RUTHFULLY YOURS

Over half a century after the “Red Scare,” playwright and memoirist Lillian Hellman, whose name is often coupled with her adversary Senator Joe McCarthy, seems to have emerged relatively unscathed in the court of elite progressivist opinion despite the exposure of her manifold fabrications and deceptions. The liar, it appears, is the incarnation of a higher truth. Such is the power of the press and the cultural salience of left-wing attitudes in America.

Hellman, a passionate supporter of the Soviet Union even when Stalin’s crimes had been widely publicized, was subpoenaed before the House Un-American Activities Committee by McCarthy and was subsequently lionized by the media, the commentariat, and the entertainment industry from the 1950s to the present for refusing to name names. She was elevated to the plinth of truth and courage while McCarthy was effectively consigned to the Eighth Circle of the Inferno as an evil counselor and a sower of discord.

We can agree that McCarthy cast too wide a net, and many will argue that he was responsible for a climate of national hysteria, but we cannot deny, after the release of the Venona transcripts, that he was mainly right. There was indeed a concerted and largely successful attempt to infiltrate the White House by Soviet agents during the 1940s and 1950s. This was McCarthy’s truth. Hellman, however, was a notorious liar, of whom novelist Mary McCarthy (no relation to Joseph) said, “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.'” Historian Alice Kessler-Harris in her hagiographic 2012 volume A Difficult Woman attempted to justify Hellman as a literary fabulist with a poor memory who believed that truth is larger than fact. Dorothy Gallagher in her 2014 biography Lillian Hellman: An Imperious Life is having none of it, turning a postmodern extenuation into a historical indictment. “She dissembles … hedges, misleads,” Gallagher writes, and proves it. Even the pro-socialist Joan Mellen in Hellman and Hammett concurs.

In her acclaimed memoir Pentimento, Hellman told of her revolutionary generosity and grave personal risk in smuggling money to a certain Julia, a member of the anti-fascist underground in Austria just prior to the war – a blatant lie, perpetuated by Jane Fonda playing Hellman in the film Julia. There was no Julia. Hellman’s reported adventures in to Berlin and her cloak-and-dagger activities were the stuff of pure fiction, like something out of The Maltese Falcon. (Ironically, the word “pentimento” refers to a scumbling technique in visual art – i.e., something painted over.) The real-life risk-taker, Muriel Gardiner, stated that she had never met Hellman, and when Gardiner wrote a letter to Hellman about her anti-fascist exploits, Hellman affected never to have received it. Gardiner’s book Code Name “Mary” (1983) and her subsequent television documentary The “Real” Julia (1987)are as definitive as you can get, the latter suggesting that Hellman may have learned about the specific details of Gardiner’s activities from their mutual friend and lawyer, Wolf Schwawbacher.

I just joined the National Rifle Association. https://amgreatness.com/2018/02/23/one-more-for-the-nra/

Although I’ve always been somewhat open-minded about gun control, especially high-powered weapons, the current mob mentality of the Left—incited by propagandists in the media—has closed my mind. The spectacle over the Florida school shooting proves the Left will exploit any tragedy, manipulate any victim, and demonize any detractor in their scorched-earth strategy to regain power. Further, its purported solution seeks to empower the public authorities who utterly and despicably failed to stop this massacre at every chance.

Unhinged elites + corrupt government = my gun.

The ruling class cannot be trusted. The revelation yesterday that a deputy sheriff stood down while helpless teenagers were slaughtered by a disturbed young man goes beyond a dereliction of duty. It reflects the lack of common decency pervasive among our protected institutions and their bureaucratic lackeys, whether they be positioned at the Department of Motor Vehicles, Veterans Administration hospitals, the top brass at the FBI, or in your local police force. In addition to their incompetence and inhumanity, we are further humiliated as they lie to us, place blame on others, and then get to “retire” with full benefits. (It’s only a matter of time before we find out Scot Peterson, the deputy who cowardly crouched outside Stoneman Douglas High School, listening to bullets and screams, will still get his taxpayer-funded pension and collect a sizable portion of his six-figure salary package.)

Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel—a Democrat—should be the poster boy for the ruling class’s pathetic cocktail of bravado, ineptitude, and blame-shifting. On February 21, he appeared on CNN’s town hall meeting, refusing, in dramatic fashion, to accept any culpability for what happened: “America, there’s one person responsible for this act, that’s the detestable, violent killer. He is responsible for this act.” (Your friendly reminder that sheriffs are politicians, too. Israel once compared himself to Don Shula, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King while defending his crony hiring practices.)

He confronted NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch, after she ticked off a string of documented warning signs displayed by the shooter, scolding her that she was “absolutely not the litmus test for how law enforcement should follow up. You’re wrong.”

In a time of competing narratives and virtually unprecedented levels of polarization, there is one sad truth that Americans can readily agree on: our mental-health system is broken.

Specifically, the U.S. has long faced a critical shortage of inpatient psychiatric-treatment beds, with devastating societal consequences. From its historic peak in 1955 to 2016, the number of state psychiatric-hospital beds in the United States plummeted almost 97 percent, in a trend known as “deinstitutionalization.” There are now fewer beds per capita in the United States than there were in 1850. An analysis of the broader system of both inpatient and other 24-hour residential-treatment beds similarly found a 77.4 percent decrease from 1970 to 2014.

While inpatient treatment beds represent only one aspect of a functioning mental-health system, they are a vital one. Without access to a bed, acutely ill individuals are left to wait for the proper treatment, forcing mental-health professionals to triage the most severely ill in hopes of short-circuiting the next awful, unnecessary massacre. At the same time, families are caught in their own nightmare, watching helplessly as their loved ones deteriorate in the absence of the right care. With nowhere else to turn, those in need end up in the only remaining systems that cannot say no: emergency rooms, homeless shelters and, too often, jails and prisons.

Without treatment beds, the criminal-justice system has become our de facto mental-health system. By 2014, ten times the number of people with serious mental illness were in prisons and jails as in state mental hospitals. Astoundingly, the largest mental-health facilities in the nation are now the Cook County and Los Angeles County jails.