ETHAN STACEY, DIANE LINKLETTER: MENTAL HEALTH AWARENESS

On 28 May, authorities finally indicted the mother and step father of Ethan Stacey for capitol murder. Outside some people carried banners calling for their deaths. One sign spelled the step father’s name with nooses where the Os should be. Ironic that so many people think it is all right for the state to take life as a punishment for taking life. It clearly sends mixed messages – and of course one can avoid the punishment if one is persuasive enough to a jury.

When I read about the outpouring of support for Ethan Stacy and his family, I wonder where were these people when the four-year-old boy really needed them?

Deseret News articles indicate many people believed both the mother and the boy friend possessed unstable if not just outright mentally ill personalities. The stepfather supposedly has multiple personalities, one of which gets violent when criticized. Apparently one of his personalities broke up a jail cell, and so the authorities will charge him with destruction of public property.

The point, though, is this: Somehow the boy wound up unsupervised with both of them.

American culture has since 1946 supported funding military adventurism abroad and atomic weapons system, which incidentally our government used only on our local downwinders. We would be better if a major chunk of that money had funded mental health hospitals, the study of mental illness, their solutions, and cures.

In Utah, mental health receives from uninterested legislators even less lip-service and mediocre funding than does our underfunded public education. Since 1946, these same legislators always managed to find maximum funding for roads.


ANOTHER VIEW OF THE SAME SUBJECT:

Art Linkletter died on 26 May , age 97. I remember his programs House Party and People are Funny which our family used to watch fairly religiously. In the 1960s he was maybe the great commercial spokesman in the days after the decline of the great commercial spokesman of the 1940 and 1950s Arthur Godfrey. The careers of Godfrey and Linkletter bore some resemblances to each other in that their folksy charm translated into advertising power, though Linkletter’s talents as an interviewer were more obvious on the TV screen than whatever Godfrey contributed to his programs. Godfrey mostly exuded folksy charm and a tendency to controversy. Linkletter interviewed and wrote books.

Linkletter’s personal life tended toward tragedy and unhappiness. 3 of his 5 children died before he did. His youngest daughter Diane Linkletter died in a hugely sensational 1969 suicide when she jumped out of her 6th floor apartment window in the presence of her boyfriend. It is now quite clear that the girl did not have drugs in her body when she leaped; the coroners made that point clear enough in the official reports. The evidence seems compelling that she suffered severe clinical depression and offed herself deliberately.

Linkletter, however, insisted practically from the first day that she had an LSD habit that contributed to her hurling herself out of a window on some sort of acid trip or acid flashback. She might have done illicit drugs, but those habits might have also been her attempt to self medicate the depression problem. Anyway, Linkletter put his considerable public relations skills into that tale and became a spokesman for tougher stricter laws against the illicit drugs used recreationally. He can take some credit for convincing President Nixon to declare war on drugs in 1971, but that achievement remains something of a dubious achievement considering how little the war on drugs has actually worked to reduce illicit drug use in the USA. Americans have hypocritical attitudes about drug use then and now.

I sometimes wonder what might have happened if Linkletter had been honest about his daughter’s death and used his public relations power to be a spokesman for better mental health treatment and more funding for mental illness treatments and cures. Instead he went into denial about her illness and her suicide, and the war on drugs got a major boost from a faked premise. Anyway it is yet another example of a family that refused to discuss publicly the issue of mental health problems in their family when the discussion might have helped others with mental health crises in their families move in more positive directions.


THE CALL TO ACTION

People in our culture talk a good talk about protecting children. That protection is mostly just words. Ethan Stacey is only the latest victim

Our legislators should have framed photos of Ethan on their desks. During the next session, he will remind them what happens when we ignore mental health.

Congress should always do more to fund mental health research, treatments, and cures.

THIS LAND IS OUR LAND? GUTHRIE'S UNCUT, UNCENSORED LYRICS

Irving Berlin wrote "God Bless America" in the form of a non denominational patriotic prayer

--- note introduction lyrics "as we raise our voices, in a solemn prayer" for God's blessing and peace for the nation "stand beside her and guide her through the night" --- Berlin originally wrote the song in 1918 while serving in the U.S. Army but decided that it did not fit in his revue Yip Yip Yaphank, so he set it aside. His lyrics included the line, "Make her victorious on land and foam, God bless America..." as well as "Stand beside her and guide her, to the right with the light from above."

Music critic Jody Rosen discovered a 1906 Jewish dialect novelty song, "When Mose with His Nose Leads the Band", contains a six-note fragment that is "instantly recognizable as the opening strains of "God Bless America." He interprets this as an example of Berlin's "habit of interpolating bits of half-remembered songs into his own numbers." Berlin, born Israel Baline, had himself written several Jewish-themed novelty tunes.

