An Insane Asylum Opens Its Doors, And An Inmate Runs For Office - From Loony Bin To Washington, What A Great Country

Janet Putnam did not consider herself mentally ill.  She was convinced that she had been cured before St. Elizabeth's suddenly opened its doors and freed the inmates.  Not so the others.  Regina Phipps was still as loony as a red-eyed cockatoo when she walked out onto the city streets, still talking to herself, babbling about abduction, sexual adversity, and plum pudding, no different than she did when she kept the whole ward awake with her cackling and demented rambling. 

Angela Crawford danced like a whirling dervish from morning till night until the attendants strapped her in her bed where she twisted, shook, and writhed until morning, as cadaverous looking as a refugee from the grave, as crazy as anyone on the ward, a nutcase, an unrecoverable, hopeless woman. 

In any case, out they went, lock, stock, and barrel by federal order.  The Congress of the United States under its all-encompassing act to protect the disabled, concluded that internment in mental facilities was cruel and unjust punishment, and that the mentally ill were no different from anyone else, just temporarily dislocated. 

Now Janet Putnam was just kidding herself about her sanity.  She was as batty as the rest of them; it was just that she didn't show it.  Her insanity was deeply buried, cloaked in an eager normality; but when it emerged as a demonically twisted specter that belonged only in a straightjacket, it was fearsome to see. She became transformed, mutated, and unrecognizable. And that was just for starters - her panoply of apparitions was another thing altogether. 

Luckily for her the demonic side stayed put except for rare occasions.  Psychiatry had not cured her of her illness, just shoved it far below ground, deep enough, the doctors thought, that it would have trouble emerging. 

The problem was that Janet missed the demonic self, for as in certain cases of epilepsy, patients have vivid hallucinations, often see God, and report the most ecstatic feelings of joy.  To those witnessing her 'fits', she was a scary creature, but on the inside, she was seeing the most beautiful, beatific scenes of the Garden of Eden. 

 

However, she had no control over the demon, and like epileptic fits, it could emerge at any time and unexpectedly.  Over her last year in the asylum before they opened the doors, she had had only one 'emergence', at supper when it appeared and as she stood up, spilling the soup and the condiments all over the table, she shouted, 'He has risen!'.  

The emergence was over as quickly as it had come.  She settled down, asked for another bowl of soup, and continued her conversation with her friends. 

The attendants of St. Elizabeth's were surprised at the Congressional order.  There was no way that these wackos should be let out onto the street, but there it was in black and white, posted on the office door as plain as day, and within weeks of the declaration, the hospital was empty. 

The state did provide some transitional care - halfway houses, temporary lodging to give former inmates time to adjust to their new surroundings - but most patients didn't know the difference and thought that they were still in K Ward of S Block. 

Janet was different.  She refused - as she had a legal right to do under the new law - to enter one of these halfway establishments, for she considered herself well enough and able enough to negotiate her way through civilian life.  She had a sizeable bank account and considerable investments which had been untouched during her stay at St. Elizabeth's and had grown considerably thanks to a favorable market. 

With those earnings she rented a spacious and well-appointed apartment in the Dresden, on Connecticut Avenue.  The owner, an old matron of considerable wealth, died, and her children who didn't want to be bothered with disposing of that part of the estate, rented it out furnished. It was perfect - classic Victorian, well-kept with views up and down Connecticut Avenue. 

Now, it must be said that Janet's demon might have been well-buried deep in her subconscious but her illness had other, less troublesome, but nagging expressions.  In other words, she was not an entirely well woman, given, particularly at night to seeing things crawling, staring, and flagellating around the apartment.  Having been convinced that these apparitions were not real, she dismissed them, let them carry on until they decided to leave. 

What was she going to do with her time? Her Georgetown acquaintances who had fallen completely for the idea of full integration and accommodation of 'the other' into society's mainstream, and still with great respect for the Putnam family legacy - a First Family of colonial America - and their storied history through the years, took her in like a prodigal child. 

 

She was by no means insane, she knew, and her beauty had been little affected by her time 'away from home'.  She was as much a lively, attractive woman as she ever had been; and her friends would do everything they could to reintroduce her to society. 

