Giselbertus: The Temptation of Eve, Cathedral of St. Lazare at Autun, 12th century. (It is uncertain if Giselbertus is the name of the artist or a patron)**
“What Do Women Want?”
I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what’s underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty’s and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I’m the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I’ll pull that garment
from its hanger like I’m choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I’ll wear it like bones, like skin,
it’ll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in.
~ Kim Addonizio
What woman doesn’t have fantasies about a sexy red dress? Or at least “used to have”? Ah, to be a “scarlet woman” at least in appearance — fearless, shameless, look-at-me kind of woman who knows what she wants and how to get it. Flaunting rather than hiding. When men cross-dress, they don’t put on demure clothes and barely visible “natural” make-up. Their bigger egos naturally push them toward flaunting, toward the red dress.
The women I know love this poem. How come? I think it’s because women are socialized to be “nice” and always put the needs of others ahead of their own. If they resent it, but carefully bury that resentment. That’s why these lines — only when coming from a woman — are a shock:
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want.
But do we believe them? After all, a poet is a woman, so most likely she is just putting on this bravado, while underneath the imaginary dress she is “nice.” She is “sweet.”
The best comes after this passage — and the dress, while still a dress, becomes much more, the woman’s truth, the essence of her life:
When I find it, I’ll pull that garment
from its hanger like I’m choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I’ll wear it like bones, like skin,
it’ll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in.
Will she ever find this dress, even after she drops the layers and layers of slavish niceness? One hope is getting older. Once they see that there isn’t much time left, at least some women decide to make the best of their last years — at least before the disabilities of advanced aging take hold. This is the last chance to reach for what you want. The last chance to tell the truth. To eat the food we really like, to wear the clothes we love to wear (usually the comfortable sort), to get that puppy or kitten we always wanted. These are not small things — they are primary. Freedom!
Being buried in a red dress is not small either. Never mind “dying with honor.” It may be too late to live free. But to die free — in the end, that's what the red dress is about. At least that.
In contrast to wanting a red dress, some women want to be near-invisible.
DICKINSON AS “LEAST FIGURE ON THE ROAD”
And when the Heavens — disband —
And Deity conclude —
Then — look for me. Be sure you say —
Least Figure — on the Road —
~ Dickinson, 401
Ah, Emily, with her careful self-effacement, her “I'm nobody — who are you?”
And that was very clever of her too — her own rebellion, her freedom, her “red dress” was pretending she hardly even existed. That’s yet another strategy, one well suited for times when repression is just too heavy.
*
This being the Southwest, "no figure on the road" is the typical experience. After the biblical “end of the world” (eagerly looked forward to by many), for a while at least, things here would look pretty much the same . . . or in Nebraska, say.
I'm glad for the companionship of clouds.
By the way, “heavens disband” because “the kingdom of heaven” did not mean a place in the clouds. It meant the future paradise here on earth. “Thy kingdom come” — not that we “go to heaven” — the Jews at the time of Jesus had no concept of “going to heaven” — but that heaven come to earth.
“Writing is that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.” ~ Pico Iyer
That, too, is the essence of Emily Dickinson.
*
“By the time she was their age, she had seen all the Kurosawas, all the Tarkovskys, all the Fellinis, all the Antonionis, all the Fassbinders, all the Wertmullers, all the Satyajit Rays, all the Rene Clairs, all the Wim Wenders, all the Truffauts, the Goddards, the Chabrols, the Resnaises, the Rohmers, the Renoirs, and all these kids have seen is Star Wars.” ~ Philip Roth, The Human Stain
Somewhat my experience after I came to this country — not that intensely with movies, but mainly with literary masterpieces. Antigone, Oedipus, Crime and Punishment, Les Miserables — those were unforgettable, formative encounters. Toss in also my knowledge of world history (much as I’d hated memorizing the dates of battles). My American peers had been formed chiefly by mass culture. There was much less common cultural heritage than I’d expected. History began with George Washington (well, OK, Columbus; someone asked me, “Did you know who Columbus was before you came to America?”)
“You must feel very lonely,” a sensitive LA woman poet once observed. I was even glad for Catholicism — at least I could talk to ex-Catholics, and have something in common.
"Bicycle Thieves" was one of several unforgettable movies that stayed in my mind forever, along with "400 Blows." Those movies expanded my empathy and molded my psyche. There was no possibility of becoming a Republican after seeing a movie like that. None.
Perhaps that's one reason that there is more sympathy for the poor in Europe: well-known cinematic masterpieces made it very plain about the power of circumstances. Inequality and randomness have always been on display in European cinema: a hero defeated by circumstances is a familiar, and sympathetic, “figure on the road” (to borrow from Dickinson). I suspect this is still true: when misfortune strikes, Europeans are less likely to assume that it's all your fault, you deserve it, you didn't work hard enough, didn't “dress for success," think positive, etc.
~ “Einstein warned: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” I would say that the unleashed power of language yields clusterfucks that are beyond us to manage.” ~ Jeremy Sherman
Oriana:
We’ve developed abstract concepts. Religions and ideologies were not far behind, ever grander and more absolute, leading to enormous suffering and slaughter.
Obviously, we can’t roll back the development of language. But we can educate children (and people in general) to question absolutes.
And we can become more aware of how our need to find meaning and patterns everywhere can lead us astray. A bird may be a symbol of freedom, but the real bird is primarily interested in food. That’s not inspiring, and we crave inspiration. But if we take an interest in reality, that may prove fascinating. Did you know that if humans had the metabolism of a hummingbird, they would have to consume approximately 155,000 calories a day?
LORENA BOBBITT AND THE AMERICAN DREAM
~ “On June 23, 1993, between 3:30 and 4:30 A.M., Lorena Bobbitt, 24, cut off the penis of her sleeping husband, John Wayne Bobbitt, 26, in Manassas, Virginia, a small town 30 miles west of Washington, D.C. She fled the scene, penis in hand, in a 1991 Mercury Capri. At the intersection of Maplewood Drive and Old Centreville Road, she flung the penis out the driver’s-side window, before continuing on her way. The penis landed in a grassy field opposite a 7-Eleven.
