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Life & Times Transcript
12/05/06 Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times -- A million and a half soldiers will eventually come home from the Middle East. Will we be ready for them? Todd Roberts>> They will start to withdraw from their family members, from their friends. You might see aggravation, anxiety come up in them over things that wouldn't normally see as creating a lot of anxiety. Val Zavala>> And then, what drove Walt Disney and where did he get the idea for Disneyland? A new biography reveals secrets from the Magic Kingdom. These stories and more next on tonight's Life and Times Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education. And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg. Val Zavala>> It's not a statistic we can be proud of. Los Angeles has the highest number of homeless vets in the country and now we're beginning to see soldiers from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars on our streets. So how do we avoid another wave of homeless vets? As Paul Vercammen tells us, the answer may lie in soldiers who served in Vietnam. Paul Vercammen>> If war is hell, then the residents here have been to hell and back with a stop in purgatory: homelessness. This is "New Directions" on VA property in Los Angeles. The brick fortress helps American war veterans battle the demons of drug and alcohol addiction and post traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Post is the operative word for soldiers. They can be haunted by flashbacks, nightmares, sleeplessness, uncontrollable rage and more, years after they've seen death and destruction. And PTSD mixed with addiction can add up to homelessness. Murray Wood>> Within a fifty mile radius of where we are right now, there are more veterans who live here than in forty-two states of the union combined. Paul Vercammen>> Since being founded eight years ago, "New Directions" has taken in more than five thousand homeless veterans and put them into rigid detoxification programs, psychotherapy and job training programs, everything from basic computer usage -- >> "All right, go to the start menu." Paul Vercammen>> -- to construction. There are so many lives here changing for the better, but there's fear on the horizon. Murray Wood>> What we see is there are a million and a half people since 9/11 that have served in Iraq and Afghanistan and they're coming back now with the precursors to what has led people to fill these beds. Paul Vercammen>> "New Directions" reports Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are starting to trickle in. They've helped more than twenty so far, and their post traumatic stress disorder is unique to their modern-day battle experience. Michael W.C.>> You don't know where the threat of attack is coming. You know, it can be anytime. You're just in this constant perpetual state of hyper-vigilance. Paul Vercammen>> Michael W.C., who doesn't want his face shown, was in the Gulf War as a Marine and guarded Army convoys for a year and a half in Iraq. The thirty-eight year old sharpshooter raised in Texas got into dozens of firefights and saw men die. Michael W.C.>> Just making the transition back here, you can't just turn it off like a switch, so I came back here and I'm still in this hyper-vigilant state, almost bordering on paranoia. Paul Vercammen>> Michael says trouble back home started a year ago. He returned in the fall of 2005 and started work as a personal trainer in Orange County. Michael W.C.>> When I was on the floor training, a man got hurt. A weight fell on him and he cried out like when a man gets hurt and I flashed back. I started flashing back and that was the one key thing that got me in here. Paul Vercammen>> Soldiers can suffer from various types of PTSD from vivid flashbacks to audio hallucinations. Michael W.C.>> I started hearing things that weren't actually on the showroom floor and I was having a panic attack. I didn't actually flash back where I saw combat scenes, but I was hearing combat and going through like a mortal fear kind of state. Paul Vercammen>> At "New Directions", Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are counseled by platoons of soldiers who've also crawled through the minefield of chemical dependency, alcoholism and post traumatic stress disorder. Dr. Michael Buffington is one of them. The Vietnam vet turned clinical psychologist warns vets. Dr. Michael Buffington>> The day isn't out right now. Paul Vercammen>> And as horrible as Vietnam was, Buffington says that many Iraq and Afghanistan vets reckon with a perhaps more damaging type of PTSD. [Film Clip] Paul Vercammen>> It's that adrenalin-laced paranoia caused by not being able to tell allied from enemy and from the constant threat of improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. Dr. Michael Buffington>> Those IEDs tend to be unpredictable, hard to discover. There's a general sense of anxiety about where they may be and may not be. It's like having a sniper in your midst all the time. Michael W.C.