Asperger's Doppelgänger on the Spectrum

Part Three

Eula Biss is a Vampire Diary doppelganger for Naomi Klein, at least around vaccines. Her father’s a doctor too. Biss began her 2014 book On Immunity, as an essay about childhood immunizations, “a subject tearing apart communities of new mothers, but discourse hadn’t caught up yet for sexist reasons, considered domestic and gendered.”-author interview in Believer, Spring 2023, a literati journal out of SF.

The essay led to a publishing contract for a book that propelled her into the liberati. Intended for hyper educated, new mothers betwixt and between on mandatory inoculations, like her- until she became a trusted expert. At the time, most anti-vaxxers were concentrated in these clusters- not trusted, still fringe like her book, talked about more than read.

I wrote a critique of her metaphorical arguments because her facts were provably false. That’s what you get when a poet is assigned to write it, rather than a journalist searching for Truth (as a mission statement). My logical rebuttal is a chapter in my 2016 Mandatory Vaccinations = Totalitarian Inoculations e-book. Sent it to an essay contest she was judging, but didn’t rate even a response, much less a book contract.

She obviously read nothing to challenge her narrative that informed mothers’ fear of vaccinations were a product of “loose associative thinking.” During her “research” she “made a dreadful realization- I would have to write a book that critiqued my natural way of thinking.” As a poet, her most comfortable mode of thought is loose association- not a euphemism for metaphor. “Loose associations between financial corruption of big pharmaceutical companies corrupting the purity of vaccines. I came to see that actually the evidence doesn’t point to that.” (Not a loose association, but Purity of Vaccines is.)

Her book, was “as much about metaphor as vaccination- what we’re doing when we inject something into our bodies. Violation, rape metaphors, state violence comes up again and again in conversation. Writing was painful-working against my own impulses as a thinker- forcing myself to rewind an association-and logically parse it out. Psychologically and creatively exhausting. Never wanted to do it again. Brought me to my knees.”

The interviewer interjected “Made you sick.”, which she agreed with. So exactly like a vaccination. Not even a metaphor- a doppleganger of an inanimate object, a medical fetish. Made out like a bandit though. Bought a half million dollar house with a washing machine. There she wrote a book about capitalism and middle class complicity-now that she’d joined it.

Klein does not dive into vaccine caused autism research either, only skims across the approved surface of “hard science.” She’s attracted to old European changeling myths as metaphor for an autistic doppelganger. Faeries stole their child and replaced it with a behavioral trickster, an other worldly explanation. The descriptions of the “beautiful but strange and remote changeling sounds very like a child with autism.”

Prescientific medical/religious remedies included beating, chaining, boiling water, being fed on leather and red hot iron to drive the demon out. No matter the real child was unlikely to be returned, the happy ending was that demon child died. Science only altered abuses of suspected changelings from “sadistic ways that families under the guidance of community once treated children with disabilities.”

Klein delved into Asberger’s Syndrome, once designated as the high functioning end of the autistic spectrum, until his name was expunged in 2013 for Memory Hole reasons. Hans Asperger, a psychiatrist in Vienna under Nazi control during World War II, was director of the largest Austrian hospital “treating developmentally challenged young people.”

His 1944 paper described “four children who were highly intelligent but socially awkward and physically clumsy” as “little professors.” An exceptional role was envisioned for them. Their memory for arcane details, math skills, hyperconcentration for long periods would fit their duties in armed forces and Nazi party as code breakers, logistics, administrative functionaries perfectly.

He didn’t provide context in that paper, but sent 800 less promising children to their death. The Nazi medical establishment, “well before they began killing Jews on an industrial scale in the death camps- practiced and refined their methods on disabled in asylums.” Aktion T4 in 1939, “sentenced 2000,000 disabled people to be murdered in the first gas chambers” or die of infectious disease from scant food and squalid conditions in their confinements.

“Medical professionals took it on themselves to kill the disabled, reducing financial strain for the Reich. They were buried in mass graves or incinerated.” Asperger kept “hundreds of brains preserved in formaldehyde”, medical researchers used for experimentation into the 1980’s. Dr. Asperger had accepted psychiatrist Georg Frankl’s belief that their brains are wired differently-not pathological, until 1937 when he Heiled the “Nazi eugenicist discourse- transmission of diseased hereditary material in these children.”

Asperger labeled them “autistic psychopaths” because “their gaze is inward, with a poverty of Gemut”, (German social bonding), who grow up to “roam the streets as originals, talking loudly to themselves.” (Proto-Beats?) The Great Reset echoes this. Euthanize the useless, cultivate the exceptional for their unusual gifts.

These severely disabled children’s typical traits were first described as “autism” in the U.S by psychiatrist Leo Kanner in 1943. His damaged children were “unquestionably endowed with good cognitive potentialities, but they lived in their own world, making repetitive motions, obsessed with objects, with limited speech, who struggle with basics of self care.”

English child psychiatrist Lorna Wing resurrected Asperger’s subset of little professors, as neuroatypical children who needed more support to reach their focused potential. Wing exposed his work to the public to coin Asperger’s Syndrome in 1981, included in the 1994 Psychiatric Bible-the DSM IV, for high functioning “autism” with an expanded diagnostic net. When euthanization embarrassed psychiatry, they collapsed neurodiverse diagnoses into Autism Spectrum Disorders in DSM-5.

Not a fixed set of observable symptoms, but a spectrum disorder. On one end were very verbal children, later adults, physically capable but socially awkward. On the other were emotionally volatile, self hitting and biting, diaper wearing, non-verbal tip toe walkers. Today, the verbal Leprechauns speaks for the entire rainbow, while parents of the Troll end are vilified for vaccine visions of their once healthy child rapidly regressing after the jabs.