Lorena Gallo, born in Ecuador in 1969, raised in Venezuela, became besotted with the America she saw in our movies and TV shows. In 1987, she came to the U.S. on a student visa, enrolling in Northern Virginia Community College. She worked as a manicurist at the salon of a local businesswoman, Janna Bisutti. At a dance hall near the U.S. Marine Corps base at Quantico, Lorena met Lance Corporal John Wayne Bobbitt, of Niagara Falls, New York. The attraction was instantaneous, powerful, mutual. Lorena: “I thought John was very handsome. Blue eyes. A man in a uniform, you know? He was almost like a symbol—a Marine, fighting for the country. I believed in this beautiful country. I was swept off my feet. I wanted my American Dream.” John: “Lorena was pretty. She was innocent. She was real, real sweet.” On June 18, 1989, they wed. The bride was 20, the groom 22.
The union went south quick. Lorena blamed John’s violence: physical (he beat her, she claimed), sexual (he forced her to engage in anal intercourse, and later to undergo an abortion, she claimed), emotional (he threatened to have her deported, she claimed). John, who denies all such allegations, blamed Lorena’s greed. “Lorena was a good wife a lot of the time. But she was obsessed with having her American Dream, her American Dream, her American Dream—she said it all the time. Janna Bisutti had a big house, a cabin cruiser, a Mercedes. Lorena wanted those things. She just wanted too much, too fast.”
In 1991, John was discharged from the Marines and found himself without steady employment. Lorena became the main breadwinner. Their fights escalated. She called 911 (so did he). Lorena was caught embezzling $7,200 from Bisutti (she stole the money out of desperation, she claimed, because she was supporting both her and John). The couple’s house went into foreclosure. They broke up. A year later they reconciled. It didn’t take.
John and Lorena had already agreed to separate again when, in the early-morning hours of June 23, 1993, John returned to their apartment with his friend and houseguest, Robert Johnston, after a night of drinking. Johnston retired to the living room; John to the bedroom, where Lorena was asleep. According to Lorena, John raped her before falling asleep himself. She went to the kitchen for a glass of water. She saw a knife. She used it to cut off his penis. “I didn’t want to teach him a lesson,” says Lorena. “No, it was survival. Life and death. I was fearing for my life.” According to John, the sex was consensual. “I was leaving her for good,” says John. “It was what my mom said—If she couldn’t have me, no one could. And there was the green card, too. That didn’t come to my mind at the time, but it’s obvious. You have to be married to an American citizen for five years to get one, and we’d only been married for four.”
On November 11, 1993, a jury of nine women and three men found John not guilty of marital sexual assault. Two months later, on January 21, 1994, a jury of seven women and five men found Lorena not guilty of malicious wounding due to temporary insanity. Both offenses carry a maximum sentence of 20 years.
By acquitting both John and Lorena, the judicial system was basically throwing up its hands, admitting it didn’t know who to blame. The public, however, was neither so confused nor so equivocal. Complexity and ambiguity be damned. They wanted a villain—John, an under-employed former Marine barfly with barbells for brains. And a heroine—Lorena, a young woman tipping the scales at 92 pounds who could hardly speak except to weep. This wasn’t life, it was TV. In fact, it was reality TV, or would have been were such a term yet coined.
CNN aired Lorena’s trial in its entirety. When coverage was interrupted to show President Clinton’s press conference on Ukraine’s nuclear disarmament, the switchboard lit up with calls from irate viewers who didn’t want to miss a single second of the proceedings, the minutiae of the couple’s squabbles—over whether to buy a real Christmas tree or a plastic one, for instance—riveting in their banality. Comedians hadn’t had it so good since a Long Island teenager named Amy Fisher knocked on the door of Mrs. Joey Buttafuoco—and not to sell Girl Scout cookies. Outside the courthouse, vendors hawked Slice sodas and hot dogs, penis-shaped chocolates, T-shirts bearing the legend LOVE HURTS. Lorena expressed the hope that Marisa Tomei would play her in the movie. Once John’s trial wrapped up, he embarked on a 40-city tour in which he participated in “Stump the Bobbitt”—that is, tried to guess punch lines to jokes about his mutilation—went on radio programs, autographed steak knives, and appeared as a judge on Howard Stern’s New Year’s Eve pageant (fellow judges included Tiny Tim, Mark Hamill, and Daniel Carver, the Grand Dragon of the Georgia K.K.K.).
Once her trial ends, Lorena is able to impose on her life a new story line, one that could have been lifted from a Horatio Alger novel, or from the Hollywood movies and TV shows that so enchanted her as a teenager. Hers becomes a tale about making it in America with nerve, pluck, and grit.
After a 45-day psychiatric evaluation, doctors decide that Lorena isn’t a threat to herself or the community. She’s released from the psychiatric hospital. “I had no money, no job,” she tells me, as we sit in the kitchen of her house, a two-story affair in the quiet, suburban town of Gainesville, Virginia, a mere stone’s throw from Manassas. There’s a bowl of fruit on the table, family photos cover the walls. She continues, “I could go back to Venezuela and my parents, but I want my parents to come here for a better life. I have nothing, but I still have my American Dream.” That summer, she becomes a citizen. Her father, mother, brother, and sister are on hand to witness the proud moment. They stay in the hopes of being granted citizenship themselves. Lorena supports them all as an administrative assistant and a manicurist.
