« I bought them, » she’d say.
Her father was in the asylum after he’d attempted suicide. Oddly he was diagnosed dementia rather than depression. He was deaf and deaf people commonly face misdiagnosis but then too deafness is associated with early dementia. I would visit her father with her. I noticed on a few visits he was all beat up, face bruised and cuts over his eye. I’d ask repeatedly ask what was being done. I asked the nurses with her.
The sordid plot unravelled. The nurses were visibly embarrassed and cagey. Finally, ‘his room mate is beating him up at night ». This was the explanation.
« Why don’t you get his room changed? » I demanded of my wife. I was angry. Her father who I liked was a gentle man, a brilliant man, sweet and amusing but sad, His wife was a bully.
I’d been to the court on their behalf to assist with her fight to defend his companies after he was hospitalized. They’d maintained their assets. I’d approached the lawyers and appealed to their compassion after watching my mother in law, a consummate actress, wailing on stage in the witness stand. I said to these young lawyers that I didn’t think this was proper behaviour and that I was the man in this family now and I was a psychiatrist and a bear hunter and didn’t take kindly to the nature of the questions and kind of questions being put to my mother in law. The older partner in the firm stepped in before I hurt one of the silly boys right there in court and promised he’d ensure the proper decorum and wrap things up. She was very pleased with the outcome and winked at me. « My performance was the best. ». She said. I was disturbed by that and yet repeatedly saw people ‘playing’ in the court, the judge no doubt knowing this, and the lawyers all realizing that this was just a ‘play’ and only people like me saw this all through some different lens.
I will always thank a lawyer friend for telling me, « Looking for justice in the courts is like looking for love in a whorehouse. ». Whatever transpired the family assets which would turn out to be considerable remained in tact. The astonishing amount I’d only learn after my divorce when the rich were again desperately trying to acquire more wealth from the poor. The father had been great at making money but his wife showed that women could be great at keeping money.
This was the time when the great wealth of Canada transferred en mass from men’s hands to women’s hands. The women who had stayed at home raising the children would go on to live 20 years longer because of the stress and work that men had in the workplace. The old adage about war was that men died and women weep. When women were in the exact same job, not job ‘designation’ which corrupts these statistics immensely, the men and women developed disease at the same rate and died as early. However when men or women were home raising the kids they were healthier.
The men of the 50’s , those who’d survived the depression or the depression aftermath, WWII and Korea and the 50’s and 60’s proceeded to have heart disease and strokes from hypertension and die early , often of the complication of alcoholism brought on by the horrible stresses of their lives in the social darwinism of the corporate work place with all the ‘laws of the jungle’ and “survival of the fittest” ‘Monopoly capitalism”.
The wives of this era had all the advantages that only the Queen had a hundred years earlier, in door plumbing, mechanized houses creating the equivalent of a half dozen servants per 50’s home, health care, and school, and generally an amazing amount of social time which often went to complaining about what a difficult life they lived. These were the ones who married the hero’s and survivors of WWII like her mother. The daughters of this generation were truly wealthy middle class, my own mother included, her washing machine saving her a day of work which coupled with the microwave reduced her work week by 20 hours time.
Their daughters would enterthe workplace and follow ‘feminism’ a girl philosophy, a form of cultural Marxism, which encouraged girls to imitate boys and multiplied their workload exponentially, while reducing the power of the family which women previously headed, before the power of the state could rise. The men just kept toiling and now the women joined them in the factory. These were the daughters of the women who once owned their homes .
As Jane Ursell a feminist sociologist said, the critical change wasn’t gender, it could be summed as one adult working could own a house and garage and car and support another adult and several kids. By the 70’s and 80’s it took two adults to afford a house and car and probably two adults could only afford one kid if any. The family became a necessity and a luxury and houses cost the price of castles but were often little more than shacks. That was the state versus the individual and the gender division was just one of the many ‘divide and conquer’ strategies of the socialist communist central authority dictatorship.
Canada became a de facto matriarchy by the 80’s.
Her father was hospitalized. I found out his room mate was a high school drop out, construction worker welfare criminal who was an amateur boxer.
« I tried to have my father moved but my mother wouldn’t let me» she said. She could never stand up to her mother.
« We tried t o separate them but his wife insisted that they remain together. » the nurse told me. She was embarrassed and apologetic.
The mother apparently had hated her husband since he’d worked in South America for an extended period of time.
« My mother thinks he has another family there and that’s why he’s been away. But his companies have as many projects there as here. ».
The mother was batshit crazy when I knew her , so having a delusion and paranoia and psychotic jealousy made perfect sense. She drank heavily against doctor’s advise and psychotic jealousy was a condition well associated with alocoholism. The uncle was a heroin addict. The family history was ripe with addiction.
I had him moved. With my wife I demanded this over riding her mother and letting the nurses and hospital know if the father wasn’t safe I’d raise hell. It was so sad to see this frail old genius being beaten nightly by a veritable thug. I’d already seen it was a common occurence in the geriatric placements because of understaffing, over crowding, poorly paid, untrained staff, corrupt administration and the idea that everyone was ‘equal’ and the insistence by the bullies that they now have what their ‘betters’ had.
There’s a telling scene in Dr. Zviago where the angry Communist poor are stealing the last vestiges of the elderly upper class insisting it was their right based on ‘history’ of ‘class warfare’. The beauty of Marx who hated his father and Jews, himself aJew, was that he created the perfect utopian doctrine of institutionalized paranoia. Cultural Marxism simply took two groups and linked them, any two groups really, with the term ‘oppressed’. This incredibly stupid and low brow reductionist philosophy was the means for countless stupid bullies throughout recent history to justify the killings of millions.
In the Canadian health care system this idea that the rich oppressed the poor results in old folks homes seeing the elderly wars with nurses taking sides. This is of course in bad institutions because thankfully the nurses and doctors generally are more enlightened than the administration which is collectively extremely ‘left’ leaning, undereducated and jealous of those who do not ascribe to this idea.
It was certainly a way for a fat old lady drinking nightly nursing resentments to get back at her husband who’d worked himself to his depression for the family. I’d just come from one marriage where my mother in law had being punching her comatose husband in the head having pulled out his lines in the ICU and here I was again with another murderous mother in law with a proxy hitman beating her ex to death.
His daughter was afraid of the mother as were the nurses. I announced to the mother that I’d arranged for her husband’s roommate , the boxer, to be moved and that he would no longer be beaten up at night. She shot her daughter the most frightening glance. My wife never made eye contact.
“You have no right to interfere in this family’s affairs.” She cussed me.
“I am a doctor and I am in this family. As a doctor I couldn’t stand by as a patient’s life was at risk in a hospital. I thought you would thank us.” I never did think she’d thank us. She didnt. She stormed out of the room her great body mass shaking the floor as she moved.
Her father a few days later, supposedly, demented looked at her knowingly and said. “Thank you. That was very kind. I don’t suppose your mother is very happy.’’ Then he’d disappear inside. He’d make these knowing statements from time to time which makes dementia one of the most unusual diseases because like schizophrenia and manic depression the individuals had these amazing windows of clarity.
My wife was having a lot of pelvic pain and wasn’t pregnant.. She was older than me and maintaining the ruse that she wanted to have a family all the while drinking and doing drugs continuously. She did have abdominal pain and had lapascopic procedure that removed a significant encoarchment by endometriosis. She thought she might get pregnant now, over 45 and stoned. I just remember feeling lonely and depressed and far from God. I was on the boat and it was chilly, whether it was or not.
The mother died. I don’t remember how. She had heart disease and hypertension and did’t take the medication and didn’t move out off her couch or out of her bed. She read all these magazines about the royals and talked incessantly about her childhood when all the men loved her and her father was a rich doctor. She always spoke loudly like a stage actress with lots of inflexion and constant innuendo. She was quite vulgar at times too insisting the royals were too. She knew everything about the royals, had read all there was to read about the Queen and her family.
Now she was dead. My wife had been with her mother that day or the day before seeing her continually but we’d arrived an hour late for the actual death and the body had been moved to the morgue. She and I went there. Asking where her mother was, the technician said, ‘in there’. We walked through the door to see her mother on the pathology gurney, naked. Typical sensitive hospital staff..
But I also couldn’t help but think, what karma, the mother had insisted on her daughter taking a picture of me , her son in law naked, while I was asleep, and here I was seeing my naked dead mother in law. I held my wife. No woman let alone a doctor needs to see her dead mother deceased in the stark lights of a pathology lab waiting autopsy. There was no sense berating the insensitive staff. The rot was not with him but with his boss in administration who was no doubt having a drunken party with his other rich “comrades”.
We went back to her home. There was the funeral and lawyers and paper, accountants and more paper.
The basement was chalk full of green garbage bags with months of household garbage. My wife had been visitting daily but I’d not visitted in months. The mother had stopped taking the garbage outside but had taking to throwing it downstairs instead. The smell was horrible. The elderly are difficult. This wasn’t about my mother in law. I’ve been to too many homes of the dead and seen the hoarding and the difficulty old people have with stairs. My own parents basement became rarely visitted in the end and certainly wasn’t cleaned in months, the dust so thick. Here there was evidence of years of decline and decay. I can’t say I’ve seen others who used their basement as a garbage dump but I’m not going to criticize the elderly since they’ve known more than I.