>> When I came back here, I still had sand in the cuffs of my uniform, you know. So it was just such a drastic change from being there where, you know, it's a life and death situation where here people are making a big deal about just trivial and trite kind of things. Dr. Michael Buffington>> So you're dealing with a low frustration threshold and a low impulse control which are indicative of some of these kinds of problems with these guys. Michael W.C.>> It's hard for me. There's a lot of anger and a lot of irritability. Dr. Michael Buffington>> They're confused about what's wrong with them and they think they are broken and they are not. They're just reacting to an unusual stressor. Michael W.C.>> I'm in a dual-diagnosis program so I can address the substance abuse and the problems I'm having with PTSD. It's been a huge help working the clinical psychologist, Dr. Rivera, and my psychiatrist, Dr. Bahrrad. Paul Vercammen>> The counselors here at "New Directions" say don't expect a steady stream of Iraq and Afghanistan war vets to come pouring through these doors looking for help right now, at least. They say it could be five or ten years or more before post traumatic stress disorder reaches its peak in triggering addictions and homelessness. Ex-Marine Todd Roberts, now a case manager at "New Directions", knows all about a delayed meltdown sending a vet onto Los Angeles's mean streets. He was there. Todd Roberts>> I became a person that I never thought I would be. I was stealing, I was robbing, I was fighting. Paul Vercammen>> In the late 1980s, Roberts was a spy of sorts, special reconnaissance in Asia. He returned to California in 1990, became an executive with a wife and three kids. But seven years after leaving the military, he snapped. Roberts got hooked on heroine and cocaine and lost everything. Todd Roberts>> I became homeless, so I went from a three-bedroom, two-story home to a point to where I was living in a tent on the side of the freeway. Paul Vercammen>> "New Directions" saved Roberts. Now he's trying to help the newest generation of vets. Todd Roberts>> Over there, it's very difficult and you don't know who to trust. The PTSD is going to be different in trusting. Who can you trust and who can you not trust? Paul Vercammen>> And Dr. Buffington says that the sign of trouble for the Iraq and Afghanistan vets is when they cut themselves off from family members and buddy up with another hurting vet. Dr. Michael Buffington>> The collusion between the two is this. This is great. Let's just self-destruct together or let's bail out together. Let's not be a part of this thing together. Todd Roberts>> They will start to withdraw from their family members, from their friends. You might see aggravation, anxiety come up in them over things that we wouldn't normally see as creating a lot of anxiety. Michael W.C.>> It wasn't long before what was the solution became the problem and it all compounded. I was having problems with alcohol and symptoms from PTSD and I wound up here. Paul Vercammen>> Michael is now another link in a chain of vets getting comfort at "New Directions" from soldiers of past wars. Michael W.C.>> The Vietnam vets have been a tremendous help to us. They take a big interest in us, almost like justifying their conflict for attention that they didn't get. Dr. Michael Buffington>> One of my role models was a belly gunner in a B-17 in World War II. I didn't have to explain much to him. He helped me immensely. Paul Vercammen>> So there's hope at "New Directions" and they're seeking a million dollar grant to help with the possible influx of Iraq and Afghan vets to what they call "The Last House on the Block". Paul Vercammen for Life and Times. Val Zavala>> So how do you think we should help veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan war? We'd love to hear your opinion and you can post it on our Blog. Just go to kcet.org and click on the Life and Times Blog. Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times". Val Zavala>> Cardinal Roger Mahony of the Los Angeles Archdiocese recently agreed to pay sixty million dollars to forty-five victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests. But that settlement leaves hundreds of cases unresolved and it begs the question of how did all this begin? David France covered the Catholic Church for Newsweek Magazine and has written an in-depth history of the church scandal. He says that most of the cases we're hearing about today were committed by a single generation of priests. David France>> What we learned early on is that the Roman Catholic Church, at least in America, has known for some time that perhaps as much as fifty percent of the priesthood is gay. Val Zavala>> That's a huge percentage. David France>> It's very interesting. It's really an interesting statistic. In the population at large, I think it's a figure of five to ten percent. I think it's in that range. Val Zavala>> It's almost as if the Catholic Church became a refuge for or a place for gay men to go. David