DEGRADED

I came across an article from more than half-a-century ago: “Conditions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies”. It was written by one Harold Garfinkel, and published in a scholarly professional journal. It’s available, among other places, at http://www.jstor.org/stable/2773484.
Judging from the date, I’d say that watching the McCarthy hearings and all of the dark looniness surrounding it had something to do with inspiring the author as to the need for the article. And further back, he must have watched the increasing pattern of demeaning Jewish people during the Third Reich of only twenty years before. And perhaps the Leninist and Stalinist “denunciations” and “classifications” that took place without let-up from 1918 right up through the show trials of 1938.

Yet it’s a piece that doesn’t discuss any then-current or then-recent events. It’s careful, dry, clear, precise, and – well – ‘scholarly’, but in a crisp social science way (social science, at least, the way it was done back then).

But still you read it and you can’t help thinking about the McCarthy trials and perhaps Germany in the 1930s. And no doubt folks who read it in 1956 did just that. It held many rewards for folks trying to get a grasp on what those events meant for Americans and for human beings generally, for Us and for Our future.

I am reading it now. The McCarthy hearings are – thankfully – back in the past, as is the Third Reich and – after much tribulation – the blood-feverish visions of Communism. Forgotten … but not gone, I think. Because when you read the article, you get the eerie and disturbing sense that it’s very contemporary. You get the sense that it’s all very familiar. Too familiar to just be about something so far in the past. You get the eerie sense that Garfinkel is describing something in the present world, the world of contemporary America, Our world.

And that can only mean that whatever demonry he describes from his own world has now come into Our world. And hasn’t much changed.

The ‘degradation’ is aimed at “transforming an individual’s total identity into an identity lower in the group’s scheme of social types”; thus it is a “status degradation”. The “denouncer” has the goal of getting the onlookers “to appreciate the perpetrator and the blameworthy event as instances of an extraordinary uniformity”. To accomplish this the denouncer “must name the perpetrator an ‘outsider’”.

I could think of the Manichean denunciation and classification of those who are “goats” in the world, in their very essence beyond the rights of human beings and liable to human degradation and violence utterly justified as being God’s will – such is the fond, fierce practice of fundamentalisms everywhere.

We see it, from a distance, deployed against other people and peoples even now.
But I want to focus on how it is done much closer to home, and not spontaneously, but erected into law and incised into the popular mood among Us to such a degree that it comes to assume an aura of inevitability, as if it had been with Us all along and enjoys the status of a ‘good’ and ‘logical’ thing to do.

Garfinkel observes that whenever such a new ‘identity’ is to be imposed on a person or a group, “the identity must be ‘total’, meaning that the ‘identity’ “must refer to persons as ‘motivational’ types rather than as ‘behavioral’ types”. In other words, it’s not what they do, it’s what their ‘motivations’ are; it presumes that there is a ‘motivation’ common to the entire target group, and that this ‘motivation’ is somehow essential to the persons, predictably expectable from them. This dynamic was used to describe ‘Kulaks’ by the early Soviets, to describe ‘Jews’ by the Nazis, to describe ‘pinkos’ by McCarthy.

It is contrary to the spirit and practice of Western law, that with a due humility does not seek to divine motives or predispositions, but rather limits itself to judging acts. An act is all that is extended into actual events, such that an observer other than the act-or can see it, or discover irrefutable traces of it. This is all a human court can do. It’s all that humans, not possessed of supernatural powers of insight and knowledge, can with any reasonable certainty discover by the flickering lamp of human reason.

In the history of this country, the Salem witch trials were not a precedent but a throw-back, a revenant from a prior age, where certain believers felt that they could discern with certainty the causes and sources of certain suspect acts; causes that included supernatural beings, active in this world. The ‘mind’ of a suspected witch or warlock, one who cooperated with dark powers and dark beings, could be clearly discerned, if the right methods were used and the right assumptions were made by the investigators. And in the end, the suspect could be declared for what she or he ‘really’ was, a cooperator with the demonic and the infernal, and thus the accused could be ‘degraded’ in status, from member of the community to ‘evil other’; death would often be the result, as it was for many in Salem.

Western justice, freeing itself from theological entanglements with the immaterial and the unseen and the un-provable, limited itself. And was justly proud of the fact.
But in doing so it set itself a difficult task, although one that proves vital to a free society. Because there is a natural and not unhealthy capacity for “moral indignation” in all human societies: it is this capacity that enables a society to inculcate in its members what is acceptable and not-acceptable to it on a fundamental level. Deployed wisely, this capacity can foster a sense of identity and unity among the members of a society. Deployed otherwise, it can create unjustifiable divisions, excessive wounds – physical or emotional, and even inaccurate judgments that eventually undermine the commonality itself. In the Western system of justice, the court – through its careful investigation and deliberation - is there to not only to protect the community from malefactors, but to protect the community from itself. Because in the long run, the community can harm itself far more grievously than any individual or individuals among it.

“The paradigm of moral indignation is public denunciation. We publicly deliver the curse: ‘I call upon all men to bear witness that he is not what he appears to be but is otherwise and in essence of a lower species.’” It’s not simply that the person is other than he appears; saints are not so often what they appear to be to their contemporaries, and angels famously disguise themselves; you could make a case that Jesus did it. But it’s that this ‘appearance’ is with absolute certainty indicative of ‘inferior’ status. In a West influenced by Christendom, no human being has the authority to reduce the status accorded to a human being by the Creator.

Not acknowledging a God, the Soviets arrogated His powers to the State. Acknowledging a God but presuming utterly that He was on their side, the Nazis also arrogated unto themselves that power. Dispensing with God with a refreshing (and almost surprising) candor, the Italian Fascist, Mussolini, simply and flatly declared: ‘Nothing outside the State, nothing above the State, nothing against the State.” The State which, not coincidentally, he and his Party ran. But all of these instances were departures from the ideals of the West; and unless We wish to condemn every entity that fails to live up fully to its ideals, then We cannot condemn the West for what these vigorous monstrosities concocted in their rebellion against it.

“Moral indignation serves to effect the ritual destruction of the person[s] denounced.” Now that is a powerful concept: ‘destruction’. Human beings in their more deliberative moments have always considered themselves well-advised to employ it sparingly; it has proven itself to have a nasty boomerang capability, especially if wrongly inflicted.

Courts in the West have thus had to contend with this delicate but vital balancing act: to inflict some ‘partial destruction’ – almost never the total destruction of death – sufficient to the crime but proportional to it as well. The job had previously been left to the wronged himself, or if he was incapacitated, to the relatives of the wronged; among advanced tribal peoples this sometimes resulted in elaborate schedules of payment – ‘wergild’ is one instance – which the wrong-doer had to pay to the wronged or his family members. A more primitive alternative was simply to let the wronged, or his relatives, go after the (hopefully correctly identified) wrong-doer to extract or inflict whatever they could or whatever they felt was due. When the State assumed a monopoly on violence, then it assumed responsibility for correctly identifying the wrong-doer and assigning a sufficient punishment. The wronged had a way of going a bit overboard with a distressing frequency; a society could be torn apart in short order.

Transforming a person in his very essence is accomplished by “substituting another socially validated motivational scheme for that previously used to name and order the performances of the denounced.” By the denouncer somehow inducing the community to look upon the person through the lenses of the substitute system, the denounced person becomes [in their eyes] a different person”. Where yesterday in the village a man was simply a fellow-peasant with a few more cows and a larger hut, today he is a “Kulak”, and the only fate for the parasitical Kulak is to be put up against the nearest wall. And through the working of the new ‘lenses’, not many folks feel bad. Although, as the Soviets eventually discovered to their dismay, a lot of folks started wondering if tomorrow they themselves might not be declared a Kulak, especially if the definition of Kulak kept changing to expand the class of potential targets. A society with too many folks thus preoccupied and distracted is not going to get a lot of stuff done. And shooting even more folks turns out not to work so well in the long run.

In order for the whole thing to work, a couple of things must be made to happen.

First, “both event and perpetrator must be removed from the realm of their everyday character and be made to stand as ‘out of the ordinary’”. The denounced person or perpetrator must be seen to be ‘extraordinary’, and not in a good way. After all, if whatever he had done was ‘ordinary’, then there would be no reason for ‘destruction’ and the usual justicial workings of the community would apply. And if he was ordinary, then folks would not feel right about inflicting ‘destruction’; and their guilt, if overridden long enough to approve the ‘destruction’, might well boomerang, sooner or later, onto the denouncer. (This is one big reason why when this type of thing gets started, it’s hard to stop: the ‘denouncers’ and their collaborators – official as well as unofficial – don’t want the lenses to come off the people and the people’s guilt, now transmuted into anger, to be inflicted upon them.)

And this is where ‘emergency’ comes in. The ‘extraordinary’ nature of the act or the denounced person justifies the change in ‘lenses’ by which the people view the denounced person. Released from the cage of ‘ordinary process’, emotions can be loosed among the people which can overwhelm reason. Dictators and revolutionaries don’t cotton to ‘emergencies’ out of boredom or lack of imagination; they grasp the usefulness of ‘emergency’s’ power. And so often, the people don’t realize the painful truth of just how primitive or emotional they can be; the fragility of ‘civilization’ is not something most folks like to think about, in relation to themselves. As the Greeks famously assumed, ‘barbarians’ – by definition – lived somewhere else.

A sturdy court system, like a system of levees, will be able to handle such a tidal surge. But if it is driven by too big and well-orchestrated a storm, then – like the courts in Germany by 1934 – then they too will bend, and become deformed. And then, not wishing to admit the fact, the courts themselves become part of the inertia preventing recovery from the flood of emotions and what was done under their influence.

Second, both the act and the denounced perpetrator must be seen to have a preference not simply for the act, but for the type of act. Thus, this type of person will inevitably commit this type of act because it is in his essence to do so. Thus a Kulak must be killed not simply for what he purportedly has done in the past (be a parasite on the people) but because he will always try to do it in the future; and thus all Kulaks must be identified and destroyed, because there is no rehabilitating them – they are what they are and can never change.

And “event and perpetrator must be treated as a uniformity throughout the work of denunciation”. The Kulak and the parasitical theft and the essence of being a parasitical thief – it’s all of a piece, and there’s no breaking that chain. You will never be able to separate the essence of the man from the act, not under any circumstances.

And the people “must appreciate the characteristics of the typed person and event by referring to a dialectical counterpart”. Thus a Kulak should always be accompanied, even if only in the viewer’s mind, by a ‘good communist’ whose shining example throws the Kulak’s dark evil into even more vivid relief, the shadow appearing darker when contrasted with light. The curious American variant – more passive – is the ‘victim’, who is, in the lenses, innocent and deeply damaged.

Further, the denouncer must get himself to be seen by the people as not-personally interested in the outcome of the denunciation, as merely a heroic upholder of the ‘common values’, who can speak in the name of those values to the people, and who can speak in the name of the people to effect the destruction of the denounced person. Again, curiously, the American variant requires that the ‘victim’ be very ‘interested’, but under the influence of a certain feminist valorization of ‘feeling’, it is this ‘feeling’ and the sympathy that any ‘correct’ onlooker will deploy that actually launches the designated ‘victim’ over the hurdle of having a very significant stake in the outcome of the process.

