.

In this period I was successfully pursuing one of my 35mm commercial sample reels someone had lifted and was showing around New York as his work. I stuttered since birth and at that time had difficulty communicating and defending myself. I was in hiding -- allowing only what I made with my own hands to speak for me. All I had were my potential future DGA credits resulting from it. The freedom to post my work in a forum such as the Internet is the result of a lifelong quest for healing.

When I confronted my father in his fancy office he defended himself by saying that since I was his son, it was okay for him to say he directed my films. By some magic, for he was not there, he believed he actually did. It was he behind the camera. He coaxed the actors. Even though he had been a huge success in another medium -- he was the filmmaker in mine. There was no me. Get it kids? I was, as usual, speechless.

Then for the first time in my life I became openly angry at the man who had sucked up the air in every room, allowing no one else to breathe or speak. (When Orson Welles was in our home with Rita Hayworth I observed my father was silent and listened.) The subsequent issue of the DGA directory contained a virtually invisible list of my father's credits, minus mine.

“As for your blog, the first entry seems too strident. Too many opinions and too few facts lead people to question your objectivity—if not your sanity. Perhaps such a peroration might attract some other victims of abuse, but I think you also want to engage people who haven’t had the experience. Overstating your case with inflammatory rhetoric is likely to turn off those who aren’t intimately familiar with the problems.”

Here we have it! Abuse is a persistent menace – therefore in speaking out stridently, I am insane. Doesn’t this well meaning, intelligent man realize half the population of this country has been abused? Therefore half our adult parents are abusers. It's probably worse than that.

It’s the subject our film (for the time being called "The Backlight Chronicles") is going to address. We elected an abused president who has surrounded himself with other abused, pathological personalities. Are we are not intimately familiar with the problems?! They are destroying us. Who would not be strident?

The only people who don't have first-hand “experience” with abuse are those in denial. It's everywhere, pernicious and dangerous. I am already receiving letters from abuse victims and lining up the hundred or so people I will need to testify in our feature-length documentary. Their stories are absolutely amazing. One would not believe civilized adults could treat their children this way. It's going to be heartbreaking. But only by telling the truth and confronting it can we bring change.

A main thrust of the film: there needs to be a federal law removing the statute of limits on child abuse. It should be like murder, for it is the murder of a little soul. Victims must be able to sue a federally, because their civil rights have been violated. Many states are so backward that most of their legislature is made up of abusers. New York is an example that also excludes recovered memory. One cannot count on those fellows to change the law.

I believed that my friend, the writer of this note, and one of the most brilliant writers I know of, had read every book that matters. When I mentioned Alice Miller, Peter Levine, and other writers on child abuse and posttraumatic stress disorder he had read none of them. He had read no books on the modern history of psychoanalysis. No Melanie Klein, Jean Sanville, Heinz Kohut. And certainly no Wilhelm Reich. What an odd and selective failure to read.

“I believe that you must be careful not to attribute quite so much of the world’s evil to this one cause: when you have no way of proving the statements, you harm your credibility. Assuming that Britney, Mel and George are abuse victims, and doing it with such fervor and without any doubt, seems to me to smack of fanaticism.”

It seems that in certain areas only fanatics can bring on change. Perhaps only those obsessed will take the steps to confront injustice or inequality. Somehow in all our years of being intimate buddies, traveling and working together we had never discussed anything of a psychological nature. That speaks of my prior self. But also speaks to my unconscious denial and unwillingness to hear the kind of responses I would have gotten.

There is no question that the out-of-control celebrities we all know about are abuse victims. What else could explain their virulent lack of self regard and personal destructiveness? There have been numerous articles in the popular press about their bizarre backgrounds -- a dense smoke plume -- fire must lie beneath.