France>> It's interesting. Now we don't exactly know why they're there. We do know from, you know, studies and surveys around the country and elsewhere that gay men and gay women are inordinately called to spiritual lives. We don't know why. It's been historically true. Val Zavala>> There's just the plain logic that, if you're a gay man and you don't have a safe cult community to go to, you can go to an all-male culture that's somewhat secret. David France>> I think that's one possible explanation. I don't think it holds up in this case, though, because these men, especially in this generation -- I think most of the abuse cases that we've seen were really caused by a single generation of priests, those who graduated seminary in 1960 to 1970 or 1972. That generation of priests entered seminary when they were twelve years old which would mean, for the most part, pre-knowledge about their own sexual identity or sexual orientation. But what happened afterwards -- and I don't believe that fifty percent of those people who entered seminary in 1954 were homosexual -- but what happened afterwards was a massive exodus from the church, from the priesthood. It increased what may have been already a slightly enlarged ratio of gay to straight priests. It increased it dramatically because they had nowhere to go. The Catholic Church tells homosexuals even today that they are not to engage in sexual activity, that sexual activity is evil and disordered. That teaching is so firm and so frightening to a lot of Catholics who really want to believe that their church is a benevolent church and doing the best for them that they struggle to live that life. They struggle to live a chaste life. That's especially true in the priesthood and I think a lot of pressure was being put on the priests at the time of the exodus to maintain and recodify and redouble their efforts to be celibate. That psychological pinch is a really fascinating one. We don't really know what sexual repression does to people. There's no body of science that says that sexual repression, either heterosexual or homosexual, any sort or description, produces certain net effects. But when we look at this generation of priests and we ask ourselves why, why them, what were the circumstances around their lives -- Val Zavala>> -- why did it result in so much pedophilia? Is that what you mean? David France>> It wasn't pedophilia. This is an important distinction. Pedophilia is the sexual abuse of little kids, prepubescent kids. These priests were going after teenagers and they were going after teenagers in a really disordered way, in a really aggressive and predatory way, in a way that we don't with other populations. If we were to take, say, a group of teachers or a group of bus drivers or lawyers and do an incidence rate for those groups about their sexual inappropriateness with people who are underage, whether teenager or prepubescent, we don't see the same incident rate that we saw in this class of priests from this generation. Val Zavala>> So you're saying that it is related to sexual repression? David France>> I believe it is and that's the argument that I make in the book. We see the triggers. We see the triggers for this group of men and we see how it came to an end. It's very fascinating that this sexual crisis -- the Catholic Church tried to tell us this and I think it didn't get the message out clearly, but I believe that they're right. The sexual crisis ended in 1985. These cases that we're seeing are all old cases. Val Zavala>> What changed in 1985? David France>> In 1985, the Catholic Church realized it had some trouble. In seminary at the time, more theology books which were written in English, of course, switched to Latin for the chapters on sexuality as though it was some sort of secret, as though you needed to understand some code to understand it. They were never invited to discuss their struggles with celibacy with their formation directors or their spiritual directors and never even after that. There was no forceful open discussion of human sexuality among the priests just to discuss it until 1985. They said, in 1985, we're going to change that. We're going to change the way we form priests. We're going to change the way priests discuss sexuality. We're going to go to seminarians and the priests on a regular basis and say, "What are your struggles with celibacy? How has that been going? Is there anything that you want to talk about or any hints or observations that we might be able to share among ourselves that will make this struggle easier for you?" That's when they realized they had a good priesthood. Val Zavala>> Oh, they realized they had a good priesthood, but they also took a lot of pressure off of them. David France>> But those gay priests, the minute they were able to say what they were under, that's it. You're right. The pressure was gone, though the pressure was different. I mean, it still exists, but the explosive aspect, the really volatile aspects of it, were -- Val Zavala>> -- so it didn't take such pathological