Joseph Kennedy and AB 2072

The story of Joseph Kennedy, JFK's father and Hollywood major actress Gloria Swanson back to the early Hollywood years (1900s-1920s) surely remind us much of such a similar parallel between Kennedy/Swanson and parents of deaf babies/youngsters with the AB 2072. How come??

Actress Gloria Swanson desperately asked Joseph Kennedy for his help with the financial troubles. Kennedy had a well-known reputation for being very successful businessman and financier for Hollywood. Kennedy agreed to re-organize Swanson's finances, then had endless sexual liaisons with the major Hollywood actress.

In the end, Joseph Kennedy made himself very R I C H and left Swanson extremely POOR at her own expense.

What is the point of story about Joseph Kennedy and Gloria Swanson with the AB 2072?

The California Coalition consisted of the cochlear implant makers and schools specialized in AVT are doing the same thing to parents of deaf babies and youngsters whose really desperately seek for the true miracles of turning their own kids into fully functional beings.

In the end, deaf kids get shortchanged from the deficiency of educational foundations if the kids are really deprived from using the natural language of the deaf to lead very productive life.

Although, Arnold Schwarzenegger (Arnie) married to Joseph Kennedy's family. Arnie and the rest of California State Legislature ought to remind themselves about the shameful past of the Kennedys especially what Joseph Kennedy done to Rosemary Kennedy, the eldest daughter of the Kennedy Dynasty.

Joseph Kennedy was a well-educated person with a lot of money and power, but he ended screwing up his own eldest daughter with the option of lobotomy (the enclosed source below from the PBS website on the documentary of lobotomies in America) -

From the 1930s through the 1950s, lobotomies were all the rage. It took an American, Dr. Walter Freeman, to revolutionize the procedure by making it quick and easy.

You may have heard reference to someone performing a lobotomy with an ice pick and assumed it was a joke. Unfortunately, it was not. Freeman's technique was to stick an icepick into the brain through the eye socket, then hacking the frontal lobe free by swirling it around in there.

World War II caused a huge surge in psychiatric patients, and the easy fix had never looked better. Additionally, a growing body of psychiatrists believed lobotomy might be an effective way to treat such "psychiatric disorders" as Communism, homosexuality, nymphomania and general godlessness.

In 1949, about 5,000 lobotomies were performed in the U.S. Some estimates place the total number of lobotomies performed in the U.S. from the 1930s through the 1950s as high as 50,000.

Kennedy's sister Rosemary received one of Freeman's ice-pick lobotomies, resulting in a severe mental impairment that left her paralysed, incoherent, and incontinent. According to some accounts, Rosemary had suffered from a mild mental retardation, which the lobotomy was supposed to fix.

Another of Freeman's patients was up-and-coming young actress Frances Farmer, considered by many to be "the next Garbo". After being arrested for disorderly conduct and subsequently stigmatized as a Communist sympathizer, Farmer was involuntarily institutionalized and progressively treated with every failed snake-oil psychiatric technique known to science in the 1940s.

During a decade spent in and out of institutions, Farmer was subjected to barbarous treatment, some medical and some simply abusive. Finally, Freeman came calling with his ice pick in hand. (There is some controversy about whether or not Freeman actually used the ice pick on Farmer, but she was definitely one of his patients, and he was a bit of a one-trick pony.) Farmer fared better than Rosemary Kennedy... arguably. She didn't end up a vegetable.

Instead, she had the "good fortune" to remember her torturous asylum ordeals, even as she spent the rest of her short life battling psychiatric traumas far, far worse than the run-of-the-mill neuroses that landed her in the asylum to begin with.

Most U.S. states have today totally banned involuntary lobotomies, but there is no federal statute on the topic, so check your jurisdiction if you want to be certain there isn't an ice pick out there with your name on it.

So the California State Legislature and Arnie should be solidly reminded of what Joseph Kennedy done to actress Gloria Swanson and Rosemary Kennedy with the so-called miracle of human intervention and correction.

PLEASE DRAFT THE REVISED AB 2072 BILL TO MAKE REAL FAIR FOR PARENTS OF DEAF KID/INFANT AND DEAF CHILDREN THEMSELVES. NO TRICKS UP INTO SLEEVES. THANKS.

ASLize yours,

Robert L. Mason (RLM)

RLMDEAF blog