It’s not hard to see how terribly fraught with emotion this type of dynamic is. Especially in the setting of a court, this can exercise a baleful influence. In a hundred or a thousand courts, the consequences to a society can be profound.

And since “not only must the denouncer fix his distance from the person being denounced, but the witnesses must be made to experience their distance from him also”, then this depersonalization introduces a toxic element not only into the court and its personnel (the judges especially), but among the people in whose name – theoretically – the denunciation is being carried out.

And finally, “the denounced person must be ritually separated from a place in the legitimate order, i.e. he must be defined as standing at a place opposed to it. He must be placed ‘outside’, he must be made ‘strange’.” The people must see – through the lenses – that this irretrievable perpetrator is also opposed to the order and well-being of their society, is an active and deliberate and purposeful enemy of it, and is no ‘member’ of it, but is rather some ‘stranger’. At times, the Soviets and the more tactful Chinese, augmented the ‘otherness’ of an enemy-of-the-people with a psychiatric label to reinforce the ‘strangeness’ (in their ‘science’, opposing or questioning the communist system was of itself a clear indication of insanity).

But it is of paramount importance that the people do not see the denounced as one of themselves. And this is also dangerously narcotic to the people, since they are lulled into the sense that what is happening to the denounced – since it only happens to ‘others’ and to ‘strangers’ whose attitude has been deliberately chosen and embraced – will never happen to them; they are ‘good’ communists, Nazis, Germans, fill-in-the-blank. Martin Niemoller, the former German naval officer turned pastor and preacher, noted that he took no notice when ‘they’ came for this or that group and did not speak up for the accused, until ‘they’ came for him and there was nobody left to speak up. Most people, when ‘they’ come for them, do not even achieve the consolation – stern as it is – of that much self-insight.

(Come to think of it – most Americans nowadays aren’t really going to grasp the concept of a ‘stern consolation’, are they?)

Thus Garfinkel. He was writing about what he detected in his times. I sense that it is among Us now. And that it is a product of two fundamentalisms: the fundamentalisms of a politically-ascendant if not mainstream Protestantism that reinforces its own identity by identifying and hunting ‘strangeness and otherness’ and of a feminist (of the Second Wave) hostility to ‘men’ and to ‘reason’ that seeks to gain leverage over ‘male domination’ by continually tapping into that inexhaustible font of powerful emotional grievance, sex. And the whole brew carefully blended by a government police power that has found that what authority it cannot expand on its own behalf, it can expand by cloaking itself behind the cover of ‘the victim’, on behalf of whose pain and outrage all manner of constitutional encroachment can be effected. And in the 1990s it all came together.

The fact that so much of what Garfinkel observed among Red-baiters (and tellingly among the genuine Reds themselves) and – I think – among the Nazis who copied much of the Soviet playbook in these matters is traceable to the tremendous borrowing that America made from the Nazis and the Soviets after the war. From the Nazis we not only got military tactics like ‘blitzkrieg’ and rockets and jets and ‘preventive’ war (and eventually the shape of their helmets), but also the masterfully developed propaganda trade-craft of the darkly brilliant Goebbels (who himself got some of his best ideas from the 1920s American pathfinder of ‘shaping’ (manipulating) public opinion, Edward Bernays). From the Soviets, especially through certain feminist theorists of the second-wave who borrowed heavily from Marx’s analysis and Lenin’s and Stalin’s praxis, and from advanced level ‘advocacy’ specialists, came orchestrated campaigns against targeted groups and imposition upon the public and the court system of ‘sex offenses’, packaged so as to be irresistible to an increasingly shallow and sensationalist mass media, and show trials, and dubious ‘science’ that is not accepted by any of the most reputable practitioners and institutions.

Why keep bringing this up? Because all of this is still operative through laws that even now continue to become more and more oppressive, and are passed without any serious justification or grounding in fact or science, and systems of registration that continually demonize large swaths of citizens.

As an example, the Supreme Court has stated that the whole system would raise constitutional issues if it weren’t for the fact that it is ‘rehabilitative’ and that it is not ‘punitive’. Yet no practitioners or researchers can point to a rehabilitation program that works, nor even a diagnostic system or etiological explanation that is viable. And Hitler – seeking the German people’s donations to his assorted schemes for assisting the needy – refused to legislatively mandate such donations; he simply published in schools and places of employment the names of those who did not contribute: harmless public notification?

And what does it do to the sense of community and the community’s sense of justice when such derangements are embedded in the public mind – and conscience? What does it do eventually to the legitimacy of Law itself?

We are operating Our constitutional system, having introduced great chunks of communist, fascist, and authoritarian praxis. Do We assume that since these chunks have been ‘baptized’ by being put into the service of ‘American’ society that somehow they will thereby automatically lose their noxiousness and toxicity?

We allowed Our economy to operate in the hands of those so ‘interested’ in it that they enriched themselves by all manner of schemes, and where has that led Us?

We allowed Our foreign policy to fall into the hands of unripes who deluded themselves into thinking that what failed for the aggressive governments of the early and mid-20th century would work for Us, and where has that led Us?

This can’t go on forever. It probably can’t go on much longer. If We don’t stop all of this, it will stop Us. That will be stern, but it won’t be a consolation. History doesn’t like being ignored on such a scale; neither does Reason.

ONLY CONNECT

Over on the Revealer site there’s an article by Alexandra Boutros about a new Creationism museum … in Canada (“Creationism in Canada”, www.therevealer.org/archives/feature_print.php?printid=2859). Sigh. One had sorta hoped that the Canadians were immune to this type of thing. Ah well.

There is fear that the public will be duped into thinking that the whole world was indeed created in 6 days 6000 years ago and that dinosaurs did indeed cohabit the newly-Created earth with Adam and Eve and were even taken – in their dyads – aboard the ark by Noah (which must have made for a mighty big ark indeed … far larger than the Navy’s largest nuclear aircraft carriers … all of them … put together).

You have to ask yourself: is it conceivable that a nation that commands (for the present, anyway) the military destructive power that this nation commands … is it possible that a nation thus armed could be so clueless – so intellectually deranged – as to depart from any semblance of seriousness and thought so as to believe that dinosaurs were on the ark with Noah and that it all happened less than two thousand years before the rise of the First Dynasty?

And if it is fearful enough that such persons do exist in organized groups (called ‘the base’), it is even more fearful to think that their intense concentration on their ‘truth’ will overwhelm large numbers of mind-flat, gum-chewing, cell-phone tapping ‘moderates’ who are so enswamped in the Flat but frazzled ‘life’ of American culture that they cannot muster the mental energy, let alone skill, to evaluate the possibility.

The question arises: How can such people be The People? Because if no People, then no Republic.

Or is there indeed a ‘silent majority’ for this age: neither balkanized into hating and fearing all who do not think like them, nor living merely out of fear and hate, nor relying on the least-developed parts of their brain to comprehend events and shape a self and a life, nor seeking false security in phantasmagoria and caricatures of the unfamiliar, nor so fecklessly surface-bound as to be sail-less and rudderless on the sea of events and meanings.

Was Lincoln’s insistence on The People a result of what he had experienced, proven to him by those he had encountered in his life? Or was it a gamble that at least enough folks were willing and able to rise up to take a place among The People? Or was it a hope that had little basis in observed experience but appeared essential if the American Experiment were to continue? And if it was only such a hope, then wasn’t it a species of the Hitlerian insight that LBJ quoted to MLK in 1965: that if you tell folks something long enough and consistently enough and confidently enough, why then they’ll come to believe it – whether its’ true or not … ?

Or is it – somewhat in the best Catholic mode – simply to be accepted as an article of faith that this Vessel of Ours is what God has given Us and We go with it as very best We can until we die or It sinks or the world ends … ?

We need to answer this question, each of Us and all of Us. Because We are reaching a hugely dangerous point in Our national existence where We appear to have ‘options’: a Unitary Executive, a private mercenary Executive Army, a Congress enwhored to the continued personal success of each of its Members and nothing else, a more ‘efficient’ and ‘responsive’ police state benevolently destroying strangeness and otherness and unfamiliarity along with Evil and evil and crime.

Few of Us recall the siren allure of the middle-‘30s: here We were over here shuffling around, scuttling to get out of the way of the shiny box-like limos while searching for a way to keep bread on the table … the great American Promise betrayed. Meanwhile, over there in Germany, legions of sharp, fresh young faces put themselves to the task of implementing their Leader’s vigorous and demanding Order, busily constructing authobahns and steel and houses and looking like a million bucks. Hell, even the Italians – the Italians! – were looking pretty sharp with their Leader and on-time trains and their army of seven million bayonets. Maybe, the voice whispered in Our ear, there needs to be a change around here.

The question is being put to Us again … and – this is the great treason of Our age – it is being put to Us by Our own government. There are now real dungeons and almost-real dragons … no need to find them in games.

Can folks who think there were dinosaurs on the ark muster the skill to preserve the Republic by preserving themselves as The People?

Nor are We only at risk from the dinosaur-base. Over on Salon Patrick Smith in his regular “Ask the Pilot” column raises a thought-provoking point as he discusses airplane/airport security (www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2007/06/08/askthepilot235/print.html).

He refers to the craze of three summers ago where some woman, uncomfortable at the presence of a group of 12 sorta Middle-Eastern-looking males having a good time on an aircraft, got it into her head that they were a terrorist special-ops team on a dry run to repeat the outrage of 9-11.

Now this site has gone on at length about the confounding obliviousness with which this country enthusiastically slid into the slough of the very obviously over-hyped sex-offender mania. At least the Communists of the 1950s actually existed as a world-wide, or world-aspiring, organization, and they had those rockets. The sex-offenders were manufactured out of whole cloth … overnight as it were, like the proverbial Biblical dinosaurs.

But where the actual unfolding pattern of the sex-offender lunacy was spread over so wide a swath of events that it was hard for the average citizen to keep a close lock on the alpha-stream, on the key dynamics and significance of the thing, yet in the confines of an aircraft fuselage, over a short and clearly delineated period of time, it’s easier to observe the dynamics of the syndrome.

Reason could not help stop her anxiety: why would a covert special-ops group collect itself and proceed enmasse to create a situation where its presence would be clearly revealed to its ‘enemies’ or its potential targets and its mission compromised? No no no no no. There were terrorists somewhere, these men agitate me, ergo they must be terrorists – call the captain! Don’t argue with me because my agitation is dispositive proof of their guilt! Or are you one of them yourself … ? And of course at this point, even St. Peter had to say No. Three times. Thus is Truth betrayed in the face of frenzy.

And when Truth is betrayed, then reality is also betrayed. And then consequences will flow to the betrayer(s) in a Flood.

