About This Blog

I began this blog last spring, when I was trying to wrap my mind around the fact that the CIA was torturing "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo, and when I was trying understand exactly how my friends and I were mistreated at Escuela Caribe. Because despite the numerous claims of abuse, not everyone who attended EC will admit that abuse happened.

In order to understand what quantified abuse, I (shallowly) delved into the history of torture in the United States beginning in the fifties, disseminating reports on Communist brainwashing written by CIA director Allen Dulles. And I apply my experience at Escuela Caribe to the tactics that Dulles describes.

They are pretty similar, enough so that I wondered if the people that began my reform school had studied the report. I asked Maya Szalavitz (author of Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids) if she thought there were any direct links between the troubled teen industry and Communist brainwashing techniques. "Not directly," she said. She thinks that "people independently arrive at the same techniques because they work to produce compliance."

Sometimes I wonder if I should leave this blog up, because figuring out how my mind was controlled was so personal and raw. I wonder if it makes me sound crazy (I'm really not). I leave it up as a testament of what even "torture light" does to an individual.

Andrew Sullivan described the nuances of torture best in his blog on January 14:

"(T)orture is not defined by some cartoonish Jack Bauer-style sadism. It need not leave any physical marks (that's why some of the techniques used by Bush were studied and used by the Gestapo). Things that might seem banal on paper - "sleep deprivation," for example - in practice when maintained for a sufficient amount of time can be among the worst torture there is. Put these techniques together - hypothermia, sleep deprivation, repeated beatings, constant nudity, sensory deprivation - and they become something often worse than an electric shock.

The definition of torture is when the victim has no effective choice but to say something, true or false, to end the ordeal. You can bring a victim to that point of surrender of his or her soul and will in many different ways."

New Blog

I've been AWOL lately partly because I was sick for a few weeks, and couldn't even begin to think of writing...I also have been so OBSESSED with the election that most of this past month's free time (outside of writing four music articles) has been spent  tracking the polls at fivethirtyeight.com, and following the election at the Huffington Post, Jezebel, and the National Review. I've also become a real fan of Andrew Sullivan. He's a lapsed conservative and I was raised one...so I understand where he comes from (though I have no desire for conservatism to reclaim its roots).

While on hiatus I decided to quit blogging here at reformschoolgirl.  In the first place,  Reform School Girl is no longer the working title of my book. Mainly though, I write about so many other things besides reform school.  If someone stumbles here because they read one of my music articles, I don't necessarily want them to associate reform school with me, because while I'm not ashamed of it, my life experiences encompass so much more. Honestly, until about five years ago, I NEVER told anyone I had been to a reform school.  Way too weird. If high school came up, I said I went to boarding school in the Dominican Republic.  

All future posting will be at deirdresayre.blogspot.com.  Hope to see you there!

When Men Become Gods

I've been under the weather for most of the past month, and consequently haven't gotten much writing done. However, I've put the idle hours to good use, reading. Over the next few weeks I'll post about my favorites, beginning with When Men Become Gods.

Even though the U.S. is more than ready to sacrifice our country's best and brightest in war against "Islamic fundamentalists," all too often, we ignore the extremists in our own backyard. The Church of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (FDLS) is one of the more glaring examples of this variety; only recently has the government begun cracking down on the church, despite the known sexual abuse of young women and children, the sect's use of child labor, and their abuse of tax dollars. For years the cult was kept under a tight rein by their "Prophet," Warren Jeffs, who studied Hitler's rise to power, excommunicating those who protested against him.

There were many correlations between Escuela Caribe, with its top down leadership and rigid idealogy, and the Jeffs-run church. Like here (p.100) where author Steven Singular describes how Jeffs began "physically and mentally forcing children to be righteous through fear...fear of getting physically whipped so bad by the principal of the academy so that you could hardly walk...fear of being publically expelled from school and ostracized from your friends for small infractions of rules...informants were everywhere. Children against parents, wives against husbands, and brethren against brethren."

Young males, known as the Lost Boys, were often excommunicated. (If large numbers of young men were not excommunicated, there would not be enough women to go around for the faithful.) One of the outcasts, Zeke, described the feeling of being separated from his family. "He (Jeffs) create(d) a huge chasm between parents and their children. He knew exactly how to do this. When he began throwing teenagers out of the FDLS, it made kids hate their parents for listening to Warren, and it made parents hate their kids for doing things to get kicked out. This went right to the heart of the parent-child relationship. When you tell a mother she can't talk to a child anymore, how much more manipulative can you get?"


And of course, once a kid was kicked out, they had few coping skills. They would do all the things they had missed out on to excess. "It's like holding a rubber band on the end of your finger and pulling it back farther and farther and building up more and more tension. When you let it go, it flies as far as it can."



Reminds me of some of my friends post-Escuela Caribe....


When Men Become Gods delves into much more detail of daily FDLS life, and highlighting the courage of those who testified against Jeffs, as well as those who worked to build a case against him. He is now behind bars.

Definitely worth reading.

Letter to the Editor

I've been busy working on my book proposal and have not had much time to write here.  I did recently compose my first letter to the editor (Athens Banner Herald), responding to a puff piece on Sarah Palin.  You can read it below.

In her ode to Sarah Palin ("No secret why the South loves Palin," Sept. 7), columnist Erin Rossiter claimed the vice presidential candidate "stood up against Big Oil" (omitting that they footed the bill for Palin's Alaskan inauguration with their record-breaking profits). She ignored Palin's push to drill in ANWR, as well as her attempt to build a pipeline from Alaska to the lower 48 (which Palin deemed on tape to be "God's will").