“Getting rid of some of the bloody red screeds would help, but first you ought to tone down the angry language. You know that a word can have very biased connotations and I think readers will trust and believe you more if you protest less. And I think you don’t want to preach just to the choir—you want the nonbelievers and the on-the-fencers, too. “

I agree. But it is hard to tone down the angry language when it is so obvious we're on a pernicious and dangerous path. I recently wrote an impassioned letter to a sophisticated female friend whose troubled teenage son had been talked into seeing the same therapist she saw. I was informed that the therapist assured the young man that nothing he said would be repeated to his mother. Please, Madame therapist, display some therapeutic wisdom, even though our idiotic laws render you invulnerable to lawsuit. A young man needs his own, private therapist.

Misinformation and lies, disseminated from the very top, have done enormous damage. An old friend, who should know better, has been convinced by the senior Bush's public statements that there is no global warming and that even if all the ice caps melt; the water level will not rise. And the earth is flat. What happened to high school physics?

“Saying that the letter was about Seung-Hui Cho, who killed people at Virginia Tech, would inform or remind people of what you’re referring to. I was confused. And I don’t recall that there was evidence of abuse in his background, either.”

It really doesn't matter what that insane fellow's name was. People know I am referring to someone so angry he pumped stranger’s bodies full of bullets, and made a video justifying his rage. Of course there is no public evidence of his early abuse. He was living in Korea where it is common to beat children. Alice Miller wrote a whole book about it. Beat children, torture them, sexually assault them, and you create a potential monster. The twisted face of Cho, grimacing for all to see, tells us everything.

“Your second entry represents to me more of the tone and style you should aim at: rational, more balanced, therefore more convincing.”

To me the style and tone of these pieces is the same. We must do something about our violent ways with children or we are doomed. If a superficially civilized country like the United States can’t take care of its kids, why are we so surprised that savagely violent Middle Eastern countries so easily produce suicide bombers. There is no political solution to this. It comes from a mother who is unable or unwilling to nurture her children in a safe environment.

“I’d like you and your book to be a success and want to see you portrayed as the rational man you usually are, and not some meshuga. And the fact is, this tone is not fair to your book, which is much more persuasive.”

A book is not a blog. I took care to make “Backlight” evenhanded and believable, even though it presents a surrealistic and idealistic take on the Los Angeles legal system. No one who knows me believes I am "meshug,” as my Shtetl raised grandmother would say. I need some feedback. Take a look at “Backlight” and tell me what you think.

Where have you gone Terri Hatcher?

2008-01-19T16:08:00.001-08:00

Backlight is a novel about the murder trial of a young man who had been abused as a child.

He is brought back to life by therapies that have been shown to work with the post traumatic stress disorder early abuse creates. His idealized therapist is named Dr. Giorgio O'Reilly: an M.D. Psychiatrist, Psychoanalyst, Ph.D. in Psychology, Ericsonian Hypnotherapist and Craniosacral therapist. When asked in court why he has pursued so many demanding specialties, O'Reilly replies, "Why not?" as if everyone had spent half their lives in profound study.

I've always been interested in names that demonstrated wildly disparate cultures in the parents. I had a friend in high school named Pierre Epstein, who became a brilliant actor. One of Milton Erickson's intellectual heirs is Dr. Ernest Rossi. The central character in T. S. Eliot's "A Cocktail Party" is a godlike therapist named Sir Henry Harcourt Riley. Since I was old enough to understand this play, the ideas behind it have influenced my work. “Giorgio O'Reilly" is intended to bring all of these to mind.

In my early 30s I went with a friend in London to meet Elliot’s widow with the intention of getting the television rights. Ah, the arrogance of youth. Harcourt Riley had been played in London and New York by Alec Guinness. My notion was to have Zero Mostel, a longtime family friend, play him. Imagine! Had I been able to put this together it would've been quite a stretch for an inexperienced director.

In Backlight, Dr. O’Reilly is an improbable compendium of some therapists I have known. I joined the best in one person and dedicated the book to them. When, on page 124, you reach the chapters dealing with therapy, you might be led to consider the nature of your therapist, the work, and its success.