Like so many people my ex had this notion that her parents ‘stuff’ had immense value. Unlike her father a great businessman, she had no sense of business. The simple rule of depreciation was beyond her. The father’s jaguar had been left to literally rot in the lane not driven for over a decade but not covered either. The rust was everywhere. In the end it was towed away for parts. Just like the rusted caddy. The basement impressed me, once all the garbage bags were cleared, with the history of photography, on the shelves, all these cameras and electronic devices, once new and expensive but how thoroughly depreciated but needing another hundred years to be antiques. They had no value and the lesson this taught me was to pass on my old electronics whenever I upgraded simply because their was little or no value in yesterday’s technology. My $3000 laptop was only worth $1000 two years later and my schizophrenic patient was buying the lap tops 4 years old for parts that he’d use to animate toys he’d give away at Christmas.
Weeks of cleaning and then the garage sale. The businessman vultures arriving at dawn all set to make steals they’d take back to their stores to sell at elevated prices because they had ‘location’. At the end of the day a few hundred dollars and most left unsold to be taken away to the Sally Ann. I think my ex had a profound discovery that all the housands of dollars spent on clothes was for nought. A $5000 gown sold for $5 in a garage sale but if you arrived early at the Sally. Ann you could get that same gown for $20 Business and money amuse me. I’ve always had a knack for it but I’d rather use my mind to address chemistry and neurology and ask the more important question ,what is this for. How to navigate. How to use the stars. How to do surgery were always more important to me than the white collar gambling called the ‘stock market’.
My brother and one nephew like the barter. My dad was very good at it too. I played the game in travels and really don’t like it much. I’d rather read a book on history than wheel and deal. I don’t think my ex had a clue about anything like this. She’d lead a very protected life. She was a ‘shaughnasey girl’ and her father’s genius and hard work had kept the family safe and wealthy. She’d had a pony as a girl and had gone to private girl’s school.
We were once invited to Jim Patterson’s place. She’d gone to school with his daughter. I can’t remember the big occasion. I really liked the father. It was a lovely place and the girls chatted about school. Another time we’d be out for dinner with what would later turn out to be an ex boyfriend’s family and the father was proudly talking about having to ‘knee cap’ a fellow who was interfering with his construction. She’d kick me under the table when she saw me about to raise objection to this whole ‘table talk’ about ‘wacking people for money’ and status. The architect there was fawning for a contract on another building and everyone but me seemed to see this ‘respectable’ man, known in the local ‘celebrity pages’ as someone to admire. I just couldn’t admire someone shooting people for profit. There are reasons to shoot people for sure but doing it purely for money seemed worse that prostitution. Not at all enlightened
“If I can’t make a profit here I’ll have to move my companies to Asia or South America,” he’d say complaining about the increasing number of government people he had to ‘pay off’ to get through his construction. “In South America it’s a fixed deal, a percentage you pay, a local boss you pay, but here it’s always more and more as the project grows. Every bureaucrat figures out a new law he can apply to get more money and then he insists that he needs something in his own home. I never know what the ‘baksheesh cost will be’ here .It’s getting harder and harder to make a profit. I’ve had to have my men eliminate a couple of union guys trying to get the union in one of my factories.” He said.
The dinner conversation continued like that. My wife and I did enjoy the champagne. She was radiant in her new dress and her hair done. I didn’t say anything.
“Paul Martin, the bloody Liberal Prime Minister won’t hire Canadian workers. Says he couldn’t run his billion dollar business here but keeps making it impossible for a regular guy like me to make a decent living without having to keep body guards to injure people trying to take my money. Some days I think it’s worse than Africa. But my wife likes the shops in Lonsdale and skiing at Whistler. It makes her happy. So I do what I do to get by.” the man said.
I’d sit at these dinners with her and she’d say it was nothing. I’d say ‘nothing’. I never heard people talking about whacking people and hiring people to whack people in my home but then we were more ‘common’. My mother never read about the royals. She insisted her father never was part of this but she certainly had some unsavoury connections that quite astonished me. My own innocence leavening screaming.
“These guys talk about killing people.” I’d say
And the fact was she was naive about some stuff and totally jaded about business matters. I had these ridiculous ideals and real difficulty not seeing. She was very good at compartmentalizing and saying that they threw nice parties.
It was the time when the Vancouver Stock Exchange got de listed and said to be the most corrupt in the world. It would only run for years under the umbrella of the Toronto Stock Exchange.
Later my friend would be a guy whose job had been as an ‘enforcer’. At any of the dinner parties I’d been with her, they may well have been referring to his outstanding work. He told me the most horrible tales of his work in the ‘business world’ . He’d had to stop his drinking and cocaine after a heart attack.
“I don’t know how I can work and not drink or do drugs,” he told me.
“What to you mean.” I asked one day after the meeting
“I was holding this guy down and torturing him with cigarettes and electricity and all I could think about was having a drink. I shot this guy in the knee cap the other night because he didn’t pay his debts and again I just wanted a drink so bad. I used to do this every weekend coked up and get drunk after but now I can’t get this stuff out of my mind. The screams these guys make like little piglets stays in my mind.”
I love this guy. He gave up his work as an enforcer. He’d paid for his labour in bits of heart, now scarred and diseased. Shortly after stopping hurting people for a living manger to stay sober. We’d laugh that people had to be ‘willing to go to any lengths to stay sober.” Our friend stopped shooting people. Now that’s dedication to the program.
It was in 1994 I had a call from a nurse on the VGH psychiatry ward.
“I know you have been upset about abuse of psychiatry for political reasons. “ she began. I was at the time in the Canadian Civil Liberties and would be a member of Psychiatrists against the Political ABuse of Psychiatry. Mostly the latter involved sending letters to Communist countries where scientists were held in institution to work after being diagnosed schizophrenic for refusing to do weapons or genetic research or some such thing. Now deprived of freedom and rights and even pay were diagnosed Schizophrenic and forced to work in ‘research lab jails’ in China and Russia. It was a typical ‘yuppie’ like involvement in an overseas issue. No cost to myself. Very virtuous and good dinner conversation about the ‘good’ I was doing.
Having been billy clubbed in peace movements back when I was dancing semi naked in the streets of San Francisco with peace and love painted on my body and face , I’d come to the point where the mayor asked to walk with me in a distinguished peace march. All heady stuff and giving the illusion that this sort of thing really did something. Very gentile.
The nurse told me this lawyer Jack Cram had been brought on the ward and that the most extraordinary treatment had been given him. “He was on Ralf Maier and perfectly lucid and reasonable,” she said, “ but here your colleague has been giving him industrial doses of antipsychotics that would kill a horse. They wouldn’t let his family see him but they brought in a film crew that made him look like a totally drooling insane person. I thought about you and what you told me about your doing for people in Communist countries. It’s happening right here. ” she was angry. I’d later talk to a private detective who had been hired by a native group to investigate the situation.
I’d seen that trick used here before by my colleague but not at this level. A wealthy gentleman was admitted to hospital and in a dispute with his family refused clothes so he would show up in court in a hospital gown. I confronted the head at the time who had thought to ‘sneak that one by’ because he’d formed an unholy alliance with the family in the dispute. I got the man clothes. A picture is worth a thousand words. If he’d shown up with his ass shown in his hospital gown he’d have lost even more millions than he did in a suit. But I became aware that day that my forensic psychiatry colleague would ‘choose sides’ almost instinctively to ensure he was on the ‘winning side’.
“I’m his best friend but he’s British and he’d turn on me in a second if I was on the losing side. He’s only loyal to himself and who is winning.” A close friend of his told me. It’s par to that culture.
I’d been warned about him. Still I liked him. One of the best drinking buddies I ever had. When I heard that he’d done this and this lawyer who went from normal and reasonable on radio to slobbering lunatic on tv I knew it was the classic “invalidation by psychiatric medication’ . It was standardized by the Russians in the 50’s . It was done to all the scientists that we were supporting overseas.
My colleague wasn’t born or raised Canadian. I try to explain this to people and they dont’ ‘get it’ . This man came from a rigid class society where he was a genetic loser. His only hope of status was to lick the ass of the one above. He told me to that if you ever disagreed with power you went missing so he was here having left his own country, enjoying what to people from where he came, were amazing ‘liberties’.
We go through this all the time. Scab voters and scab labour brought in to this country. Worker fighting for freedom and people who’ve never had a dishwasher so easily bought off.
I’d learn that Jack Cram had represented a Cree woman in the land claims about this city. The irony is that I’d spent a year with Community Medicine and knew that the Vancouver Aboriginal Land Claim was the strongerst of all the land claims in Canada.
The whole land claim business was a legal ‘make work’ project that back fired. The lawyers made a hundred million to every million the natives got so it was a great deal for the lawyers and bureaucrats. But the land that was being given to the natives like the original ‘reserve’ land was supposed to be shit land. It had been no good for agriculture but later with mining and oil those ‘shit lands ’ became worth billions. Today we have billionaire natives in CAnada. Also the separate law that governed natives allowed them to make a killing, literally, off tobacco sales. They’d also have casinos.