Her re-entrance happened during the Biden Administration, an age as most remember, one extremely accommodating to the previously marginalized - the black, the gay, the Hispanic, the poor, and the disabled who were now to be considered no different than anyone else in the white, proper majority.  

Representatives of each identity group, chosen for their charisma and general appeal were enlisted to speak for this community; and so it was that Janet came to be noticed by a Congressman from Ohio who had been a champion of the disabled, he himself having been crippled by a strange childhood palsy and confined to a wheelchair.  

He loved Janet as soon as he met her, for who could not love those cornflower blue eyes, flaxen hair, sumptuous figure, and delightful charm which she had not lost during her internment? In fact, every morning when she looked in the mirror she saw not herself but some princess of the past, one who changed every morning.  

On one morning she might be Nefertiti, another the Czarina of Alexander II of Russia, another the first wife of Sultan Suleiman's harem. It was not that she imagined these women, she was them, and as she walked out the door and saw the admiring looks of every man she passed, she returned the gaze, right and proper for a royal highness to acknowledge her subjects. 

Like the demon episodes, these fugues into the past passed quickly and she recovered her grip on the world without a hitch. 

In any case, it was during one of these episodes - actually an unusual confederation of many princesses and queens of the past - that she met with the Congressman in his Capitol Hill offices.  She was perfectly capable of being a princess and holding the most pedestrian conversations at the same time, such was the peculiarity of her illness. 

And so it was that the besotted Congressman, always left in the lurch by women who were put off by his crippledom and now in the thrall of this exceedingly attractive girl, invited her to join his office and his campaign. 

The mentally ill were always thought of to be a twisted, deformed, drooling, and twitchy lot; and here was just the opposite, a recovering madwoman who could make the case for inclusion. 

It took no practice and no rehearsals for her to be a compelling speaker, for all the various incarnations which were part of her deeply schizophrenic mind joined forces to spread the good news.  Mental illness was not the offensive, horror of Bedlam, Broadmoor, or the maximum security hospitals of Norwich and Battersea.  'I am the mentally ill', she proudly said - or perhaps it was the Duchesse de Nantes who said it. 

 

Not only did she speak for the mentally disabled, she was welcomed into the bigger tent of the progressive movement and before long her beauty, charm, and eloquence led her into climate change, gender reform, the black man, immigration, and the redistribution of wealth.  

Soon she was coopted by the leaders of these many factions and sub-causes and did fewer and fewer mental shows and more and more wider issue appearances.  Before long she was recognized as one of the most articulate spokespersons for the Left.  Yes, she was white, upper class, and straight, but even the arch-liberals of The Movement knew that they had to broaden their reach. 

So successful was she, that she was considered for public office, and it was then that the whole kit-and-kaboodle of demons, princesses, consorts, empresses, and queens came loose from their moorings and appeared all at once.  She began to speak in tongues, imagined ancient Egyptian, Farsi, Russian, and Ottoman Turkish, a nonsensical caterwauling that her audience - this time in the Great Hall of the Kennedy Center to a congregation of a thousand - and was hooked off stage like a bad act in the high days of vaudeville. 

The cat was out of the bag and Janet never felt better.  It was like those first few months at St. Elizabeth before they force-fed her drugs, jammed needles in her arms, and shocked her silly.  Insanity felt good, she said, and now as she was being pulled off the stage, she felt good again. 

Now, of course, there was nowhere to put her.  She was jettisoned as quickly as damaged cargo by her progressive colleagues who wanted mental disability in small doses, not this hysterical mania, but there were no public hospitals open anymore and she had no family that was willing to place her in one of the privately run, exclusive hospitals in Connecticut, so she ended up on the streets, one of a thousand batshit crazy schizophrenics sleeping in culverts; but by this time she didn't know the difference between shit and Shinola and ran out her days completely happily. 

Electric Cars And Hybrid Sex - Life In Our Precious, Fairyland Age

Jan Bossey was well into his sexual transition, feeling a bit dodgy and off his feed at time, but the hormones had kicked in nicely and that springtime, feminine feel that he had long been waiting for had finally arrived.  He put on his Easter bonnet - yes, he knew it was too early, but he simply felt like it, and his new self gave in far more easily to whim and fancy than his old self had. 

