HOW IT WORKS

I don’t want to harp on any particular topic within the vast Mania panoply, but this Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) thing and the Christian summer camp suicide on Cape Cod continue to add useful examples of general Mania dynamics as more and more elements and stratagems are called into play. And I think that is worth noting.

Yesterday opinion columnist and member of the ‘Boston Globe’ editorial board Joan Venocchi published a column that demonstrates not only the many knotty and twisty ‘interests’ involved in fueling the Mania and keeping the ball rolling, but also how the Mania can be used for other purposes.

Venocchi is employed by the ‘Globe’, which is very much a ‘liberal’ paper and very much pro-Mania; it has rarely met a Mania initiative or gambit it didn’t like.

Brown is a Republican and the pol who beat the state’s female Democratic Attorney General in a special election for Teddy Kennedy’s seat when that luminary departed this mortal coil to appear before that Judge Who cannot be ‘reached’ or ‘fixed’ – no doubt a novel experience for the gentleman.

Brown has posed the paper a thorny problem: a Republican (and a male) he has made a shrewd tactical move by claiming the mantle of Victimhood with his recent assertion that he was ‘sexually abused’ (apparently groped by a young but still older camp counselor back about 40 years ago). Consequently, he has all of the rights and privileges appertaining thereto: to wit, his claim cannot be questioned, he can reveal as much or as little as he wishes, and he can do so whenever he wants and not before or not at all.

The Democrats, and perhaps the Attorney General herself, would very much like that Senatorial seat back and elections are coming up. How then do you go after Brown the politician without dissing the rights of Brown the alleged abuse-victim? And in the process perhaps exposing a whole bunch of unexamined presumptions about ‘victims’ of ‘sexual abuse’ that none of the major players and interests want to see suddenly pulled into the light of sustained – let alone skeptical – public scrutiny.

The Attorney General herself is keeping out of it, making no public statements of any substance. Her own record of ‘victories’ in Mania cases is apparently not something any of her demographics want to see dragged into the light. She counts among her supporters and colleagues a law professor at a not-first-rate local law school whose most remarkable utterance to date has been that some recent (and dubious) Mania legislation has finally overcome one of the long-standing obstacles to more prosecutions: to wit, that ‘victims’ are not getting ‘justice’ just because there is “no evidence”.

Venocchi is trying to do her bit for the team: she calls upon Brown to reveal the name of his claimed abuser because to keep quiet about it enables the abuser to continue (raising the specter of the alleged abuser carrying on his depredations for the past 40 years and counting).

Brown may well not care to go this deep into the matter since there may come to light a whole bunch of things that he’d rather not see in the public domain – including, perhaps (though it cannot be Correctly suggested in so many words) that the whole story was overblown if not actually fabricated for personal or political gain.

So Venocchi will try to help the election outcome by going after Victim Brown in the name of all other Victims. Brown, ideally, would have to name-names or else admit that he was just trying to surf a useful wave and made the thing up. She scolds him for not fully coming forward. Interestingly, in the case of a female Boston City Councilor (and Democrat) who made an even more recent claim about being a ‘rape’ victim (see my recent Post) and refused to discuss names or dates, Venocchi has nothing to say.

She jazzes things up by referring – although with an uncharacteristically careful “alleged” – to Brown’s groper as a “pedophile” – which clinically is not evident from any information available and may not be accurate at all. (I recall that in the British government’s collaboration with the Bush Administration in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq the UK equivalent of the US Attorney General referred to Tony Blair’s insistence that the facts by “sexed up” to help move matters along … that sort of thing.)

She also sniffs that Brown’s grossly un-Correct position has not hurt him at all in his standing with Massachusetts voters, though national Democrats and others have tried hard to insert the proverbial broomstick in the rapidly spinning spokes of his bicycle wheel. Which might lead an independently-minded reader to wonder if perhaps the electorate is starting to wise up to the stampede it has been running-in for a couple-three decades now. But this is precisely NOT what Correct dogma and its cadres want to see.

The Comments by readers (which are accessible through the above link) are notable for their refreshing skepticism about Venocchi’s gambit. Which is heartening for members of the SO community who may sometimes be tempted to think that in the matter of public opinion about Things Manic they are mere voices crying in the wilderness.

Today, now, the ‘Globe’ publishes an editorial, ostensibly about Joe Biden’s unveiling last Monday of new Department of Education ‘guidelines’ that essentially seek to apply both the Sex Offense and Domestic Violence Regimes to universities (where liberated females apparently go to lots of parties and drink a great deal with loutish males and then report themselves ‘date raped’, and where sizable numbers of students apparently live together – with or without sex – in some sort of ‘intimate partner’ scenario).

