SO AND SAUL ALINSKY 8

I continue with an SO-specific look at Saul Alinsky’s 1971 book “Rules for Radicals”*. There is a corresponding Post on my other site here.

As I’d said, the Master Post for this 8th installment contains a discussion with all the page quotations, and you can access it here.

In this Post I will simply deal with the SO-relevant material.

His seventh chapter is entitled “Tactics”, a nice military approach.

The historical quotation that leads off the chapter is from Hannibal, referring not to some backwoods 19th century American politico but to the Carthaginian general who inflicted upon the Roman Republic its worst-ever defeat at Cannae: “We will either find a way or make one”.

It’s a tad ironic since in actual history, Hannibal did not go on to attack the City of Rome itself, after he had destroyed the legions that stood in his way and had an unopposed path.

Once again, the ‘war’ mentality is evident in Alinsky. And – even if he claims he’s only offering a ‘technique’ here – it’s a technique that will allow no bounds to what it will do to ‘win’. Truth or reality don’t constitute major obstacles; nor, as We saw in his previous chapter, does Respect, even for those who have been selected for the benefit of being ‘organized’. So if you are in a ‘war’ then – as everybody knows – truth becomes the first casualty because the primary objective is to ‘win’ (the American variant is: to righteously defeat your evil enemy who is soooooo bad that anything you need to do is OK).

No wonder neither truth nor the Constitution seem to have had an effect on the pols or on anybody else who has signed-on to this supporting this Regime.

I also wonder just how much you can construct your daily peace-time life on a war-mentality before you sort of get used to ‘war’ and think it’s just a thang.

And again I point out how much of ‘war’ there is in Alinsky, and his ‘war politics’ and now his ‘war tactics’. This entire thrust is hugely dangerous when applied not only to a deliberative democratic politics but to a Constitutionally-bound criminal law.

Yet the allure of being part of a ‘war’ is stunningly seductive. Thus not only Left and Right but the average person can find at least the appearances of some sense of ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ in waging or supporting such a ‘war’. And this is especially true when you have manufactured the ‘sex offender’ as almost the perfect ‘enemy’ or even ‘enemy of the people’. In a way you combine the most powerful attractions and seductions of both the vampire movie and the war movie.

He defines ‘tactics’ as “doing what you can with what you have” although We have seen that you can also ‘create’ what you don’t have, and that what you don’t have may include some vitally substantial philosophical underpinnings. Which is precisely what was done in the manufacture of the SO Mania Regime.

All of his advice flows from his conviction that “power has always derived from two main sources: money and people”. And since the Haves are the only ones with money, then the Have-Nots have to rely on “people”.

Logical enough on its own terms. But then, since “people” are so important to what you want to accomplish (and the So Mania Regime’s various backers have a lot that they wanted to ‘accomplish’) then you have to manipulate your ‘people’ since they don’t always know what’s good for them.

He has some “rules of power tactics”.

His first rule of power tactics is to Consider the parts of your face, he instructs. Take the eyes: “if you have organized a vast, mass-based people’s organization, you can parade it visibly before the enemy and openly show your power”.

On the other hand, consider the ears: if you don’t really have many folks, then use the example of Gideon: “conceal the members in the dark but raise a din and clamor that will make the listener believe that your organization numbers many more than it does”.

Alinsky has worked on both ends of the Regime. First, the number of genuine supporters is probably far less than anyone realizes (although there are vast numbers who simply ‘agree’ with the Regime on the basis of those frakkulently inaccurate legislative Findings). Second, the numbers of ‘sex offenders’ have been hugely inflated by vague and elastic definitions, inaccurate registrations, and the ‘technical violations’ of the AWA system.

I can’t help but think that THIS has been the one more often deployed as if it were a form of democratic and deliberative consensus-based politics. And of course, in modern ‘advocacy’ such “din and clamor” consists of shrewdly selected or perhaps manufactured ‘incidents’ of ‘outrage’ and ‘oppression’ and ‘pain’. Rather than get whole bunches of people together demonstrating (since you usually don’t have that many) then you can focus politics instead on the full-face close-up camera shot of this or that (and alleged) ‘victim’.