A film deal based on her life story fails to materialize, which is O.K. by Lorena. She’s still dazed and blinking from the glare of the spotlight, has no desire to have it trained on her again. She and John divorce. She reverts to her maiden name. While she makes paid appearances in South America, she refuses many lucrative offers in the U.S., including, she says, one from Playboy: a million dollars to pose nude. “My family, we just ate beans and rice and hot dogs because that was the cheapest thing,” she says. “Do you know how much a million dollars would have helped? But I stood up for my beliefs, my integrity, my Catholicism.” If cutting John turned her from a normal woman into a sideshow freak, she’s going to turn herself back, purely through force of will.
She re-enrolls in community college, where she meets her partner of the last 20 years, David Bellinger: “I didn’t just fall in love with David like I did with John. It was a friendship that grew into love.” In 2005, she gives birth to daughter Olivia. In 2007, she starts a foundation dedicated to the prevention of domestic violence. “The media was focusing only on the penis, the sensationalistic, the scandalous. But I wanted to shine the light on this issue of spousal abuse. When I went to Knoxville [to speak at a symposium for Lincoln Memorial University’s law review], the president of the school introduced me as a celebrity. I said, ‘Thank you, but let me correct you. I am not a celebrity, I am an advocate.’”
What Lorena, 49, wanted with John she got with David: the family—not just her daughter but her brother and sister and parents, all of whom live close by—the job, the home. And the Lorena of today seems like a different Lorena. Gone is the tear-stained child-woman hiding behind the curtain of long dark hair. For one thing, she’s a blonde now. And though slim, she appears not in the least frail. Nor is her personality meek or retiring. In fact, she’s commandingly confident, particularly when discussing the Lorena Gallo Foundation or her support of Hillary Clinton or on being regarded by some as a #MeToo pioneer. And why should she lack for assurance? It’s been, against all odds, nothing but progress and ascension for her since she walked out of the Central State Hospital on March 1, 1994.
Well, there was one small misstep. In 1997, she was arrested for allegedly assaulting Elvia Gallo, her mother. A neighbor testified that Lorena jumped on Elvia while she was watching TV, beat Elvia’s head with her fists. But in court Elvia claimed, through a translator, that her facial injuries were caused by “a pimple, a big one.” Said the judge, “If you asked me if I think [Lorena is] guilty, I’d say yes. I have reasonable doubt, so I’ll find her not guilty.”
Lorena Gallo (formerly Bobbitt), 2018*
A chance encounter with adult-film actor-director Ron Jeremy at the Playboy Mansion leads to John Wayne Bobbitt: Uncut. “A porno seemed like the best way to show my penis worked,” says John. “Only it wasn’t all-the-way healed yet. I realize now that that was the point.” Uncut is released in the fall of ’94. John almost misses the premiere because he’s convicted of misdemeanor domestic battery against his girlfriend Kristina Elliott, a dancer at the Olympic Garden Topless Cabaret, and sentenced to 60 days in jail.
John and Jeremy’s follow-up, Frankenpenis, so named because John had accepted Howard Stern’s offer to pay for what is euphemistically known as male-enhancement surgery and the results were mixed, comes out in 1996. Says Jeremy, “Let’s put it this way: with that type of procedure, length you can do, not thickness. John went for both.”
Though Uncut is, according to Jeremy, among the highest-grossing adult films of all time, and Frankenpenis does respectably, John somehow winds up more broke than when he started. “The porn industry is a crooked place,” he says. In 1997, Jeremy introduces him to Dennis Hof, owner of the Moonlite Bunny Ranch, a Nevada brothel, and star of the HBO reality series Cathouse. (Hof is the current Republican nominee for a Nevada State assembly seat.) Recalls Hof, “I hired John as a greeter. I thought it might be an opportunity to get a little media for the ranch. John’s first interview was with NBC. He was all ‘I feel so bad. I’ll make it up to Lorena. I want to get back together.’ And then he offered to show the producer his dick, which, I heard from some of my girls, looked like a dented Red Bull can. I get him in the office and say, ‘Listen, butthead, this is not a petting zoo. Put your dick away. And forget this crap about you’re sorry. Your wife cut your penis off. This is the Bunny Ranch. You’re surrounded by 30 hot chicks. This is the get-even. Get it?’” John doesn’t quite. Hof fires and re-hires him several times. (John denies this: “I wasn’t fired. I I ran off with two of Dennis’s girls. Then I came back.”)
In 1999, John pleads guilty to a felony charge of attempted grand larceny related to the theft of $140,000 worth of clothes from a store in Fallon, Nevada. (John claims he was unaware the clothing hadn’t been paid for.) He’s sentenced to five years’ probation. Four months later, he’s found guilty of harassing Desiree A. Luz, an adult-film actress and ex-girlfriend.
After John leaves Nevada, he drifts. There are fewer and fewer ways left to exploit his notoriety, though he and his lawyer-manager, Barry Levinson, a scam artist (Levinson will die in prison for defrauding multiple homeowners’ associations), keep trying to find them. He appears on WWE Monday Night Raw. He joins the Jim Rose Circus, part of the knife-throwing act.
He’s supposed to step into the ring with Joey Buttafuoco for Celebrity Boxing 2, only he’s unable to make it because he’s charged with battering his third wife, Joanna Ferrell, a fitness model. (Somewhere in there, he slips in a second wife, writer Dottie Brewer. That marriage is annulled after 13 days, which doesn’t stop Brewer from publishing a tell-all, This Week I Married John Wayne Bobbitt. Her other titles include How to Shit Money! and When the Soul Cries.) He works construction, drives a truck, hauls furniture. He and Ferrell split. (John would be found not guilty of several domestic-battery charges relating to Ferrell.) He moves back home to help take care of his mother, sick with cancer. In 2014, a car runs a red light and John smashes into it, breaking his neck. In 2016, he schedules an appointment with Dr. Berman, asks the man who once re-attached his penis to reduce it. “I should’ve just left it alone,” says John.
