Questions of Mental Competence

The President of the United States, whoever that might be at any given time, gets regular and thorough physical examinations. This is as it should be. By analogy, and because of the incredible and almost overwhelming burden of the office, the President should also have regular examinations to determine the state of his–and/or it might soon be, “her”?–mental health.

Because of inadequate screening, it is possible that someone suffering from some type and some degree of mental illness might be chosen as the chief executive of a nation. Of course, in those instances where a nation has no say in who attains that high office, it becomes even more likely that they will be ruled by someone who is or borders on psychosis.

In nations where the people have some say, they should be–and sometimes are–aware of this possibility. Certain types and degrees of mental illness should not be a barrier to high office, but we should be, and in a few cases have been, aware. We try to be aware of physical health problems before voting: serious heart problems, terminal cancer, lack of physical stamina, early stage Alzheimer’s are among things that should give us pause before electing a person.

On the other hand, we have been served about as well from a wheel-chair as from a touch football field. Physical handicaps do not necessarily disqualify one for competent leadership and statesmanship. Similarly, mental illnesses of several types can be managed quite well with appropriate medicine and/or competent counseling. Many of us believe we were better served by a president who probably suffered from major depression–Abraham Lincoln–than by a man of apparently good mental health–Herbert Hoover.

On still the other hand (life, like the octopus, has numerous “other hands”), if we place in office a person in good health, but see their health decline to the point that they are incompetent (the unexpected onset of rapidly escalating Alzheimer’s or the surprising appearance of psychotic paranoia), we should have appropriate ways to replace them.

Perhaps we have such ways. I am quite limited in my knowledge of the particulars of how our government works. Surely we have in place ways other than impeachment to remove one who has become incompetent.

Were a nation to have a Chief who suffers serious mental illness, some sort of action should be taken to remedy the situation before disaster occurs. Particularly in the case where we see disaster happening, we should take action to change the situation. If executive leadership is disastrous–as is presently the case globally in too many instances–and if psychosis is ruled out, then that Chief still should be removed from office.

In the United States, impeachment would be the appropriate action if mental illness is not what is causing the problem. Other nations have differing procedures. Unlike Bush and Blair in the case of Saddam Hussein, and in the case of military coups, I believe that violent removal from office only changes the color, flavor, and style of the problem, and more often than not exacerbates the situation.

Is any of this relevant to the state of affairs in the United States of America in these opening years of the 21st Century?

Fresh out of Brains

In Frank Yerby’s novel, The Garfield Honor, story begins just after the war between the states. Roak Garfield is telling his doctor about surgery done on him during the war without the benefit of anesthetia, specifically, opium. Garfield told the doctor that they are “Always fresh out of something you need rightly bad in a war.” Before he could continue, the old doctor adds: “Especially the brains and guts it takes to find some other way to settle disputes besides murder in the first place.”

We don’t believe in violence; we don’t believe in war; we don’t believe in murder. Not until push comes to shove and “we have no choice.”

I’ve never been able to figure where our ability to make choices got lost. Seems to me that is one thing that can never be taken from us, unless we give it up to those who believe that violence is “the final solution.” Maybe we lose our ability to choose because deciding demands more brains and guts than most of us have available, having allowed them to atrophy from disuse.

As long as we hold violence in reserve as an option, we will use it, because it is easier than exercising the brains and guts it takes to call on our “heart and nerve and sinew [and brains and guts] to serve [our] turn long after they are gone, and so hold on when there is nothing in [us] except the Will which says . . . : ‘Hold on!’"

Murder is easier. War is easier. A good beating is easier. But of no long-term value. In the long haul they make no lasting positive contribution to human society.

This is why Gandhi said that it takes more courage to be a pacifist than to be a soldier. It is why M. L. King, Jr. told his followers to go back home unless they could suffer, even to the death, with no thought of violence as a response.

It is often said in many institutions that the only way to solve certain problems is to have a few funerals. That may be true at times. If so, those who are the problem should die of natural causes.

Sells' Law

Without knowing it, President Bush has learned that Sells’ Law should be given serious consideration before making policy decisions. Sells’ Law is more universally valid than Murphy’s Law or Parkinson’s Law.

In the summer of 1959 I took an introductory course in psychology at Texas Christian University, taught by Dr. Saul B. Sells. I’m sure I learned much more than I am aware of, but I am conscious of remembering only two things from the course: Miss Texas and Sell’s Law.