Mark Rudd, the leader of the student demonstrators at the Columbia University building take-overs of 1968 and later founder of the Weathermen in 1969, some years later acknowledged that “we manufactured the issues”, which led him – logically, from his point of view – to assert that “the issue is not the issue”. What he meant was that the manufactured ‘issue’ was simply the pretext upon which you could whip up a ‘critical mass’ of demonstrators who would somehow apply ‘pressure’ that would somehow result in Year One of the Great New Age.

The media can (and did and do) help by providing the cameras. And in the event that you do scrape up some folks for a demonstration in the bright light of day, the media can (and do) help by not wishing to appear insensitive and actually showing any shots that would reveal the size of your whole (small) set-up. Instead if you have 20 people the camera will tight-focus on that 20 as if it were a shot of merely a fraction of the folks you’d like everybody in the viewing audience to think were really there.

Surely this advice was followed in the manufacture of the SO Mania Regime. Selected ‘victims’ and horror-stories about them were used to inflame public imagination about ‘sex offenders’, backed up by the speculations or downright untrue ‘Findings’ made by legislators.

After a couple-three decades of this sort of thing, the public isn’t going to be able to distinguish between fact and fiction, truth and falsehood, reality and illusion.

And finally Alinsky looks at the nose: “If your organization is too tiny even for noise, stink up the place”. Which if you think about it must have been the operating principle (though not widely publicized to those who ‘just don’t get it’) for inciting the ‘emergency’ and the Stampede that lubricated the SO Mania Regime. Selective information, mis-information, dis-information, inflated numbers, truly inaccurate and perhaps dishonest science, and legislators misusing their authority and office … all in order to cobble together a monstrosity that in one way or another would serve each and all of their self-interested purposes.

Alinsky’s second rule of power tactics is “Never go outside the experience of your people”. Which is shrewd enough.

So you bring the ‘sex offender’ INTO their experience: he’s everywhere, he can assume the shape of a ‘normal’ person or revert to his basic monstrousness, he wants your children, he lives in your community or he’s going to move into it.

Alinsky’s third rule of power tactics: “Wherever possible go outside the experience of your enemy”. Again with the military and war imagery, where – granted – it is indeed a sage operational maxim.

And nicely, Alinsky uses an extended example from William Tecumseh Sherman’s March Through Georgia.

What attracts him about Sherman’s strategy – and it is an impressive point, from the viewpoint of military thinking – is that Sherman refused to let his force take a Shape: cutting himself off from the classic invading-army Shape that included (vulnerable) supply lines and telegraph lines back to some base camp in Union territory, Sherman simply cut loose and marched along, pursuing a line of march that offered no clue as to his next ‘objective’. The Southern defenders had no way of formulating a defensive response because they really couldn’t figure out what he was up to (his intention, marvelously, was not to fight IN Georgia but to march THROUGH Georgia).

Shapelessness works! IF, however, it is wielded by a tremendously gifted and competent military commander within the context of a much larger Plan and – not to put too fine a point on it – Shape. Temporary and purposeful Shapelessness is what Sherman wielded, and since this was the first time it had been tried in the American setting, it worked that much better. And throughout the whole campaign in Georgia, Sherman’s army itself maintained a superb Shape: as a coherent and cohesive military force and instrument it remained capable and instantly responsive to his commands.

So Alinsky’s insight here is hugely fraught.

He is not conducting – or shouldn’t be – a military operation of deliberate deception in the service of Assault. He is proposing a Method of conducting political activity, and within the context of a deliberative democratic politics (although, of course, he considered such a politics to be Not On The Level).