In today’s “sensitive” world a plane-full of balanced and quiet folks cannot hold a candle to the influence that a fear-addled singleton must be allowed to wield. In today’s “responsive” world an attempt to calm the screaming rather than grant the demand is taken as form of outrage and crime itself. It’s as if the two-year-olds were able to write the handbook for how to handle tantrums. But then again, ‘adulthood’ is merely an oppressive construct; and anyway, it’s those whom society deems unwell who are really well. Or so some book said.

On such grounds, indeed, a ‘sensitive and responsive’ Unitary Executive did feel Our pain and stretch forth its hand to smite somebody so as to alleviate Our pain. If in the process far greater pain has been caused, well … We are to appreciate its good intentions; and anyway the pain it caused was somebody else’s. If We flinch from the pain now irrevocably caused on Our behalf, then – as another world Leader once said as things went south – “if the people cannot muster the will to follow my vision then they are not worthy of me … and should disappear from the face of the earth”. Ach ja! He would have done for them himself, except that his own nemesis was approaching him at the speed of a T-34, steady and relentless. But they wouldn’t soon forget him; the whole world wouldn’t be able to forget him.

And how did We come to this? How have We lost so much capability over the past decades? Another piece in the puzzle of causation is occasioned by the ending of “The Sopranos”. In his blog at Buffalo Report (www.buffaloreport.com/2007/070610.jackson.shrink.html), Bruce Jackson discusses a book he reviewed when it was first written 30 years ago: Yochelson’s and Samenow’s “The Criminal Personality”.

These two ‘experts’ asserted that there is a thing called a “criminal personality”; that it is the ‘criminal personality’ that taints everything an individual does with the stain of criminality and indeed constitutes an essence (getting kinda medieval here); that such criminality is a choice and it is a willful choice made at a very early age (before puberty); and that very few ‘criminals’ can be talked out of their choice; because by the time they’re first caught they’ve been committing crimes for years, and will continue to commit crimes unless they are forcibly and effectively stopped; and a criminal who commits any type of crime is capable of committing any other type of crime and probably will, so that a bank-robber will easily rape and a car-thief will easily burgle and no matter what the crime the same ‘criminal personality’ underlies them all, and cannot be reformed.

The diagnostic symptoms of the inner criminal (interchangeably called the ‘psychopath’ and the ‘sociopath’) include children who expect their parents to meet their needs. Such insight. There’s not much actual scientific fact in the book (a pair of volumes, actually), but lots and lots of anecdotes – remembered stories told by clinicians about this or that patient.

But there is a unique thought process that is the core of their ‘criminal’. The ‘criminal mind’ doesn’t want to take responsibility for his actions and tries to distance himself from them; he practices deception to avoid detection; he says what he has to say to law enforcement and therapy personnel in order to get free; he is incapable of thinking correctly. So far this sounds like the unique markers said to apply to sex-offenders; and surely describes the behavior of recently deposed CEOs and … come to think of it, is pretty much the Standard Operation Procedure for the Executive and Legislative branches of the government. And the authors assert – remember – that this type of person is not reformable.

As to ‘numbers’, the authors have figured (in ways they don’t quite explain) that the average ‘criminal mind’ commits 187 crimes in a year. Now a) you have to ask how the hell they came up with a number like that and b) how does that compare to the number of crimes the average person commits … but then, of course, if you’re not convicted or caught then you don’t qualify as having that ‘criminal mind’. If you can follow that.

And what about the ‘criminal mind’ in a CEO or a politician or somebody in the Justice Department? How many crimes do they commit compared to the average person? But of course the ‘average’ person is by definition not ‘criminal’. And We must accept that this goes for the average CEO and politician. That still leaves us a couple-three more things that We might choose to believe before breakfast.

But to end on an upbeat note: this all means that if you incarcerate 2 million folks (roughly what our prison population is now) then you’ve – presto! – prevented 374 million crimes each year. No wonder they like this inside the Beltway. And – surprise! – in short order Samenow was appointed to Reagan’s task force on crime victims (because each of those crimes had to have a victim, and each victim can vote … presuming the crimes and thus the victims exist in the real world).

Worse, it is ‘the criminal personality’ that pre-exists any particular ‘crime’. Once a person is convicted of a crime, then it must be assumed that he is – and always has been – a criminal personality; thus one can go back through his prior life secure in the assurance that everything bad he did proves that he will irreformably continue to do bad, and every good he appears to have done was merely a proof that he has always been shrewd enough to cover his evil and nefarious tracks (until, of course, our glorious security forces shrewdly exposed him). Conversely, if you haven’t been convicted of a crime then you don’t not have – nor have you ever had – a criminal personality.

But of course, that can change, can’t it? In the twinkling of an eye. One could be convicted of anything, and suddenly find that one is now guilty of everything, past as well as present, potential and future as well as actual. And thus once convicted, one may be added to a list of those exposed and ‘tagged’, like cattle branded. Added to a list? Added to a Registry? Ah … that’s logical.

As Jackson notes, they think “the only adequate program for habilitating (you can’t “re-“ what was never there in the first place) the criminal to noncriminal life … requires 3 hours of group therapy every day, sexual abstinence, unquestioning acceptance of Yochelson’s and Samenow’s definitions of criminal attitudes, desires, needs, and behaviors, thorough self-disgust, and abandonment of criminal thought and work.” This may be a set of objectives (and dubious ones at that) but such a wish-list does not constitute a coherent set of methods and steps to achieve those objectives. And it wouldn’t take a college-degree for some potential therapee to entertain a few doubts – which of course would reveal him as ‘in denial’ and refusing therapy. All in all, a standard toxic brew of everything that distinguished Mao’s re-education camps as cutting-edge educational praxis. Packaged now as trew-blew American ‘science’. Yah.

It stuns. But the ballet of ideas-and-events that followed is exquisite in its symmetries and evolutions. 1978: the gender revolution has been waging its war on “masculine culture” (and – it would consequently have to be admitted – “men”), but it hasn’t yet figured out a way to harness the vast police power of the government in its cause. Rules of evidence, statutes of limitation, and other oppressive tools of masculinist ‘reason’ are impeding progress, perpetrating further outrage, revictimizing the victims. “Men” are inherently rapists, claims the vanguard thought of the revolution, but how exactly get the government to accept that assertion and deploy the police power and the criminal law in the service of your vision and your agenda? As it stands in 1978, the revolution appears to have bogged down in ersatz psychologizing and panglossian self-help and plaintive whining in sympathetic media outlets. What then is to be done?

Meanwhile, on the exactly opposite end of the ranch, the Fundies are trying to figure out how to distinguish the marks of Good and of Evil, so that Evil ones can be identified and exposed and fought and conquered by those who are clearly and permanently Saved and – thereby and therefore – Good both now and forever. And is it possible to actually stretch forth the collective Fundamentalist hand and wrest control of the wildly careening Culture of this country from the whackjob ‘libbuls’ who want to change all that is American and Good into Evil?

Along come Samenow and Yochelson with a theory that essentially creates something for everyone: an objective class – the criminal class – that is permanently dangerous and permanently evil and easily distinguished and can be permanently tagged; and against which permament and irreformable and willfully chosen Evilness anything may be done by those who are permanently and by nature Good because no matter what the Good have to do in order to do what it takes, that action that is taken is always and ineffably Good.

These two re-created at a stroke both a form of the old revolutionary “objective class of enemy” and an easily recognized and perfectly hate-able Manichean ‘Other’ against whom the purely Good might lustily wage ceaseless and no-holds-barred war.

The feminists get a justification for the bending of the criminal law against “men”; the Fundies get a justification for the marshalling of the criminal law in the service of enforcing their vision of the Pure and Perfect America; the law enforcement and criminal justice systems get a huge dose of respect and the justification and authority to do things the way they want to … and a budget to make it work. And they all are suddenly provided with an added, but from a PR standpoint indispensable, element: a class of Victims, who can be displayed (perhaps even prepared) for the cameras.

And so, as at Santa Anita, they were off.

Neither Communist revolutionary thought nor Old Testament war were ever going to be compatible with the American ethos and the fabric of the Constitution; indeed, they are positively toxic to it. And yet the Democrats needed voters and the Republicans needed voters. And politics were descending into “issues” upon which one must hold ‘the’ correct opinion regardless of anything else. And what the Democrats perfected the Republicans took and re-badged and put in a more powerful engine than the Democrats had ever managed and fueled it with a far less refined crude than the Democrats had ever dared. And here We are. Or, as Lincoln said that Spring day in 1865, with abyssal, ineffable sadness: “And the war came.” The Democrat would erode the Constitution to punish (male) perpetrators and the Republican would erode the Constitution to restore morality. The hope of neither could be answered fully; the consequences of each have been answered far too fully.

And the awesome police power of the government, carefully caged by the Founders, was set loose in the service of both ‘bases’ as 1980 saw an entrenched Democratic Congress and a wildly popular Republican Presidency. ‘Victims’ – of men, of crime, of evil, of Evil – could feel comfortable in either Party.

And within a year there were the pre-school dragon-sex-with-children cases. And then the drug-lords and the superpredator kids and then the abusive husbands and then the child molesters and then the sex-offenders and then the terrorists and then the Iraqis and now the Iranians. Democrats kept their feminist base happy criminalizing ‘men’ and Republicans kept their law-and-order base happy turning the police power loose on sex and drugs (rock and roll having gone away on its own).

Nobody needed to ‘think’, nobody was advised to ‘doubt’.

Of course, the huge dangers within the conceptual core of the Samenow-Yochelson universe have been ignored: anybody might be convicted at any time, thereby negating everything he had ever done and – the horror! – tainting everyone who had ever been close to him (and this was precisely the defining nightmare of every Soviet apparatchik).

For the unspoken beneficiary of the Yochelson-Samenow universe was the government power: if anyone can have his life utterly reversed simply by a ‘finding’ by the government power, and if that reversal might be occasioned by anything at any time, then the government became the all-powerful Source of success or failure, doled out in measure modest or immense, to be placated, obeyed, feared. And its police agents as well.

And Jackson notes that those police agents not only got to have their own Grand Unified Theory to justify their status as trustworthy professionals, but also got a theory that “reduced a great deal of complexity to a very trivial set of assumptions … that renders all punishment justified.” Which, come to think of it, is a pretty good description of the ‘thinking’ that led us to Iraq, our eastern front. The hell-hot ironies of how the Beltway hothouse takes a trendy idiocy from one area of activity and spreads it around to other even more significant areas. “And the war came.”

It was all well and good that this or that interest or coalition of interests rode high on the back of the tiger now; at any time any of those interests might itself be displaced and cast into the outer darkness, discovered to have a “criminal personality”. It set this nation on a course that was positively French in its potential for revolutionary, governmental Terror.

So much of what passes for ‘science’ in the assorted cries of the Advocacies is derived from this Yochelson-Samenow template. From 1980 through the still-erupting pockets of the sex-offense mania. And beyond – to the ‘terrorists’ who simply ‘choose’ to hate us, and are consequently evil in their very essence and thus against whom no perpetration can be deemed ‘excessive’.

