Pre-Waco, Law and Order had yet to make it vividly and unmistakably clear that not wanting to leave your weapon-laden home was, in fact, a crime worthy of being burned alive and, if you make it through that, serving long prison terms. Domestic sieges were staples of 10 o'clock news and Cops-style docutraumas. Post-Waco, it takes more than mere armed hermitage to make copy. The siege of Shirley Allen, for example, existed below the Baby Jessica radar of eccentric human-interest stories almost from the moment it began in late September.
Mrs. Allen, a 59-year-old widow living alone on 47 acres with a slow-pumping oil well, began disturbing her family after her husband died in 1989 - with such activities as not inviting them in on Labor Day, writing weird letters mentioning the radar beamed at her head, getting off Prozac, and generally acting quite depressed and out-of-sorts. With the suggestion of lots of other bizarre behavior not made public, Allen's relatives got a judge to declare her ripe for an involuntary psychological examination. Her brother and some state sheriffs went to fetch her on 22 September.
For whatever inexplicable reason, Mrs. Allen didn't want to be taken in and possibly locked up in a mental ward without benefit of a trial. She waved a shotgun when they kicked in her door; the cops fired tear gas; Mrs. Allen fired her weapon; cops shot rubber bullets at Allen. She retreated to her home, took completely rational defense measures against the tear gas, including breathing through a wet towel, and settled in to her canned-goods-laden house for what became a six-week siege.
The state cops were called in, Allen's power and water were cut off, her phone was connected only to the cops, loud music was blasted at the house constantly. After some more attempts on the part of the cops to get too close and some shotgun fire from Mrs. Allen, she eventually sat in a waterless, powerless house with only one unbroken window, Illinois winter coming on.
The press and public were kept at least a half-mile away from the property, leaving the police the only source of information as to what was going on. Family members, wired for sound and with police whispering instructions into their ears, were occasionally sent in to sing songs at her. The hoary joke had come completely true: Even paranoids have real enemies. Especially alleged paranoids. Eventually, 39 days after it began and a couple days after she shot a police dog sent to fetch her, Allen wandered onto her porch to snip cables on police surveillance cameras. She was shot again with rubber bullets from a 37mm launcher and subdued.
The case became something of a cause célèbre for types apt to be alarmed by police military tactics, and rumors flew to the effect that the family had been attempting to win control of her land and oil. Not all of them pan out; the oil well turns out to be a low-pumping dud, and Allen's whole estate probably isn't worth much more than US$200,000. But those, apparently including the judge, who blandly accepted the family's pure-hearted concern for Shirley must not have ever seen any soap operas in their lives: While a Dallas scenario doesn't seem likely, there are all sorts of squirrelly reasons why a family might become sincerely convinced that, really, wouldn't it be better for everyone involved if Mom was sent somewhere to get the help that she needs?
When it becomes a public-policy issue, when nearly a million dollars in public money is spent to make some lonely, but self-sufficient, woman's paranoid fantasies come true, a fuller explanation as to her dangerousness would be in order. Shirley's brother has been enthusiastically supportive of everything the cops did, including tear-gassing his sister, and blandly assures the press that Shirley's will is airtight and leaves everything to the grandchildren. He's never heard, apparently, of the "being of sound mind and body" clause, as familiar to most Americans as the beginning of the Miranda rights. Which Shirley Allen didn't get to hear, because through all this, she was not being arrested; she was not charged with a crime; she was being taken in for involuntary psychiatric evaluation.
The notion that, according to the psychiatric profession, the most benign personality quirk can be defined as a mental illness, has gotten quite a bit of almost amused coverage lately, most prominently in an issue of Harper's and in a Washington Post story last. It's commonplace enough to have become a staple of banal stand-up comedy: Airline food sure is awful; psychiatrists can diagnose all human behavior as an insurance-billable diagnosis. Ha, Ha, ain't the world aggravating, but still, through all the petty problems, kinda funny?
Yes, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and the pretensions of the psychiatric profession are kinda funny, sort of, in a way. But there's a corollary to the joke of overreaching psychiatric diagnosis that isn't quite so funny, or is funny in a different way. The therapeutic profession, in combination with state laws that allow involuntary commission to a mental institution on the evaluation of a psychiatrist or two, becomes the Therapeutic State, and two months ago, the state declared war on Shirley Allen. If, as Randolph Bourne once wisely asserted, "War is the health of the state," siege is its psychiatric evaluation. And we're all crazy now.
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This article appeared originally in Suck.