Until the Conservatives, under Mr. Harper brought in a ‘transparency act’ about government money the ‘chief’s’ of the reserves were getting millions and millions adding up to gazillions of dollars which they were stashing in the Cayman Islands. The mining companies in addition to the government were now given them millions in ‘backsheesh’ . The ‘blockades’ up north were as commonly an Indian gang ‘extorting’ more money from the business men and women who’d already paid millions. The latest was that the ‘elected chiefs’ got their kick backs but now the the ‘hereditary chiefs’ the competing groups demanded their millions. It really was the Wild West.
James Michener wrote the novel Alaska to describe the land claims boongangel that went on up there. I’d known this Alaskan psychiatrist who was the second one to come to one of the Alaskan cities up. He was actually shot at on the job. Bullets whizzing by his head while having a burger. It turned out his colleague who’d had a monopoly on the legal and psychiatric trade in the city objected to the competition. I so enjoyed that this man survived and I got to hear his story in person. Great guy.
I’d later hear similiar stories of abuse and corruption from Dr. Talbot, tfamous for the Talbot Recovery Campus. He’d spend an afternoon with me to help me as he’d heard I’d been ‘hurt’ by abused by colleagues. . He started by telling his own story. I’d hear hundreds more like his in coming years.
I miss innocence.
But this is the Wild West and truth is far stranger than fiction.
I received a call from Mr. Cram a while later. My uncle was the mayor of Invermere, a very old man, who told me that Jack Cram had helped the whole of the west of the province fighting the corruption and abuse of government there. He’d been in the court room when the sheriffs attacked Jack Cram . Later I’d see my 80 years uncle again in the court and he’d point out a real troll liked steroid abusing sheriff in his 20’s and say “I wrestled that SS thug to the ground. “ He beamed at his wife of 50 years who looked at at him lovingly. I loved my William Wallace uncle who still made his wife’s heart beat faster. I’d missed all the shenanigans before this and would have gladly gone to my grave were it not for the call by the psychiatric nurse.
I just had lunch with Jack Cram to hear what he wanted . He asked for a psychiatric evaluation. I gave him my time Pro Bono and completed a formal psychiatric evaluation. He said ‘am I psychotic’. I said ‘no’.. He was a tad more narcissistic I said than the average fellow but that lawyers collectively shared this trait so that he probably was normal. The trouble with lawyers is that as a group they share most of the sociopathic traits successful criminals have. They also don’t like that.
I much prefer the military to law. An army sergeant major asked what makes him different from the enemy and said “I’m a sheep dog. I protect my men and the sheep. Those others are wolves. They just protect themselves.’ The RCMP I knew well shared this virtue but the lawyers like me a doctor didn’t differentiate ‘right or wrong’. I saved the lives of murderers and their victims and left the sorting out to later.
My colleague saw a judge as a psychiatrsit because the judge had been a lawyer who had used every wile to get criminals off so became rich, the richest lawyers do just that, the criminals being willing to pay the most because they know they did the murder but don’t want to be found ‘guilty’ for doing the murder. Doing a crime is different from being found ‘guilty’ . But now my friend said the judge for the first time in his life had to be ‘impartial’ and it took him a year of therapy to balance this and actually find a ‘conscience’.
Jack Cram was sane as any other lawyer.
I didnt’ even know the whole story. I don’t need to declare a person sane at that time.
I just appeared in court and said that I’d examined the patient and found him to be sane. He was not psychotic, not suicidal and not homicidal. He did not meet the criteria for certification or ‘involuntary committal’. Really it wasn’t rocket science. I’d done countless comittals and ironically studied under the philosopher who helped develop our certification laws in Canada and BC. “Insaneity’ is a much misunderstood term and my colleagues who didn’t work in the emergency or asylum might well have limited knowledge of the subject. I’d studied it far more than the average psychiatrist first in undergraduate, then in the Canadian Civil Liberties and in my day to day work for years as a psychiatrists especially in the asylum and the psychiatric emergency. . There was no way Jack Cram could be considered ‘psychotic’ by any medical or psychiatric criteria.
Now he could be committed under a ‘governor general’s warrant’. That’s a separate issue. Much more complex and above my pay grade. It was telling that the courts didn’t go that way because that’s more a social behavioural decision. Instead the question was whether Jack Cram was psychotic today or even this week. A person interestingly can be psychotic weeks ago and not be committed today. The example is commonly with alcoholism where a person can be deemed ‘psychotic secondary to alcohol abuse’ but when he sobers up or a day after he can no longer be ‘held against his will.’
“What are your findings. Dr. Hay”. The judge asked.
“I have examined Mr. Cram and he is not psychotic.” I may have said more to that affect but I don’t remember that . I kept it very brief and to the point and didn’t enlarge on the matter as in court it’s always best to just answer the question as it was put. Then was I thoroughly and utterly shocked to hear my Forensic Psychiatrist colleague say to the judges’ question:
What are your findings. Dr.?”
“I did not examine Mr. Cram but I reviewed the court hearings (weeks before) and find Mr. Cram to be psychotic today.” He said with great authority .
“On What basis did you find Mr. Cram to be psychotic?” The judge asked as if they’d rehearsed this play before opening night.
‘Mr Cram said this was a Nazi court and implied you were a Nazi. As this is not a Nazi court and you are not a Nazi then he is clearly psychotic. “ my colleague stated.
I really couldn’t believe my ears. I was gobsmacked as they say.
This really was a provincial Supreme Court and this really was the sort of drivel going on.
My colleague was a total toady. He was more insane than what he said.
“What do you have to say to that Dr. Hay.” The Judge questioned me.
“I’m afraid if my colleague and this court doesn’t grasp the concept of metaphor then this court is indeed a Nazi court. Sir”. I responded.
I really wish low brow bullies would simply say, ‘see this gun. I’m holdiing the gun. Do as I say.’
“I’d do it.” But for some reasons these sorts always want your approval. I’m quick to obey but there’s a whole joke about the issue of approval.
A man in a movie asks a woman if she would have sex with him for a million dollars. She said “I’d consider it” He then asked ‘would you have six with me for a dollar’. She shocked, said ‘what do you take me for.’ He responded ‘that’s already been established. I ‘m just dickering for price.’
But when they want to say this is ‘right’ then we have problem. Christians especially have a problem because we believe in truth. Scientists have an even greater problem because their mistakes explode or die. The courts are just about money and power.
I loved talking to my cultural psychiatrist friend who’d survived a concentration camp. ‘The communists just deny you food. It’s amazing what a person will do without food. I was actually impressed that the schizophrenics were the most responsive and the academic were the least. The intellectual academics died while the schizophrenics lived in the communist concentration camp simply because the schizophrenicswanted to eat. If I could use food for behaviour modification I am sure I could cure schizophrenics. ’”
It was an amazing trial if only because no lawyer in the province of BC would represent Jack Cram. Imagine that! No lawyer at all! . The lawyer that represented Jack Cram had come from Quebec. Imagine a man unable to get a lawyer. It was a major issue with the prosecution of Mafia crime bosses.
I’d later learn there was a side story . I’d only known Jack Crams getting into trouble defending Cree Lawyer Renate Andres-Auger. She made the audacious claim that the land of Vancouver was native land. It was one thing to give the natives shit land that was worthless for farming and find out later it became worth a fortune for mining rights, it was another thing to demand that the whole of VAncouver be given back to the natives because there never was a treaty.
The mockery of the justice in the system which allowed so many ‘white lawyers’ to become multi millionaires was that they and the judges were ‘renegotiating treaties made hundreds of years ago’. This was truly a great ‘gig’ if you could get it. A marvellous scam worth billions. The society as a whole has become psychotic ‘rewriting history’ and ‘demanding reparations’ for ‘perceived wrongs hundreds of years ago.’.
To simply if for anyone not following or having listened to too much CBC, Communist Broadcasting Corparation, the Pravda of the west,
“ I sold a house for a hundred thousand that’s now worth $500, 000. I want $400, 000 dollars now.” . It’ really that simple.
However as I discussed with Dr. Jack Hildes who’d worked so long with government and land claims the best land claim was when there was no treaty. There was no ‘bill of sale’. The natives still owned the land. If someone had moved into my house without a bill of sale then I’d be able to come back and claim it. There’s a whole set of maritime rules about abandonment, and lack of use and then there’s ‘squatters rights’ and such but when you’re getting $500,million and the Indian is getting a million dollars” and a chunk of ‘worthless land , ‘it’s a good gig” by anyone’s standards. As Bob Dylan’s said, “What’s a good girl like you doing in place like this....you’ve got to play your harp till your lips bleed’.
Back to Vancouver, 1994. I’m only 42 at that time and my wife is 45.
So the courts hammered the Cree Lawyer and they hammered Jack Cram.
“Steal a little and they put you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king. Dr. Samual Johnson 1780’s paraphrased by Bob Dylan, Nobel prize winner for Literature. The first job of the court was to support the crown. The reformer is the enemy of anyone who benefits from the status quo.