I am particularly fascinated by deeply wounded, but creative people. Some seem to not suffer from their wounds to any depth. They are productive and often times reasonably happy. Then, inexplicably the wounds fester and explode. To my mind there is no escape but genuine healing.

The lovely actress Terri Hatcher admits she is not happy with her love life. She wrote her life story, charmingly, yet left out that she had been abused. Shortly thereafter she made it public (for uniquely humane reasons), demonstrating how that one element of her childhood has overwhelmed her adult life. So it is for many others.

The element that struck me was that she NEVER told her parents. Whatever therapists she might have had did not have to dig deep for this. Ms. Hatcher remembered everything – but concealed from herself the pain of being alone with parents who could not be trusted.

I wrote her a letter excerpted below. She never replied.

"Thank you for again having the courage to present yourself in public as an abuse victim. My sister, Hilda Brown, and I are also abuse victims. We have known about it since childhood and over the years, as we became more aware have been working on healing. Luckily there were two of us -- witnesses.

I'm sure you know, one third to one half of adults have been abused as children. Sexual dysfunction is epidemic. Emotionally healthy men should not need Viagra. The secret sexual life of many, if not most women is unsatisfactory and unfulfilling.

Four years ago I began novelizing my experiences and the lifelong course I’ve embarked upon to heal myself. On the path of publishing “Backlight” I am creating a feature length documentary film about the lifelong, devastating effects of abuse. It will present on camera testimony of dozens, perhaps as many as a hundred abuse victims and will show the way to newly emerging therapies that can heal them.

I stuttered since I was born. A crippled, stuttering film director -- now healed! I am now be able to speak in my own films. So many have suffered and live partially realized lives. Successful artists have a special obligation to appear in public -- one that you are fulfilling in outstanding fashion.

Experience has shown me that talk therapy does little to heal pre-verbal injuries. This is one of the subjects of my novel. My observation is that many therapists are closeted abuse victims, so fail to recognize it in their patients, and have no emotional tools to help. Their training has failed them because the shadow of their own abuse prevents them from seeing and working with that of their clients.

Abuse, especially before three years of age, becomes built into our very cells. It is physically copied and repeated, retaining a lifetime pattern of damage that can only be dealt with by non-verbal methods. The resulting Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome is every bit as powerful and enervating as that combat troops suffer.

I have already interviewed some successful healers on video, including my sister. The determination of healing revolves around T. S. Eliot's lines in his great poem, "East Coker." "We are only undeceived of that which deceiving could no longer harm." When we are no longer attracted to the pain of the old injury – we are healed.

One wonders about the childhood environment, beginning pre-natally, which allowed your pathological uncle to abuse you – and simultaneously forbid you from seeking aid from those closest. Where were your mother and father? I hear this frequently.

The tragic conclusion I finally came to was that both my sister’s and my parents were intimately involved in what happened to us -- were aware of it from the very first moments – and were participants. We have each other to confirm this. Our mother passed without telling us the truth and our father is in denial.

Would you allow me to video your historical testimony? I am going to ask Marie Osmond, Tatum O'Neal, Angela Jolie and other abuse victims who have come out, if they will appear. From truth we will make a devastatingly powerful feature film which will reach and begin healing millions.”

Terri Hatcher has on her face that "caught in the headlights" terrified expression I associate with early abuse. In Backlight Dr. O’Reilly takes one look at his young patient and knows he is an abuse victim.

“O’Reilly immediately saw that his new patient’s reported memory loss was probably the result of “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.” He had seen it often, and within an hour, could usually discern the proximate cause. Healing PTSD was another matter. Humans damage their children in pathetically predictable ways. O’Reilly observed a vague look on David’s face that most take for normal—and perhaps it is, in a world as stressed and lacking in spirituality as ours. His process was to observe compassionately, make no judgments, hide nothing of what he felt or saw.”

