Page 20 RAIN November 1978 BAD GUYS The History ofShock Treatment, edited by Leonard Roy Frank, 1978, 206 pp., $6.00 from: Bookpeople 2940 Seventh St. Berkeley, CA 94115 250,000 people each year in the U.S. are administered electroconvulsive ~shock) therapy, which is essentially a means of obliterating emotional distress through controlled damage of the brain. Leonard Roy Frank, a staff member of Madness Network News and a campa~gner against psychiatric inhumanity, has pulled together this disturbing history of shock therapy. His anthology of letters, testimony and articles covers every angle-from dispassionate clinical ads in psychiatric journals to such piercing reconstruction of shock treatments as that of poet Sylvia Plath:. "Then something be1t down, and took hold of me and shook me like the ·end ,of the world. Whee-eeee-ee-ee, it shrilled, through an air crackling with blue light, and with each flash, a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my b•ones would break and the sap fly out of r:ie like a split plant." --- --- =--=:: In a neighborhood of a thousand welfare cliepts, the equivalent of'one carton of cigavettes or one bottle of booze per week, per person, would be about $5,000 a week, or about one-quarter of a million dollars a year! With a cas}:i flow like that the ·neighborhood would have such options as opening its own light industrial plant, retail stores, or forming a local construction comp·any-or a co-op to buy the neighborhood from absentee landlords who may be looting and deliberately ruining it for future speculative profits. Housing or any other social service is not simply a matter of money: money is only one tool in a constructive pr9cess. Housing, for instance, is a matter of work and the allocation of raw materials-hammers, nails, building materials, skills. ·To organize to provide housing is one thing and, I think, a short-sighted thing at that. To organize to make housing• possible could be a more vigorous and healthy-activity an.cl it would be based, I believe, on a shift of attitudes away from rights and toward responsibilities. A living example of this sort of shift can be seen in the East 11th Street project in New York City. Although it has received some generous support from federal funds, it got started and derives its main energy from a notion of responsibility. In that neighborhood, a group mos~ly of Latin-speaking peopl~ got together to take over an abandoned apartment house and recondition it for the use of people in the group. The idea en)arged until, now; the people involved are branching out into community gardening, light-industrial production 1 and construction generally. They are building their own lives and community-not asking that one be provided for them. One objection to this, from a sharply differing ideological point of view, is that'poor people should not be forced to make up with their own energy the deficiencies of a system that has for so long exploited or oppressed them. To be stuck in such a position is to forever spend time building With its origina,l articles, glossaries and shock-sourcelists, The History of Shock Trt:atment is a ·comprehensive primer for exploring this most controversial of psychiatric techniques, and its undeniable connection·to other kinds of human and social repression. -SA /Rotten Tomatoes (or more Why Big Business Loves "A.T. ") Large-scale hydroponics is becoming a new growth sector for such conglomerates as General .Electric, General Mills and Ralston-Purida. General Mills is currently piloting hydroponic "Kitchen Harvest" lettuce in the Minneapolis ', area. Ralston-Purina is doing the same with house plants for Tupperware-type party distribution. And G.E.'s "Geniponics" brand tomatoes are selling at 50¢ a pound in Syr~use s.upermarkets. The General Mills lettuce is grown in movable troughs that pass from light to dark areas to "simulate day ang night," while the G.E. system relies on the more labor-intensive option of workers turning lights on and off every twelve hours. "We tried constant light," said Lewis W. Fogg, head of G.E.'s hydropQnics project, "but the' tomatoes .split wide open." (Wall Stroet Journal, Sept. 22, 1978, via NCAT) -SA variations of old power structures, re-oriente(i but not otherwise changed. The shift toward the ·East 11th Street approach is to shift toward building a new world inside the shell of the old and not just trying to make the old one b~arable. There are, basically, two ways to get things don·e today. You can either beg and plead or you can organize.to produce. At the outset, you may have to beg a bit-perhaps some tools or space or materials. But there is a significant difference, the initial begging is soon to be abandoned, it is not the object, and, ideally, it should be considered merely a convenience that could be dispensed with any.way! . I believe that there is a moral principle·involved in all this. I call it moral because it is one of those practical matters that seems to be so pervasive and persuasive that it needs a more high-falut1n name than simply being called "a practical matte(." Nevertheless, as a practical or a moral matter it see s to me that it is inappropriate to turn people into consumers when they could be producers. I believe in the old saying that when you give people a fish you ·solve their hunger for a day, but 1when you teach them to fish, you solve it forever (given • livable waters, of course-another area in which local-level social agreements have worked whereas top-level state solutions have not). Some other examples of possible practical differences be- . tween rights and responsibilities that come to mind: Unemployment among black teen-agers is, as ev~rybody now must know,.the highest of any easily defined group. Most black teen-agers, like most people of any sort, seem to think of employment solely in terms of getting a job (an extension of the rights concept). Suppose, instead, black teen-agers thought of creating work instead. They have massive advantages! continued+
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