With A Vengeance

 Once a person was asked to step into this brutal century,
anything could happen 
--A Confederacy of Dunces,
John Kennedy 

Your love is like bad medicine
Bad medicine is what I need
Shake it up, just like bad medicine
There ain't no doctor that can
Cure my disease 
--Bad Medicine, Bon Jovi

 You can only kill those who never harmed you 
--Vengeance is Mine (1979)
_____________________

Ranger does not quail at the sight of blood, but he stands in awe of the virtual violence dished out in heaping helpings to a ravenous audience apres the terrorist events of  9-11-01.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (or, "Men Who Hate Women") was published posthumously to much acclaim in 2005; it is now the biggest-selling ebook. The eponymous "girl" exacted vengeance via her computer hacking skills. She was Machiavellian and presented as autistic; she did not understand the more gentle human emotions like "love", mistaking it for opportunistic sex.

Popular television series "Golden Boy" features the youngest homicide detective in NYPD history, who gets there by planting evidence which indicts a "bad guy". He has earned adulation and rank by flouting the law, and each episode follows this template of a supposedly conflicted morality: Good guy does illegal things to get bad guys. The problem is, morality is not the issue in the arena of law, which is quite specific.

The ultra-violent series, "The Following" features an FBI agent who is chasing a nasty serial killer. However, the FBI agent killed a person in revenge before his appointment as a federal agent, so again, vengeance is rewarded. 

Bad characters mete out bad (unconstitutional) police work, and the viewers find this gratifying and/or acceptable as entertainment.The violence being acted out supersedes anything portrayed in X-rated films of the past, the only possible result in the viewer is exhaustion, or faint relief that the incessant violence has ceased. 

Why do we subject ourselves to such visual and aural pain? 

These entertainments suggest a moral lassitude among our law enforcement personnel, and an aggrandizement of the Dirty Harry template. In an easy analogy, Presidents G. W. Bush and B. H. Obama are Golden Boys, and our entertainment inures and acclimates us to accept the supposed ubiquity of the transgressive behavior.

[addendum: We, like everyone else, are long on grievances but short on solutions. A reader sent the following effort from the site, "Free Man's Perspective,  "How to Fix Detroit in Six Easy Steps". ed.]

Big Boys Don't Cry

--Maria Datsykova

Thou shall not kill
Thou shall not steal
Thou shall not take the Lord's name in vain
Thou shall not cause thy children pain
--The Eleventh Commandment,
Collin Raye

Little child, looking so pretty
Come out and play, I'll be your daddy
Innocent child, looking so sweet
I'll rape your mind and on your flesh I'll eat
-- Daddy, Korn

The sexual abuse and exploitation of children
is one of the most vicious crimes conceivable,
a violation of mankind's most basic duty
to protect the innocent
--David Walsh

Children are the world's most valuable resource
and it's best hope for the future
--John F. Kennedy

But Jesus said, Suffer little children,
and forbid them not, to come unto me:
for of such is the kingdom of heaven
--Matthew 19:14
__________________

I know four men who were sexually assaulted when they were young.

Four, and I do not that many people intimately. I am not a counselor, nor have I ever solicited such information; how could one? Yet it is true: four men have confided in me of their abuse at the hands of relatives, headmasters or other trusted adults. Their response varies from melancholy and confusion to fury. Some have married, some never will. For each, it is a heavy burden.

It is unforgivable to break the innocence and trust of a young person via sexual exploitation -- to my mind, it is one of the highest moral offenses (ignoring the criminal aspect.) We all get to feel the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune soon enough, but sexual exploitation corrodes straight through to the core of a young person's identity. It can never be set aright, though one can hope -- if the victim is fortunate enough and resilient enough -- that the accretion of a lifetime of compassion may help eventuate some measure of healing.

In my limited experience with these four, they are the more sensitive and thoughtful among us; probably, they were the more trusting. All the more pity their abuse.

Poseur "Bishop" Eddie Long -- self-proclaimed imperfect man and accused child molester -- is back in the news last week after taking a sabbatical from his post at the mega church Atlanta New Birth Missionary Baptist after his wife (who held a position at New Birth via "divine ordination") filed for divorce. Apparently the divination decree did not extend to her marriage vows.

People like Mr. Long cannot earn a seat hot enough in hell, IMHO. Long, married father of four, settled in a non-disclosure agreement in May with five young men who accused him of sexual coercion, and though "[d]etails of the settlement were to be kept secret, people with knowledge of the case have put it at several million dollars paid over a period of years".

One can only be re-born so many times. A suggestion for Bishop Long's next incarnation (if not an incarceration based on new embezzlement charges) would be as a Gospel Clown, doing a perpetual atonement schtick before any ministry willing to listen to such a fraud. Not very funny, but one thing Long is eminently qualified to do.

Equally vile is the unfolding case of Ex-Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky and the now dozens of sexual abuse charges he faces. Many of the young men Sandusky is accused of assaulting were predated upon over a period of years and were procured via his Charity, the Second Mile. Complicit in the tragedy are police, university administration, probably Sandusky's wife, and many others.

How can this happen? Surely some of all of these people subscribe to a religion and presumably believe in the protection of the flock, no? Some say in the case Sandusky, it is a cabal of secrecy which surrounds profitable athletic programs. For those in the employ of the church, they have a ready-made cover.

But really, the issue is power. Children have no voice, and especially children of need. Layered upon that is guilt, and a sense of shame and culpability, and you have victims who nicely feed into the cabal. Shame may be one of bedrock human emotions, one not easily extinguished.

Oh that the perpetrators were able to access their own sense of shame, and minister to it accordingly, as only an adult is able to do. Until they do, the repercussions of violence and assault eddy outward. And we continue to feign naive shock when we hear of the latest shipwreck as we plod on the endless march of stupidity, cruelty and idiocy that is the worst of what we call a life.

If we cannot extinguish cruelty in a personal transaction, we will not be able to halt it on a more universal level. Thinking of the multifold abuses that occur in the silence of the church, one wonders if religion enables poor behavior by facilitating or accommodating our primate nature. Through the Confessional, indulgences, prayers and baptisms, one gets a sort of endless mulligan.

But what if there were no do-overs, and one could only sit in the welter of whatever it is they thought was a good decision at the time? What if one did not have recourse to some kind of divine or cosmic forgiveness, and one was stuck with the reality of his actions and the repercussions upon those whom he acted. Might that change our impetuous, self-gratifying nature? Is conscience capable of rising to the fore for the average person? Not as long as social institutions hand out free passes for feeble excuses called the School of Life.

Unless one is dealing with a true psychopath, it is usually not hard to find the genesis of aberrant behavior. The Sandusky's and Long's of the world are probably not ex nihilo.

• More than five children die every day as a result of child abuse.²
• It is estimated that between 50-60% of child fatalities due to maltreatment are not recorded as such on death certificates. ³
• More than 90% of juvenile sexual abuse victims know their perpetrator in some way. ⁴
• Child abuse occurs at every socioeconomic level, across ethnic and cultural lines, within all religions and at all levels of education.
• About 30% of abused and neglected children will later abuse their own children, continuing the horrible cycle of abuse. ⁵
• ^{Almost 500,000 episodes of child sexual molestation are reported annually in the U.S.}
• 14% of all men in prison in the USA were abused as children. ⁷
• 36% of all women in prison were abused as children. ⁷

(U.S. Statistics from ChildHelp.org)

National Insanity

Those who would give up a little liberty
for a little security would lose both and deserve neither
--Benjamin Franklin

This is supposed to be a happy occasion.
Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who
--Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

robot trainers earn their pay
as mutant kids go out to play
it's such a pretty pretty day
with orange nights and days of gray
--Cold Life, Ministry
__________________

Further reflections on the Tucson shooting, our violent culture and rush to abdicate civil liberties, and blindness to the implications of both:

Democracy requires citizen participation in what is already a strained relationship, as the electorate is far removed from the reality of its governance. A probable reactionary security protocol will further isolate the electorate from the elected. The more isolated the voters, the less informed their decisions; the more meaningless the gesture of voting.

To what purpose or benefit are we becoming a security state? Our leaders could be as delusional as the wanton shooters in our midst and we would not know, and the shooters are not some unimagined aberration; they represent the fringe just as the elected generally represent the privileged. There is no solution to this bifurcation.

The U.S. will close the barn door once again. But whatever the reaction, crazies will always breach the perimeter because they are unpredictable and there is no 100% security posture if we chose to remain a free society. If we became secure we would no longer be free. Safe, maybe, but not free. Further, the threat would have to be clearly identified: Safe from what?

The Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©) is supposedly keeping us safe from crusaders, as law enforcement protects us from criminals, but how to protect ourselves from crazies? It seems we will always be vulnerable to crazies, whether they be the lone desperado or entire posses, like the gang in the George W. Bush administration which fostered indefensible invasions, torture, secret prisons, illegal renditions, et. al. Taking this view, the acts of the lone gunman pale in comparison to the institutional insanity to which we are collectively held hostage.

What we sow, we reap. We vote symbolically and get screwed realistically, and we are so distracted and hypocritical we weep for the apparent aberrant violence while giving a pass to the institutional.

The Land of Rape and Honey

One of these days I'm gonna
change my evil ways
Till then I'll just keep riding on
--Ride On, AC/DC

far below original sin
far below the state I'm in
far below malicious crimes
far below her for the time
far below
far below
far below is the place you'll go, ho!
--Revenge, Ministry

Jesus loves the little children
All the children of the world
Red and yellow, black and white
They are precious in his sight
--Everything is Beautiful, Kalb and Stevens

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to violence,
the word and the act
--Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965)
____________________

Ranger Question of the Day [RQOD]:

Why do we fly the flag at half-mast when white,
well-to-do folks get shot by a gunman,
but ignore shootings in L.A. barrios, Washington D. C. slums
and all the other free-fire zones we call "inner cities"?
Are some deaths more worthy of sorrow than others?
____________________

If the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©) were real, why do our congressional representatives travel freely and unabashedly among the populace? The lack of security around our Senators and Representatives suggests that foreign terrorism is a conjured bogeyman which gives the military and government something to do and with which to distract the people.

Meanwhile, though terrorists cannot get to our unprotected VIPs, our indigenous crazies can do so with impunity. What is the actual threat when foreign crusaders and criminals cannot outperform our own nut jobs, of which there is no shortage?

Ranger attends gun shows and often comments on the bat-shit crazy philosophy and hatred promulgated by the National Rifle Association and associated groups which subscribe to the Glenn Beck Truth Ministry. The annual NRA convention is a bacchanalia of Right Wing paranoia parading as patriotism, deep-fried in all things red, white and blue.

Yet somewhere between the NRA and Congress reside the bulk of U.S. citizens, but how to define them? Surely most would say we are a peace-loving nation, but since 1847 every generation of Americans has fought a major war. We travel with death and are comfortable killing people, presently raining it down surgically from Predator drones, never shedding a tear or taking a moment to reflect upon the need / needlessness of such actions, but shootings in Tucson sure do cause a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Soldiers win medals for killing. This archetype is so powerful that even the best-selling video games want a cut of the action. "Medal of Honor" and "Call to Duty", for example, show nothing but unadulterated, unabated violence. How many hours in a day does the average young person spend participating in such spectacles, wielding such ersatz power to destroy? "I oughta kill you" need no longer be hyperbole.

Our entertainment is filled with violent heroes who kill with weapons. Beloved modern directors like the Coen Brothers or Quentin Tarantino show realistic shootings up close and personal. Any attempt to attenuate the violence by calling it Pulp Fiction is lost on the more disturbed, or more determined, among us. When Sheriff Rooster Cogburn vaporizes a guy's head with his trusty Colt 45, this is heroic; possibly a defective mind conflates and mimics this action by shooting a congressperson. If shooting people is heroic in wars, games and movies, then it must be o.k. on Main Street right?

If your tastes do not run to the art house, there is always cage fighting, World Wide Wrestling, boxing and pro football for your amusement. What is the effect upon those whose minds are unable to differentiate between symbol and reality? Our lives are supersaturated with violence, yet we are befuddled when we see people who fail to differentiate reality from fantasy and pop a cap on someone's head.

We have become inured to violence and killing, and are blase to its ubiquity. Of course, other national traits feed these actions: We are fiercely individualistic, praised in some circles for "going rogue" and for "letting it all hang out". We gain too-easy accolades from grade school on up, and political correctness demands "everyone is beautiful, in his own way."

We are a culture of violence. While we can legislate gun restrictions and medicate for depression, we cannot criminalize insane behavior, the latter which seems to be a growth industry in America.