Ms. Hatcher has spoken on television and in magazines about her difficulties with remaining in a relationship. No one, to my knowledge, has publicly connected it to physical and emotional injury in her early childhood. In an industry where almost no one remains in a relationship, she at least has the courage to complain about some process still active within her that prevents her from being happy with a partner. This, of course, adversely affects her daughter. I have no idea what kind of therapy she may be in, but perhaps as this is written her loneliness has been resolved.

Nowhere have I seen or heard discussed the difficulty many, if not most, entertainers and
celebrities have in sustaining relationships. Recent celebrity "marriages" have lasted only weeks. Inability to remain with one partner does not succumb to bullying or rational dialogue (any more than additions do) and has a tragic effect on the children produced. I am a film director with long experience with talented actors. My belief is that the history that drove them to become celebrities is identical to that which prevents them from experiencing intimacy with the same partner for an extended period. I know from work on myself. It is intimacy and the old unresolved, painful material arising around it that drives such couples apart.

There is one more layer to this puzzle. Forgive me for repeating. If the injury you
consciously remember, reconcile yourself with, forgive, and believe you have healed, does not remove the enervating symptoms: then all of the emotional cancer has not been excised. It's still there, as active today as it was when you were in your infancy; hidden beneath layers of what very likely has been superficial verbal therapy.

Abuse victims often use their mouth to self medicate for the terrible pain their body remembers that has been inaccessible to verbal therapy. They over eat the wrong foods. What was your mother going through when for the first time you used your mouth to feed? What emotions did she feel and thereby transmit to you? What were the feelings surrounding your first human contact? Mine were panic! When healed (I have experienced this) the desire to over-eat, which has nothing to do with physical hunger, disappears. It requires no medication and our normal body returns to us.

Does your weight go up and down uncontrollably? How much of America's obesity epidemic is caused by unhealed, early child abuse? It is likely that a substantial component in otherwise sensible people's inability to cease smoking is also caused by oral addiction from child abuse.

Have you been in therapy? Do you think you've gotten to the bottom of everything? Are you still ballooning up and down? Are you still running from one relationship to another? Are you still unable to be happy with a single, intimate partner? Are you alone and lonely in the midst of fellow workers and "friends." Perhaps you need to take another look at the therapy you have been participating in.

What I Would Do To Help Britney

2008-01-10T17:08:00.000-08:00

Now that Dr. Phil has publicly pitched in to save this unfortunate young woman, I can no longer remain on the sidelines. The doctor is highly educated, quick with words and apparently benignly despotic. He is a brilliant, physically charismatic and compelling public speaker. These stunning attributes do not mean he can heal anyone. Force of personality will do nothing for the hidden, unspeaking and unhearing child running Britney.

She is a useful public example of what we find in the world. Because she is a celebrity, when she is genuinely helped others will learn and benefit. The torturous journey back to her early days quite likely will be overwhelming. She will go into the shock her drug abuse and other destructive behavior has been long holding at bay.

So, I suggest a nonverbal interaction with a quiet healer, not at all interested in fame or money, presently living in Chang Mai, Thailand. A few weeks with this amazing western woman should calm Britney down to where she can begin to work with a US specialist in post traumatic stress disorder resulting from early childhood sexual molestation. All that is at risk is round trip airfare and the modest cost associated with this healing. It is as far from the useless rehabs in Beverly Hills and Malibu as one could imagine.

A recent article in US weekly speaks of "Britney's twisted childhood. Grandma’s suicide, family bankruptcy, sex at 14, dad's addiction: how the child star’s secret demons are destroying her.” Not mentioned anywhere is the big secret many of us carry. To heal Britney one must deal with what must have happened to her little body from the time she was born to approximately 6 years old. The circumstances of her childhood point to terrifying possibilities. Those who know her intimately, if they understand the inevitable symptoms of early childhood molestation, would agree. Until this material is dealt with her children will have no mother.