And you can’t expect to manipulate civilians – and indeed a Citizenry – like a military commander commands and manipulates his army. This is a matter of politics. But then, that’s precisely Lenin’s vision: that he needed an ‘army’ of dedicated vanguard cadres to take his orders and impose Shape on ‘the masses’, who in his vision of the Red Revolution are merely those benighted lumps who never functioned as more than the ‘necessary cattle’ witlessly munching the grass. (And then came Stalin …)

Alinsky adds another example from Patton’s Third Army sweeping around the increasingly decrepit German armies in France, but enough.

The point here is the danger of the ‘war-mentality’, especially the Righteous War Mentality, among the Regime’s supporters who have ‘organized’ this thing and sustain it.

But with that goes the reality that the Regime is not simply some bumbling – shockingly bumbling – that was put together higgledy-piggledy in well-intentioned haste. It bears the marks of much ‘strategic’ thinking: it is a tightly-knit and shrewdly constructed iron net, impervious to reason, truth, or the Constitutional ethos. It may have been a huge and lethal mistake, but it was no accident.

His fourth rule of power tactics is to “make them live up to their own rules”. (p.128) “You can kill them with this”, he gloats, “because they no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity”.

Oy and frak.

Who can ever completely live up to their own rules perfectly? What human or human organization? I am NOT here justifying government’s breaking their own laws, but simply pointing out that the unspoken assumption here is that Alinsky’s cadres, cut free from any morality or ethics since they are fighting the genuine Evil of the oppressive Haves, are bound by no rules at all (except his tactical advices).

And note that shrewd elision of a deliberate flouting of one’s own rules, on the one hand, and on the other hand the “Christian church” (he may mean ‘religion’ rather than ‘church’ here) being unable to ever fully fulfill its ideals.

There is, as I have said in previous Posts, that stubborn Incompleteness to all things human: humans are somehow not ‘complete’ in the sense that what they envision as their personal and societal Ideal can never fully be realized; there are failures-to- fulfill and they seem built into the human thing.

Some philosophies – the Eastern ones especially – and even some versions of Christianity – German pietism, for example – respond to this reality by advocating a complete withdrawal from ‘the world’ and from large human affairs.

Other philosophies suggest the imposition of ‘order’ by a government – Hobbes and his Leviathan, for example.

And others suggest that humans must make their best efforts, continuously and deliberately, to try to bring their personal and societal Ideal into actuality – the Framers and the Christian (certainly the Catholic) approach.

But Alinsky chooses the route that winds back at least to Machiavelli and up through the European revolutionary tradition: since nothing can ever be Ideal then there is no Ideal and anything goes. (He makes here the same mistake as the six blind men encountering the elephant in the ancient Eastern story: since there are so many differing and opposed ‘takes’ on the shape of the elephant, then the elephant clearly does not exist. Which is illogical and hugely inaccurate. Or perhaps you can go with the Postmodern Approach: the elephant is merely a ‘text’ for the reader to do with as s/he finds most useful.)

And I can’t ignore the bald and stunning statement “you can kill them with this”. The man is talking about a nation’s politics, for God’s sake.

In the SO Mania Regime, the ‘Sex Offender’ (not necessarily as an actual convictee but as a conceptual construct) is made to take full responsibility for failure or incompleteness, while everyone else (‘normal’ and ‘decent’ in the schematic) can escape from their own failures and incompleteness and take consolation from the fact that they are not ‘sex offenders’ and never will be (well … nobody can be sure of that last part; the ‘definition’ is elastic, after all).

His fifth rule of power tactics, which he claims is contained within the fourth, is: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon”. In a politics of Deconstruction – where the cadres of the assorted advocacies are deliberately seeking to ‘de-valorize’ the established truths, Ideals, structures and beliefs of an entire society and culture – this bit of advice takes its toxic place. Generations of Americans have now been raised within a Zeitgeist redolent with the assorted anti-Western, anti-Adult, anti-whatever ridicule of radical feminism (it’s all just patriarchy and sooo ‘male’), multiculturalism (it’s all just ‘white’ and that’s not worth your respect), it’s all just ‘old’ (and therefore must be ‘changed’), and you name it.