As Yochelson-Samenow refused to consider structural factors as playing a causative role, so too the Imperium quickly spun matters such that the structures of historical events or geographical imperatives or even America’s own record of activities were considered irrelevant: as the feminists presumed “men” were rapists and the Fundies presumed that Evil is a choice that disqualifies the chooser from any further communion with the Pure and the Good, so too the ‘terrorists’, the inconvenient life-forms impeding American control of dwindling oil supplies … well, one can go on.

Yochelson-Samenow are no longer widely accepted as ‘cutting edge’, or even accurate. But their ‘bases’ are secure – especially in a law enforcement community that has waited far too long for its day to let go so soon. When ‘testilying’ and ‘framing the guilty’ are justified by two whole thick books (!) … you don’t just walk away from that.

Yochelson-Samenow have re-infected this nation with a primitive and simplistic conceptual scheme that has regressed Us back into the pre-Constitutional murk and slime. The philosophy of Muldoon of the Strong-Arm Squad, itself an importation from an older, darker world, was reintroduced: if a crime needs a guilty criminal, find one you figure is guilty of anything, frame him, and everybody’s happy and can get home to supper at a reasonable time. The dinosaurs walk among Us.

But that’s what the Fundies have been saying all along.

WHEN CRIME GOES BAD

A previous Post (“Crime and Governance”) had discussed a very valuable book by Jon Simon entitled “Governing Through Crime”.

His thesis is that over the course of the past half-century or so “crime” has gone from being an unavoidable aspect of life that the government – with its monopoly on violence – has a responsibility to address within the framework of Constitutional praxis to being the blazing pretext upon which the police power of the government can continually expand into the lives of citizens.

Concomitantly, the ‘ideal citizen’ now is not the frontiersman or the pioneer or the farmer or the industrial worker but rather the ‘victim of crime’. And for that ‘victim’, and on behalf of that ‘victim’, the police power of the government will wage sleepless – even pre-emptive – war against perps perverse, probable, possible. The media, needless to say, find such ‘wars’ hugely telegenic and tirelessly profitable; far more than oil wells, the public’s capacity to feel fear and anxiety, the public’s capacity to seek vengeance, the public’s dark but abiding dislike of ‘others’, the public’s capacity to feel better when strong actions are taken, never run dry.

The consequences of drinking too deeply too long from such wells are only now becoming clear.

And so, Simon says, ‘crime’ becomes ‘Crime’: not an event or a pattern of acts, perpetrated by identifiable individuals and addressable by competent police action and judiciously formulated social policy – all with the Constitutional framework. Rather: a handy torch that will stampede the citizen-herd into granting (or at least acquiescing-in) the exponentially increasing authority of the government to expand the writ of its police power. Feelings are all: frighten them, outrage them, get them all worked up – just don’t let them slow down to think or to look or to ask questions.

Do whatever it takes to find perpetrators of great evil. If there aren’t enough of them, if they aren’t doing enough awful stuff, hook up with the media and create the appearance that they are.

Do not go near ‘malefactors of great wealth’. Keep it all focused on ‘perpetrators of great evil’. What is vivid and awful is best; that it might be infrequent or even rare is of no consequence. What might have happened is good enough; that it might not have happened or could not have happened is of much less consequence.

On the basis of the ‘emergency’ such awfulness creates, get citizens used to your doing things that not so long ago were considered beyond police or government authority. Keep up the pressure on the citizens through more vivid and sustained and selective focus on the worst possible crime. Don’t let anyone snow you with ‘reason’ or ‘thought’.

Label anyone who questions your authority to go after a perp as a perp himself.

Remind everyone who sees you: you are doing this for the people. Promise them that you will enforce zero-tolerance; heck, tell them you’re going to eradicate evil.

If they question your authority, tell them that you as the police are the moral guardians of society and anyone who questions what you do must be immoral.

The media will help you with all of this.

Extremism in the service of the citizens’ safety is no vice. Moderation is no virtue.

**

The similarity of all this to the German experience of the early-1930s cannot be gainsaid.

In that prior Post I named the type of government that would pursue such a programme as the “National Crime State”, a mode of governance based on warring-against-crime the same way that the National Security State is based on preserving “national security”.

But I don’t think that’s adequate. Grammatically, “Crime” still looks too much like "crime”. And we are all by now conditioned – and not inappropriately – to hiss and claw when we encounter the subject of crime.

I’m going to call it Krime. I define Krime as the use of criminal activity – real or imagined – or victimization by criminal activity – actual or feared – by the government as a pretext for expanding its powers within our society and our culture, by manipulating the acquiescence of the citizens through fear and/or outrage.

I am not thereby plumping for a return to the 1960s’ idea that criminals are simply misunderstood or that crime is simply activity that the police disapprove of or the French idea that crime is so crazy to begin with that a perpetrator is by definition too whacked-out to be held responsible and prosecuted.

But I am asserting that crime must be dealt with through intelligent and effective law enforcement and criminal justice praxis and social policy, after due deliberation by citizens widely and accurately informed by a responsible media, and after some consensus has been reached by the citizenry in its vital Constitutional role as The People.

And I am asserting that in consequence of the foregoing, such enforcement and praxis must conform to the traditional Western principles of Justice enshrined in the Constitution, and that the Integrity of Constitutional Process must take priority over the immediate furtherance of any tactical cause through the implementation of any programme, however well-intentioned or worthwhile.

That being said, I’d say that Krime is the greatest threat this country faces right now.

CRIME AND GOVERNANCE

Max Boot has an Op-ed in the “Los Angeles Times” (“Keys to a successful surge”. www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-boot7feb07,0,4299148,print.column?coll=la-opinion-rightrail).

He discusses the cutting-edge in Counterinsurgency Theory. Several points draw his attention: A) The population will be governed in its loyalties by which side demonstrates the most strength and can control violence to its own purposes; B) Insurgents will not be hindered if when arrested by lawful authority they can take advantage of “the many normal safeguards built into the judicial system” to effect their quick release; C) “Clearly, more than any other kind of warfare, counterinsurgency must respect the principle of a single direction. A single boss must direct the operations from beginning until the end”; D) “Control of the population begins obviously with a thorough census. Every inhabitant must be registered and given a foolproof identity card.”

Let us pass over with only a moment’s serious regard the fact that you can’t – apparently – start operating a Democracy if you’re faced with a counterinsurgency. The best you can go for appears to be some form of military-authoritarian boot-camp society. Let us note soberly that having once ensconced a military and a junta-government in such a strong position as this Theory requires, the odds of thus further developing in an orderly fashion into full popular Democracy are somewhere south of zilch.

Let us instead give full and undivided attention to the thought that this very same Counterinsurgency Theory seems to be the operative model for governing here, at home, domestically, in these United States. Whether pressed by the Neocons for the purpose of spackling up the population to serve the needs of empire, or by the Fundamentalistics in order to spackle up the population to serve the needs of a vengeful “Jee-zuzz”, or by assorted Identities to ensure no popular opposition to their various agendas, or by the ‘soccer parents’ to ensure that their children – increasingly carrying on in their parents’ absence – will grow up (as if in compensation) in a risk-free, totally secure ‘world’ … this Counterinsurgency Theory seems to have become the many-rooted, de facto governing model for this Republic.

And that means that We The People are now simply envisioned as “the population”, an easily excitable, not very with-it, herbivorous herd that needs to be controlled and headed in the ‘right’ direction. Among whom there are un-named hordes of wild criminals of various violent proclivities, seeking to do to “us” on a daily basis what was done to the Twin Towers all in the space of a few minutes.

Staring at those disturbing tea-leaves, wondering where all this came from and how it has managed to become the domestic policy of the United States, then pick up the newly-published “Governing Through Crime” by Jonathan Simon (Oxford University Press).

Simon’s thesis is that somewhere in Time our government ceased to simply ‘govern crime’ and sought instead, and with a sustained and mighty effort, to govern THROUGH crime. The ideal ‘citizen’ and the ‘idealized political subject’ of the government then ceased to be ‘the yeoman farmer’ of the early 1800s, the pioneer, the industrial worker of the later 1800s, the immigrant of the early 1900s … but rather became ‘the potential victim of crime’. And the job of the government has thus mutated into serving that idealized citizen-victim by avenging and even preventing the crime that endangers that idealized citizen. This has become the American ‘Script’, the American ‘Story’ for this era.

We are well-advised to consider that if it goes on, it will also be the last-ever American Story, at least insofar as we are a Republic.

The job of the American government is thus not the preservation of rights, nor the protection of pioneers, nor the opening up of ‘new lands on the frontier’, nor the protection of the worker’s rights and the owner’s rights, nor the provision of jobs and great public works nor the guarantee of decent wages and reliable jobs, nor even the provision of decent education (who nowadays can say what should be taught?). Indeed, given the peaking of the American postwar production hegemony in 1969, the government wasn’t going to be able to keep any such promises. And given the Vietnam War it wasn’t going to able to guarantee ever-victorious military undertakings either.

What then was a government to do?

J. Edgar Hoover, of course, had been an early federal-expansionist via the police power of the government. Taking over the predecessor to the FBI just after World War I, he quickly cut his teeth on ‘Reds’, and when that ‘Scare’ was surfed out, he was on to ‘gangsters’: not, curiously, the big mob bosses, but the more vulnerable independent (if showy) entrepreneurs, especially ones who drove automobiles across State lines. Here was a fine new frontier for the Federal police power to colonize, and it did.

After the diversions of World War Two and the occasional Nazi spy, there was another Scare involving the Soviets and Joe McCarthy, and then – amazingly – it was Bobby Kennedy – himself a former prosecutor – who saw ‘crime’ as an excellent vehicle for enhancing his brother’s and his own political service.

After the assassinations of JFK, Martin Luther King, and RKF himself, and the profoundly jarring experiences of the urban riots of the later ‘60s, and the overall Anything Goes attitude of the Boomers (in their youth), the Omnibus Safe Streets Act of 1968 becomes, for Simon, the foundation for an American “National Crime State” (my own term) that rivals Gore Vidal’s description of the National Security State that arose after World War 2.

It is the unspoken and rarely seen growth and subsurface efflorescence of this National Crime State – its mentality, its vision of the place of the individual citizen and of the role of the government (Federal and State) and of the prosecutor, and the ‘changes’ (to put it nicely) it required in American law and justicial practice – that Simon isolates as the great and dangerous development underlying the challenges the Republic faces today.
When the Democrats (see the earliest Posts on this site) embraced the assorted Revolutions of the Identities in the later 1960s and afterwards, the (hardly unrelated) spike in ‘crime’ – from ‘pot’ to ‘drugs’ to all sorts of violent acts to all sorts of arguably ‘deviant’ behavior and acts – became a richly potent wedge for the now-waxing Republicans, precisely as the ability of the Federal government to continue the essential New Deal preconditions of constant expanding economic well-being decreased. Nixon was a ‘law and order’ man who was gonna get ‘tough on crime’. He and Agnew and Mitchell …

The Reagan-era, ushered in by his election to the Presidency in 1980 but pre-figured in his tough-on-crime governorship of California in the mid-‘60s, capitalized on the crime issue, focusing on the South American drug-lords (while barely noticing the S&Ls being devoured by assorted well-connected Republican-leaning piranha and sharks). To meet the emergency and the threat posed by those South American drug lords the ‘war on drugs’ was declared, and all manner of jurisprudential damage was done to constitutional structures in an effort to get a clear line of attack on drug-lords, drug-sellers, even drug-users.