A victim can often deal with memories of sexual abuse in his or her teens. Somehow, out of nowhere an uncle, a neighbor, the janitor in the basement, the local handyman -- got a hold of an unfortunate young person – usually a woman, and sexually assaulted her. Women have reported to me rapes and abuse they had dealt with more or less successfully in therapy, but they were remembering things that happened while they could speak. Where were the parents before the abuse happened? What might have been done years earlier that made their child vulnerable?

At the very end of my second marriage, while in pointless family therapy with an empty headed therapist, my ex-wife suddenly demanded I shred the beautiful, brown, sweater jacket, I was wearing. I had known her over 15 years, and had worn that jacket many times. It now emerged that an uncle had worn a sweater like that when he abused her. In her smiley, do good family every real emotion was buried.

If the remembered abuse is the extent of what occurred, therapy should produce healing. Those who are pathologically sexually promiscuous should not find it difficult to cease. Those who are compulsive binge eaters, constantly going up and down in weight and struggling with this use of their mouth to satisfy an unspeakable urge, should be able to control it. Those creative beings who simply cannot reach inside to the core that creates original thought, should be able to. Those who are sexually numb should begin having pleasure. Those "un-curable" alcoholics and drug addicts who find themselves constantly back-sliding should be able to remain sober without struggle. Those of you struggling with abuse you cannot or will not remember, plug in your adult symptoms here. The answer, as it does for Britney, lies in your first three years -- perhaps beginning even in the womb.

Braver and wiser men and women than us have suffered from the same inability to face their nonverbal past. It is little known that Jung, Freud’s contemporary and sometime associate, was sexually abused as a child. In Jung's voluminous writings he refers to it, and also writes Freud:

“My veneration for you has something of the character of a "religious" crush. Though it does not really bother me, I still feel it is disgusting and ridiculous because of its undeniable erotic undertone. This abominable feeling comes from the fact that when I was a boy I was the victim of a sexual assault by a man I once worshiped. Even in Vienna, the [flirtatious remarks of women] sickened me, although the reason for it was not clear at the time. This feeling, which I still have not quite got rid of, hampers me considerably...” (Bollingen) 1974

Jung knew he had been abused, admitted that the experience had had a major psychological impact, yet never mentioned it again. Amazingly, he never considered his childhood sexual abuse as a significant factor in his ability to treat his client’s abuse. Like Freud, rather than face his history, Jung created a complex and often beautiful psychological theory -- based on a lie.

Quite likely, as many in their society were, both Freud and Jung were abused as infants. How many therapists today work in that shadow? I have experienced colossal therapeutic denial as a patient more than once, only learning the extent to which my therapist had been wounded (without recovery after therapy ended.

I never gave much credence to Jungian pretensions to wisdom. These vague discourses about myth and culture were far less attractive than the down to earth and practical work of Reich. Unfortunately Reich appears to have gone mad. One can see the shift within a few pages of some of his most powerful books.

There is a terrifying conclusion many of us have experienced in therapy -- the way to money, power and reputation today, is to lead patients away from working on their core issues, while stroking their egos. Therapists often ignore the flesh and blood woundings of clients and engage instead in self-righteous socio-cultural theorizing. They too often provide superficial verbal advice that cannot possibly be followed, because the part of the brain that is wounded can't hear the words or interact with them.

Getting people to face deep wounds as hard, and supporting them through the difficult process of real recovery is demanding. The caring therapist, working with terrifying material is often driven to exhaustion. It is much easier to talk about human potential and how spiritually involved we are. Many television "therapists" mistake the impact of their verbal brilliance and powerful personality for actual healing. You cannot simply talk a serial womanizing man out of it, unless you go to the original wound.

Even more terrifying, the abuse we remember and courageously deal with in therapy, may only be the superficial remembered trauma that is causing all the problems. T. S. Elliott, in his seminal poem, "East Coker" creates a simple mantra for us all. "We are only undeceived of that which deceiving could no longer harm."