The paper disseminates all the usual ‘Findings’ by government agencies and ‘research’ that justify this ‘emergency’ that somehow is as bad or even worse today than it was 20-plus years ago when major attention was focused on campus sexual behavior.

Thus “one in five” women will be “victims of an attempted or completed sexual assault” during their college years, at least according to “the National Bureau of Justice Statistics” (it’s anybody’s guess whether the capitalization of ‘statistics’ is a typo or an indicator of how very very much such numbers are essential to continuing the career of the Mania). Notice that if “sexual assault” is itself a hugely vague and porous term, the qualifier “attempted” simply intensifies the obfuscation exponentially. And add to that the ‘victim-friendly’ axiom that it is the (self-declared) victim who gets to claim – with some immunity from further investigation – what is ‘sexual’, what is ‘assault’, and what is an ‘attempt’.

We recall that in order to qualify as a ‘statistic’ for the government, it may be necessary simply that a ‘phone survey’ be made, in which the respondent is free to claim whatever she (or he) wishes, secure in the knowledge that the claim will not be ‘studied’ further. After all, to verify is to re-victimize. And quite possibly the government is looking to ‘keep up the numbers’ in the first place.

But just to make sure the herd heads in the right direction the editorial immediately draws the Correct conclusion: the figure is “staggering”. Which, if all the muzzy variables are accurate and forthright, it might very well be. But that’s the problem in so much of these Mania ‘reports’ and ‘studies’, isn’t it?

Attempting to put out a fire that it doesn’t want to admit is burning, the editorial then voluntarily broaches the problem of skepticism about whether “date rape” – apparently also termed “gray rape” by far too many persons – is actually on a victimological par with “stranger rape” (which is what the average citizen would presume rape to be). This un-Correct impression is apparently held by many insensitives who, the paper volunteers, note that in a whopping 90 percent of reported cases the victim and the assailant were somehow “acquainted”.

And worse, the editorial volunteers that this type of insensitive skepticism is shared even by “victims themselves” (and once again, apparently all it takes to qualify as a bonafide ‘victim’ is to claim that you are – which should surely help keep numbers up).

But, the editorial instructs, “that [stranger rape-date rape] distinction doesn’t hold up”.

And as incontrovertible proof that that seemingly common-sensical distinction is actually illusory and inaccurate, the paper quotes a Boston-area university psychology professor who has apparently “studied” the matter of ‘gray rape’ and finds it, he is sure, very black-and-white indeed. Such “undetected rapists” (but surely they were, sooner or later, ‘detected’ by their victims?) ply their intended victims with drugs or alcohol, and otherwise engage in “careful planning and premeditation”. Which sounds very much like what a full-blown rapist might do, except that in this professor’s scenario – or at least the way the paper presents his thoughts – college parties are swarming with highly-focused (yet drunken and loutish) males who are all pursuing, independently, targeting strategies against unsuspecting females (though the standard heterosexual scenario may not be the only one in play and I – for one – would be interested in how many lesbians might be attending the parties with precisely the same tactical plan).

I can’t see how so heavy a concentration of males at a party can simultaneously be drunken frat-boys or jocks partying and yet also felony-level professional criminals capable of devising and executing a comprehensive plan. Even if you factor in, as the prof does, that most of them are “serial offenders” and operate under the cover of “sexually violent subcultures”, among which he singles out “fraternities”. Which makes it all sound like a blend of Fifties-type Communist subversive cells and some frattish-jockish equivalent of The Mob. The solution any parent of the era would have offered was simply to stay away from ‘that type of gathering’ – which, when you think of it, was a hugely efficient and efficacious approach for any particular student: you want to avoid Communists, don’t go to parties at the cell headquarters; you want to avoid The Mob, don’t go to the types of joints the wiseguys usually run.

If nothing else, the prof’s scenario reminds me of something like the royal grand ball in “Start the Revolution Without Me” where half the party-goers are, for their own purposes, trying to assassinate the other half.

But if this is mostly taking place at fraternity parties or jock-parties, then the thing is hardly an uncontrolled epidemic: it is, for one thing, rather substantially localized in certain types of clearly-marked venues where – looking back on my own university days – no students reasonably jealous of time and academic obligations would waste their time. And are there still college-age kids who haven’t seen “Animal House” or any of the zillion knockoff films?