Miss Texas sat in the desk to my right. When she was there. It seems the title carries with it responsibilities that override academia. She missed class a lot. Once when she showed up, she was surprised to find we were having a test. I noticed that she was looking at my answers, so, using my right forearm, I covered my paper.

She was the queen of Texas--rank has its privileges--so she asked me to move my arm so she could see the answers. I didn’t, but I was amazed at her audacity. I judge that there is no ethical component in beauty contests.

Much more importantly, I remember Sell’s Law. For almost fifty years my wife and have observed it at work, and have seen it fail only a handful of times. One day in class, Dr. Sells gave us his law to put in our toolbox along with Murphy’s and Parkinson’s.

Sells’ Law: “It is easier to get into things than to get out of them.”

Observe and judge for yourself. It rarely fails. The President–the Commander-in-Chief–and all his armed forces, his staff, and our national legislators are finding that Professor Sells was not passing out ideas that were merely academic.

The "Paul Harvey" of War

I have a good imagination; it serves me quite well. When someone says to me, “You can’t imagine . . . ,” I say within myself, “You have no idea of what all I can imagine. Yes, I can imagine what you suggest is beyond my ability to envision.”

But there is something I can scarcely imagine: what it would be like to be living in Baghdad, as an ordinary citizen, across these last two or three years, trying to find a way to go on about living, as much as possible (impossible), a normal kind of life. That horror is, for me, unimaginable.

I was born in 1934 and have lived in the United States through WW II, the Korean, Vietnamese, Gulf, Afghanistan, and Iraq wars. I have never missed a meal, have lived in a comfortable home, walked the streets without fear, and heard the sound of guns only when I went hunting.

Wislawa Szymborska was born in 1923 and has lived in Poland through WWII, and a continuing series of warlike violence throughout the years that have followed. Belligerent Russia and menacing Germany have kept Polish life unstable and unpredictable.

In 1996, Szymborska was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The following poem is rooted in her lived reality, not her imagination, although she gave it its imaginative form. The story of war has been told many times by historians, novelists, and movie producers. Szymborska tells “the rest of the story.”
_____________

“THE END AND THE BEGINNING”

After every war
someone has to tidy up.
Things won’t pick
themselves up, after all.

Someone has to shove
the rubble to the roadsides
so the carts loaded with corpses
can get by.

Someone has to trudge
through sludge and ashes,
through the sofa springs,
the shards of glass,
the bloody rags

Someone has to lug the post
to prop the wall.
Someone has to glaze the window,
set the door in its frame.
No sound bites, no photo opportunities,
and it takes years.
All the cameras have gone
to other wars.

The bridges need to be rebuilt,
the railroad stations, too.
Shirtsleeves will be rolled
to shreds.

Someone, broom in hand,
still remembers how it was.
Someone else listens, nodding
his unshattered head.

But others are bound to be bustling nearby
who’ll find all that
a little boring.

From time to time someone still must
dig up a rusted argument
from underneath a bush
and haul it off to the dump.

Those who knew
what this was all about
must make way for those
who know little,
And less than that,
And at last nothing less than nothing.

Someone has to lie there
in the grass that covers up
the causes and effects
with a cornstalk in his teeth,
gawking at clouds.

Turning Sand into Ice Cream

Michael Kinsley, a tough, hard-nosed neo-conservative, writing in Time 11-20-06, said: "I'm in favor of toppling dictators, establishing democracy and watching it spread painlessly throughout every region where there is no experience of it. Not only that, I am in favor of turning sand into ice cream and guaranteeing a cone to every child in the Middle East."

Only blind ignorance and arrogance believe this can be accomplished by demolishing these children’s homes, striking them with the shrapnel of “collateral damage,” and soaking their soil with blood, both ours and theirs. This abuse goes beyond child and spouse abuse; it proceeds on to the ultimate in physical abuse.

The alchemy of converting sand into ice cream will be possible once we have killed all of those who don’t want peace.

There are many recipes for ice cream. There are old-fashioned, wooden, hand-cranked ice cream freezers, plastic electric freezers, and other kinds of ice cream making machines. Nonetheless, there are definite parameters that must be accepted, both in recipes and in the freezing process.

Ice cream cannot be made with granite, sawdust, and nitric acid, nor can it be frozen in a blast furnace. Neither lasting peace nor worry-free security can be coerced.