Madness in our streets

2008-01-05T12:07:00.002-08:00

Our media systematically ignores child abuse as a direct cause for what we see in the news. A compassionate response to irrational behavior should be to look for the fetus in the womb.

Poor Britney Spears -- completely out of control -- with no one to help, except by talking to her. Talk cannot reach the preverbal child suffering in her who was physically assaulted. You can't talk a man like Mel Gibson out of the murderous rage induced by what seem to have been years of systematic beating at the hands of his father. His irrational outbursts and sadistic films, reveal pain and suffering he must use alcohol to manage. Such a man -- untreated -- cannot stay sober.

Britney is in such obvious pain she must self medicate. Does anyone inquire into whose hands this infant girl was born? What was done to her small body before she was six years old? Do any of those in and out, hugely profitable, rehabs she and her fellow celebrities attend treat the early physical damage inflicted on every cell of her body? Where would they even find therapists trained to do that?

We must take into account the huge investment many have made in conventional psychological and psychoanalytic training -- which is mostly based on talk. The psychoanalytic community has a long history of bowing to societal pressure. One of Freud's earliest papers on female "hysteria" described his patients "neurosis" as the direct result of sexual abuse by her father. The outcry in Vienna so threatened his practice that he withdrew his diagnosis, thereby abandoning treatment of this unfortunate young girl. His re-diagnosis brilliantly invented a system based on what he called "Oedipal fantasies" -- satisfying the perverted, wealthy men who paid the bills and eventually made him a huge success.

Jung did the same -- abandoning ideas that were inconvenient to the powerful men who ran things, substituting safe theories based on psudo-spiritual mumbo jumbo. Apparently the only courageous psychoanalyst operating in Vienna at the time was Wilhelm Reich. And we know what happened to him. However his ideas live on.

Therapists are now receiving training in attempting to heal the physical results of early childhood abuse. I say attempting, because until there is massive restructuring in therapeutic understanding, every patient is subject to the hidden shadow of whatever childhood abuse might have driven their therapist to become one.

Hang around -- we are well into making a two-hour theatrical film on this subject. Since half of the Western world suffers from some form of post traumatic stress disorder I think we have an audience. Hundreds of thousands of vets wander the streets crippled by war and its echo with their own early abuse. Our wasteful and arrogant government -- run no doubt by abuse victims -- does nothing for these heroes. We are working with leading-edge healers. If you want real help that will work -- it is becoming available.

We welcome on camera testimony from anyone who wants to tell his story. We are aiming for a over a hundred faces and voices.

We blindly elected a president who's partially revealed history marks him as a classic abuse victim. His unfortunate symptoms are the butt of endless -- and useless humor. He was, and probably still is, so damaged that he nearly brought down the government because of an inane drive originating from his pre-verbal years. I have read nothing about any treatment for this (now we have some to offer) or any comment about what kind of woman, no matter how brilliant, would marry such an obviously emotionally crippled man.

A country that takes abuse for granted, that believes in beating children, that believes children are not affected by childhood trauma therefore it's okay to abuse them -- gets what it deserves. We have seen the results for the past eight years. There were good reasons our current president self medicated, and may still medicate, with alcohol.

In this first blog I include this letter I sent to the LA Times. The response I got from the eminent columnist was that my ideas seemed "interesting." Interesting! An understanding of this material would have made the difference of life or death to many people. We ignore the tortured among us, and their torturers, at our peril.

"I read your article in the April 22 issue of the Los Angeles Times with great interest. What you wrote is only part of the evolution of a madman. Nowhere in the recent media have I seen an understanding of what really creates man like this. A recent issue of Newsweek completely missed the point of what made Cho kill, so appallingly, that I was too disheartened to even bother writing them.

I just finished a novel, and am making a long form documentary about pre-verbal physical abuse. This brings on a form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that in susceptible personalities leads to insane, murderous behavior. A large body of literature, led by the works of Alice Miller and Peter A. Levine, explains how a man becomes a machine that murders other human beings.

