I’ve just been watching American Horror Story: Asylum. It’s a cable show about a throng of victims who are wrongly labeled deviants by the state and subjected to torturous abuse. Those in authority do what they want with impunity and relish. Threat looms from all sides, and betrayal is the only constant.

If you’ve been put through the restraining order wringer, this scenario will sound familiar.

The show is set in 1964, so we can pretend that we’re looking back at a distant, degenerate period in the past when heinous violations could occur right under everyone’s nose, and no one would lift a finger to intervene. The same political games masked as “conversion therapies” are indulged today, of course, only their abuses are subtler and directed at the psyche instead of being committed with canes, electrodes, tongs, and scalpels.

And those abuses are what this blog is about.

The protagonists on the show, which is set in a mental institution, are all punished brutally for being honest, and those in authority, who are supposed to uncover the truth and restore sanity, are concealing horrible lies of their own and cultivating madness to gratify personal agendas, which they justify to themselves as furthering the common good.

Maybe I’m a little mad myself, but these themes resonate with many that have preoccupied my life since I had my first brush with the “justice system” nearly eight years ago. I rarely watched TV before that. Print was my obsession—and I still nostalgically sniff it sometimes. I’m watching the show this post is about, in fact, on DVDs borrowed from the library. For several years, I didn’t go to the library, and I can’t remember when I last borrowed a novel that I actually finished.

Like the characters in American Horror Story: Asylum, many individuals who’ve visited this blog and I have told our tales repeatedly to figures in authority who’ve discounted or disregarded them, preferring instead to administer the mandated treatment.

A line in the show goes something like, “Go ahead and scream. No one will hear you.” It’s juicily sinister and rings true. Truer yet is that even if someone does hear you, s/he’ll make believe s/he didn’t.

Screaming, though, at least gives you something to do. As a number of those who’ve visited this blog have reported of their own ambitions, what I’d rather be doing has been rankly corrupted.

I haven’t watched the show’s last episodes yet. I’m waiting for the villains in charge to cannibalize one another or get plastered by the karma bus. It could happen. It’s fiction, after all.

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