Winning vs Losing

Since we seem to be looking at the power struggle white men are having, I think it's important to realize that in Chief's mind the white man can never win against Nurse Ratchet. I say this because on 109 Chief says, "She's lost a little battle here today, but it's a minor battle in a big war that she's been winning and that she'll go on winning...She'll go on winning, just like the Combine, because she has all the power of the Combine behind her. She don't lose on her losses, but she wins on ours. To beat her you don't have to whip her two out of three or three out of five, but every time you meet. As soon as you let down your guard, as soon as you lose once, she's won for good." This quote caught my attention because when Chief says that she's got "all the power of Combine behind her," I completely agreed with him. Society has never like the idea of different or of a broken person, and so really society is behind Big Nurse for she's the one who fixes these people, or if they can't be fixed, lets them live with her instead of with society. People, just like Big Nurse, like life to run smoothy: they hate when they have to make extra time or see something so unlike the norm, and so in their minds having a place like the ward is completely okay. This thinking that society has is problematic because as Big Nurse treats these men like they are children or machinery, she is supported by society. It is so much easier to let some facility deal with these blemished people than to have them in society, and so poor treatment in the ward goes unnoticed. Big Nurse is not particularily kind, and in fact takes pleasure in the men's failures, and that is what is so twisted about the Combine and the ward. These men are supposed to be cared for and 'fixed,' yet the person doing that fixing takes every opportunity she can to manipulate the men. A while bakc Nurse Ratchet said McMurphy was the manipulator, but I would argue otherwise and say that really, it is she who is the manipulator.