This rule wouldn’t work in the Stampede game. Ridicule has been replaced by Monstrousness. SOs are ‘monsters’ – thus you don’t weaken their ‘power’ by laughing at them but by ‘warring’ upon them through the criminal law (neatly masquerading as ‘regulatory and administrative’ measures and a form of public service).

His sixth rule of power tactics is that “a good tactic is one your people enjoy”. No reason why you can’t have fun while you’re doing all this. And what folks ‘enjoy’ they won’t bother to question, neatly. Assaultive deconstruction can be FUN! AND you get to be ‘cutting edge’ and very ‘with it’ and prove that you ‘get it’ by grabbing an axe and having a whack at it yourself. You can’t imagine this stuff – so widely characteristic of the decades of the 70s, 80s, and 90s without queasy recall of Nazi efforts to get the German people to join in the exhilaration of the Regime’s frakkulence, either by joining in or at least by standing by and cheering and Heil-ing as brownshirts and fellow (and sister) citizens descended into animality, barbarism, and Hitler’s nationalistic version of neo-paganism. Such progress.

There is a lethal allure, a seductiveness, to ‘being the Good guy’, and this is especially so when you can come up with a vivid and lurid ‘Bad guy’ who a) makes you look even more Good and b) is sooo Bad that you can do ANYTHING you want to him and still be Good … or even more Good than you are now.

The seduction of violence and mayhem simultaneously seduced and increased-the-numbers of many many ‘demonstrators’ and students back in the late Sixties. It was hard to tell how many were dedicated to some principle or goal, and how many were just there to enjoy the chance to wreck and wrack.

There is a profound violence inherent in the SO Mania Regime. It is a seductive trap that has already led authorities as well as (deliberately?) ill-informed citizens far down a dangerous road.

His seventh rule of power tactics is that “a tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag”. Hence the need to be constantly coming up with new tactics, new issues, new ‘outrages’. The frakkulent effects of a society’s being continuously and constantly bombarded with an unending stream of such ‘news’ is bound to become demoralized. And its politics will become demoralized. And folks will simply give up on the society and the culture, hope to make a few bucks, and pull up the drawbridge behind them.

The effects of this advice on the SO Mania Regime are clear. The ‘excitement’ of ‘escalating’ combines with the seductive allure of ‘being the Good guy’ while the incessant reports of ‘new’ variants of the Problem that require new and even more invasive laws … it’s a powerful Kool-Aid cocktail.

What you want to avoid, intones Alinsky, is your organizing and your cause turning into “a ritualistic commitment” (p.128) just like “going to Church on Sunday mornings”.

He’s onto something here. But mostly not. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German theologian and pastor who was executed by the Nazis for leading a theologically-based resistance to their regime, was also opposed to ‘the religious man’, by which he meant a person for whom ‘religion’ had merely become a set of social customs, uninformed and un-Shaped by the Gospel demands of Christ. It was for that reason that Bonhoeffer proposed a “religionless Christianity”, by which he meant only that Christianity must be based in an active faith that engaged the entire life of the believer – the Christian ‘Ideal’ you might say.

Bonhoeffer saw how the truly and genuinely ‘spiritual’ can be lost in the dust and noise of daily events – individually and societally – and thus be reduced to a shell of its true authority and redemptive power. But this has always been the challenge of any belief-system (Alinsky’s included): that its adherents lose their ‘edge’ and become dulled to routines of activity rather than living an active life grounded in belief.

Alinsky chooses – as really he must – to define Christianity (as so many other things as well) by its weakness rather than by its strength and the well-established potential of its approach. Which was a dynamic that dovetailed perfectly with the ‘politics of Deconstruction’ as one after another Identity after 1972 sought to do away with any abiding public sense of the value of Large Things and Unseen Things.

