We may think we’ve outgrown the superstitions of the past but
every once in a while you read something that tells you it’s all
there, waiting to be rediscovered again — the Medieval myth of
Prester John, the Christian emperor waiting for us on the other
side of Islam (try the Iraqi Shi’ia), the Protocols of the Elders
of Zion or Jewish or Masonic cabal that secretly controls the world
(try Obama’s “1 percent”), or the witch manias of the 17th century
— try what has happened over the past few months in the small town
of Le Roy, New York.
In a marvelously restrained and insightful
article in the New York Times Magazine, Susan Dominus
has gently dissected the mania of “twitching girls” that struck
this depressed little upstate town outside of Rochester and ended
up on national television. Last year, Katie Krautwurst, a high
school cheerleader whose mother was about to undergo a brain
operation, suddenly came down with an uncontrollable condition.
Within a few weeks, Thera Sanchez, her best friend and also a
cheerleader, developed the same tics. Soon the mysterious condition
had spread across the high school, first among cheerleaders and
then to less popular girls — but all of them girls, no boys, no
adults.
From the beginning, doctors who examined the girls said
the phenomenon was psychological. A specialist from Buffalo offered
a diagnosis of “conversion disorder,” a condition in which people
subconsciously convert stress into physical symptoms. But of course
we live in the age of television and newspaper gossip and so this
humbling evaluation was quickly dismissed in favor of a much more
fashionable culprit — the environment!
Le Roy has had industry in its history. It was the
original hometown of Jell-O. The factory closed in the 1960s but it
was industry, after all, and therefore probably doing something
harmful. Remember now, this is upstate New York 2012, where
industry is basically forgotten. The vast outback, stretching all
the way from Newburgh to Buffalo, has the misfortune of being
politically dominated by New York City and Albany. There Democrats
rule and industry is something to be exploited, if not shunned. The
whole state is currently in an uproar over fracking the Marcellus
Shale and it looks as if New York will become the only eastern
state not to tap the bonanza that is filling the coffers in
Pennsylvania and Ohio. Were it separated from Metropolitan New York
City, upstate would be the second poorest state in the country,
right behind Mississippi. In this post-industrial era, created by
high taxes and hostile policies, industry — like any stranger —
is easy to blame.
So it wasn’t long before Erin Brockovich was in town
trying out for her next movie role and assuring everyone that
environmental contamination was the likely culprit. Why
environmental contamination would only affect teenage girls,
particularly cheerleaders, was something left for the newspaper and
TV reporters to figure out. And of course they didn’t. So it wasn’t
long before the cameras and notebooks were following Brockovich all
around, barging onto the school grounds at one point to collect
samples proving her theory that a railroad accident that had
spilled an organic solvent forty years before must be the
perpetrator. When school officials turned them away, there was
another TV moment in which Brockovich told CNN, “Usually when I’m
confronted by officials barring access to something, they usually
have something to hide.” The whole town was in general agreement
and soon public officials were hooted down and accused of
cover-ups.
From there it was on to the “Today” show where the girls
twitched on camera and told their story. By this time they had
achieved such notoriety that dozens of other girls at school were
twitching too — so much that the early victims were openly
accusing the latecomers of faking it. That’s the way things stood a
month ago, although recent reports say that the epidemic seems to
be dying down.
Dominus, in the gentlest of manners, pushes the hysteria
aside and gets to the heart of the matter. Such epidemics are not
uncommon, she notes, particularly among teenage girls.
“Cheerleaders frequently come up in case histories of mass
psychogenic illness at schools, partly because psychogenic
outbreaks often start with someone of high social status,” she
recounts. “In 2002, 10 students, 5 of them cheerleaders, in a rural
town in North Carolina suffered from non-epileptic seizures and
fainting spells.” In another instance, a Louisiana cheerleading
squad that had embarrassed itself by running on the field at the
wrong time suffered an epidemic of fainting that ended up summoning
five ambulances.
Dominus quotes Simon Wessely, a London epidemiologist who
has studied hundreds of such psychological outbreaks and writes,
“Things only go wrong when the nature of an outbreak is not
recognized, and a fruitless and expensive search for toxins, fumes
and gases begins. Anxiety, far from being reduced, increases. It is
only then that long-term psychological problems may develop.” And
indeed, some of the girls in Le Roy are now so convinced that they
have been permanently damaged by the environment that their
condition has become much worse.
But there’s an even sadder side to this whole episode.
Somehow the twitching epidemic in Le Roy seems to embody all the
pathologies that Charles Murray, in his recent book, Coming
Apart, says are rapidly overtaking blue-collar
America. As Dominus perceptively notes, the twitching
epidemic was wholly confined to girls who are on the outs with
their biological fathers. One of the more pathetic victims recounts
her most recent memory — a fistfight she had with her father when
she was 14. And of course another one of the cheerleaders is well
on her way toward a second generation of broken families with her
own fatherless child.
Dominus lets them all down easy. A couple of the girls,
she notes, have been able to go back to cheerleading. The teenage
mother has “put back together” something resembling a family by
moving in with the parents of her current boyfriend — who is not
the father of her child. But it isn’t going to be that easy. From
the looks of things, there’s a whole lot more at stake. On the wall
of the bedroom where Katie Krautwurst and Thera Sanchez sit posing
for the cover of the magazine is a decal I’ve never seen before. It
says, “I (heart) Black People.” On Krautwurst’s night table sits a
huge handsome portrait of President
Obama, smiling with that implied message: “If
your family falls apart, the government is waiting to take you
in.”
When teenage girls in Le Roy, New York — who have
probably never met more than a handful of African Americans — have
abandoned aspirations for their own careers or stable family life
and started idealizing the culture of reckless illegitimacy that
black people — along with the help of the welfare system — have
so successfully popularized, then you can almost feel that tidal
wave of dependency starting to gather strength
