November 14, 2009 Susie Bright's Journal
Gypsy-hobo-joan-greg I can't be the only one to make the connection.
For those of us who who are devoted to the American tele-novella Mad
Men, the recent psycho-shooting at Ft. Hood had an eerie plot echo.
(Spoilers ahead).
In Mad Men, which takes place in New York of 1963, there's a fictional
character named Greg, an aspiring surgeon who disgraces himself so
badly in the operating room that he is forced to go into, shame of all
shames, psychiatry.
Since I've placed my life in the hands of a therapist more than once,
this reaction came as a surprise to me!
Yet among Greg's colleagues at the hospital, the psychiatry career path
is considered a "fail." The deep background on Greg is that we already
know he is a messed-up dude, a rapist with serious issues who is the
LAST person you'd want to be talking to on a couch.
As the season closes, we learn that Greg has joined the Army where
they're desperate enough to take a loser like him and give him a
surgeon's scalpel and a badge.
He's so ignorant he doesn't have a clue that Vietnam is his imminent
destination.
Meanwhile, in real life, Nidal Malik Hasan, the deranged Army
psychiatrist who went on a shooting spree at Ft. Hood, also turns out
to be... a failed surgeon. The detail that caught my eye was the
anecdote revealed by his uncle, who said that Hasan went into
psychiatry after he FAINTED in the O.R. during a routine childbirth.
The sight of a baby emerging from a woman's vagina sent Nidal over the
edge.
With that clue, something in me snapped.
This was a guy, who by all accounts so far, has never been on a date,
and routinely complained to his mosque's imam that he couldn't find a
woman "pious" enough to marry, a virgin who would wear a veil around
the clock.
Hassan is being scrutinized for any potential ties to espionage,
fanatical religious beliefs, and vicarious PTSD from treating so many
broken soldiers.
But this man's craziness is more clearly understood in the context of
his severe and distorted sexual repression.
<end excerpt>
Michael