Simon doesn’t spend as much time as might be spent on a couple of other monster developments, but he raises them and limns them accurately enough. First, the development throughout the 1970s of womens-liberation issues in such a direction that women’s vulnerability to men was presented as primarily a violent-crime issue, toward the meeting of which ‘emergency’ and the ‘suffering and outrage of the victims’ Federal police power had to be expanded even more than it had been in the civil-rights era of the late 1950s and the whole of the 1960s.

Second, the (distracting) framing of many of the Democrat-connected social changes as ‘moral’ and ‘religious’ issues, abortion quickly passing pot-smoking and ‘free love’ as a powerful trellis upon which oppositional forces could shape themselves, with (Republican) governmental help. To add to this the Fundamentalistic sensibility – Manichaean, intolerant of ambiguity and impatient of dissent or delay in the gratifications of its vision – created (I would say) an intensely powerful cultural fire, one that could be stoked to power large engines indeed.

That the Fundamentalistic sensibility as described is in a sense a mirror-image of the ‘revolutionary’ sensibility of that age’s feminism and the advocacy stance of other emerging ‘Identities’ merely indicates how inter-tangled these powerful societal and cultural forces were beneath the surface appearances of polarization and ‘total oppositeness’. And the governmental march toward enhanced police powers, necessary to re-authorize itself as the Avenger and Crime-Preventer to the American citizen (white, black, male, female, young, old … any victimization would do, so long as it was not economic or ‘class’ related).

He spends some time with one of the most powerful loci of these titanic forces: the sex mania that united ‘parents’ and ‘fundamentalists’ and ‘women’ against (the least numerous forms of) men and the most outrageous, if rare, types of sex-related crime. That this mania is still raging and Mr. Simon still has a scholarly career to keep might explain his less-than-extensive treatment of this still-roaring conflagration, but he does discuss the issue and everything he says is accurate.

And he does give substantive treatment to the sex-offense mania’s immediate predecessor: the domestic violence surge, which resulted in liberty and privacy being interfered with by the government merely on the allegations of an individual – a hole cut in the watertight bulkhead of Constitutional protection which – whatever its good intentions – has created damage that may never properly be mended.

Very interestingly, within this National Crime State he distinguishes between the enhancement of the role of the prosecutor and the weakening of the role of the judge. This, I think, is one of the quiet and almost counter-intuitive developments that has helped militarize (and thus threaten) the classic constitutional praxis of law enforcement and the administration of justice. The judge in the American system, in his/her sentencing power, wields the power of mitigating punishment if – s/he decides – this particular case so warrants. But it is precisely the need of the National Crime State to demonstrate its authority to the citizenry, and strengthen its bond to the (law-abiding) citizenry, by most vividly if not also floridly demonstrating its punitive power and resolve.

To secure that objective, the role of judges has been publicly defamed and – the pols eagerly piling on – statutorily restricted and decreased. Prosecutors, as the efficient avengers of the victim and comrade-in-arms of the sturdy but hard-pressed police, can cut through the ‘crap’ (we think of Max Boot’s counterinsurgency theorems) to secure the objective, the victory, of conviction and maximum imprisonment.

And prison itself – once a method of rehabilitating and ‘correcting’ the inmate – now becomes a technology-saturated ‘warehousing of garbage’ operation, the objective merely being to make the inmate’s life as risk-free (to any of the staff) as possible by isolating him (mostly ‘him’) from human contacts. But there are few supermaxes, although it’s a vision to sweeten the dreams of far too many victims, advocates, media types, pols, and citizens – although not, I think, of so many prison-administration professionals.

And more abstractly but hardly less cogently, he spends some time on the consequences of this National Crime State (again, my term, not his) on American civic and societal and cultural life. The embrace of the illusion that there could ever be anything such as perfect security or total safety or zero-tolerance; the formulation of one’s personal and social identity as a victim – whether passive and ‘devastated’ or enraged and vengeful; the acceptance of the non-humanity and the non-rights of (large) numbers of citizens, whether having been convicted of a crime or not; the approval of the government’s authority to ‘preventively’ incarcerate persons targeted as ‘potential’ criminals (and who isn’t?); the learned and reinforced mistrust of large numbers of other citizens, be they strangers or family members or persons of societal or cultural ‘authority’ … what will be the effects – specific and cumulative – of all these?

I would add, in the light of Max Boot’s musings, that the needs of the National Crime State and of the National Security State and of the National At-War-With-Terrorism State and the National Empire-for-Survival State … they all require sorta the same type of folks for their populations. And that type is not the Citizen, nor in the aggregate The People, nor necessarily educated nor independent nor mature nor spiritually nor morally developed.

The challenges that faced 1st Lt. Watada (see the Post immediately preceding this) are facing Us as The People. Our rendezvous with destiny is here now, calling Our name.

THE FREE WORLD

Just a bit more on this sex-offense Script and the doctrine that underlies it. Robert Jensen has an article on the Atlantic Free Press site (http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/) entitled “Media reform should include critique of sexual exploitation media”.

The pornography trade should be stopped. He notes, rightly indeed, that seeking to reduce “toxic” pornography is no different from seeking to eliminate toxic foods. It is harder, however, to assess the exact effects of pornography on the mind and to ascertain the pathways through which those effects are created. We are in the intangible realm of mind, not the physical and material realm of food and physiology. This is the scientific problem that faces us in these intangible affairs.

Worse, of course, is that an attempt to rapidly address the problem, and through policy and – even more gravely – through the alteration of criminal law and – even more gravely – through the alteration of fundamental requirements of Due Process … such an attempt, based on such presently meager knowledge, is not wise. In the related area of sex-offender law and policy, as noted else where on this site in the review of Eric Janus’s new book “Failure To Protect” (see "Prosec Nation" on this site), huge changes have been wrought on the basis of what even that well-disposed author acknowledges is very little knowledge indeed.

To apply the analogy of palpable problems to these intangible matters is bad science. Of course, if we assume that we are dealing here not with a scientific inquiry but rather with a revolution, and that consequently we are not dealing with principals who are seeking objective facts and actual knowledge, but are rather seeking to ram home an agenda using science as a fig-leaf to ease the sensibilities of a putatively rational public … then we can see how such large errors in formal scientific inquiry can be so widely effected, and by many whose education and profession should lead them to know better.

Equally ill-advised is the next point Jensen makes: that a “civil rights approach” to pornography is an appropriate “legal strategy” through which to address the problem. Do we have a “civil right” to be “free” of pornography? Of unhealthy – but not tainted – foods? Are we then to give the government the power that would be necessary to ensure a “risk-free” world and life for ourselves?

And as proposed by Jennifer Pozner on Alternet (“A Culture of Rape”, www.alternet.org/module/printversion/35514) “… American culture and law needs to find real solutions for punishing serial rapists or, more importantly, preventing men from perpetrating such criminal behavior in the first place”. Her thoughts raise some substantive questions.

Does not ‘American science’ need first to find out as much as it can? Have we not always had laws against rape and serial rape? Do we not have the punishments? Didn’t we have those punishments in place before the wide-ranging sex-offender laws? Weren’t – according to the government statistics – sexual assaults on a downward turn since 1976, a full 20 years before the great sex-offender push of the mid-1990s.

And if we are to explore the possibilities for American culture’s “preventing” male criminal behavior, do we also deploy the awesome criminal-prosecution power of the government to “prevent” crime? Do we start down that dangerous road? Indeed, we are already well along it, and such ‘prevention’ and – let’s say it – ‘pre-emption’ has now infected foreign policy and the military posture of the government, and has led to the current ominous mess in Iraq.

Can we ‘prevent’ crime? Can the Constitution bear such an awesome load? Can we punish all crime? We have already started down that road, through the unholy alliance of revolutionaries of the Left and the neo-Puritan furies of the Fundamentalist Right. Now them Kathliks, they never figured to ‘prevent’ crime (or sin); they figured it was ineradicable – which was why it was called Original Sin. Their ethos was woven from a certain patience with the inevitable and a clear-eyed awareness that if crime or sin were to be totally stamped out, the population of the entire world would have to be imprisoned, if any government could stand long enough to implement such a program. The fact that the U.S. now holds one-quarter of all the imprisoned convicts on the planet suggests clearly that this road of criminal-law and imprisonment will take us to a very dark place. If the actions of ‘men’ are to be singled out, then almost half the citizenry is theoretically liable to imprisonment. And if the government is empowered to deploy itself against ‘men’ today, then what is to stop it from deploying against other ‘enemies’ down the road?

To ‘inform’ the American “culture” is certainly an excellent goal, if the citizenry be accurately informed and then allowed to deliberate a course of action. But that is not what is being suggested by the relevant Advocacies and it has not been their gameplan so far.

They are not pure ideologues. They are very rightly aroused by the crimes that are being committed. But anger and outrage, no matter how compassionate or in what good cause, are no basis for policy, let alone for law.

To exercise prudence in the awefull matters of the criminal law is not “insensitive and insulting to the victim and to all women”. It is the responsibility of the government to deploy its terrible power prudently against its citizenry and – in this matter – against half that citizenry. The mollification of outrage is not all there is to Justice; to imagine that it is constitutes a massively inadequate conception of the situation and such a lack will lead to monstrous consequences, as we are seeing in Iraq now.

None of this is to condone rape or any sexual violence. And ‘boyo’ behavior, and the cultural foundations that support it, do indeed need to be accurately assessed so that they can be changed. It is not only women who suffer from it; the ‘boyos’ themselves are hugely diminished and deformed by such behavior and such cultural presumptions, and so are We as The People, and so is all the world that can be reached through the levers of power that such ‘boyos’ control.

A masculinity that can produce a Washington and a Lincoln – to name but two among innumerable examples of matured manhood productively contributing to civic life, however inevitably flawed in one way or another – is surely an asset that the nation and The People cannot afford to waste. We are all flawed, male and female. It is the nature of our kind, if them Kathliks be believed. And the climb to maturity is a long, hard, staggery slog, no doubt about it. But it must be begun and sustained by all, and the more who are so engaged, then the more will mutually support the others.

This great project, this Old Frontier – this Ancient Frontier – cannot be reached through the lascivious application of the criminal law. As a matter of fact, it requires much of the resources – mind, spirit, Virtue, Truth – that have been disposed of by the very Theory that was embraced by the proto-Advocacies themselves decades ago, to the extent that any coherent and comprehensive thinking grounded their agendas at all.

So there is much work to be done, by all of Us. Nor is this a situation that can be undertaken with a certain leisure. So much of what has already been done has borne baleful consequences, in our domestic affairs as in our foreign affairs. We must fix the aircraft in turbulent flight, repair the ship while she is underway in heavy seas that will not calm any time soon. It is our rendezvous with Destiny, but a situation much of Our own making.