In 1938, as Adolph Hitler and the Third Reich became more militaristic and belligerent, Berlin, a first-generation Jewish European immigrant, decided to revive the song as a "peace song." Kate Smith premiered it on the 1938 Armistice Day broadcast of her radio show. Berlin made some minor changes: people might have interpreted "to the right" as a call to the political right, so he substituted "through the night" instead. He also provided an introduction that is now rarely heard but which Kate Smith always used:

"While the storm clouds gather far across the sea /

Let us swear allegiance to a land that's free /

Let us all be grateful for a land so fair /

As we raise our voices in a solemn prayer."

Meanwhile, folk singer compose Woody Guthrie disliked the song because it lacked detail of the real America. So he wrote his own patriotic song. Some of the verses rarely get sung in public though, even though those particular versus seem starkly modern.

This Land is Your Land
Woody Guthrie
Original 1944 Lyrics

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.

As I went walking that ribbon of highway
I saw above me that endless skyway
I saw below me that golden valley
This land was made for you and me.

I roamed and I rambled and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts
While all around me a voice was sounding
This land was made for you and me.

When the sun came shining, and I was strolling
And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling
A voice was chanting, As the fog was lifting,
This land was made for you and me.

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;
Sign was painted, it said private property;
But on the back side it didn't say nothing;
This land was made for you and me.

As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."
But on the other side it didn't say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.

Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.

In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple;
By the relief office, I'd seen my people.
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,
Is this land made for you and me?


Confirmation of two other verses

A March 1944 recording in the possession of the Smithsonian, the earliest known recording of the song, has the "private property" verse included. This version was recorded the same day as 75 other songs. This was confirmed by several archivists for Smithsonian interviewed as part of the History Channel program Save Our History - Save our Sounds. The 1944 recording with this fourth verse can be found on Woody Guthrie: This Land is Your Land: The Asch Recordings Volume 1, where it is track 14.


This Land Is Your Land
Woody Guthrie
1956 Lyrics

This land is your land This land is my land
From California to the New York island;
From the red wood forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and Me.

As I was walking that ribbon of highway,
I saw above me that endless skyway:
I saw below me that golden valley:
This land was made for you and me.

I've roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts;
And all around me a voice was sounding:
This land was made for you and me.

When the sun came shining, and I was strolling,
And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling,
As the fog was lifting a voice was chanting:
This land was made for you and me.

As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."
But on the other side it didn't say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?

Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.

MY FREE VERSE POEM IN HONOR OF THE CENSUS COMPUTER SYSTEM ENTITLED

PBOCS

P is for the pains that you give me. You give some a pain in the neck, but I have a lower opinion.

B is for boxes of binders which we cannot ship when you do not work.

O resembles the number you are worth. On a good day even.

C is for the innocent computers you infected. C is also for the cramps you gIve us in our craniums.

S is for the sniveling sinister programmers that invented you and inflicted you on an unsuspecting sensus - - ur . . . census.

Put them all together they spell PBOCS -- a name that our posterity will wonder why we scream out at night for years into the future.

MODERNIZING THE SUPREME COURT

President Obama's nomination of Elena Kagan to The Supreme Court nomination illustrates the narrow band of Supreme Court experience. The United States has a population of well over three hundred million, but the Supreme Court looks as if it judges a nation the size of Spain.

3 of the justices will be Jews and 6 Catholics. No Protestants, Buddhists, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians.

When we consider America’s variety of towns and cities – contemplate that before their appointments, our Supreme Court justices lived in:

Metro Boston (2);
Buffalo;
Chicago (2);
metro District of Columbia (5);
Jefferson City, MO;
Long Beach, IN;
Italy somewhere to write a thesis;
New York City (4);
New Jersey towns (5);
Pin Point Georgia;
Sacramento; '
San Francisco (2).

Kagan lived in upper Manhattan, Sotomayor in the Bronx and Greenwich Village, Ginsberg in Brooklyn, and Scalia in Queens.

4 of the 9 with connections to one city. I might try humor and say an associate justice has not lived in Provo, Utah since 1922, and that certainly illustrates the court’s lack of regional diversity.

America has more than 200 law schools. The justices studied at three: Columbia Law School (1); Harvard Law School (6); Yale Law School (3). The professors and students of these 200 plus law schools teach and study the same law.

Thousands of colleges dot America from sea to shining sea. The justices earned university degrees at --

College of the Holy Cross;
Cornell;
Georgetown;
Harvard;
London School of Economics;
Oxford (2);
Princeton (3);
Stanford (2).


THE CALL TO ACTION

The Kagan nomination to the Supreme Court illustrates the need to modernize the Supreme Court. A country of 300 million needs more than 9 justices.

A constitutional amendment should require one justice from each of the 13 judicial districts, plus 3 at-large justices and a chief justice for a total of 17 justices.

8 should be men; 8 women, and a toss of a coin should determine in the beginning which seats will start with men justices and which will start with women justices and then alternate back and forth through the years. This means more men or more women justices might serve on the court at any given moment; however, in the long view of time the gender composition numbers will add up roughly equal.

An appointment to the Supreme Court should not last a lifetime. It should last to the age of 86 at most.

The chief justice's gender should alternate through the years as well.