These days, John is back in Vegas. He’s single and lives off the disability settlement he received from the car accident. And though he still makes the occasional paid appearance, the majority of his time is devoted to searching for the treasure chest that eccentric millionaire Forrest Fenn is rumored to have buried in the Rockies. He hopes to be invited to the White House if he unearths it so he can express his support of President Trump.
it suddenly dawns on me why his eyes unnerved me so [the day I interviewed him]. They’re Trump’s eyes—small, blue, panicky. In a rush, I realize how much the two have in common: tabloid covers, the Playboy Mansion, WWE, foreign-born wives, pornographic actresses, Howard Stern. It’s beyond that, though. It’s the macho swagger coupled with the crybaby belief that the human race has wronged them, that it’s a witch hunt or that they’ve been framed, fake news and more fake news. No setting goals and reaching them through the steady application of effort; instead, it’s get-rich-quick schemes or, in Trump’s case, stay-rich-quick schemes. Forget cultivating a talent that the world might recognize you for; instead, achieve instant celebrity for knockoff of real Hollywood fame and has since eclipsed the original, this fame more famous than fame. And yet, much as I hate to admit it, I’m compelled by John, just as I’m compelled by Trump. I admire Lorena for her nose-to-the-grindstone, up-from-the-bootstraps ethic, much as I admire Hillary Clinton for hers. But it makes them feel like figures from a different era, an era I wish wasn’t gone but is. Somehow John and Trump are the primitive men who are, paradoxically, the modern men.
The silence between us stretches. And then John says softly, “You’re not going to victimize me too, are you?” ~
https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2018/06/lorena-bobbitt-john-wayne-bobbitt-25-years
John Wayne Bobbitt, 2018*
Oriana:
Lorena had the advantage of the right cultural timing: feminists (and many women who wouldn’t necessarily call themselves feminists) embraced her. Men did not embrace John Wayne. He basically never outgrew being a dirty joke.
Mary:
The John and Lorena Bobbitt story reads like a tabloid epic, the American Dream of a population choosing the inauthentic mythology of celebrity over any limitations of historical fact. We have not come into the present situation, where a narcissistic buffoon speaks gibberish meant to obfuscate and deny the facts, calls into question all opposition as nothing but lies and fake news, all the while endlessly spooling out lies and accusations on anyone "disloyal " to him, now holding the highest office in the land, and proceeding in every move to disallow, dishonor and destroy the very principles and laws once the foundation and backbone of all we were and could be — THAT American Dream, the one that promised freedom and equality, justice and the pursuit of happiness for all.
The Bobbitts and their story prefigure and reflect a nation prepared for the particular disaster now playing out before us. Lorena insisted on her American Dream over and over, disappointed, and probably furious that she wasn't getting all the wealth and luxury of that dream, was stuck in a going nowhere job with an unemployed husband . . . no riches forthcoming, she stole from the employer she envied, and didn't get away with it. Her dream was a dream of wealth, prosperity and possessions. THAT American Dream. The dream she felt she deserved was replaced and withheld. Then her husband raped her. So she cuts off his penis, takes it for a spin and throws it out the car window.
The emasculated husband has the organ restored and reattached . . . the miracle of medical science comes through for him . . . THAT American Dream. But then he exploits his situation, and his story makes him a Celebrity in the tabloid world, rife with a kind of Carnival life, where grotesques achieve fame and endless attention. This is also, unfortunately, the American Dream of so many, not to be any particular thing, not to care if they are infamous, as long as they are Famous . . . living in that celebrity spotlight, in the kind of fame they think might also make them rich.
The Bobbitts and their story are an American creation, part of the groundwork for Trump's presidency. They are part of the “reality show” world where there is no reality, where all is staged to manipulate an audience either unaware or indifferent to the fact that it's all a huge pretense . . . the cameraman is right there munching on his sandwich next to the "naked and afraid" “reality stars.”
Trump did not appear sudden and full blown. America was getting ready for him for quite a while.
Dutchman’s breeches — love those plant names. For whatever it's worth, please note the similarity of the blossoms to bleeding hearts. **
TRUMP, THE “TOBACCO STRATEGY,” AND LOSING THE SENSE OF SHARED REALITY
~ “If a novelist had concocted a villain like Trump — a larger-than-life, over-the-top avatar of narcissism, mendacity, ignorance, prejudice, boorishness, demagoguery and tyrannical impulses (not to mention someone who consumes as many as a dozen Diet Cokes a day) — she or he would likely be accused of extreme contrivance and implausibility. In fact, the president of the US often seems less like a persuasive character than some manic cartoon artist’s mashup of Ubu Roi, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, and a character discarded by Molière [as presumably too grotesque a caricature].
Relativism, of course, synced perfectly with the narcissism and subjectivity that had been on the rise, from Tom Wolfe’s “Me Decade” 1970s, on through the selfie age of self-esteem. No surprise then that the “Rashomon effect” — the point of view that everything depends on your point of view — has permeated our culture, from popular novels such as Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies to television series like The Affair, which hinge on the idea of competing realities.
The postmodernist argument that all truths are partial (and a function of one’s perspective) led to the related argument that there are many legitimate ways to understand or represent an event. This both encouraged a more egalitarian discourse and made it possible for the voices of the previously disfranchised to be heard. But it has also been exploited by those who want to make the case for offensive or debunked theories, or who want to equate things that cannot be equated. Creationists, for instance, called for teaching “intelligent design” alongside evolution in schools. “Teach both,” some argued. Others said, “Teach the controversy.”
A variation on this “both sides” argument was employed by Trump when he tried to equate people demonstrating against white supremacy with the neo-Nazis who had converged in Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest the removal of Confederate statues. There were “some very fine people on both sides”, Trump declared. He also said, “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides.”