This was a recipe for human catastrophe, because humans need to believe and will raise up (as Moses found with Aaron’s Golden Calf) whatever is available as an object of belief. Hence the need – from Christianity’s point of view – to provide an abiding object of belief that would bring humans to a Larger and more Genuine Sense of itself. Otherwise, anybody enterprising and skilled enough would raise up a Golden Calf and offer it as a compelling object of belief.

Bonhoeffer saw the Nazi State as doing precisely this, as Hitler very much intended and as Mussolini pithily described: “nothing outside the State, nothing above the State, nothing against the State”. Given the government-and-State-dependent polity of the National Nanny State envisioned by the cadres of the assorted Identities here, you can see just how America would start heading down this road, in substance if not in ‘spin’.

Alinsky’s eighth rule of power tactics: “Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose”. And here you have the unending series of ‘crises’ and ‘outrages’ discussed above, and how – with the help of a shallow media ‘reporting’ – every element of national life is claimed to be either infected or complicit in the great disease of ‘oppression’ and must henceforth be ‘changed’ forthwith. The SO Mania Regime is clearly following the gameplan.

His ninth rule of power tactics: “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself”. Curiously, he offers no discussion here and moves on directly to number 10. I think I can understand why. What he’s implying here, and doesn’t want to get into, is that a good organizer has to make any instance of his/her selected ‘oppression’ seem as awful and terrible and ominous as possible. Selectivity, exaggeration, illogic, and the indispensable help of a media that doesn’t get beneath the appearances you have cagily manufactured and the ‘scenario’ you have carefully assembled for the cameras … all of this is what he advises.

The consequences of a wide, deep, and unremitting stream of such ‘news’ cannot be good: the Citizenry and thus The People become not only misinformed but also, after a while, incompetent to distinguish reality from ‘spin’, substance from appearance. And on top of that fatal consequence, public policies are erected and imposed – on the authority of The People – that are most surely not in the interest of the common-weal and are indeed not in contact with truth or reality.

And can you say ‘Iraq War’? But as I have been saying, long before the Bush-Cheney neocon imperium deployed this bit of advice, the American people had already been drugged into incompetence by the heady media cocktails of a dozen busy Identities and their advocating cadres.

And in order to maintain the illusion that this or that Advocacy’s Emperor (or Empress) has no clothes on then politics must devolve from The People to this or that ‘base’, which is comprised only of those true believers – those who ‘get it’ – who are sure they can see the ‘clothes’. This is a recipe for a Balkanization and fracturing of American politics, so that now the Beltway finds itself in Marshall Tito’s position in the former Yugoslavia: given irreconcilable differences among the many ‘identities’ that comprised the polity, only force applied by the (increasingly-nominal) central government can hold the polity together. But in this country, with enough of the Constitutional Ethos still intact, the Beltway chose to ‘buy’ the loyalty of its irreconcilable fractals, using huge amounts of ‘wealth’ (a wealth that was itself increasingly illusory).

And in the SO Mania Regime you wind up with a ‘base’ that is an amalgam of Left and Right, victimology-types and law-and-order types, advocates and entrepreneurs, all of whom now have at least a triple-interlocked web of motivation for keeping the thing going: to do something Good, to keep the job going, and - as the Aura of Pure Goodness starts to wear thin – to prevent the Citizenry from starting to see what’s really been going on and what has been done on their authority.

It is also a recipe for an intensifying civic Incompetence on the part of the Citizenry and The People and of the national politics. Immature and cartoonish thinking, not at all incompatible with an emotion-based, ‘non-male’ mode of ‘sensitive intuition’ and reliance on ‘personal stories’ become the only basis of political action and national policy.

What will happen now that the central government’s supply of usable cash is dwindling and can’t be increased without destabilizing the currency itself (especially in the eyes of the international community of nations) … what will happen to the American polity as the cash dries up is anybody’s guess.

He quickly proceeds to his tenth rule of power tactics: “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition”. Again, this is a politics of Assault – upon the very competence of the Citizenry to comprehend their own public affairs and to judge what then might be most workable for the common-weal.

