DECIPHERING POLITICAL SEX-ASSAULT

Two short articles appeared today: both in the same edition of ‘The Boston Globe’.

In the first , a brief piece notes that on Monday Joe Biden will speak just up the road at the University of New Hampshire (the states are small in that part of the country). In company with the Education Secretary, his purpose will be “to introduce new guidance to help schools, colleges, and universities understand their civil rights obligations to better prevent and respond to sexual assault”.

Politicians’ public comments about these matters should always be a matter of some judicious Tire-Kicking; it also helps to deploy the old Soviet citizen’s trusty divining rods to get to what might really be going on.

Political ‘appealing to the base’ is always a consideration in an American polity now fractalized by decades of Identity-Politics. Which has reduced politicians to ‘deal-closers’ – no longer looking to consider the long-term consequences of legislation upon the entire polity and citizenry, but simply looking to ‘close the deal’ with the bunch whose agitations have gotten them to make you sit around this table in this room and demand this and that. Biden – former used-car salesman who professed himself “bored” with the things on the syllabus at law school – has become a past master at this, smiling that smiley, toothy grin while eyeing the clock on the wall to close the deal before the end of the day.

The article notes that “he was the author of the Violence Against Women Act of 1994” and “worked as a US senator to change the way domestic violence is handled”. Nothing else in the way of commentary or reporting about those two huge bits.

Speaking of journalism’s role, this is a four-paragraph article, and each paragraph consists of one sentence, giving you the idea it’s really just a press-release from Biden’s office transposed by the ‘reporter’ – or perhaps transcribed.

Yet the VAWA ran into constitutional problems (Joe was telling the truth: he hadn’t really cared for the ‘technicalities’ in law school). And “to change the way domestic violence is handled” is a nice way of not-mentioning what that has entailed: a ‘deconstruction’ of the sanctity of the hearth and home which was one of the vital mainstays of Family and the raising of children, which was the dense societal matrix that the Constitution was originally envisioned to protect. And a stunning expansion of the police-power into the home, as well as the introduction of police, prosecutorial, and jurisprudential tactics last seen in police-states modeled on a certain 12-year regime in mid-20th century Germany and Stalin’s trusty USSR. But this frakkulent dynamic served the purposes of several bases with whom a ‘deal’ needed to be made, and as is said at Santa Anita, they were off! The Family and the home, after all, had been suddenly discovered to be the largest on-going crime scene in American history. It was an emergency.

The guidelines he will unveil are supposedly designed to cover “schools” as well as “colleges and universities” so you can imagine that children rather young are included here. That is understandable since kids in even the pre-teen years now are having a go at sex (see my recent Post on this site about Statutory Rape prosecutions and the travails of one “Bernardo B.”).

This disturbing dynamic cannot be unconnected to a whole mess of ‘demands’ made by assorted ‘bases’ in various other ‘deals’ that have been made in the Mad Hatter’s Beltway: with the weakening of the Family and even Marriage and the concept of a two-parent, mother-father dyad overseeing the development of the energies and character of their children (the entire concept and structure now to be considered ‘oppressive’ and ‘victimizing’), young humans receive almost no help in mastering some of the most powerful – and potentially life-wrecking – of human urges, which if not handled properly will, like a fire in the boilers that has been allowed to leap out of its usefully structured space, spread to the entire vessel and consume and destroy it.

But ‘sex’ itself has been ‘valorized’, seen – in that witless Boomery way – merely and fundamentally as one of life’s great entertainments and recreations (and since Evolution is concerned merely with the reproduction of the species generally, and not with the maturing of its individual members, then there is a lot of natural impetus built into the human being to support such a lethal delusion).

Except that now huge numbers of young kids are setting forth into ‘school’ without any preparatory guidance from parents (such as the term is defined), among scads of peers equally bereft, and figuring that if this is what grown-ups do, and if the alternative is homework, then let’s have a go.

So, weirdly but then again not so irrationally, the deconstruction both of the containment concept that might help youth master the sexual urges, and of the societal and cultural support for undertaking that vital task, and the 'devalorization' of the persons (the parents) who are most strategically well-placed to start this process during the development window of those crucial early-years … all that deconstruction has resulted only in the unleashing of hordes of youth who really don’t have any ability or perhaps even motivation to refrain or to master themselves, for the sake of society, future, and their own families and offspring that might dwell further along in their increasingly fragile future.

And after all this deconstruction, the only thing that has been constructed to replace that profound societal, cultural, and human loss is … the Mania Regime and all its pomps and all its works.

By the time the government’s guidance – including whatever will be unveiled on Monday – comes into play, the crucial developmental window has irretrievably passed. Even if there are intelligent programs, they are now being installed – to the extent they will be successful at all – on human platforms already insufficiently framed and developed in the shipyard of the Family and the Home.

But perhaps there will simply be a call for more government-backed punishment and criminal laws; perhaps if the kids in ‘school’ are made aware of the threat of the criminal law they will Just Say No on their own.

The other alternative is (or was) to develop the moral (not necessarily ‘religious’, although it would have helped) chops and skills to undertake a certain ‘character development’ whereby an individual stands up against the urges and conducts a bit of a moral deliberation him or herself: if I do this, even if it’s fun, what effect will it have on me as a person, on the other individual here as a person, on society and culture in general (for we are all members of a living polity)?

This entire approach was deconstructed and ‘de-valorized’ decades ago as being oppressive and victimizing. As a result of incoherent and mutually contradictory agendas and demands and the 'deals' that pandered to them, the 'individual' has 'total autonomy' but the Self of any individual or the Nature of human beings ... that cannot be discussed because it could be anything, could be whatever whoever wants it to be at the moment, and to impose any prior definition on that play-dough allegedly at the core of the human being is merely an 'oppression' and interferes with a 'right'. So there is the individual, but there is no Self and no Shape and no essential anything to the human being - this is a recipe for lethal confusion, catastrophic human confusion. For individuals and for society and for culture and for any efficacious civilization.

And the government made a deal to agree.

Additionally, ‘sex’ is now apparently a ‘civil right’ – but in an oddly skewed and selective way: you have the right to do it whenever you want because you have ‘total choice’ (see, if you wish, my Post on my other site about Montaigne here, yet you shouldn’t be trying to ‘think’ too much about your choices because that will merely lead you to repress yourself. Go for it!

Except if you are a male (whom Evolution has saddled with a particularly robust urge to reproduce, for which reason civilizations and religions developed in great part to help harness that urge and energy, among all the other human urges, desires, and energies).

And given that males are growing up from the get-go with so little parental guidance and familial example and modeling of a mature and fully human way to Shape a Self and conduct a life, then you don’t need to be a math-professor to realize that by the time kids grow into college-age they are going to be in a heepa trubble, being at the mercy of all those un-boundaried urges and energies, so easily deployed but so ultimately corrosive when they wind up being the primary recreation and the primary source of Meaning in a life.

And of course once a female reaches the magic age (legally 18 but the law is woefully behind the developmental schedule) of ‘total freedom and choice’ then she must be allowed to seek sex whenever and however she wishes (which isn’t going to do the female any good either in the long run). EXCEPT when she doesn’t like it anymore, and then the government will step in with some newly ratcheted regulations and laws – against males who have suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of a line drawn in the sand somewhere during the process.

This entire matter of ‘rights’ – expanded now as it has been into areas of sex (I can do it whenever I want but I have a right not to be ‘victimized’ or ‘oppressed’ if I feel I have been) – has simply muddied the waters lethally.

Recall FDR’s ominous expansion of the concepts of ‘rights’ in his Four Freedoms formulation during World War 2: every human has the right to Freedom of Expression and Freedom of Religion. But when he got into the second two Freedoms they were Freedoms-From: Freedom FROM Want and Freedom FROM Fear.

The role of government in ensuring the first two Freedoms is to keep the path clear and let humans as individuals and as societies pursue those two higher-order goals of mature expression and the mature search for Meaning in their lives. But then the next two Freedoms require government to get very intrusive, re-arranging society and culture to prevent two general realities that have been a part of the human experience from Day One. And who is to define what “fear” is? Because if it is – as it has become among Us now – the individual who can report that she is ‘fearful’, then any individual can summon the awesome Leviathan’s power at any time. Thus the Mania Regimes.

Nobody looked too carefully when FDR rattled off his Four Freedoms; he was a nice guy and you felt you could trust him. But then he died and others took his place and took their places in government.

So at this point, as part of the ‘deal’, a female can have all the sex whenever and however she chooses, except that when she doesn’t want to play anymore then the criminal law is at her beck and call.

This is supported by the last paragraph of the article (which was no doubt part of the text of press release from Biden’s people): “Nonetheless, the statement said, young women aged 16-24 experience the highest rates of rape and sexual assault, while one-in-five will be a victim of sexual assault during college”.

I say this again and again and again: I hold no brief for the forcible and unwanted imposition of sexual activity by one human being (male or female) on any other human being (ditto).

But at this point no discerning reader and citizen can be genuinely certain just what ‘rape’ now entails, let alone the ‘sexual assault’ that includes the hugely inchoate ‘date rape’. And the fact that the ‘privileged party’ – i.e. the female – legally gets to say what rape is and when it occurred simply muddies the poisoned waters beyond any possibility of comprehension.

It can be no wonder that given a) the weakening of familial and parental training in the vital developmental window of the early years, and b) the societal ‘valorization’ of ‘sexual freedom’ especially if it’s ‘total’, and c) the hugely increased aggressivity or enterprising-spirit among young females now ‘liberated’ to be as sexually antic as males, and d) the intensifying incompetence of young males to master their powerful sexual urges, all in the context of e) a life that has by Correct definition no reliable larger Meaning or Purpose that any other human being is bound to recognize or respect …. In the light of all those factors, now in play thanks to many many ‘deals’, government guidance to educators in the matter of somehow getting the genie back into the bottle (without oppressing or restricting the genie) is a fatal cultural case of Too little, Too late.

But then there is this second article.

Yesterday, during a public hearing, a female Boston City Councilor announced that “she was raped as a college student at Boston University”.

Given that she is 37, this would have happened during the maturity (as it were) of the Mania Regime and not in the putatively dark ages before 1990 or 1980. You may recall the (interestingly now defunct) Antioch College’s campus sexual code of 1991, and you can refresh your memory here.

We recently saw Senator Scott Brown’s ‘revelation’ about being groped at summer camp decades ago come and almost immediately go. Brown is a US Senator from Massachusetts and the Councilor holds office in that State’s capital city, just down the road from New Hampshire where Biden will be speaking on Monday. The timing and even the simple geography are curious; a short drive up the interstate might well put the Councilor at the meeting on Monday, and perhaps on the dais with Hizzoner the Veep of Deals.

April, and this was the last Council meeting before that month begins tomorrow, is – if your calendar isn’t already marked – Sexual Assault Awareness Month in this country. So score a second quizzical mark under Timing.

She describes herself both as being a victim of “sexual assault” and a “survivor of rape” – neatly mixing the two already vaporously-defined categories. Is rape a sub-category of ‘sexual assault’? Or is ‘sexual assault’ a separate and lesser category? In law? In public usage? In the specific codes deployed by the assorted persons who toss the terms around in public comments?

But – in an eerie similarity (and, I would say, give-away) to Scott Brown’s revelations – she is not mad at the universities and colleges and she doesn’t wish to “demonize” them. (Shrewd, since Academia is one of the last true-believer bastions of Correctness and all its pomps and all its works.)

And in an equally amazing coincidence, she gives no further indication or information: did she report it? Who was the alleged perpetrator? Has or will legal action be initiated against him (or – it has to be said – her)? We don’t know. Again, as so often in this type of case, and especially in the case of politicians who suddenly ‘reveal’ this sort of thing, the public is left with nothing to go on.

But then, has the public ever really been given enough accurate information to give this sort of thing serious thought? Stampede, rather than deliberation, is the goal here.

In fact, she pointedly refused to discuss the details any further even when asked, although she piously declaimed that she revealed it because “it’s important to always put a face to issues”. But then – wouldn’t you want to “put a face to” the perp? Might he/she not still be loose out there in the world, continuing his/her depredations? Isn’t there some sort of responsibility, according to logical – and not simply Mania – thought?

But ‘putting a face to the issue’ is actually code. In advocacy-speak it means putting a victim up front to engage the visceral and primal public emotions of shock and outrage (and thereby weaken the desire for actual information – the Stampede gambit). Goebbels, in the run-up to the take-over of the Sudetenland and the outright invasion of Poland did not make vivid newsreels of government officials explaining things; he got actors – women and children – to stand in village-type surroundings, artfully made up to look like they had been beaten and kicked … by the evil, subhuman Poles of course.

And in the current situation here, politicians don’t want to put a ‘face’ on the perp because that would immediately require a public examination into the charge that they have ‘revealed’ – which could go wrong in any number of ways.

“This is a crime of silence”, she asserts, following the Correct Speaking-Points script. “It is a crime because it is underreported”. But how do We know that? How can anyone ever know that? If it is underreported, then on what basis can you make the claim that it is underreported – since it is by your own definition an unknown quantum? And it appears that she herself committed such a ‘crime of silence’ and may be the only instance of an under-reported incident of which we can be certain.

I would say that if after decades of the Mania Regime(s) and the college codes, this sort of thing is still under-reported, a major element in that is that increasing numbers of kids – victims most truly of the frakkulent deconstruction of the most vital child-raising institutions and beliefs that American culture had at its command – are reaching ‘college’ with no ability to master themselves, and indeed with the sure and certain assumption that ‘sex’ is what grown-ups do, that it is the most defining and ‘liberating’ human experience a person can have, and that it is a ‘right’ that nobody can take away from them.

We have simultaneously been reduced as a society, a culture, and a civilization to ‘sex’, and to the government imposition of police-state ‘sex laws’ designed precisely – but selectively – to try to control what has been by other government deals so awfully unleashed.

This cannot end well.

So much remains to be done. To be reconstructed.