When he was a Senior Vice President at a major consulting firm on the Route 128 tech corridor, he had been decisive in his attitude, peremptory and unforgiving in his management, and absolutely determined and goal-oriented in his life.  He was a feared supervisor not because of the harsh punishment meted out to laggards, but because of his stature.  There was no one in the firm with more intelligence and resolve than Jan Bossey.

It was a complete surprise when it was learned that he was unhappy in this premier macho role and had opted to transition.  During initial psychological counselling his feelings about femininity were probed, and while he was not exactly asked to pick from a Chinese menu of options, it amounted to that.  Like everything else in modern genderism, there was a spectrum, ranging from tough Bernal Heights flannel and jackboots tough girls to sweet, frilly, pretty things and everything in between.  Of course, the counselor noted, gender transition was not yet an exact science, no bulls eyes, only approximations.

Jan, feeling if one was in this thing, then one had to be all in, he opted for the frilly end of the gamut.   His mother, like him a romantic and vaudevillian at heart, looked like Toulouse Lautrec’s Jane Avril, all feather boas, black stockings, petticoats, and dancing shoes. 

 “I feel pretty, no matter what anyone says, especially your father”, she said to young Jan who was always her most attentive audience, sitting on the plush dressing room divan waiting for his mother to emerge.  All that anticipation and delight when she finally threw open the door and danced before him had taken hold at a very early age; and despite the many years of suppressing it and becoming an ur-macho Simon Legree, it never went away.  So the choice of the girly-girl persona was easy enough.

Yet, as he proceeded in his transition, he felt that there was something wrong – a niggling sense of incompleteness and dissatisfaction.  He was stuck between second and third gears, he thought on his last trip up and down the Strip in his hemi Dodge Charger.  This too will pass, advised his transition counselor.  One does not simply pull out all that nasty male stuff in one go.  Soon enough he would see the changes he was expecting, and today, the day she donned his Easter bonnet and headed for St. Maurice’s church to flirt with the men talking golf with Father Brophy, the change was secure.

Or almost.  As much as the counselor told him to dismiss his persistent, recurrent dreams of pursuit and penetration, he was always a man in them.  What was this all about?  Despite his current demission and removal from the psychiatric pantheon, Freud’s insights could not be totally dismissed.  Psychiatry was not all behaviorism and drugs, but the psychological potpourri of genes, hormones, childhood, and their weird dynamics.  

If he was chasing women in his dreams, it had to mean something.  Perhaps ‘that nasty male stuff’ his counselor referred to was not just a flimsy thing easy to extract, but something more permanent and resistant to the daily doses of progesterone injected every day.

This middle state, this inconclusive, changeable period of neither here nor there was not unpleasant at all, for what man or woman could feel both male and female?  The very pleasant calm before the storm, the final explosive burst of pure sexuality at the end of the transition process.

Jan had always liked cars, and the Dodge hemi was but the last in a line of muscle cars he had had ever since he turned eighteen.  There was that reconditioned 65 Corvette; the 64 GTO, 389, Hurst three-on-the-floor transmission, racing tuned double carb beast; the chopped and channeled Camaro which tipped out at 150 without so much as a groan or a shimmy.  

He went to car shows and admired the cars he could never afford – Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and Maseratis.  He liked to hang around body shops, garages, and racetracks.  He bought a TR-3 for $500 dollars back in the day, took it to Lime Rock and raced in the short track at the foothills of the Berkshires, did his own tune ups, lubes, and brake jobs.  Cars and men were one.

On that very Sunday when he went out in his Easter finery, he noticed a number of hybrid cars in the church parking lot.  Now what were they? he asked permitting himself a moment of doubt.  Of course he knew what they were – little underpowered four-wheelers designed to save energy, to turn on and off, gas and electricity, and designed to get you there without much fanfare.  It was the idea of a hybrid that piqued his now highly sensitive metaphysical interest – something, like him in his current transitionary stage, that was neither this nor that, neither here nor there.

He had never had much patience for Teslas until Elon Musk’s designers made one that would go 0-60 in under two seconds and was one of the fastest production cars on the market.  Musk never got on this neither fish nor foul hybrid bandwagon.  He went all in for electric, and he would make Tesla the peer of the fastest Ferrari on the road.  A macho car despite its batteries and plug-ins.