We must ‘own’ that, as we must ‘inhabit’ our Present and as we must People our nation. Only thus can we continue towards true freedom. But we will never reach ‘perfect’ freedom, hence never ‘perfect’ security. It is a fate we share with all the peoples of this earth. And it will be a first liberation to realize that, and a second liberation to accept it. And thus to climb together from there.

DINES WITH THE REVOLUTION

Gail Dines is a sociology professor specializing in race and gender issues; she is on the faculty of Wheelock College in Boston. She has an article over on Counterpunch (www.counterpunch.com/dines01202007.html). She is not pleased. She was interviewed by Paula Zahn on CNN when the Nifong mis/mal-feasances were brought to light. Upon reflection, she considers herself to have been “ambushed” and “set up”.

We are first given several paragraphs that apparently are designed to show us that the pre-screen producer “conducted a thoughtful interview, unlike any I have had”. Thus she decides to do the show, attracted and reassured by the ‘thoughtfulness’, and thereby simultaneously establishing herself as someone alert to such ‘thoughtfulness’ and no doubt full of thought herself.

From this producer’s line of questioning she concluded that this would be a show dealing with “the historical and contemporary issues of violence against black women in this society”. Still, she then says it took “four phone calls” for her to finally agree to do the show.

When suddenly … in the limo on the way to the Durham court house she got a call “from a different producer” who said that the show was going to focus on race and not gender. The professor, intimating a large experience with talk-show honchos, “knew enough not to argue with a senior producer an hour before taping” and so she “simply agreed”.

Thus the ambush.

At this point in the article, she starts to share with us the views that CNN apparently didn’t want to deal with. We don’t really know though, because the professor quotes nothing of what she said on camera. Instead we are told that she asked Zahn after the show how Zahn could “do a show that once again leaves this woman stripped of her dignity and rendered invisible as a human being”. Zahn - indicating a large experience with agenda-driven talk-show guests - simply smiled goodbye.

Arriving back at her hotel half an hour later, the Professor finds she already has a passel of “hateful” emails, all – she points out – from “men”; it is a “flood” and a “barrage”. She is taken aback at such an outburst. In apparently innocent perplexity, she takes a look at the video of the show. And there it was: the show on that video is not about raceandgender but rather billed itself as “an examination of the ‘rush to judgment’ on the part of the media and society”.

But at this point, the ambushed victim wallowing stunned in the water suddenly makes sail, hoists colors and runs out her guns. And who can be surprised? Who can be surprised at her discomfiture in the interview or at her self-serving article? CNN was looking at a very significant reality, one that the Professor and her cohorts, colleagues, and accomplices - some females and some males – have been at great pains to obscure for all of the 20 years that she has been professoring and more.

There is indeed a ‘rush to judgment’ and the slow, careful, steady process of Due Process has been eroded by the superheated efforts of the Advocacy. Nor is this unintended. The whole gameplan was designed not to open room for more balance achieved through deliberation, but rather to simply quickly wrench the justice system into a stance more favorable to the programme of the Advocacy.

Of course you can’t just go and exercise such violence on the system and not expect some interference. You can’t go whacking the walls of a court-house with axes and not expect some folks to inquire as to what you think you’re doing. So you need an ‘emergency’, or a set of interlocking emergencies, that will ‘explain’ your haste and why you don’t simply go through the doors during regular hours.

Thus you have to create the emergency of having to ‘rescue victims’, and raceandgender work actually gives you a two-fer. This is how the Advocacies have carried on seriously corrosive agendas for decades now: they’ve been pretending to be the Fire Dept. Rescue Squad. It’s a wonder that it’s taken so long for the Iraqi resistance to pick up this strategy: masquerading as ‘emergency’ crews or ‘good guys’ in order to get in and do what they’re going to do.

The Professor quickly elides two substantive but different matters: a) the very acute question of the ‘rush to judgment’ that is has been an established Script in sex-offender melodrama for almost two decades now and b) the feminist complaint that the simple reality of not-accepting a self-declared victim’s story at face-value immediately is itself a collusion and a form of further assault.

The former matter has been dealt with at length elsewhere on this site. The latter has too, but Dines here gives us an instant example of all that’s going on with this raceandgender gambit in the case. First, there is the use of the word ‘victim’ without any qualifying ‘alleged’, which has the effect of presuming the veracity of the alleger’s (allegator’s?) claim(s), when actually the whole purpose of a trial is to determine – at its end – whether an act was indeed committed, which if it was committed would then and only then make the alleger a ‘victim’ for public purposes.

Second, there is the instant equation of doubt and skepticism about an alleger’s claims with some form of wrong-headed or even criminal refusal to help, which is then immediately construed as an insult to the alleger and as a ‘re-victimization’ of the alleger.

Now this type of carrying-on is a recipe for disaster in a legal system. The whole purpose of Due Process is to conduct a thorough and reasonable inquiry, sift for truth, and deliberate carefully in order to make a determination. But this is not the revolutionary’s way; the revolutionary’s way is to force one’s programme or agenda upon events, and in that work time-consuming ‘deliberation’ is the functional equivalent of cowardice and obstruction, a firefighter dawdling so as not to have to go into a burning building and rescue victims. Lenin found early on that not only Czarist-leaning judges but any judges who believed in the process of Law had to be done away with it because they were slowing down the work of his revolution. A true Soviet judge would need almost no time to determine if an accused would receive the weight of criminal sanction; many times it was simply the fact of ‘belonging’ to a certain class that constituted the ‘crime’; Stalin improved upon matters by making justice ‘presumptive’ and ‘proactive’: if you had even a moment’s access to a Westerner, then you might now doubt the wisdom of the Soviet system and why take that chance when you can be sent to Siberia to help build things?

So only then does the Professor get around to the true source of her ire: “I appeared as not just a gullible fool, but even worse, a gullible fool with a feminist agenda”. So there it is. But it’s even worse, I think: it was her flawed agenda that resulted her in taking a foolish approach to this case, and she was then caught out on the show, when it became clear not only that a) the ‘men’ in this case were not guilty and the ‘victim’ had indeed made some truth-challenged – if you wish – assertions, but also b) the media were not going to ignore the obvious this time in order to hew to the correct Script. The horror!

The Script is – and the Prof deploys it with the skill of a casino card-dealer – that the woman was victimized, that the men were boorish and violent criminal oppressors, and correct-thinking requires outrage at the men and immediate, unqualified sympathy not only with this victim but with all women-victims (the terms being for these purposes almost interchangeable). Running right by the fact that the alleger was a professional stripper and had accepted this gig at her usual rates, the Prof starts swinging her axe at something else: The show “leaves this woman stripped of her dignity and rendered invisible as a human being” and “it is the lying, black stripper and the amoral D.A.” who must be guilty. This, the Professor seems to think, should not be accepted as true even if – in this instance – it is true. That the woman “was bought and sold” precisely because she had advertised herself as a commodity is not a fact that the correct citizen notes.

But it apparently is true. And the defendants in this case – unlovely as they are – were facing serious and lifelong criminal consequences (nor would we want to accept the judicial fiction that sex-offender registry is purely ‘administrative’ and done to help keep track of you so you can be notified when ‘a treatment’, perhaps ‘a cure’, is ready).

And the defendants certainly are, to no small extent, unlovely. She quotes an email one of them sent which indicates that these boyos are in need of serious maturity: characterological, emotional, social, and spiritual. The thought that they might go on to positions of power in the military or business or law enforcement is deeply disconcerting. The thought that many of their kind, of previous age cohorts, are already in such positions is positively alarming (nor can the inhabitants of Unitary-Executive Land be discounted in such considerations).

But we cannot solve the ‘boyo’ problem by dismantling the legal and justicial protections that keep us the Republic and the democracy that we are. Nor can we much longer tolerate not only the consequences of such dismantling, but the noxious inability to see and speak Truth to the ‘revolutionary’ elements that have been whacking away (with some good intention) at the carrying-walls of our society and culture and Constitutional protections.

I am not speaking here for a return to ‘boyo’ behavior (and indeed I fear we are now in the throes of ‘boyo’ government). Nor am I speaking against actual victimization. But I am speaking against the ‘revolutionary’ solution that, duplicitously, has been deconstructing the structures and fabric of law, justice and culture for decades now while claiming to be simply a well-intentioned rescue mission in an extreme emergency. That was how the boyos in Washington City spun the war in Iraq.

We may presume that much of what Professor Dines professes is taught to students at her college, and to the extent that her material is representative of mainstream doctrine in the universities, that it is taught to many students at many institutions. And has been for quite a few years, even decades. So how many students and – far more numerously – graduates are now among us operating on the tenets of this ‘education’, conducting a life and a societal participation on that basis? And what consequences accrue from that?

The times are changing and a hard rain’s going to fall. Down with the revolution. Up with the Republic.

NIFONG NIGOOD

Reports in the “Washington Post” (www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/24/AR2007012400507) and elsewhere that the prosecutor in the Duke Rape Case(s), Mike Nifong, is now going to be brought up on more serious ethics violations before the North Carolina State Bar. The entire 33-page complaint claims that his actions “constitute a systematic abuse of prosecutorial discretion”.

The matter has been discussed previously on this site (“Put Up Your Dukes”) but let’s give it another go.

The Nifong case is a firebell in the night, alerting us to not one but two fires eating greedily away at the integrity of our criminal justice system. The first fire is Militarization and the second fire is – for lack of a formal phrase - ‘Sensitivity Reforms’.

From the ‘right’ the integrity of the system is being eaten away by the military-type prioritizing of Outcome of Integrity of Process, in order to control the Outcome and make sure it’s in your favor, to ensure – in a word – Victory. This is the military way. This is also the JAG way. It is ballsy and cocky and brash and in-your-face and gives modern- day males a chance to be gunslingers like the Strong Man With A Gun Whose Violence Saves and Redeems back in those old movies. It gives JAGs a chance to notch their resumes so that they too can stand at the bar (liquor type) and brag as loud as the line officers and pilots and other heroes, even though law school meant that they didn’t – most of them – ever actually get around to serving up there where the hot lead flies.

It gives wannabes and wannabe-reelected DAs a chance to grab some of that can-do military aura. All you have to do is to declare that justice is a ‘war’ and that therefore anything that has to be done to Win that war is Good. It makes the accused your ‘enemy’, and being an ‘enemy’, well then – bringing him down is the object of the drill, right? Any way it takes. Any way at all. Integrity is too expensive a commodity to be kept in regular supply in war. “Due Process” is just another word for letting the enemy win; it’s one of those ‘townsfolk’ phrases for hen-pecked shopkeepers and bonneted old ladies. No self-respecting gun-guy, especially if he’s the Good Guy, can ever stand to let those town-types get all prissy and wussy when it comes to Making Things Right.

That’s what the militarization of justice has done. And of course, in the military justice system, the whole thing is weighted toward the prosecution. On top of all the obvious but never-admitted factors that work against any accused in the system, the military prosecutor has all sorts of built-in powers that his poor wuss-pecked civilian counterparts do not. (See "Miiltary Justice Is No music", Parts 1 and 2, on this site.)