Lest you start drawing your own conclusions or at least wandering off-script (you as a reader are, after all, assigned the cow-in-the-stampede role) the paper instantly funnels you into the Correct chute: “In this light, what some people see as morning-after remorse starts to look suspiciously like a victim coming to grips with a crime”. But this conclusion would only be true of a reader who – in any light – would see the prof’s scenario as both believable and widespread. Trying to hide its own thumb and those of its favored demographics, the paper hides behind the old “some people” dodge. There may indeed be ‘some’; but I wonder if there are ‘many’. And THAT, of course, is a question that none of the Mania-managers want anybody to start wondering about.

“Alas” moans the editorial (yes, that’s an actual quote from the piece), fully 85 percent of “rape victims” do not report “sex assaults” to the authorities. Again you have to ask: are we dealing with ‘rape’ or ‘sex assault’ here? ‘Attempted’ or ‘completed’? And if these episodes are unreported, then how on earth do we know they existed in the first place? Isn’t this the equivalent of the government telling you how many angels (or devils) are dancing on the head of that pin on top of your bureau?

AND if 85 percent of the theoretical victims are not reporting it … what does that say, really, about the way college females consider these things? I can’t accept that a generation that was born and raised completely under the shadow of the Mania is still as reticent about reporting as the college females of the pre-Mania generations.

Is this a case of the ‘advocates’ actually having to tell the alleged victims that they are indeed victims? That seems more than a little odd – although Saul Alinsky, noted ex-Marxist organizer of agitprop and the unapologetically manipulative methods of ‘organizing people’, mentioned often in his text “Rule for Radicals” that sometimes people don’t know what’s good for them and need to be herded along toward the proper conclusions.

You may recall an episode from the old “MASH” TV show where Corporal Klinger, medical orderly who was always trying to find a way off the front-lines, actually rigged up a half-conscious, wounded patient to make it look like he was holding Klinger hostage and the patient wanted them both airlifted to the rear or he would shoot Klinger. The scam fell apart as the patient collapsed unconscious from lack of blood at the door of the tent dropping the gun that Klinger had artfully placed in his limp hand.

The paper – speaking from an Advocacy speaking points sheet, no doubt – wants universities to ‘educate’ “students” against “high-risk behaviors” such as “binge-drinking” (and going to the type of parties where no serious student, male or female, should want to go in the first place). In other words, in the absence of serious parental formation, universities – prodded by the government and its trusty Mania Regime – should try to ‘educate’, although of course without trying to oppress any student’s ‘total autonomy’ by becoming too ‘directive’ or ‘judgmental’. Which, by the by, will require fresh battalions of ancillary employees in the oh-so-mushy ‘consciousness-raising and awareness’ field. Something for everyone.

With predictable but still impressive chutzpah, the paper concludes by sighing that “No one should pretend that sexual assault cases on campus will be easy to prosecute. But district attorneys shouldn’t worry about conviction rates in such areas. And given the serial nature of rapists, any case authorities make is likely to prevent many future assaults”.

What can this possibly mean in actuality? If police and prosecutors are backing away from these ‘gray’ cases because there is no way that even a ‘victim-friendly’ justice system can possibly justify convictions, then are the paper and the advocates for whom it is fronting urging that prosecutors bring charges and cases – with all the costs in time and resources that involves – even though there is no reasonable chance of successful prosecution (and perhaps no reasonable basis for suspecting that the alleged crime was committed in the first place)?

Notice that the paper here is trying to insinuate into the criminal justice system precisely the ‘civil rights’ lowered standard of evidence, whereby the court must presume that the alleged civil-rights violation was probably committed. When this standard and this template is applied to criminal law, in matters where college-age males and females are exercising their ‘total autonomy’ to binge-drink together at parties specifically thrown for that purpose (which, I grant you, is a serious problem all on its own in any case), then the Mania Regime is going to be taking a huge step farther along the dark path down which it has already traveled so great and lethal a distance.

Slyly, the paper thinks to justify this whackulent exhortation by referring to “serial rapists” – which, with the exception of the tenuous assertions of that conveniently Correct psych prof, is a threat that hasn’t been clearly and fully established in the first place.

If a college-age male hoping to ‘get lucky’ at a frat party is already actionably definable as a probable serial-rapist, especially if he is responding to the reality of females (and you can mix and match genders and sexual orientations of both perp and victim however you see fit here) who have come to the party with precisely the purpose of drinking or doing party-drugs until they aren’t sure which is the ceiling and which is the floor (and I am not in favor of such parties in the first place), then universities (and apparently local law enforcement) are going to need to establish Soviet-levels of surveillance, prevention, and prosecution.

But that’s been an operational objective of the Mania from Day One of Year One.