Atonement

  Greetings,

  to recapitulate the story so  far we're studying the data fog, a not unusual topic but we've already covered and dismissed the questions we call the causality questions  which have to do with technology and with , of course, the human psyche which is acted upon and conditioned to attain the response the scientist or demagogue.  Like bullets the techniques are value neutral. We've also begun to dismiss the questions of context that are often used to describe "what the speaker really meant."
    Essentially if you dismiss on set of prejudices you have to dismiss them all.

   Perhaps the best way to describe what is happening is I am gradually recovering from the effects of a world apparently gone mad.As such I am less declined to speculate and more interested in recording the factual side of things. 

    

A timely tale

         In the ninth century the Muslim empire extended to the Pyrenees mountains in northern spain. The leader of France at the time was Charlemagne. In that day and age there were no capitals per se. the King was constantly on the move collecting money and keeping the nobles in line. Charlemagne visited the mountains of Spain and decided the moors were too strong to risk battle and withdrew. In doing so he left the rear guard under the command of a young knight named Roland.

            The army was something like a wagon train. Roads were not wide so the line extended often twenty or thirty miles. Roland was having a dispute with his uncle, also a knight and his uncle went over to the Saracens and told them how to attack and destroy Rolands forces. Roland was accompanied by a Bishop named Turpin who when asked why the two people’s fought replied, because “they are pigs and we are not.” This phrase was at times used in the cold war when it became unclear whether the CIA had any kind of moral advantage over, say KGB. It means in effect, don’t ask that question because it cannot be answered.               Moreover if you need proof you’re in the wrong business.

                     Anyway Roland and the Bishop fight on and eventually everyone of the Christians is killed.

The King , needless to say, is not happy. When he finds out the role of the uncle in the slaughter the uncle is brought on trial. The uncle in turn is also furious. He says “I am of the nobility as was my nephew and we settled our grievance fair and square. France had nothing to do with it.

The court did not buy the argument and the reason why amounted to one of the cornerstones of the notion of the nation state. Basically, Roland was acting in the position of the King’s representative. Had he not been in the army it would have been different, but while he was where he was he represented the nation of France and that priority too precedence over any petty disputes between nobles.

Why do I mention this fifteen hundred year old court case? We’ll as you know the nobles of our day wish to enforce ignorance where ever possible on the masses – so as to keep the masses happy and docile and as a result I am loath to mention anything that might still be in copyright.

Also what we are facing today in the neoliberal free market ideology is the idea that corporations have the right to do competitive battle with other corporations and as well influence the policy’s of nation states but those same nation states must be limited as far as what controls they might puton the freedom of corporate entities. It is the same issue as faced in ninth Century France.

As to the election – personally I don’t like Mormons. It’s a bogus dog and pony show religion that insults my intelligence. For that matter their candidate is a horses’s ass . Anyone who makes a fortune by moving American Jobs overseas should be disqualified from running.

There’s a George Carlin show where he says, “Fuck Tiger Woods - I’m tired of being told who I should admire” This statement was made long before the Tiger’s fall from grace, during the publicity build up. Where the hell do they dig up these wackos?

 

Hello again. 

  This is the initial part of the post  It begins by referencing the social cost of the economic decline. Then I wrote the piece that begins the essay which describes why it is critical a legally justified to limit the freedoms of corporations, and then I wrote the conclusion, which describes the extreme copst of not doing so.

       This time I’m going to approach the essay more or less sans the Tamlin persona. That means I will not pretend to be a thirty thousand year elf and pretend instead to be an ordinary human. As I am sure you can imagine, or at the least have been told, traumatic experiences can take a while before the emotional aura’s wear off and we can speak of them without such colorations.

     In the current instance I am not going to talk about something bad that happened to me, other then in the most general terms, but even in the most general histories of events there are bound to be differences brought about by the context of the one doing the telling.

           I have a degree in Psychology from Hofstra University, attended several other colleges, including NYU, and later on worked administering criminal justice programs for the federal government. While my initial interest in psychology was the great theorists of the early twentieth century I must admid much of my work and research was a matter of statistical analysis. For instance I prepared the Reports for the FBI that described criminal activity in a given region on a yearly basis.

I left that position in part because the administration I served under was compromised and in a matter of time would be thrown out by the voters, something which in fact happened. In the course of working I developed several thesis’s concerning the genesis of criminal behavior that were entirely based on the numbers. The area involved, Long Island had suffered several mini-recessions so I was able to get fairly clear data as to what the effects of sudden unemployment were.

In actuality my conclusions were not that radical as to the mini recessions, but the much large effects of the collapse of the economic system that began in the nineteen eighties were far more troubling and more difficult to describe. I must now interject immediately that the question of how good or bad the economy is at any time is usually controversial and I wish no part in the overall question. For our purposes let it suffice to say that portions of the previously employed middle class lost their options and what is more they discovered that apparently the rest of the country could not care less.