Climate deniers, anti-vaxxers and other groups who don’t have science on their side bandy about phrases that wouldn’t be out of place in a college class on deconstruction – phrases such as “many sides,” “different perspectives”, “uncertainties”, “multiple ways of knowing.” As Naomi Oreskes and Erik M Conway demonstrated in their 2010 book Merchants of Doubt, rightwing think tanks, the fossil fuel industry, and other corporate interests that are intent on discrediting science have employed a strategy first used by the tobacco industry to try to confuse the public about the dangers of smoking. “Doubt is our product,” read an infamous memo written by a tobacco industry executive in 1969, “since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public.”
The strategy, essentially, was this: dig up a handful of so-called professionals to refute established science or argue that more research is needed; turn these false arguments into talking points and repeat them over and over; and assail the reputations of the genuine scientists on the other side. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s a tactic that’s been used by Trump and his Republican allies to defend policies (on matters ranging from gun control to building a border wall) that run counter to both expert evaluation and national polls.
What Oreskes and Conway call the “tobacco strategy” was helped, they argued, by elements in the mainstream media that tended “to give minority views more credence than they deserve”. This false equivalence was the result of journalists confusing balance with truth-telling, willful neutrality with accuracy; caving in to pressure from rightwing interest groups to present “both sides”; and the format of television news shows that feature debates between opposing viewpoints — even when one side represents an overwhelming consensus and the other is an almost complete outlier in the scientific community. For instance, a 2011 BBC Trust report found that the broadcaster’s science coverage paid “undue attention to marginal opinion” on the subject of manmade climate change. Or, as a headline in the Telegraph put it, “BBC staff told to stop inviting cranks on to science programs”.
In a speech on press freedom, CNN’s chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour addressed this issue in the context of media coverage of the 2016 presidential race, saying: “It appeared much of the media got itself into knots trying to differentiate between balance, objectivity, neutrality, and crucially, truth … I learned long ago, covering the ethnic cleansing and genocide in Bosnia, never to equate victim with aggressor, never to create a false moral or factual equivalence, because then you are an accomplice to the most unspeakable crimes and consequences. I believe in being truthful, not neutral. And I believe we must stop banalizing the truth.”
In a 2016 documentary titled HyperNormalisation, the filmmaker Adam Curtis created an expressionistic, montage-driven meditation on life in the post-truth era; the title was taken from a term coined by the anthropologist Alexei Yurchak to describe life in the final years of the Soviet Union, when people both understood the absurdity of the propaganda the government had been selling them for decades and had difficulty envisioning any alternative. In HyperNormalisation, which was released shortly before the 2016 US election, Curtis says in voiceover narration that people in the west had also stopped believing the stories politicians had been telling them for years, and Trump realized that “in the face of that, you could play with reality” and in the process “further undermine and weaken the old forms of power”.
*
[Red-pilling: selling an inside-out alternative reality, in which white people are suffering from persecution, multiculturalism poses a grave threat and men have been oppressed by women.]
Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis, the authors of a study on online disinformation, argue that “once groups have been red-pilled on one issue, they’re likely to be open to other extremist ideas. Online cultures that used to be relatively nonpolitical are beginning to seethe with racially charged anger. Some sci-fi, fandom, and gaming communities – having accepted run-of-the-mill antifeminism – are beginning to espouse white-nationalist ideas. ‘Ironic’ Nazi iconography and hateful epithets are becoming serious expressions of antisemitism.”
One of the tactics used by the alt-right to spread its ideas online, Marwick and Lewis argue, is to initially dilute more extreme views as gateway ideas to court a wider audience; among some groups of young men, they write, “it’s a surprisingly short leap from rejecting political correctness to blaming women, immigrants, or Muslims for their problems.”
Part of the problem is an “asymmetry of passion” on social media: while most people won’t devote hours to writing posts that reinforce the obvious, DiResta says, “passionate truthers and extremists produce copious amounts of content in their commitment to ‘wake up the sheeple’”.
Language is to humans, the writer James Carroll once observed, what water is to fish: “We swim in language. We think in language. We live in language.” This is why Orwell wrote that “political chaos is connected with the decay of language”, divorcing words from meaning and opening up a chasm between a leader’s real and declared aims. This is why the US and the world feel so disoriented by the stream of lies issued by the Trump White House and the president’s use of language to disseminate distrust and discord. And this is why authoritarian regimes throughout history have co‑opted everyday language in an effort to control how people communicate – exactly the way the Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four aims to deny the existence of external reality and safeguard Big Brother’s infallibility.
Orwell’s “Newspeak” is a fictional language, but it often mirrors and satirizes the “wooden language” imposed by communist authorities in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. Among the characteristics of “wooden language” that the French scholar Françoise Thom identified in a 1987 thesis were abstraction and the avoidance of the concrete; tautologies (“the theories of Marx are true because they are correct”); bad metaphors (“the fascist octopus has sung its swan song”); and Manichaeism that divides the world into things good and things evil (and nothing in between).
Trump has performed the disturbing Orwellian trick (“WAR IS PEACE”, “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY”, “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH”) of using words to mean the exact opposite of what they really mean. It’s not just his taking the term “fake news”, turning it inside out, and using it to try to discredit journalism that he finds threatening or unflattering. He has also called the investigation into Russian election interference “the single greatest witch-hunt in American political history”, when he is the one who has repeatedly attacked the press, the justice department, the FBI, the intelligence services and any institution he regards as hostile.
In fact, Trump has the perverse habit of accusing opponents of the very sins he is guilty of himself: “Lyin’ Ted”, “Crooked Hillary”, “Crazy Bernie”. He accused Clinton of being “a bigot who sees people of colour only as votes, not as human beings worthy of a better future”, and he has asserted that “there was tremendous collusion on behalf of the Russians and the Democrats”.
In Orwell’s language of Newspeak, a word such as “blackwhite” has “two mutually contradictory meanings”: “Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this.”
