Progressive Trolling and … The Real McMurphy?

I have, for weeks, had a mercifully short but accurate metaphor to deliver as an editorial titled America As Job.

However, my last two columns had to take precedence over America As Job. Recent headlines demanded I postpone any Biblical metaphors.

This time, however, another unavoidable delay has been inspired by a commenter mildly veiled as Snarkysnob opining on my editorial Catholics vs. Communists:

I am convinced that Moriarty’s work here is some of the greatest satire ever devised, of Swiftian quality. Either that, or he is in need of continuing electroshock therapy and heavy medication. There’s no serious dispute that priests have abused their parishioners, and that the hierarchy (local, national and international) have covered it up.

Electro-shock.

Yes.

In the Spring of 1964.

I was 23 years old.

In London, England.

There it is called ECT, electro-convulsive therapy.

The institution administering the treatment, ten of them, was called, ironically, The Priory.

The deeper irony is that it is … or was, at the time … ostensibly a Catholic nuthouse.

Yes, the occasional nun as nurse.

That same institution had already administered the same ungodly treatment, in punitive doses, 54 of them, to the American Communist, Paul Robson, in 1963.

What was that Big, Deep Red Baritone doing in a Catholic nuthouse?

Or was he actually taken there because The Priory was not merely Catholic but Progressive Catholic:

The Progressive Party

In 1948, Robeson was active in the presidential campaign to elect Progressive Party candidate Henry A. Wallace, who had served as Secretary of Agriculture, Vice President, and Secretary of Commerce in the administrations of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

A Progressive re-indoctrination center, metaphorically run by the likes of Nancy Pelosi playing Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest?!

And am I possibly the real McMurphy?!!

Other celebrities … and even a politician have been treated with electro-shock.

Most were fighting depression.

I, however, was not in a depression.

Quite the opposite.

I had, while in Florence, Italy for the very first time, what is now known of as The Stendhal Syndrome, a quasi-manic state induced by, yes, the Renaissance richness and glories of the most astounding of Italian treasuries, home of Michelangelo’s David, the Uffizi Museum and … uh … in short, I suffered from The Stendhal Syndrome’s other name: Hyperkulturemia.

A Freudian version of too much culture.

I had, however, instead of being so “blown away” by Florence, was lifted into what is now and still is the most undeniably breathtaking and blissful certainty of God’s existence.

This, of course, to the ears of the very Progressive Priory was psychiatric heresy; and, to a Progressive Catholic like Pelosi, politically threatening. I might even begin to believe that abortion really is a cardinal sin.

“He has a major ‘father problem'”, was the advice of the Priory physicians to, of all people, my father, a surgeon.

Yes, I do have a “father problem” with Science as God.

Apparently and according to the intellectual supremacists of Progressive Science, the faith-driven, little people, use God as a neurotically and/or psychotically fictional father-figure to smooth over problems they should be facing all by themselves!

Something like that.

Hitler’s and Stalin’s “You will obey orders!!!” is being magically and, need I say, “fundamentally transformed” into the Progressive New World Order’s “do as the doctor tells you”.

However, according to Wikipedia, the Stendhal Syndrome was only named in 1979, when it was described by Italian psychiatrist Graziella Magherini, who observed and described more than 100 similar cases among tourists and visitors in Florence.

The syndrome was first diagnosed in 1982.

I was electro-shocked by the very Progressive Priory for “hypomania” in 1964.

Perhaps God knew that the only way to keep me from dying in Vietnam would be 10 electro-shock treatments.

However, after those ECT’s I was so depressed and incapacitated, I would have welcomed dying anywhere.

It took me ten years to recover.

That fact did, however, keep me out of military service.

Snarkysnob has the inside line to my life so I can’t wait for him to further inspire me with, for some people, very insightfully provocative lectures about the Progressive Psychiatric and SEIU Point of View.

Science and Labor vs. God.

Communists vs. Catholics.

Thugs with degrees … versus … the deluded Judeo-Christian Civilization!

In the Fifties and Sixties, of course, Progressive Britain was handing out ECT’s like aspirin.

I claim that these “enlightened despots,” as Voltaire would have labeled them, helped destroy both Paul Robson and Vivien Leigh with their ECT’s.

Odd and ironic that my tribute and support of the Catholic Church’s stand on abortion should so inspire a Progressive Troll like Snarkysnob whose knowledge of my medical past indicates a familiarity and closeness that would be disturbing if I hadn’t left Progressive America and its homicidal dreams of the future.

“Michael, is there anyone in Manhattan you have not insulted,” asked Dick Schapp.

I thought, “Yes, you Dick.”

You and, in Hollywood possibly, Snarkysnob.

My last article, Catholics vs. Communists, had obviously struck a chord with Snarkysnob who – rather like Charles Gibson looking over his glasses at Sarah Palin in the increasingly failed effort to discredit her – wishes to argue ad hominem.

This, dear and not so dear readers, is exactly the strategy the Obama government wishes to use against its own citizens with its control of American health and hospitals.

I guarantee you, every bit of information a Progressive government has on its citizens will, indeed, be used against them in more than a mere court of law.

If these citizens disagree in the slightest with a Progressive New World Order’s plans for the future, well, welcome to One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest!

Obama’s admiration for the film Godfather explains why the President wishes to obtain information about all of his citizens that would empower him to “make offers no sane person could refuse”.

I am now shamelessly 69 years of age and consider every second of life, following my heart attack over three years ago, as God’s gift.

I find the showdown now shaping up below the 49^th parallel is something I saw coming 15 years ago, in 1993 when the impatiently Progressive Attorney General, Janet Reno, said, “I know Murder She Wrote has few violent scenes in it, but they talk about nothing but violence.”

With Nurse Ratched’s threatening smile and pianissimo voice, Reno watched the NBC execs quiver at the other end of the table.

Rather like McMurphy I thought, “To hell with this! The b—h is crazier than I am!”

Oh, as an irony of all ironies, I was selected to do the recorded reading of “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest”.

It, like most of my films, has been lost in the same, seemingly terminal obscurity Nurse Ratched eventually placed McMurphy in.

I think you’d find my reading of Nurse Ratched, by the way, quite chilling in a charmingly camp sort of way.

Little did I know I’d actually meet a Nurse Ratched years later in Washington, D.C. as an Attorney General.

I wonder if A.G. Eric Holder has any similarly unforgettably cinematic alter egos.

Oh, perhaps Nurse Ratched’s superior at the Hospital is Dr. Snarkysnob.

I don’t remember ever seeing The Biggest Boss of Nurse Ratched on camera actually.

Bu then again we don’t see a lot of George Soros either.

“Dr. Soros, Dr. Soros! Wanted in emergency immediately!”