form. David France>> I think so. Val Zavala>> So will the Catholic Church weather this and what form will it take? David France>> Well, I hope so. Val Zavala>> It's not immune from scandal, heaven knows, historically. David France>> The Catholic Church has gone through some bad patches in the past, as we know. It also does incredible good. You know, it's the second largest provider of social services in many parts of the country, after the government. You know, it was a good idea. Val Zavala>> Do you personally believe, though, that, for example, celibacy will have to be dropped in order for the church to continue? David France>> The churches will know that it can't continue without that. The reason for that is because they can't recruit new priests. Val Zavala>> So that's going to happen. David France>> Very few people are going to seminary anymore. They've closed all their minor seminaries and all the main seminaries, the college seminaries, now have enrollments of two and three around the country and they're being merged. So we have a crisis in the priesthood because nobody wants to be a priest and something is going to have to give. They've been bringing priests in, and we know this now in most cities, from Vietnam and Cambodia and the Philippines and courting priests from arrested developed parts of the world. Val Zavala>> What will have to change if the Catholic Church is going to survive? David France>> If the church is going to be the church, it's going to have to do several things. They'll have to figure out a way to bring in more priests and figure out a way to retain their Catholics that they've lost. Val Zavala>> And rebuild the trust? David France>> And rebuild the trust. I think one of the ways we're going to have to do this is to go out and reach out to the kids. There are tens of thousands of kids who were abused at the hands of this generation. Maybe as many as a hundred thousand. Go to them and say we understand what happened to you. If they can understand that, if they can figure that out, I think that's the barrier. If they can jump over that barrier, then I think they've got hope at rebuilding their prominence in America. Val Zavala>> David France, thank you so much for your thoughts. David France>> Thank you very much. Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address: Life and Times 4401 Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, California 90027 You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org. Val Zavala>> His name is known around the world, but how many of us really know who Walter Elias Disney was? Well, now an award-winning writer has been given unprecedented access to the Disney archives and he's written what could easily become the definitive biography of Walt Disney. Vicki Curry went to the Disney Studios in Burbank to talk with Neal Gabler. Vicki Curry>> After researching and writing this comprehensive biography of Walt Disney, you probably have as good a sense of him as a person as anybody. So what was it about him that drove him to do everything he ended up doing? Neal Gabler>> Well, I think you look at his childhood, or at least the way Walt looked at his childhood, because Walt was a self-mythologist and he looked to romanticize. Walt looked at his childhood and he always regarded it as being tremendously difficult, a childhood of financial deprivation, a childhood of emotional deprivation because his father was a very cold, hard man. I think Walt, in a sense, lived his life as an antidote to that childhood. If you want to look for the real source of the drive in Walt Disney, I think a lot of that drive comes from trying to create an alternative reality that was everything that that arduous childhood was not. Vicki Curry>> I think most people know that Walt's earliest success was the creation of Mickey Mouse and he had a series of short films starring Mickey, but then he decided to make a feature length film, "Snow White". Was that considered a big risk at the time? Neal Gabler>> You know, Walt always said that when he decided to make "Snow White", people said this is Walt's folly, but there were many more people, including his brother, Roy, who was the Chief Financial Officer of the company, who said, yeah, let's go for it. People really should be interested in this. So the risk wasn't so much that people would sit through it. The risk for Walt Disney was would people react emotionally to a feature animation? Walt Disney was driven. He was really driven. He was obsessive about this. It was the idea of raising the status of animation. He always believed the quality was the thing that was going to enable him to succeed. Walt was interested in turning animation into art. In fact, there's one story where I was reading the transcript and he said, "It's not cartoons we're making. It's not cartoons. It's art." Vicki Curry>> He had such big ideas. Do you think he knew when things were going to be successful? Neal Gabler>> Walt Disney was enormously self-confident. Walt was not a man who doubted himself even when