The administration, in fact, debuted with the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, insisting that Trump’s inaugural crowds were the “largest audience” ever – an assertion that defied photographic evidence and was rated by the fact-checking blog PolitiFact a “Pants on Fire” lie. These sorts of lies, the journalist Masha Gessen has pointed out, are told for the same reason that Vladimir Putin lies: “to assert power over truth itself”.
Trump has continued his personal assault on the English language. His incoherence (his twisted syntax, his reversals, his insincerity, his bad faith and his inflammatory bombast) is emblematic of the chaos he creates and thrives on, as well as an essential instrument in his liar’s toolkit. His interviews, off‑teleprompter speeches and tweets are a startling jumble of insults, exclamations, boasts, digressions, non sequiturs, qualifications, exhortations and innuendos – a bully’s efforts to intimidate, gaslight, polarize and scapegoat.
Precise words, like facts, mean little to Trump, as interpreters, who struggle to translate his grammatical anarchy, can attest. Chuck Todd, the anchor of NBC’s Meet the Press, observed that after several of his appearances as a candidate Trump would lean back in his chair and ask the control booth to replay his segment on a monitor – without sound: “He wants to see what it all looked like. He will watch the whole thing on mute.”
The back cover of Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here, 1935Philip Roth said he could never have imagined that “the 21st-century catastrophe to befall the USA, the most debasing of disasters”, would appear in “the ominously ridiculous commedia dell’arte figure of the boastful buffoon”. Trump’s ridiculousness, his narcissistic ability to make everything about himself, the outrageousness of his lies, and the profundity of his ignorance can easily distract attention from the more lasting implications of his story: how easily Republicans in Congress enabled him, undermining the whole concept of checks and balances set in place by the founders; how a third of the country passively accepted his assaults on the constitution; how easily Russian disinformation took root in a culture where the teaching of history and civics had seriously atrophied.
There are no easy remedies, but it’s essential that citizens defy the cynicism and resignation that autocrats and power-hungry politicians depend on to subvert resistance. Without commonly agreed-on facts – not Republican facts and Democratic facts; not the alternative facts of today’s silo-world – there can be no rational debate over policies, no substantive means of evaluating candidates for political office, and no way to hold elected officials accountable to the people. Without truth, democracy is hobbled.” ~ Michiko Kakutani, author of The Death of Truth
https://www.theguardian.com/profile/michiko-kakutani
Oriana:
Religions have shown that it doesn’t matter how absurd the statements are — only if they are repeated often enough — abetted by attractive promises as rewards for belief and dire threats as punishment for non-belief.
Nazism and Stalinist Communism, grand ideologies that have adopted religions’ disdain for truth and evidence and thus became secular religions, showed that the simple old techniques are best for manipulating the masses. A bold, simple lie repeated often enough is bound to have an effect — it enters the psyche in an ineradicable manner even when we are on guard against it. Does truth always win in the end? Or, even if finally accepted as true, is it simply dismissed? I forget how many smokers I met who said that yes, smoking did cause cancer, but “we all have to die of something.”
Now I have a reply to that — dying of lung cancer is a particularly horrible death because you slowly suffocate — not only do you gasp for breath, but oxygen starvation of the tissues causes agonizing pain. There are easier, better ways to die. But even that can be countered with, “My grandfather smoked all his life, and he lived to be eighty” — or something similar. It’s like talking to an alcoholic — their whole life philosophy is a huge defense system of their inalienable right to drink. And it seems that the interest in the unorthodox religious views of Simone Weil has dropped after someone observed that the purpose of her “spiritual development” was to find new ways to defend her anorexia.
Ah, but I have strayed into the territory of addiction, and it could be argued that an addict’s “truth” is too distorted to be relevant to politics. But is addiction so utterly different from other realms of life and belief? Or a fanatic’s religious beliefs? Is is possible to reach the mind of a cult member?
Nor does truth necessarily lie “somewhere in the middle.” The Holocaust either did happen or it didn’t happen. There is overwhelming evidence that it did. It won’t do assert that yes, a few million Jews did die, but not as a result of a deliberate attempt to exterminate a whole people — no, they died mostly of natural causes, and also because a war was going on. A lot of people die during a war, don’t they? On both sides. On many sides. And there were such fine people among the Nazis.
Perhaps the most disturbing trait of humanity is that the drive to discover the truth seems absent in the majority — truth is often disturbing, and they want comforting lies. We are not a rational species; we are the rationalizing species. That science has emerged at all seems the greatest and most fragile of all miracles.
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“Beggars do not envy millionaires; they envy other beggars who are more successful.” ~ Bertrand Russell
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~ “IT'S PEOPLE'S EAGER ABSOLUTE FAITH IN NICENESS THAT MAKES IT SO EASY FOR EVIL TO TAKE OVER.
The counter-culture held two absolutes:
We are all one.
Do your thang. If it feels good do it.
We didn't notice that these have always been in potential tension and we're speeding toward a head-on collision. Our faith in a win-win was as gullible as the libertarians' faith today. Everybody can do their own thing and we'll end up with a harmonious whole.
Or like lovers in the honeymoon period, when honesty and generosity stroll hand in hand and it's unimaginable that they could ever be at odds with each other.
Lovers often continue saying "I love you" long after the feelings have become more conflicted than that.
Before the TMP cult replaced the GOP, the US was calibrated to maintain a level of civility (we are all one) that we can't sustain now without compromising our honesty. Something has to give. Either we lower our standards for honesty to sustain respectful civility or we lower our standards for civility. Pretending that we can always optimize both civility and honesty is another false faith in win-win solutions, the kind of faith that leads people to falsely claim that you can always find a way to be kind and honest.
We should always try to find ways to maximize civility and honesty, but never assume that they can both be optimized. There will be times when one of those absolutes must be compromised because no win-win is possible.
For civil defense, especially against evil growing from within, civility should be compromised to maintain honesty to the extent one can, especially because many people are constrained by circumstances to maintaining civility, for example, an inability to speak honestly on social media without losing your job.