They’d already tried throwing Jack Cram in jail and he’d got out. He was thrown in the psychiatry ward and with the assistance of a ‘crown psychiatrist’ what is called in the trade the ‘company doctor’ and one who was a coward but smart and knew well what side his bread was buttered on contributed to muddying the waters as politics is all appearance. His job was to destroy Mr. Cram’s credibility in the classic abuse of psychiatry for political reasons.
There is no Hippocratic oath in communist countries. Hippocrates would roll over in his grave having seein what was done to Mr. Cram. There is no ‘truth’ in post modern society as everything is ‘constructed’ and truth is ‘my truth versus your truth’. Very convenient in a society wheree ‘might is right.”
I’d see very few of these grotesque abuses in my time with the system. But they stink. They are rare and they do tell of the normalcy of these in Commuist Countries and Third World Countires and Muslim Dictactorships. I’d later work with refugees and see how common this was in other countries where freedom and respect for the individual didn’t exist. My old drinking buddy was the psychiatrist. This was British Columbia, not just Columbia. This was a hiearchal system and not a true democracy. A colony really. These dregs of power existed and the courts were reflective of that history.
I wish the silly nurse hadn’t called me. I was there in that court that day and wondered what was this Monty Python circus. I was utterly shocked at my colleague testifiying on the basis of ‘reading’ a court document, not even interviewing the man, and where was the hospital psychiatrist who I gathered had the sense to stay out of the nuclear fall out zone. He’d done his bit making Jack Cram drugged on tv slurring and stammering. He’d let a television unit interview a man who after the drugs was ‘incompetent’ and ignored the ‘compis mentis’ radio interview the evening before. It was all bad science. Great drama and politics and intrigue. But downright ugly.
What made it even more Hollywood worthy was that Jack Cram and the Cree Lawyer had called out the the judge for being apart of or hiding three judges, who Hedy Fry said were part of a pedophile ring in BC power. Years later I’d see that one Judge was caught. A pedophile who’d slept with thousands of Indian girls. He apparently liked 10 year olds. His story hit the news for one day. Then it was gone. Canadian media is Pravada all the way. Never a mention in CBC. Just a brief report and then buried.
The residential school money grab with lawyers getting 100 million and natives one million charged the schools and churches for abuses but noticeably absent were the administrators and lawyers who were never mentioned but surely were the first and worst at depriving native children of their innoscene. Nothing on this scale goes without the permission and participation of those at the the next level.
Years later I worked in a court house which was named and paid for by one of the world’s most know pedophiles of greatest proninence.
I gathered the other two judges which had been accused of by Cram and Renate and Hedy Fry had died. Or that was just an unrelated incident. Maybe all the judges were pure. It’s all above my pay grade. I’ve thought of this a lot over the years. It always amuses me to hear people at my church and elsewhere thank the natives for the use of this Vancouver land that they say isn’t Vancouver’s but rather the natives. It’s a Gandhi type thing. I didn’t really expect to be part of it. All I did was my job. But the head of the Canadian Psychiatric Association flew out to thank me and the Head of the CAnadian Medical Association said that he thought I was the only psychiatrist with integrity in British Columbia. Neither would have wanted me to quote them.
Jack Cram and his lawyer thanked me . He and the Cree lawyer were disabarred. I gather the psychiatric play didn’t work as well as they wanted.I expected my drinking buddy hadn’t played along as well they hoped. The thoroughly unconscionable psychiatrist they brought in for the trial would go on to be the richest most powerful psychiatrist in the province.
The death threats against me began the next day. Phone calls calling me a traitor. Indian lover. Don’t I know I’m a white man. How dare I go against the courts. Whose side was I on. I wasn’t a white man. A white man wouldn’t work for the red skins like I did. Lots of slurs. People following me slowly in cars. Strangers looking me in the eye and point their fingers at me across rooms and pulling imaginary triggers.
My wife and I had been planning on sailing to Mexico . Her mother was dead and that was the reason we were in Vancouver. I’d saved up another $10,000 and our plan had been to get work and sail on around the world or just sail down and leave the boat in Mexico as a future winter getaways We’d planned to go that year or the next at the latest but now it seemed best to expedite the plan. We hurried up the finishing touches for offshore, the boat having been ready with the help of my Maori friend. It was just a matter of closing practices and letting the house we’d acquired .
Our really respectable friend would want to rent it for a year but my wife insisted on renting it with the low life expolice man she did drugs with. I didn’t like that but it was her decisions. They loved drinking and smoking dope together. His friend was a good guy who had his boat on our marina but this ex police man was just a drunk I complained to my wife for having around because he always just came to eat the food, drinking the liquor and leave.