But the JAGs, and the gummint itself, have been working to rectify that. Many a JAG gets off the active-duty gravy train only to go into civilian law enforcement and prosecution. Others become law school faculty or heads of law schools; many are judges in the civilian courts. One was the Clerk of the Supreme Court not so long ago. Working from within the system, egging on ex-military who are now in law enforcement, keeping their ship sailing squarely before the wind of anti-crime ‘wars’ that feed off assorted public anxieties yet serve ultimately only to enhance the police power of the gummint at the expense of liberty and Integrity, these types sustain and intensify the relentless termite assault on Constitutional justice.

Meanwhile, in the name of ‘sensitivity’ and feeding off the same media-stoked public anxieties, advocates for ‘reform’ of the Process loudly bring pressure to effectively dismantle by pieces the strong bulwarks set up not only to protect individual citizens from the ever-to-be-inspected power of the government, but to protect the accused from the not-always-rational passions of the public, and to protect the public itself from perpetrating primitive acts of lynch-law ‘justice’ that will deform the minds and hearts and souls of the perpetrators and that can never be undone.

In the Nifong case, the specific ‘sensitivity’ was around the now-entrenched, highly Scripted ‘sex-offender’ campaign, which itself feeds off the fuels provided by feminist advocacy and advocates for victims, as well by anti-crime advocates and assorted religious advocacies.

Nifong’s behavior – as it is now coming to light – and the very bland, matter-of-factness with which it was carried on, reveals a pattern that should frighten us all. He arrogates to himself the cocky, you-can’t-touch-me attitude of the military prosecutor, relying on the now-de rigeur sex-offender prosecution Script wherein fearless prosecutor wreaks official vengeance on obviously-guilty (they being men and this being about sex) perps, supported by outraged community baying in full cry like a Greek chorus from Hell. Long live our glorious indefatigable Prosecutors! Or, as the French has it: ‘public procurers’. Nor does he think he's doing anything wrong, really. This is the way you 'do it' nowadays; this how 'justice' is done in our modern American reality.

The Prosecutor, fed by Right and Left, has swelled to a status and power far beyond what is safe and healthy for the integrity of our criminal justice system. That he has come a cropper in the Nifong case might merely indicate, as it did in Salem in 1693, that he went and picked on the wrong ‘witches’, i.e. students of a powerful and – the hot ironies! – militarily-inclined university with more than its share of deeply ‘old-school’ alumni who ain't gonna sit by and see their male heirs put through the sausage-grinder of sex-offense justice and its Script.

Whether Prosecutor Nifong simply picked the wrong ‘enemy’ against whom to deploy the usual sex-offense Script, or whether finally this firestorm is starting to cool, remains to be seen. Much damage has already been done; significant structural elements of our traditional Justice process have been damaged, perhaps irreversibly. Twenty years worth of students have grown up assuming that this Script as it has played out in various cases constitutes one of the most essential and valuable threads of our modern civic reality.

Nor is it probable that they are far-enough matured to note on their own the ominous similarities between the rush-to-convict (sex-offenses being only the most recent instance) and the rush-to-invade (Iraq being only the first in a planned sequence paving the oil-spattered road to Hell).

There is much to consider in this case. We must apply ourselves to reflect upon it and assess it soberly. Lest we wind up like Mr. Nifong, as described by Shakespeare: “Exit, pursued by a bear.” It’s no way for a great People to go out.

SEX AND SEX AND SEX

It seems that’s all we ever think about. Too bad, because while we were thus away, the country has taken a violent lurch toward authoritarianism and we’ve made the Vietnam mistake all over again, only this time it’s worse (in the ‘60s we were still the world’s dominant economic and industrial power, our middle class was comfortable and confident in its own and the country’s future, and there was a wide consensus that being “American” was mostly a good thing and you’d want it for your children and your children’s children - not so any more). We have lost our “internal empire” in a fit of absence of mind. Or rather, we have taken it apart, timber by timber, in mid-ocean. Repairs are in order, if we can keep our minds to the task.

But that last was a metaphor and metaphors can only take you so far. To be on a self-deconstructed ship in the middle of the ocean, to see water coming in where there used to be solid timber … yes, that indeed can have the effect of concentrating the mind wonderfully. But rarely in ‘everyday’ life are we confronted with such a clear sight of our situation: all sorts of distractions and denials are possible, since non-immediate and subtle warnings can be spun – even to ourselves – as a ‘glitch’, an ‘oddity’, or even an undigested bit of beef. So if any concentrating is going to be done, we’ll have to do it ourselves. If we’re up to it.

Kim Ridley reports that “precocious puberty” is on the rise (Ode Magazine, see www.truthout.org/issues_06/010907HA.shtml). It appears that girls are now reaching puberty as early as 8, and boys as well. The culprit appears to be accidental exposure to “hormone-mimicking” chemicals. The shocker is to find out that such chemicals are in all sorts of everyday stuff: plastics (mimicking estrogen) are found in personal-care products, pesticides, and flame-retardants, and at least one type of PVC that’s in shower curtains, toys, and packaging; boys had absorbed inordinate amounts of testosterone from normal skin contact with fathers who were using testosterone-enhanced cosmetic and sexual products.

Thoughts as to effects – “sequelae” as they say in the medical trade – flood in. Will these children now be further drugged in an effort to reduce or reverse the exposure? What will be the psychological effects on them? On boys specifically? On girls specifically? How reliable will these children be – when grown – as workers, as citizens, and (we’re really gonna need’em) as troops?

And of course, in light of what was noted in the immediately previous Post, what are the implications for the Republic of yet another aspect of the on-going ‘Emergency’ of sexoffensemadrapistsdaterapechildporngoraphychildmolesting that, like a particularly resourceful and agile virus, continues to mutate into a new and more virulent strain each time its initial ‘outrage-carrier’ has worn itself out, to the possibly permanent detriment of the structural elements of The Republic? With the already dubious ‘sexually unaware child’ now reaching puberty at age 8, will the government – at the invitation of the Advocacy – demand even more authority to intrude in the lives of everybody?

It had been noted a Post or two ago that up in Boston its paper, the “Boston Globe”, had piously commemorated the 5th anniversary of its sex-offender-priest campaign in the Sunday edition. An Op-Ed wondrously showed up on its pages, in which an advocacy organization specifically erected for the purpose back then vowed now to expand its ‘war’ to the entire world, and would not close down shop until “the truth” was out all over the aforementioned planet. Such extension of a war has a familiar ring these days.

Tuesday, under the rubric of reporting, the paper did an article on a “solemn midday march” by “about 60 people” from the local Cathedral to “a nearby law school” who were demonstrating in favor of more legislation to combat this “silent, violent epidemic”. And as always, “a cheering crowd” (number not even estimated, perhaps as low as 60) supported the unveiling of a proposed set of “reforms” to the law. The only bright spot in the ‘reporting’ was that the posters carried along – also de rigeur for this sort of event – carried photos of children “allegedly” abused by priests, a sub-class of the species Homo Sapiens that could include – granted the “allegedly” – just about, oh, anybody and everybody.

The “epidemic” is a three-fer: granting the authority of science and the urgent compassion of medicine in the face of a worsening crisis. Well it’s a four-fer, actually: the ‘crisis’ is “silent” … which is code for “hidden” which is code for “there’s no palpable evidence of it” which leads the devotant to the only conclusion allowable: there is no evidence because a massive world-wide conspiracy has hidden it. Add to this then the academic ploy: but you can read all about it in our Theory, which will fully fill in any gaps in facts that cannot be located out in the actual world.

Anybody familiar with the old Soviet reality can read this ‘reporting’ and the event itself to plumb the full depths of its many calculated dimensions. We are dealing here with a ‘script’ taken almost wholly from the manuals of the old Socialist Realism and the days of those ‘spontaneous demonstrations’ so familiar in Communist capitals.

The media must bear a huge responsibility for this mess (Iraq and the sex-offense mania). In both instances its utter lack of skepticism has lubricated the whole thing. In the Iraq matter, a ‘sensitivity to’ and a ‘respect for’ the government resulted in no hard questions being asked and no revealing pictures to be shown; thus not only were returning military coffins not shown (not very often and far too late, anyway) but in April or May of 2003 the media filmed a “spontaneous” demonstration by the liberated Iraqis, who went and pulled down Saddam’s statue. As Molly Ivins recently pointed out, the wider-angle non-American footage shows a sparse bunch of Iraqi onlookers and a Marine tank or tank-like vehicle actually pulling the hefty thing down with a cable. No wonder the government felt it could get away with torture. Before that, in the sex-offense matter, ‘sensitivity to’ and ‘respect for’ the self-declared victim has emasculated any skepticism. Almost anything can be claimed, almost any change in the law will be called a ‘reform’, almost any theory will be listened to respectfully.

No wonder then that the media have crippled themselves. By not only embracing a bad idea (the abandonment of objectivity in reporting) but then erecting it into a Plan (advocacy journalism, as it is called) they have undercut their role as watchdogs. It has now reached the point where they can’t credibly investigate the government and report their findings because their ‘reportage’ of the assorted doings of the Advocacies has been so skewed that the government – sleazily but with some truth – could claim the media are being ‘biased’ against it. This loss of its soul happened to the media long before the corporate interests began treating ‘news’ divisions as profit-centers and we might even surmise that the 1996 Act allowing news outlets to be amassed by monster for-profit corporations was simply an acknowledgement that the media had forfeited their special status within the Constitutional Republic, and were now just another hawker on the consumer highway.

As has been noted previously on this site (see “Bishops Bomb”) the Catholic Church in America was a large, slow-moving target, and sorta low-hanging fruit, back in the day. It was stolidly all-male in a world where feminists were angling for more space and power; it was heavily dependent on Reason and Tradition in an era when Feelings were raised on high and all Tradition was suspect as a tool of ‘oppression’; to hungry, theology-and-ministry-challenged Fundamentalists it was an unbeatable and enviable opponent; and it had a very irreverent habit of speaking out against abortion and gayness – annoying the increasingly rabid Left, and (the unpatriotic impudence!) of lecturing the government of Ronald Reagan and the Pentagon about the immorality of nuclear war - annoying the increasingly rabid Right.

And the Church in America was beset by numerous internal issues. Since 1965’s Vatican Council had ended the Church had been stressed by numerous competing and vocal factions, none of whom were looking to “reason together”: feminists who wanted men out of – or at least women into – the priesthood and the right to abortion if the need arose; traditionalists who wanted the gays out, the 12th century back, and who doubted the validity of every Pope since John XXIII; radical reformers who wanted the hierarchy sorta out and a ‘democracy’ of some sort put in its place; gays who wanted to be living an ‘out-er’ life; a priesthood trained more for garrison duty and ‘maintenance’ than for breaking new ground in matters spiritual; and an episcopacy coasting along on its ‘status’ as doctrinally sound and quite content to ‘administrate’ rather than rock any boats (the aforementioned nuclear-war lectures being the work of ‘rogue’ prelates and troublesome priests since passed from the scene). A true medieval carnival brought into our own times. And a heavily-laden, wallowing, lumbering, inattentively-captained treasure ship if ever there was one. Once upon a time in Hollywood any C-list screenwriter could have ginned up an optionable script with this stuff in a week.