The hybrids were delicate little nothings that flipped on an off, never made a fuss, and were nothing but shows of environmental purpose for the leafy neighborhoods of Northwest Washington.

So wasn’t he a hybrid? A neither here nor there male/female?  There was no technique for scraping all the XY chromosomes from his DNA and replacing them with double X’s.  Not like sparkplugs or alternators.   He would be an XY male for the rest of his life, like it or not, Easter bonnets notwithstanding. 

But doesn't nature trump nurture in these behavioral days?  It was what you believed you were not what you actually were that counted, that made a difference.  If you truly believed that you were a woman, and that the belief could be augmented by a shot or two of female hormones, then you were a woman, no questions asked.

Yet the hybrid image stayed with Jan and he couldn’t shake it.  He was becoming what he never intended to be – a she-man, he-woman, a sexual hybrid.

The hybrid cars and Freudian dreams put the brakes, so to speak, on Jan’s transition.  He could wear an Easter bonnet whenever he wanted with all his equipment intact, or revert to Dodge Charger hemis; retake the fifth floor of his old firm and rule the roost like he once did, or join the secretarial pool.  

The transgender, gender fluidity advocates had a point.  Sexual expression was a matter of preference, so go with your personal flow. Where Jan got off the bus was denying genetic determinism.  As many frilly dresses as he might wear, no matter how many high heels, handbags, perfume, and eyeliner were his, he would always be Jan Bossey, tough guy.

He went overboard on the return – full beard, heavy drinking, Harley Hog in the garage – but soon settled back into his own particular maleness.  A few friends asked where he had been for the past year or so, but he demurred – family business, personal affairs and that sort of answer – but soon enough that hiatus had been completely, absolutely forgotten.

Suffrage, Feminism, Female Agency - Fertility Gives Way To Secular Obsession, Lessons From The Lindsay Clancy Trial

The women shouting for Lindsay Clancy's acquittal, absolving her from the responsibility of murdering her three children because of 'mitigating circumstances' displayed cracks in the feminine ideal.  Somehow the movement for equal rights, shattering the glass ceiling, full and free access to all that modern America had to offer had gone off the rails. The murder trial - Clancy had readily admitted to killing the little ones - had turned into a sad caricature.

There was no way said liberal women, that this woman, beleaguered and besieged by a patriarchal, abusive husband, chained to motherhood and deprived of even the basics of a liberated life, should be convicted.  If anything, she was understandably disturbed, upset, and indeed mentally ill because of the punitive treatment meted out by her typically misogynist man. 

One juror - a man - refused to buckle to this progressive hysteria, held his ground, and insisted that she was guilty of first degree murder.  She had researched strangling on the web, found a suitable errand for her husband that would take him out of the house until she had done the deed, and had planned the whole thing.  

The children had to be rid of, exterminated, eliminated from life.  To rule anything but premeditated murder would itself be a crime, a capitulation to febrile politically correct nonsense, a travesty of justice, and an unholy, immoral act. 

Marcia Griffin was on the fence when it came to the trial.  She had been married twice to fools and ignoramuses and to this day she damned herself for being so credulous and naive.  How could she not have known?  How had she been so shamed and cowed by an abusive father, watched him demean and dismantle very shred of dignity of her mother, that she jumped at the opportunity of loving a good man? Hah! How stupid and hopelessly romantic.  

Yes, Harper Fleming was dashing and virile, charitable and attentive and seemingly kind and caring; but it didn't take long for him to sidle up to the women in his office, the tarts on K Street, and the dames in his corporate boardroom. Marcia thought she was marrying the anti-father when in fact, Skinner, Maslow, and Freud being directly on target, she instead took wedding vows with her father,  Harrison P Griffin himself. 

The second time around should be a charm, but husband number two turned out to be a wheezy wheedler, a randy follower who claimed he knew women but that was just part of his treacly liberalism.  He gave her more space than No. 1, but was so objectionable and totally, completely clueless about femaleness, femininity, and womanhood that she couldn't stand one more painful, numbing hour with him. 

That was Part I of her Lindsay Clancy dilemma. Part II was her hidden desire to have children, many of them, to fulfill the only real reason women were created in the first place, fertility and reproduction.  Of course in today's progressive political environment in which she made her home, she could never even hint at what would be considered treasonous notions, but there there they were, niggling, insistent, thoughts that wouldn't retreat.  