Unfortunately, in Palin's unique worldview, God's will does not cover protecting his creation. She refuses to recognize climate change as being caused by man, despite extreme drought here in Georgia, another intense hurricane season, and the fact that the North Pole now is an island for the first time in human history. She fought protecting polar bears, and supports the aerial hunting of wolves.

It might read nice for Rossiter to claim Palin is "sweeter than ice tea," but Palin's digs at Obama's community organizing efforts were vicious, if not disingenuous, given that soon after Palin's election as mayor of Wassilia, she had to hire an administrator to ensure that the town of 7,000 was run properly, partly due to the protest of her constituents, who didn't cotton to the idea of their mayor attempting to fire their librarian and ban their books.

In the future, when covering Palin, please investigate the facts thoroughly, and dispense with the personality pieces. We have less than 60 days to vote on the fitness of a candidate who has yet to be properly vetted.

The Context of Colorado Springs

Sunday morning, both the Associated Press (owned by Rupert Murdock) and NPR reported that John McCain and Sarah Palin spoke before an adoring crowd in Colorado Springs, CO. They mentioned that Colorado Springs is home to many conservatives, but left out Colorado Springs' essential context, ground zero of America's culture war, and the home of James Dobson's "ministry," Focus on the Family.

I became acquainted with Colorado Springs first-hand in 1989, during the month I spent in nearby Manitou Springs, at the Summit, a FOTF camp where we learned about the evils of rock and roll, homosexuality, abortion, secular humanism, and how to influence our congressmen by waging letter campaigns. I made friends with Ryan Dobson, son of James, a really sweet guy who received major road rash after he fell off his skateboard when bombing the hill the Summit was located on. He struck me as being more than a little overwhelmed by his overbearing father, rolling his eyes and blushing crimson when I asked him about how it felt to be discussed (often negatively) on the radio.

I could so relate to the embarrassment, albeit on a much smaller scale. And I came to understand the darker, draconian side of Dobson all too well three months later when FOTF recommended my parents send me to Escuela Caribe, where I spent the next two years along with my peers being abused in the name of religion.

Behind the scenes, James Dobson's influence has only increased during the ensuing twenty years. He no longer has the power to merely influence doting evangelicals like my parents to homeschool their children and then send them to be brainwashed in third world countries; instead America's most influential evangelical has been bent on recreating America as a theocracy in his own image (most cynically by being pro-business, as opposed to protecting God's creation). The polarizing Palin was nominated due to the efforts of FOTF's feckless leader, as well as Left Behind author Tim Lahaye, Grover Norquist (thank him for the Bush tax cuts) and the cast of other extreme conservatives making up the Council for National Policy. They "vetted" a candidate who supports teaching creationism in schools, whose environmental record is to the extreme right of Bush and Cheney, who is against abortion in all cases, who attempted to ban books while mayor of Wassillia, who cut funding to help teen mothers and children with special needs while governor.

SO when Palin is adored in James Dobson's hometown, it's important to know the context*. And all the more important for the rest of America to educate ourselves and our fellow citizens on the positions that she supports, and to know which puppet masters are pulling her strings.

*NPR might not cover the context b/c they fear their efforts to knock them off the air.

Labor Day

On Labor Day, my husband, son, and I went hiking in Tallulah Gorge State Park, one of the great wonders of our state (if not the nation), and a phenomenal example of why there should be unequivocal support for protecting the environment. Afterwards we went to lunch at the Dillard House, where I experienced the thrill of my summer when I spotted former Senator Max Cleland in the gift shop. I was paralyzed for a few moments about whether or not to approach him (I don't like invading people's personal space), but luckily my husband seized the opportunity, removing a display blocking the Senator's wheelchair. He took the opportunity to introduce himself, telling him how honored he was to meet him. Naturally I joined in, and thanked Senator Cleland for all he has done (which includes being staunchly pro-environment, renouncing his vote for the war in Iraq, and vehemently expressing his disapproval for its handling). He took a picture with us, and signed a card for our son.

I couldn't help feeling sad after I saw him, because it reminded me of the ugliness of his re-election campaign, when he, a vet who lost three limbs in Vietnam, was smeared as soft on terror because he didn't back Bush's version of homeland security legislation. His opponent, Saxby Chambliss, who sat out of Vietnam with a hurt knee, juxtaposed Cleland's image with that of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Rove-ian politics at their slimiest, and reason number one (among many) of why I will never call Saxby my Senator.

Sadness aside,I couldn't help but be invigorated after meeting our former Senator. I met a real hero, which is not something that happens every day. It made me very happy and excited for November, which I'm starting to believe could enact real change.

One can only hope.

Focus on the Family

This links to one of the best articles I have read on the upcoming election, If You Really Want to Understand What This Race Is About, Look at the Two Candidates' Fathers, and is a welcome antidote to all the Obama-Clinton chatter dominating the focus of this election. The author posits that "Both men have written strange, searching books about their fathers. It is in their pages that we can find the clearest -- and most haunting -- clues to their potential presidencies."

By contrasing their two cultural backgrounds, the colonized vs. the colonizer, we are able to peer through the prism that shaped their two worlds. Particularly chilling is McCain's father's reflection on the Korean War--that "it wasn't fought hard enough...His father's reaction to failure in Vietnam was to urge bombing of Cambodia", and to compare that with McCain's reaction to failure in Iraq" singing "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran."