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Another stay-at-home mother — 10 Comments

  1. This isn’t about Patty Hearst but did want to say that the tax code makes it very difficult for a married couple with a higher earner and a lower earner to fare well.The lower wage earner is often put in a position that it really is just not worth it-ask me how I know as a part time nurse!
    Also a story that seems to be developing that i would keep your eyes out for is the laying off and “early retirement options” of hospital employees.Crozer health system (Chester PA right outside of Philly)just put in offers to cut 500 people(to close out 350 full time positions).I can guarentee you that most of those are female employees.It is a direct result in the changes of Medicare only paying for observations and 23 hourpost op stays and then paying the hospital significantly less.I predict that the cutbacks will only get worse since one of the ways for paying for health care is to just pay the hospitals less or of course my favorite not at all -for the emergency room visits that hospitals must provide by law but since many medicaid patients abuse this(someone has to pay attention to me)some of the states just won’t pay!This is the second hospital in a month that I have seen cutting staff-both for revenue reasons.
    I doubt that these stories will be making the national press so I would watch locally.

  2. I too defend Patty Hearst. We’re in good company, Neo. John Wayne came to her defense early on.

  3. Charle:

    I didn’t remember that about Wayne, but I can tell you I defended her early on, too. In my earlier post, I described it this way:

    But when I tried to argue that these things [factors that mitigated her culpability] were even a possibility I was shouted down. I seemed to be in an extreme minority. I vividly recall attending a dinner with my parents and about four other couples who were their friends—liberal Democrats all, people with children roughly around the age of Patty Hearst. I’d known all these people my entire life and had never had a political argument or even a disagreement with them, and they’d always seemed to be relatively mild-mannered. Several of them were in the field of social work, a profession that one might think would predispose them towards sympathy for Patty’s plight.

    But no. In fact, the topic of Patty brought out a surprising rage in them. If Patty were ever to be captured, she should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. There was absolutely no possibility, they screamed at me, that she hadn’t done all of this of her own free will, and there should be no excuses made. I was a gullible fool.

    It seemed to me that all the frustrations of parents of the 60s and early 70s towards the excesses of their offspring—the long hair and the pot-smoking and the open sexuality and the music and the refusal to follow in those parents’ footsteps and become doctors and lawyers and upstanding community members; the turning on and the dropping out and the living on the hippie communes, as one of my cousins had done (although her parents didn’t even know it was actually a naked hippie commune)—everything these parents had been swallowing, all the rage and confusion and hurt they hadn’t fully expressed towards their ungrateful children, was coming out in one great big rush at Patty Hearst, who symbolized it all.

  4. (I misspelled my own name in my first comment. Sheesh.)

    Yes, those were strange times. Not that things are any less strange now.

    If I might, I’d like to share my Patty Hearst story:

    My first wife looked a lot like Patty Hearst. A lot. When the Patty Hearst story first unfolded, before her capture, I was stationed in Monterey, CA at the main computer center for the Naval Weather Service.

    I’d gotten off mid-watch, and woke up in the afternoon. My wife was out. I turned on the TV and all of Monterey was in a tizzy because Patty Hearst had been spotted downtown.

    When my wife returned I asked her if she’d been downtown. She told me yes. When I told her that people had thought they’d seen Patty Hearst there her eyes got very big.

    We decided we’d dine in and go to the club on base instead of the dinner plans we’d made for a restaurant downtown.

    No point in pulling the tiger’s tail.

  5. Good stuff, Neo. I agree with you on Patty. 38-years this May 17th on the L.A. shootout which killed Cinque and five other SLA members. Weird alignment of the planets, God’s protective will thing that Patty wasn’t at the East L.A. house when the carnage happened. So glad that the girl has had a good, solid, quiet life for most of the years since. I looked up Wendy Yoshimura and see that she, as well, has led a quiet, responsible life since getting out of prison. Has a studio in Oakland and is a water colorist of some talent.

    My then wife sat in out L.A. living room that Thursday evening watching the broadcast. Two days later I turned 30. WOW.

  6. Patty Hearst … hmm, that takes me back. I lived two blocks up the street from her in Berkeley. Caused quite a little kerfuffle when she was kidnapped, and God knows that that neighborhood, which included People’s Park and Telegraph Avenue (site of all the riots), was accustomed to kerfuffles.

  7. Jeez. People who insist that Basic Training is brainwashing can’t figure that being in Cinque’s grasp is the same???

  8. I was stationed at Mare Island in Vallejo at the time. I was quite taken by what I believed Patty Hearst must be like and even fantasized (hey, I was 18) about rescuing her from her captors.

    That her boyfriends name was “Weed” told me she was hooked up with the wrong dude anyway.

    I am pleasantly surprised to read how her life turned out.

  9. My daughter and her oldest shared a school in the 80s/90s and I was at a couple of dinner parties with the Shaws. They seemed like a nice couple with perhaps a slight penchant of a concern with security.

    I note today that Lydia, the younger, is running along the celebrity trail but seems to have fallen a bit off the pace né¸w that her purported “relationship” with the somewhat more elderly Jeff Goldblum has, I think, gone off the rails.

    http://www.observer.com/2010/12/who-will-jeff-goldblum-play-in-girlfriend-lydia-hearsts-new-lohaninspired-film/

  10. I was on the distant edges of some of the ’60/’70’s stuff. I knew even then as the story exploded that Patty Hearst should have never, ever been prosecuted. Should never, ever have spent a minute in jail. Should never, ever have been treated like she was treated. Pre- or post- …it was a train wreck.

    She was rescued.

    And then punished.

    Jeezus.

    My belief in American justice took a decided turn for the cynical worse then.

    I noticed and cheered all those years later when Clinton gave her a full pardon (it raised my estimation of Clinton more than a notch or three); though – as I hadn’t followed it by then in years …it was just too …disheartening – I was shocked that she hadn’t been given that – legal – relief from the highest, years – and administrations – previous (one of the few good things entirely correct things Jimmy Carter did was commute her sentence …and alas, Ronnie: you could have, and should have, done the right thing, as you must have known).

    I was always glad that she had the money to live a quiet life and out of the public eye, after being victimized, tortured, used, and then subjected to grave injustice (by petty political opportunists IMO); I’d thought it a small thing at best, wealth, generally, to the positive development of character …but in her case, a palliative that I’m sure was barely enough recompense for a bewildered young women who must have thought that life and society had entirely and unfairly turned against her.

    …and a high regard for the man who had come to know her more than anyone, and had married her.

    Nothing in her starred, cosseted young life could have prepared her.

    My own black thoughts to this day are vindictive gladness in the knowing comfort that “Field Marshall Cinque” daily roasts in the arms of blackest, deepest tortures of Hell. Burn, Donald DeFreeze you evil bastard, burn.

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