Enter the sex-offense advocacy, fresh from its massive mis-steps in the kiddie daycare/serial-molestation-in animal-suits events, which had scored a couple-three convictions (almost all except the Massachusetts ones now vacated or reversed) but at great cost to the credibility of sex-offense ‘law’ and sex-offender ‘science’.

The Advocacy had become, in an eerie similarity, “Teflon”, like the Great Communicator himself. Instead of retiring in sackcloth to reflect upon its sins, the Advocacy immediately returned to the fray (that it itself had started). It deployed sensationalism and awful crime in high places (grounding itself in the scientific creds of Freud – such as they are – and seducing the increasingly seducible media); it deployed either-or thinking to capitalize on particularly awful cases to mobilize fear and outrage and suppress not only dissent but even doubt, and to distract from the thinness of the provable (or even perceptible) facts on the ground; it deployed ‘science’ that based itself on anecdote, self-reports, speculation, and shoddy research; it attacked law as ‘obstructive’ of justice and ‘insensitive’ to the needs of the victims (whose status as such had not yet been established by a trial of the facts) and demanded ‘reforms’ that would effectively dismantle the male-oppressive emphasis on Reason, Due Process, and Rules of Evidence (all precisely in place to prevent the awefull police power of the state from being deployed inaccurately against a defendant).

And in effect, the Framers’ scenario of a predatory and ever-engorging police power of the government versus an independent, individual citizen was scrapped for: the innocent victim of a crazed and irreformable monster-stranger living in pain and unavenged, demanding rescue and redress from the powerful but somnolent government police power (which, of course the hero-Advocacies would wake up).

And then, at some point, it must have occurred to the hombres in government that rather than being pesky ‘wimmen’ – even in a man’s body, some of ‘em – interfering with the traditional mano-a-mano of Cop-vs-Robber, these advocates might be a very convenient wave upon which to launch their ever-ready surf-boards. The advocates provided the police power with one of those Kowabunga moments that have sweetened the dreams of every ambitious policeman since time immemorial. And suddenly, rather than being rebuked, ducked, or simply ignored, this Advocacy was brought in to be photographed with law enforcement honchos and prosecutors. And – as used to be intoned at Santa Anita – they were off.

Back to the “Globe”. Priests had occasionally been snagged in the increasingly wide trawl nets of the sex-offense sensibility since the early 1980s. Whether there were more priests, statistically, committing these offenses than in other groups or professions, was (and still is) not clearly known. The ‘rape’, cases of which had initially engaged the legitimate outrage of the public, became ‘abuse’ and then ‘molesting’, the media reporting the exponentially-increasing numbers of incidents even as media descriptions of any particular case became increasingly vague, and finally dissolved into the simple rote descriptors of ‘abuse’ and ‘molestation’.

None of this is to imply an approval of the perpetration of any form of unwanted sexual experience, nor does it imply a blanket dismissal of or pardon for any such perpetrations by Roman Catholic priests. But given the manipulations of this Advocacy, abetted after a while by the hugely well-placed opportunism of the government police power, we simply don’t know, in each individual case. This engorgement of the police power – especially the criminal police power - included the substantive weakening of classic justicial boundaries put in place to preserve the achievement of Truth in determining an individual’s guilt or innocence.

Now, seen from the point of view of the Framers’ vision, it’s as if Kong was being purposely released, the walls holding him into his part of the island were being breached and the massive gates swung open, on the assumption – never put to The People for serious and deliberate discussion – that Kong could be made to do ‘good things’ and would be amenable to control.; could be – eerily enough – domesticated, even as his feminist cheer-leaders were seeking to free themselves from this or that form of ‘domestication’ through him. Again, this script would be optionable and it almost writes itself. But then – as in so many of these Advocacy-managed phenomena – the thing has already been carefully scripted at the outset by the Advocacy’s professionals themselves. A screenwriter would almost be superfluous.

And if it be asserted that the purpose of this vast engorgement of the criminal police power was not to accurately apply the Law to mere (mere!) individual cases but rather was to ‘send a message’, then we are regressed back to Stalin’s poo-poohing the gambit with the aphorism that In order to make your omelet you have to break some eggs. Such is the morality of revolution. But then, hadn’t it been clearly said that that’s what the feminists were all about in the first place? Who could be surprised? They couldn’t have made themselves clearer back in the days of the (whichever) Wave.

But by the middle of the 1990s, it appeared to the bishops that the storm had passed; a few priests had been swallowed up in the waves – hopefully guilty but whatever happened was God’s will – and business could be gotten back to usual. And so it was within the walls of the Church’s enclave.

But then came Bush, and with him his Fundamentalist base that had been quietly engorging throughout the later 1980s and had really started to bite deeply when the Republicans made their thousand-year Contract with America in 1994. And them Kathliks were still – as they had always been – in the way. And then came 9-11, and the Pope of the time was known to frown upon war, having – unlike Mr. Bush or his echelon of advisors – been through a war and an Occupation himself and he hadn’t skipped town. It is hard not to imagine some folks there in Washington City wondering if the worthy gentlepope and his organization might not be somehow distracted? And might not at the same time the Incumbency’s increasingly enthusiastic ‘base’ be fortified for the exertions to come (the revelation of which had not been seen fit to vouchsafe to such excitable types)? A two-fer. What wasn’t to like?

Be that as it may, on January 2, 2002, even as the plans for war were being secretly drawn up in Washington City, the aforesaid “Globe” did with deliberation aforethought ‘break’ the ‘story’ of Kathlik sex-abuse. It would receive a Pulitzer Prize for reporting. But of course by this time the Advocacy had managed things such that all a ‘reporter’ really had to do was put a name on the front page with an allegation: that chum in the water, it was merely a matter of time – and not usually a lot of it. Since allegations and claims could be made with a reasonable certainty that one wouldn’t be too closely examined oneself and/or that matters had happened so long ago that few witnesses and little evidence might be left and/or that the offensive act might have been unprovable even when it was allegedly committed … these ‘reforms’ of media and justicial praxis bid fair to provide an increasing number of allegations and claims.

The haplessness of the episcopacy, that chose not to honestly contest but rather to quietly try to ‘bury’ individual problems, was soon demonstrated, as the ‘individual’ claims rose to a flood. But too, by that point what prudent defense lawyer would have recommended ‘contesting’ since the media and courts had already ‘reformed’ themselves into a partiality all the more obnoxious for its smarmy and righteous protestations of good intentions (so similar to fundamentalistic style).

Nor did the bishops prove themselves particularly conversant even with the virtues of their own tradition. The Catholic tradition of patience with the long, sustained, staggery struggle of the individual human person toward spiritual growth was allowed to be ‘spun’ as sleazy and feckless collusion in the maintenance of vast underground cabals of sexual depravity. It seemed after a while a real question as to how much the bishops knew … about the Catholic ethos they were consecrated to nurture. But they were ‘administrators’, sanctity being considered a bit too malleable a foundation for the principles of sound management.

Ominously, the righteous impatience with Evil and the violent thrusts to expunge it were far more characteristic of the fundamentalistic approach to life and people. After watching that approach’s success – if it may be so called – in the “Globe’s” gambit, perhaps the Incumbency took increased devotion to the assumption that such an approach would work as effectively in foreign affairs as it had in domestic.

In its current article, the “Globe” obliquely compliments and justifies itself (yes, things are starting to reach that point) by noting in the accents of science that “between 1950 and 2003 162 priests were accused of sexually abusing minors. This group represents about 7 percent of the priests serving in the Archdiocese during that period …” This is a clear statement that paradoxically (except to readers who learned to read under the unique tutelage of “Pravda” and “Izvestia”) raises far more questions than it purports to answer.

Over 53 years 162 priests were accused. That comes out to 3.05 priests per year. They were accused, but what was the outcome of those accusations? What was the definition of the ‘abuse’ – was it rape? Improper touching? Improper thoughts? How many interactions between priests and minors of the Archdiocese might reasonably be calculated to have taken place over those 53 years? And of that number of interactions, how great a percentage is constituted by the quoted acts of ‘abuse’? And of those acts of ‘abuse’ how many were rape? Improper touching? Improper communicating? And so forth.

This would give us some hard numbers. As opposed to ‘extrapolating’ and ‘reverse extrapolation’ or “unofficial studies” or “unofficial records” or anecdotes or stories or memories dim or repressed or – still conceptually implausible and professionally unaccepted – ‘recovered’.

None of the foregoing is any way meant to condone misconduct, and physical violence against any human being is utterly criminal. But it is an awesome and awe-full thing to deploy the criminal law – or even the civil law – against any individual. Those who choose to deploy it and execute its operations must be held accountable for the force they unleash, and for the consequences intended and unintended, foreseen but even unforseeable (and does any of this sound familiar?).

And we desperately need the hard numbers in order to help us get some perspective on just how big a threat we face. WMD would have been a huge threat, had they existed. The size of the ‘bomber gap’ screamed by anti-communist Republicans against their own Party’s President – Eisenhower – would have been fatal, had it existed. The size of the ‘missile gap’ deployed by candidate Kennedy against candidate (and Vice-President) Nixon would have been utterly lethal, had it existed. On the basis of those exaggerated numbers our fears were exaggerated, and Truth went overboard as far too burdensome a cargo to be carried in such a tempest. Such ‘emergencies’ create a deforming damage not easily mended.

And it cannot be enough to say that all is justified if we ‘mean well’ or if we ‘save even just one’. The road to hell is proverbially strewn with good intentions. And the damage we have inflicted – not only on any inaccurately accused but on the framework of our own Constitutional Republic and on our own ability as its citizenry to People this Republic – will not easily be mended. And the consequences of that damage, in an eerie mirror image, are demonstrated palpably in the now un-spinnable and undeniable debacle that Iraq has become.

What will happen to this sex-offense activity may seem of less concern than the wreck of our interest and our standing and our honor and integrity in Iraq. But this particular Advocacy has not only wrought its own damage but provided, it seems to me, the playbook for the Iraq misadventure. That blood cries out from the earth.

Let every priest and every bishop take serious and renewed devotion to his responsibilities, interpreted in the deepest and broadest and highest way. Let every authentic victim be graced to come forward and speak, and let everyone of goodwill who chooses to assist in that find strength and let every ‘reporter’ committed to accuracy and the truth amplify their experience.

But let every single mother-loving one of them remember that, contrary to the postmodernists there is indeed a Truth, and that contrary to the Fundamentalists that Truth is not determined by adherence to a flag, and that contrary to the garrison-mentality of churchly organization that Truth is so alive as to raise the blood-pressure and the hair on one’s neck as it draws near, and contrary to the flattened vision of a world collapsed into its surfaces and its appearances there is a Vertical dimension to each of us – up and down – and a Beyond over all of us. And It draws near. Wisdom attend!