he had every reason in the world to doubt himself. He was self-confident from the time when he was relatively young. When he was twenty years old, he formed his animation studio and the animation studio went bankrupt within roughly a year. Walt was unfazed. He left Kansas City where he started this company and went to Los Angeles and he started a new studio. So I don't think Walt was a man who was wracked by terrible doubt. Vicki Curry>> Walt Disney not only had a huge impact on our popular culture, but he was also a business titan. Neal Gabler>> He wasn't really a great businessman by the likes of modern business practice. By that, I mean, Walt Disney lost money on almost all of his animations. "Snow White" made an enormous amount of money, but "Pinocchio" in its first release, disaster. "Fantasia" was a bigger disaster. "Bambi" was a bigger disaster still. So he was not a good businessman in the sense of looking at the bottom line and making profit. He didn't make money until he opened Disneyland and really made a steady amount of money, but he was a great businessman in the sense that he never looked short-term. He was always looking to the long-term and, because he was so self-confident, he always believed that, in the long run, it's all going to work out. In the long-run, I'm going to make money. Vicki Curry>> So Walt Disney broke ground in both art and commerce. What were some of the other things that he did? Neal Gabler>> Walt was always on the cutting edge of almost every technology. You know, he put sound on animation with "Steamboat Willie", the early Mickey Mouse. He brought color to animation. He was interested in television. Walt was the first movie executive to use television to form an agreement. He signed a deal with ABC to produce his Disneyland television program on Sunday nights. No other studio was interested in doing that because they thought that television was the enemy. He was the person who pioneered the true life adventure series, the modern nature documentary. He was a person who pioneered or helped build public support for space exploration. So there was always an interest in technology, always an interest in being on the cutting edge of something. Vicki Curry>> Where did the idea for Disneyland come from? Neal Gabler>> It's really hard to determine where the idea for Disneyland came from. Walt himself often said that he got interested in Disneyland when he would take his daughters to amusement parks on Sunday afternoon and he found himself bored. Now whatever the genesis was, once Walt got the idea, he grabbed it and ran with it and it became another obsession in a life of obsessions. Vicki Curry>> Tell me about that obsessiveness. Neal Gabler>> Of all the characteristics of Walt Disney, I think the single most profound was his obsessive perfectionism. Walt Disney never delegated unless he really wanted to delegate and he only delegated when he didn't care about something. But if he cared about something, he was obsessively perfectionist. Vicki Curry>> So it must have been quite something to work for him. Neal Gabler>> Working for Walt Disney was not always a day at the beach. Actually, it fell into kind of two phases. In the early days at the Hyperion studio, there was a real sense of camaraderie. As time went on and the studio grew larger and particularly when Walt moved to Burbank, the new studio which is to this day the headquarters of the Walt Disney Company, Walt became much more difficult to work for. To work for someone who always set the bar so high, who was never satisfied, who only wanted out of you your ability to realize the image in his head, that was not easy. Vicki Curry>> Why was he so successful? Neal Gabler>> Well, if you try and analyze why Walt Disney was successful, you could be here for an awfully long time. Part of it was his belief in wish fulfillment, in his own wish fulfillment which vicariously linked up to the wish fulfillment of virtually everybody who watched his films. Part of it was his control. Now I said he was obsessive, he was a perfectionist, and his ability to impose his control on the world was something that was appealing to people who were living increasingly in a modern world that seemed out of control. There's something very resonant about the idea that we have the power to shape the world. And of all the things that Walt Disney did, I think that may be the single most important legacy. He convinced people that they could impose their imaginations on the world because he did so. Vicki Curry>> Neal Gabler, author of "Walt Disney: The Triumphs of the American Imagination", thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us. Neal Gabler>> Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Val Zavala>> Once again, Neal Gabler's book is called "Walt Disney: The Triumphs of the American Imagination". And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education. And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg. Sponsored in part by:  | |
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