An interesting point can be made to the effect that the oncoming of poverty is more upsetting to the former middle class then to the previously poor. In the mind set of the “proper” middle class or bourgeoisie marriage was and is something that is to be accompanied by that ability of the male or both partners, to provide for a home and the upbringing of children. Poor societies, knowing that such possibilities were not the norm, simply had as many children as soon as possible. There are other conditioning factors. Children have been described as the poor man’s insurance policy, but in any case it is beyond question that marriage ages skyrocketed as the ability to provide for others became less common.

I must also add something else, speaking in the voice of an actuary, the baby boom had an excess of young women in the sixties and a surfeit of them twenty years later, since women tend to marry at ages far younger then men. That also contributed to the situation.

In the plainest of language what developed was a society of sexual predators. Those either with jobs, or inherited wealth found themselves , as the expression goes, “in the catbird seat.”

Suffice to say we tend to repress this knowledge. The notion for instance that rapists on the average have more children then non rapists doesn’t sit well in our minds. The phrase one hears is that rape is a crime of violence and not sexuality. Like other cliché’s it is half true. In the fight or flight response paradigms sexuality is on the side of the fighters. Without going into great detail one could suggest that a TV cop show where the cops “emphasize” with criminals and talk them out of shooting and being shot, would not have very high ratings.

I wish to make two comments on this. One is that the process permeated the entire society from public entertainment to the White House. Irregardless of single scandals Mr Clinton’s sexual habits were well documented and it was a maturation of society that allowed it to go unnoticed and allowed a second term. Clinton was elected not despite, but because he was a sexual preditor.

It was said that one of the major difficulties Republicans had in capitalizing on Clinton’s behavior was they were unable to come up with persons of stature themselves who’s personal lofe could stand the scrutiny.

When Disney makes a movie called Pretty Woman, about a prostitute and it stars “America’s Sweetheart” we must take things seriously as indicative of a social change.

There is no bad thing that happens on a large scale that is not sold to the public as a good thing. So, depending on your point of view, “whore chic” could also be portrayed as the liberation of women from archaic role’ choices, while there can be some merit in looking at things like this, such behavior does not in reality happen overnight. Here we have to be careful to narrow our suggestions down.

In the nineteen twenties a similar refashioning of women’s role was achieved. A signifigent amount of this came about as the result of advertising, in particular it became newly permissible for women to smoke. There’s a saying to the effect that he operation was a success but the patient died. In this case we may suggest that the best psychological manipulation happens after a degree of isolation and confusion into the subject being hypnotized, or brainwashed.

What I’m suggesting here then is that it appears at times that populations have unintentionally been weakened by techniques of mind control that were meant only to achieve more limited objectives then what actually happened.

I may add, although I won’t go into detail, the actions effects on the population as a whole often can be seen in individual cases. In the seventies the heiress Patty Hearst was subjected to effective enough manipulation to the extent that she announced she was no longer Patty but “Tonya” a revolutionary freedom fighter. The aspect of this which I choose to refrain from describing happens every day in the creation of working girls who exchange sexual favors for money and then turn the money over to a pimp.

No matter how you describe it, it is difficult to suggest that a woman who has sex with many men in a day and then turns the money over to man who beats her is the origin of individual liberation.

Yet that is the common case, what is more the woman invariably treats her clients with contempt and outright hatred whereas she proports to be in love with the pimp. Too often, I suggest, we place the blame on the woman and refuse to admit to ourselves the power of the techniques used byher handler. Recall also as well that this is not a new trade. I don’t think your average pimp could come near to explaining the ways that his “charm” is created – he just knows that it works.

Returning to the larger issues then; the creation of a predatory society, it stands to reason that there are few if any women willing to admit they are settling for a second rate love affair because there are not enough eligible males in the vicinity. It just isn’t done. Most people have too much pride and so rather then admit they were forced into living a certain lifestyle they will maintain that they and only they alone choose the path they tred.

As the joke goes, “If life is ugly you might was well put a positive spin on it.”

Likewise the maligned judge declares to the woman “If you’re being raped you might as well relax and enjoy it.”

I hate to admit it but speaking as a man who’s known two women that claimed to be raped, the fact is , it’s a turn off. I’ve also known women who have had more then the usual number of sexual partners but because they don’t call it rape it seems less traumatic. Suffice to way weirdness abounds.

Consider the married woman who was raped and made pregnant. She had been hoping to start a family and they didn’t know until the child was born who the father was. It was the rapist. But the father’s in a weird position since his wife was willingly going out with the man who impregnated her.This was brought about because the woman liked cocaine and the man, also married, was using his money and drugs to live a high lifestyle. He’s wealthy and needless to say never worked a day in his life.

Now the wife wonders why her husband is taking it all some calmly. He thinks, “Well what am I supposed to do?” It’s a good point. The odds of gaining a conviction of rape on a millionaire are basically zero- to none. If the husband shoots the rapist he goes to jail and nothing good comes of it.

What the hell it was just a little misunderstanding.

Take this story and multiply by a few thousand.

A man’s wife goes to the president to ask for a favor for her husband. The husband at the same exact time goes to a park and puts a bullet in his head. Who is the hero?

You tell me.

I’m not saying that there can be rectification or atonement. That’s what is is to be a man. It took me a long time to learn. There is no fucking atonement, no bloody atonement. You just don’t do it and if you do, then you pay and pay, forever.

Tamlin