In times like these, those of us with the lucky latitude to speak honestly should, rather compromising honesty in the name of civility, peace, love, and harmony.
If we don't, normalization is inevitable.” ~ Jeremy Sherman
Oriana:
The bible can be quoted to justify practically anything. So yes, at one point we are told to “love thy enemy” — but at no point are we told to be nice to the Anti-Christ and the Whore of Babylon.
By the Whore of Babylon I don’t mean Melania. A mere gold-digger, she’s too small an exemplar of evil. It’s rather kleptocracy, the corrupt system of government by crony billionaires plundering the country.
Expecting the victims to be “nice” and civil to the oppressor unfortunately plays on what is impressive in Christianity — but forgets that Jesus simultaneously preaches “Judge not” and promises to come again to be the judge at the Last Judgment.
Another thing that's relevant here, historically, is that Jews were urged to be nice to Hitler, not to "inflame him." Again, Christian teachings were ultimately the model of this "niceness" -- turn the other cheek!
Jeremy replies:
~ “Indeed, or the Christians counseling forgiveness for TMP mulligans in their existential campaign to cast out the devil Dems.
Tolletalitarians (Ehkart Tolle's douchebag movement) does something similar. He claims he's not being egotistical and judgmental when condemning all egotistical behavior. He's just reporting on the way reality works from a neutral overview. He never bothers to provide an objective definition of egotism.
It's perfect. It afforded people the license to say "that's ego (bad), about anything they don't like and feel the joys of non-judgmental egolessness at the same time.
This is the season for us to get clear on the source of cult/asshole power. It has nothing to do with what you believe but how you strut it. It's all trump cards for pretending your omniscient, omnipotent, and omni-noble.” ~
Jennifer Steinkamp: Blind Eye, 1981**
Prague, 1964. Naively, I didn't think it would happen to me — being so molded by my different childhood and youth, carrying all kinds of eccentric love within me (e.g. Warsaw's Palace of Culture — historically and aesthetically indefensible, yet too great a part of a certain generation's psyche to be demolished until that generation is gone; Vatican 2 was a major emotional devastation, letting lapsed Catholics know there was nothing to return to).
Of course the danger of "remember only the beauty" principle is a serious distortion of reality. That's the danger of all nostalgia, "that morphine of beautiful lies," as I call it in one of my poems. But a part of me always remembers the bitter parts too. Always.
**
FOUR MAJOR RISK FACTORS IN MALE SUICIDE
~ “New research by the Black Dog Institute has identified, for the first time, the consistent risk factors in male suicide, which equates to 80% of all suicides in Australia. They are:
A period of disrupted or depressed mood
Unhelpful conceptions of masculinity – the ‘tough Aussie bloke’ stereotype in particular
Social isolation
At least one personal stressor, like unemployment or relationship breakdown.
Researchers conducted interviews and focus groups with 35 men who had survived suicide attempts, alongside forty-seven family and friends of male suicide survivors.
“It appears that some of the stereotypes are true,” said study leader and Associate Professor Judy Proudfoot. “Many Australian men are not good at dealing with poor mental health and unfortunately this tips them into a downward spiral of hopelessness, poor decision-making and poor resilience to day-to-day life stresses.”
The typical ‘toughen up, mate’ mentality is a huge blocking factor in seeking help, which leads to isolation in men, which leads to increasing risk of suicide. Excessive displays of masculine behavior is typical and aggression can often be overlooked as a symptom of depression. Turning to drugs and alcohol as coping mechanisms is also common.” ~
https://www.pedestrian.tv/news/a-study-has-now-identified-the-leading-causes-of-suicide-in-men/
Oriana:
Just two tiny comments: no matter what the explanation, the mystery remains. The “why” after someone near you commits suicide never leaves you.
The second comment may seem indecent in the face of the tragedy of suicide. Dr. Proudfoot — what a comic, Dickensian name. I wasn’t going to include this, but it hit me that my having noticed is relevant after all. A sense of humor IS a defense against suicide.
And no one ever lacked a reason for committing suicide, as Cesare Pavese said, before eventually committing suicide.
LOW POPULATION DENSITY LINKED TO SUICIDE RISK
CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics calculated age adjusted suicide rates by state. Here are the 10 states with the highest suicide rate:
10. Oregon: 15.2 suicides per 100,000
9. Utah: 15.4 suicides per 100,000
8. West Virginia: 15.9 suicides per 100,000
7. Arizona: 16.1 suicides per 100,000
6. Colorado: 16.4 suicides per 100,000
5. Nevada: 18.3 suicides per 100,000
4. Montana: 19.4 suicides per 100,000
3. Wyoming: 19.7 suicides per 100,000
2. New Mexico: 20.4 suicides per 100,000
1. Alaska: 22.1 suicides per 100,000
This has given rise to the hypothesis that suicide rate is linked to population density, and that explains why it’s higher in “sparsely populated hinterlands.” I dare say those are incredibly scenic “hinterlands.” But what I’d call the “frontier mentality” makes you either a winner or a loser.
Even if your expectations of success collapse, in a city you constantly run across people who are doing worse than you are. There are the homeless, begging. There are the disabled, making your problems seem small by contrast. And there are support groups. There are, very simply, people. A city provides more venues for jobs, new social connections, and making a contribution, relieving that “useless” feeling that’s tied to a suicide risk.
The beauty of nature can protect you only if you truly commune with nature and are in awe of its beauty. I owe my survival at least in part to the beauty of California. But most people need other people.
The average rate across the whole country was 12.6 per 100,000 (2015 data)
Wyoming experienced the highest increase in suicide rate in the last ten years.
Some of these states have the highest gun ownership, but there are exceptions.
Nevada and Arizona also have a very high homicide rate (Louisiana is #1).
It seems to me that some of those areas are a kind of “rural skid row” for alcoholics and drug addicts (and also for compulsive gun collectors).
