| |
|
|
        |
|
A SALEM HALLOWE'EN Salem has been very much on my mind this Halloween season. On Halloween day, I'm on CNN's Burden of Proof (Friday, October 3)1, a show that focuses on Salem's witch hunt and trials. I also felt moved to write the following essay. Having visited Salem's memorial park last January on the 300th anniversary of the Day of Contrition, I know we must never forget how easily irrationality can come upon us. Your comments are welcomed in the discussion site. How might we rouse the NAS to action? Essay: by Moira Johnston, author of Spectral Evidence A Salem Hallowe'en In Salem, Massachusetts, the Chamber of Commerce has worked alchemy on its past, turning witches into gold -- transforming a shameful history of witch hunts into a month long festival starring Salem as "The Hallowe'en Capital of the World." A few seasons ago, while tourists reveled in spooks and broomsticks, a father destroyed by a modern day witch hunt stumbled onto Salem at Hallowe'en. His life had been undone by gossip of incest based on his eldest daughter's flashbacks of twelve years of abuse that ranged from a sexual look to forced bestiality with the family dog. It was uncorroborated rumor. But it spread like wildfire through the neighborhood, and into Napa Valley's most famous winery, destroying his life. He came to Salem to connect with the past. But he couldn't find it in the Chamber of Horrors, or the crowded streets. If Gary Ramona had stumbled on Salem's bleak memorial park -- if he had seen the names of the nineteen hung on Gallows Hill carved into its granite benches -- he might have found his ghosts. But would he have found solace? He has not found it in legal vindication. In a landmark jury trial in 1994, he won a half-million dollar malpractice verdict against the therapists he charged with planting false memories in his daughter's mind -- the first of thousands of accused fathers to gain the right to sue. He has just seen California's appellate court dismiss his daughter's rape and damage suit against him, ending at last the Ramona family's eight year civil war. But he's been condemned to a living death. His marriage and family are gone. He can never reclaim his brilliant career. The taint of "perpetrator" will cling forever. And yet his victory turned the tide of the recovered memory wars. It spurred memory research, intensified scientific scrutiny by the courts, and led to a spate of multi-million dollar verdicts against therapists, forcing caution and reform. New accusations have shrunk to a trickle. The mainstream now knows that memory is a fallible reconstruction, not an accurate videotape replay, as claimed. And as proof continues to elude that an entire childhood of traumatic sexual abuse -- not physical, not emotional abuse -- can be massively repressed, then accurately recalled, the memories have been almost universally dubbed "unreliable." The few corroborated cases of delayed recall are explained by preeminent memory scientists like Daniel Schacter, chair of Harvard's psychology department, as "falling within the rubric of ordinary forgetting and remembering. It would seem time for remorse. The Village of Salem publicly apologized five years after the witch trials, 300 years ago. "I justly fear that I have been instrumental, with others...to bring upon myself and this land the guilt of innocent blood," confessed Ann Putnam, one of the finger-pointers. But the memory wars rage on. As long as science cannot say for sure what's false or true, those with a stake in the wars stir up witch's brews of theory in a desperate effort to salvage some legitimacy for recovered memories before they are relegated to history's dustbin. I see as extremely cynical the current cry that the beleaguered flashbacks should be held to no higher legal standard than ordinary, fallible memory; let us not forget that it was the claimed pristine accuracy of these memories that was the very basis for the destructive thunderbolts hurled at fathers like Gary Ramona. It is hard to face our failings. Salem scrubbed its past and sublimated it into tourist prosperity. As we dig out from more than a decade of witch hunts for recovered memories, satanic ritual abuse, day-care sex rings, and patriarchal monsters committing incest in every home, we try to avert our eyes from our persisting susceptibility to witch hunts and irrationality. Note, for example, the swift demise of two recent movies which exposed our folly on the big screen: "The Crucible," Arthur Miller's story of Salem's witch hunt, and "A Thousand Acres," a retelling of Lear which relies on flashbacks of incest by daddy to explain all of life's problems, a device Shakespeare didn't seem to need. Enough tricks! Hallowe'en would be a good time for Congress to give us a treat, and ask the National Academy of Science to appoint a panel to study and report on the recovered memory phenomenon -- a report whose authority might, finally, put the memory wars to rest. Moira Johnston is the author of Spectral Evidence: The Ramona Case. |
|
Columbia Journalism Review Lights a Firestorm | Reviews Home | Biography | Point of View | Characters | Discussion | Chat | Links
|