Alice Miller describes the intensive “training” German children received from birth, which enabled hundreds of thousands of them to gas and incinerate millions of innocent people. German child-rearing books in the 1890s and early 1900s demanded that parents crush their children's individualism and personality, by repeated beatings. Adolph’s father often beat him half to death. Hundreds of thousands of German soldiers, tortured in childhood, slept peacefully at night, while by day they gassed and incinerated humans. They were simply getting even with the mirrored image of their torturers.

One wonders if the creation of a suicide bomber is only ideological. A society that degrades and tortures women is bound to evolve their children as equally degraded and tortured young men and women. A reading of the diaries of the 9/11 pilots reveals this.

We are not born with the capability of doing what Cho and others like him, did. He was physically tortured in his early life, probably before he could speak, (so were they all – all of the other high school killers) so that by the time you wrote about him, he and his victims were already doomed. It is said we find no one on death row not physically beaten and tortured as a child. If the truth could emerge, virtually everyone serving time for violent crimes would be discovered as an early life physical abuse victim.

These ideas are not better known to the general public because our psychology and therapeutic establishment is based upon "talk therapy." The Dr. Phil variety. One witnesses him attempting to heal people who have been pathologically damaged since birth, by verbally convincing them of his version of right behavior. Therapists have invested millions of dollars in a kind of training that is generally ineffective in the long term, if the damage happened before the patient could speak—and much of it does.

The obvious failure of much of “rehab” speaks to the ignorance in the therapeutic community. Celebrities publicly display insanely destructive behavior over and over again, even though they or their handlers spend fortunes on so called therapy.

Trauma that occurred before we were born, and during the first three to six years of life, cannot be healed with language we did not possess at the time of the injury. A reading of "Thou Shall Not Be Aware," or "Waking the Tiger," will convince anyone how a monster such as Cho is created. “Waking the Tiger” leads to one of many non-verbal therapy paths which could have helped Cho and prevented this tragedy.

Cho’s words say he is getting even with “them.” Who are “they?” His face twists in rage against a barely remembered torturer. He writes insane, but very explicit diatribes. He creates dramatic pieces about getting even, but does not appear take revenge upon anyone who might have injured him in his adult life. In fact many of the people surrounding him that I have read about seem to have treated him benignly, or even tried to help. Like the concentration camp guards, he kills those who are, to him, faceless.

It is clear someone once did something terrible to Cho, so terrible that they deserve not one, but as many as three hollow-point, 9 mm rounds. He projects his anger at those who inflicted life-threatening wounds on an innocent and inoffensive infant. No human is born with such sadistic impulses.

We are gradually becoming familiar with the dehumanizing aspects of warfare which throughout the past century returned millions of mentally crippled men to our society, wreaking havoc in their families. We will soon receive home over 100,000 traumatized young men, many of whom will pass the same horrific damage on to their children.

The post-traumatic stress of war, and the longtime damage it inflicts upon societies, is beyond this conversation. It is essential to understand the way such a murderer as Cho is created. It is not inborn. It is not genetic. It is not simply the result of sibling rivalry or wounds and slights, which may contribute to an already murderously pathological personality. By the time this young man was six years old he was already so damaged that his path was assured.

Thankfully not everyone tortured as a child becomes a murder. There are likely other factors involved. But it is my belief, and the belief of many more learned than I that physical torture to an infant is the one essential ingredient.

It is understandable that no one in Cho's family remembers anything about this. Torturers do not usually step forward and confess. I have read of no one claiming intimate knowledge of Cho’s first three years, in a country addicted to violence against children.

Better understanding of how such murderers are created, will help prevent their creation in the future. Physical violence towards a child is intensely dangerous. Spanking scars. Bring that up at your next church meeting, or social supper and see what kind of response you get. A society that condones or encourages violence towards children, as a form of training, is a dangerous one indeed. Just look at our countries recent acts in the world."