Alice Neel: John, 1981 (I'm not suggesting that the subject of this portrait committed suicide. And yet I find the image fitting and compelling.)
VIRUSES MAY TRIGGER ALZHEIMER’S
~ “Many scientists had long assumed that amyloid-β was essentially a waste product, with no meaningful purpose. But the researchers had earlier shown that amyloid-β might actually serve as a first line of defense against fungal and bacterial infection.
In the current study, both viruses seemed to provoke an identical reaction. The mice’s brains grew new deposits of amyloid-β plaques practically “overnight,” according to senior author Rudy Tanzi, a geneticist specializing in the brain at Massachusetts General Hospital as well as Harvard Medical School. And the mice bred with these human-like neurons were able to better fend off brain infection than mice without them. The same effects were also seen in the petri dish.
“The seeding of amyloid is what causes the deposition of plaque,” Tanzi told Gizmodo, “and herpesviruses and other microbes can rapidly seed amyloid-β.”
The study is the second in recent weeks to support the role of viruses in Alzheimer’s disease. That first study, also published in Neuron and led by researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, found evidence that certain herpesviruses are more abundantly present in the brains of people who died with Alzheimer’s; it also suggested that genes belonging to these viruses directly interact with human genes that raise the risk of the disease.
The timing is no accident, Tanzi said. His team has corresponded with the Mount Sinai team for years, and they had originally planned to release their results at the same time (both will be published in the same print July edition of the journal). It was the Mount Sinai team, Tanzi notes, that suggested the Harvard team look at HHV-6 as well as HSV-1 in their experiments, since that was the virus they had started to zero in on in their work.
Supporters of the viral theory have often speculated that germs such as HSV-1—the most commonly blamed culprit—directly goad the brain into spiraling out of control through inflammation, with amyloid-β only being a bystander. But in Tanzi’s version, amyloid-β still is the key cog behind the disease. Neurons use the protein to either kill or safely trap viral or bacterial particles in a “nano-net,” as Tanzi put it. In Alzheimer’s disease, this process goes off the rails, leading to the uncontrolled buildup of plaques. From there, Tanzi’s work has shown, the plaques trigger the production of tangles—clumps of another brain protein called tau seen in the later stages of Alzheimer’s—which together then trigger chronic inflammation. All of these moving parts align to wither the brain, eventually causing death.
In this scenario, it’s not so much the germ, but the immune system that’s at fault. “The microbes are the prequel to the amyloid hypothesis,” Tanzi said.
Viruses are only one of the things that could set off Alzheimer’s, he pointed out. The same sort of seeding might happen in people whose genes cause them to make too much amyloid-β, in the absence of infection. And genetics might help explain why only some people’s infections cause the brain to start producing amyloid-β en masse. “Just having the virus isn’t enough,” Tanzi said.
“I think we’ve gotten past the point where this idea is ridiculed, but some might be still violently opposing it,” Tanzi said, referring to the 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s maxim about the three stages of truth (first ridicule, then violent opposition, and finally acceptance as self-evident).” ~
https://gizmodo.com/yet-more-evidence-that-viruses-may-cause-alzheimers-dis-1827511539
First, we need to understand that most diseases of old ages are auto-immune: it’s our own immune system that kills us. And it’s often the pathogens that trigger the immune system into an over-reaction.
For more on this, read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Natural Causes. Few people know that she has a Ph.D. in immunology.
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THE DIFFICULTY OF LOVING GOD
Calvinist minister R. C. Sproul, in his book “What Is Reformed Theology?” writes:
~ “Love for God is not natural to us. Even in the redeemed state our souls grow cold and we experience feelings of indifference toward him. When we pray, our minds wander and we indulge in woolgathering. In the midsts of corporate worship, we are bored and find ourselves taking peeks at our watches . . . Our natural lack of love for God is confirmed by our natural lack of desire for him.” ~
Though the minister cites this as an example of our total depravity, how I wish I’d come across a passage like this one when I agonized over my inability to stay attentive during prayers! I didn’t know it was a normal phenomenon, and everyone’s mind tended to stray. I thought that happened just to me, the wicked one.
But what worried me most was my inability to love god. I saw god as evil so love was impossible. Jesus was supposedly sweet, but he too would come back to preside as judge at the Last Judgment, tossing the huge majority of people into hell for eternity.
Only Mary was non-punitive, so only Mary could be loved. Others must have felt that way too, since most churches were dedicated to her, most icons and most candles.
Then there were the many saints, all helpful, non-punitive spirits. It was not unusual to love one or more favorite saints, especially Saint Francis and Saint Anthony. Mary was the adored mother, while the saints were like kindly uncles and aunts.
Children were taught to love Jesus and generally were not reminded that it was Jesus who would come the second time for the Last Judgment, and throw misbehaving children into eternal fire. As a child I was under the impression that it was the cruel God the Father who did that, but not the children-loving Jesus.
Still, the text is clear: Jesus, and not the Father, will be the judge at the Last Judgment. “Judge not”? Just typical of all the contradictions that we were not allowed to question.
But here comes the real jewel. ~ “Sproul cites Luther’s answer to the question ‘Do you love God?’
Luther replied (prior to his conversion), ‘Love God? Sometimes I hate him.’ This is a rare admission among men. Even Luther’s candid reply was less than totally honest. Had he spoken the full truth, he would have said that he hated God all the time.’ (Sproul, 127)” ~
~ John Morreall, “Questions for Christians”
Oriana:
Perhaps the answer is simple: even most believers don’t believe that god is good.
Maybe we need a radically different approach to life, not just to the unpleasantness of mortality.
Perhaps we need a dancing god.
Perhaps a laughing god or master teacher.
ending on beauty:
You see, I want so much.
Perhaps I want everything:
the darkness that comes with each infinite fall
and the shimmering blaze of every step up.
~ Rilke, The Book of Hours
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