So as much as she agreed with the millions of set-upon women who felt that Lindsay was simply acting out a justified reaction to male subjugation and the prison of motherhood, she could not deny that the woman had snuffed out the life that she had given - that only she, a woman, could give. Murder was one thing, unacceptable, heinous, criminal, and immoral; but when committed against the very flesh and blood that a woman created, carried, and delivered was in a hell reserved for only the most evil. 

The trial which had become a viral, social media caricature of modern politics - liberal vs conservative philosophy - for Marcia it was far more than that. It forced the hidden conundrum - fertility or agency - out into the open, forced her to wonder why she had resisted motherhood so adamantly and ferociously, why she had reviled God's creation. 

 

At the same time Marcia thought of Freud who was quite generous to the mature, intelligent women of his day who simply and austerely chose either single womanhood or a life unencumbered by children. 

He wrote about Aimee Herzog, wife of Austrian financier Henrik Herzog.  Mrs. Herzog was the center of Viennese society, had charmed Freud with her wit, intelligence, and social grace.  She led a life which suggested a new age of female agency, a pre-feminist who admired mothers, children, and childbirth, but who abjured the idea for herself. 

There was room enough in the universe for both kinds of women, surely, so why was it that she was so upset by the subterranean urgings of motherhood?  A lifelong progressive, espouser of every cause in the liberal canon, she froze at the idea of abortion.  

Her colleagues had become cavalier about it.  The fetus was no more than a clot of unwanted phlegm, an irritation, and intrusion to be rid of. And yet the fetus had a beating heart and could feel pain.  Even if one did not grant identity to the unborn child, it was a potential soul and scraping it summarily out of the womb was depriving a life of being. 

So how were these howling hyenas calling for the head of the male juror who resisted their hectoring, bullying, and abuse representative of the modern woman?  Something had gone wrong between suffrage and today.  Something had gotten twisted beyond recognition when women defended the likes of Lindsay Clancy and her heinously conceived and executed execution of her children?

These same progressive colleagues laughed at the stay-at-home moms of the country, the homemakers, caretakers, wives, women content with their calling - the only calling which distinguished them from men.  

Worse, progressive women were questioning the very nature of womanhood.  Wasn't gender self-identified and one could choose from any one of a hundred choices up and down the fluid gender spectrum? How were men, castrated, injected, twisted and deformed into horrible caricatures of women, ever considered women?

When the suffragettes of the early Twentieth Century demanded the right to vote, they only wanted electoral equality and with it the ancillary rights of property, ownership, and wealth. They were vilified, abhorred and rejected, but they were right.  Fertility and agency could exist simultaneously.  No one said that electoral power eliminated the nature of a woman to reproduce. 

In today's culture of identity there is no such thing as a national ethos, a universal moral code to which everyone subscribes.  Race, gender, and ethnicity trump obedience to and respect for commandments of right behavior.  A woman is simply one of many identities, and within that one fungible category, she can subdivide, reconfigure, and reform.  In so doing she has lost both fertility and agency. 

As much as Marcia listened to the blandishments of her colleagues, their pleas for understanding the female condition that Lindsay Clancy represented, their demands for lockstep solidarity in the matter of rejecting male patriarchy and privilege, and their insistence on the irrelevance of motherhood, she remained unconvinced.  The woman had murdered three innocent children, killed them one by one as each watched. 

For Marcia it was too late for husband No. 3, too late for fertility, for children and for motherhood.  She would have to stand on the sidelines and watch, regret her own ignorance, lack of will, and submission to the outrageously deformed canon of the Left.  

There was nowhere for her to turn.  She could no longer abide progressivism and the sanctimony of her liberal friends - the Clancy case slammed the door shut on them - and she had been far too public about her endorsement of the canon she now despised to be looked at as only an operative, a spy, a mole in the conservative camp.

It didn't have to end this way, but she did not have the willpower of the one male juror who stood his ground at the Clancy trial to resist the cant and doctrinaire bullying of her colleagues.

Hers is a sad story.  Now old, without children, with no comforting political camaraderie, no future, no man, and only regrets for a past unrealized she passed out of sight, lamentably out of mind, and eventually away.