Wendell Berry 1

In this World

The hill pasture, an open place among the trees,
tilts into the valley. The clovers and tall grasses
are in bloom. Along the foot of the hill
dark floodwater moves down the river.
The sun sets. Ahead of nightfall the birds sing.
I have climbed up to water the horses
and now sit and rest, high on the hillside,
letting the day gather and pass. Below me
cattle graze out across the wide fields of the bottomlands,
Slow and preoccupied as stars. In this world
men are making plans, wearing themselves out,
spending their lives, in order to kill each other.
–Wendell Berry

Berry and I are the same age. We are both philosophical and agricultural in orientation. I stayed in the classroom to teach philosophy and theology; he left the classroom to return to the family farm, write poetry and essays, and farm it the old way–without tractors, erosion, and every square foot plowed.

Berry in Kentucky, Roark in Oklahoma. At sunset I have ridden Queeny and Coley to the pasture tank to water at the end of a day’s work. I stayed aboard as they waded out, knee-deep, sinking in mud, then stretching their neck, nosing under water, hurriedly, greedily, sucking in long, deep draughts of murky liquid. I sat, listening to them, watching the tree limbs flow with the cool breeze, watching the sun go down.

I was young, not a care in the world. The year was 1943. The team belonged to Uncle Booten, my always pleasant uncle with the wooden leg. His son, Billy, the finest in the county everyone said, had just been shot down while parachuting somewhere over Holland. Billy knew Queeny and Colie before I did.

Berry was writing in the 1960s, Vietnam days. Tonight I sat out back cutting up downfall apples and tossing the bits to my backyard banties. A peaceable evening, granddaughter coming for a summer visit in another hour or so. And still, in 2007, “In this world men are making plans, wearing themselves out, spending their lives in order to kill each other–Iraqis, Americans, and their remaining allies.

I visit tonight with our youngest granddaughter. Our second grandson, a Marine, will sleep tonight, maybe, with one eye open, in Bagdad.

Do we really think we can ever make them be like us? Do we really think we can ever make them want to be like us. “Don’t ever feel useless. You can always serve as a bad example.”

Immanuel Kant on War

“Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: 'War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.'”
--Immanuel Kant

Among philosophers, no one is accepted as an authority. Just because Kant affirmed some ancient Greek thinker who claimed that war breeds more evil then it destroys, that doesn’t make it so. Kant, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel, are counted among the most highly respected and influential philosophers in Western history. But that makes neither Kant nor an unknown ancient Greek authorities on war.

In philosophy, every claim, every theory must stand up to rigorous critical investigation. Ideas must be held up to the light of human experience and human reason. Therefore, you and I must make our own judgments about the validity of the Kantian quotation.

The implicit assumption is that war is good if it kills more evil than it begets, but it is bad if it begets more evil than it kills. Thus:

Either our present war is unjust or it is just.
If it is unjustified, it is making things worse than they were.
If it is just, it is making things better than they were.
Therefore our war is making things either better or worse.

This, of course, is obvious. It also is vague. As a general principle, we all are agreed that war, as such, is not a good thing.

In a war, each adversary kills and maims--both physically and psychically--their enemy. In an unimaginable variety of ways, we bring suffering to homes and families. We destroy or severely damage cities and societal infrastructures that later must be rebuilt with labor and resources that might have been put to better use. We drain, and sometimes deplete, our national budgets of funds that might have alleviated some of the causes of the war. The total cost of war is incomprehensible and unconscionable.

Often, nations engage in war, based on principle. Abraham Lincoln judged that men “of principle” were always dangerous. They consider nothing except to stand for principle at all costs. Lincoln stood for principles--plural, not singular.

Governments, he believed, should place all their basic principles in the balance and weigh them against each other. People and leaders must take account of the probable variety of gains and losses that will be incurred.

The singer, Johnny Cash, once said that songs were the only good thing to come out of a war. At the time I heard him say that, it seemed to ring true. Then I realized that war has always–necessity is the mother of invention–produced medical and technological advances that are, in turn, of lasting value in civilian life. What gain? What price?

Unaware of the enormous costs of the research required to develop one useful medication, we are quick to decry the exorbitant prices charged at the pharmacy. On the other hand, the medical and technological advances that come to us by way of the battlefield often are praised with little thought given to the costs, of all kinds, of war in contrast to the costs, again of all kinds, incurred in laboratory research.

We must each judge for ourselves, whether in Baghdad or in Kandahar we are creating more evil than we are killing. Al Qaeda continues to grow; terror clouds every horizon; on one hand, mothers and children continue to die, on the other, they continue losing fathers and husbands; ethnic groups, religions, and societies are becoming more polarized. As responsible citizens, our personal judgment must be translated into public policy.

What are we begetting? What are we killing? Could it be that we are merely speeding the advance of a human illness that just might be terminal?

“War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.”