Lots of scheming. I was purely involved in sailing and frankly glad to be leaving Vancouver .It was so sordid. I didn’t like the death threats either but I knew that if they were serious they’d shoot out my windows or as my friend said, ‘You’d come home and reach up to pull on the the light and it would be the tail of your cat strangling above you.” I’d spoken to my Queen Charlottes and Northern BC native friends and they all agreed that it was good that we leave but that the threats were just harrassment. A native chief had died on the island with a ‘accidental gun shot wound’ behind his ear.
The land claims that the lawyers were working on was found in favour of Vancouver with the lawyers getting $50 million and an Indian getting $1 million. The classic division of funds. I was just disgusted to be human at the time. I felt good sailing. She was depressed. I was thoroughly disenchanted. It was a good time to go sailing. Nothing clears the head more than being at sea.
We were forced to take a friend because the insurance companies only insured offshore vessels at the time with three. We’d not sailed much with him and though we knew his eccentricities didn’t fully appreciate how crazy he was until we were offshore. He’d always wanted my wife. He thought she preferred him to me. Weird. She didn’t like him because he was weird but wanted him along because she thought three of us would be safest off shore.
We’d done all our homework and training and were part of the annual Blue Water Sailing Association southern sail. It’s a great organization and we’d enjoyed being a part of it as a couple for years. Now we’d sail as a group meeting up with each other as we leap frogged down the coast.
The principle problem in departure was her refusing to let go of stuff.
“We don’t need your high heels>”
“We don’t need your dresses.”
“We can’t take your dolls”.
Really it was insane. I had to have the coast guard come over and inspect the boat and get their blessing with our layout and what we were taking. I love the Canadian Coast Guard. I love their advice. They’d just started doing this for off shore sailors. But after they came and went she brought a car load of clothing and filled our cabin with clothes.
‘We can’t take this. We can’t move in here. The coast guard said that it was perfect the way it was. You’ve got to leave your party dresses. You can’t take them.’
It was a nightmare leaving Vancouver.
We’d go off with friends and stop over in Victoria. Finally we had a sailboat which was till overpacked with unnessecsary shit and the cat had had kittens but she and I had done done some amazing sailing to Alaska and on the west coast and immediately we left Vancouver she’d become the girl I loved. Getting her away from Shaughnassey she’d simply lighten up. The death of her brother and mother wore on her. She had so many sad memories and the abuse by her mother was unbelievable and became more apparent when the mother’s writing was exposed and the insaneity, the delusions, and grandiosity.
I now was just wanting to sail south. I was a ships Captain. I had a great boat. I was as prepared as anyone was and about to do what sailors had done for hundreds of years without any of the equipment or support we had. It was the start of a grand adventure. A year of sailing . We’d worked bloody hard for this and bled for this and deserved it. I couldn’t say the same for crew. He didn’t work. He’d not worked for years doing odd jobs to get by, having savings and family support. One of those who are rich in time and resources because they only take care of themselves. My wife had been carrying for her mother and father and getting her exams. I’d been caring for my wife and countless others. It was my mistake to take a crew who cared for himself and had a basic flaw that he couldn’t follow orders. I often think this as Canadianism these days.
The greatest leader was the greatest follower.
I learned surgery and medicine and worked for years because I followed the orders so well. I was the servant of my patients and my society. I served my wife. I was a Christian and a worker. Jesus was called the ‘servant king’. I didn’t have a lot of time to myself. When I smoked dope and played guitar after a week up north working on reserves where no doctors would go I felt like I was ‘entitled to’. It was my blue collar reward. I worked hard and played hard. So did she. We now had a break. Our ‘break’ wasn’t just flying off to a beach in Hawaii but the culmination of countless courses and years refining out skills and outfitting our boat just for this purpose. To sail to Mexico and then around the word if we got to Mexico first. We knew the risks.
But of the boats that went down at sea, the American Coast Guard statistics showed clearly that a third weren’t fit for offshore and another third the captains were untrained. The odds were very much in our favour. I would have preferred to have left a week or two earlier but she had delayed our departure repeatedly with clothing issues and sheeer nonsense. I even said ‘if we don’t go now we’d best go next year.
“No I want to go .Really. Really I want to go”
We got going within the fragile window, before the winter storms. Personally I’d sail solo through hurricanes in years to come so looking back think of these sailing days as idyllic.
However when we first were in 10 knots of wind we lowered all sails sailing years before to Desolation Sound. In a foot of waves we’d thought we might over turn. We’d been told by fellow Blue Water Sailors to keep a log specifically to look back and laugh. We’d since sailed in big winds and big seas off the West Caost of VAncovuer Island and come through a gale in Hecate Straight. We’d were salted sailors, she and I. We were prepared.
Our crew mutinied. And the end of the marriage followed.
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