The pressure of incessant streams of ‘reports’ and ‘studies’ – especially by those who think that you can be a ‘scientist’ and an ‘advocate-cadre’ at the same time – fueled the SO Mania Regime.

Alinsky’s eleventh rule of power tactics is that “if you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counter-side”. Curiously for someone with pretensions to a military-type textbook approach, he offers as his commentary on this point only a bit of gobbledygook: “this is based on the principle that every positive has its negative”.

I think what he means is that if you push hard and deep enough, you will force a reaction that may appear negative to your interests in the beginning (as your ‘enemy’ succeeds in countering you) but that then that reaction may morph into something positive to your interests (as your enemy oversteps himself). Which is neither an inaccurate nor an unheard-of military thought, but hardly prime strategy.

And it’s curious that he doesn’t say what he means more clearly. Perhaps he’s trying to maintain some of the aura of mysticism or profundity. Although if you’re only writing up a ‘technique’, why would you bother with something like that?

And there’s no guarantee that a counter-reaction “will” perform as expected; that’s a best-case scenario.

But I wonder if something like this wasn’t pressed on Beltway pols once those worthies revealed themselves as receptive as the SO Mania Regime got started up: if you keep trying our plan, no matter how ill-advised or imprudent or whackulous it looks right now, then sooner or later you’re going to break through to the other side and it will all look very good and you pols will look like true visionary leaders and statesmen (or statespersons). It sounds ridiculous, I know – but given what We have seen of the Beltway-advocacies ballet, is it too ridiculous to be possible? I’d say it’s not only a possible explanation but a probable one.

“In a fight”, intones Alinsky, “almost anything goes”. Well, maybe so (although look what’s happened in the GWOT and in Iraq and Afghanistan and Abu Ghraib and Gitmo). And the SO Mania Regime.

But again, this country is a democratic deliberative polity, not a military operation.

His twelfth rule of power tactics is that “the price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative”. And to explain this Alinsky immediately and simply states that “you cannot risk being trapped by the enemy in his sudden agreement with your demand” and saying to you that you were right and please tell us how to fix this.

And he moves on.

I can’t quite make this out as it is written. As best I can figure, he means that you should have a plan to fix the problem, but then wouldn’t your ‘demand’ have pretty much covered that? Or were you simply going to make a ‘demand’ that was really only a ‘complaint’ and hope that the ‘enemy’ would make a fool of himself trying to come up with a placating ‘solution’ that you could then make fun of or disregard or disparage? Or perhaps by simply complaining loudly enough, the ‘enemy’ (being the Beltway pols - in the very beginning anyway – or the public or some such entity theoretically also a part of the American commonwealth) will be so eager to give in to your ‘demand-complaint’ that he will give you more than you might have dared to ask for yourself.

This then would be a variant of the infantile manipulation whereby you scream long and loud enough and your parents – if they are of that nature – will give you whatever you want and more just for some peace and quiet. (Of course then - and the comparison with Hitler’s Modus Operandi in the mid-late 1930s comes to mind – you have no intention of allowing any such further peace and quiet and after a short interval start right up again in order to collect the next round’s tribute.)

In the SO Mania Regime it means. I think, that the advocates cannot permit a too-quick acceptance of initial demands, since Alinsky-ite doctrine requires a whole follow-on sequence of demands. A too-easy acceptance will undermine the fuel for a long-running programme. And the programme has run 20 years already. It has had such a long run because pols were actually threatened by the increasingly immature politics that they themselves were seeking to induce; by that I mean especially the cartoonish, immature thought-process of Either-Or: you’re either for the Regime or you’re for the sex-offenders.

Yet Alinsky is capable of an attention-getting candor when he feels like it. His thirteenth bit of advice is “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it”. Imagine here that the cadres of Identity Politics and all the other follow-on excitements kept this maxim on a handy wallet-size card. What would ‘politics’ look like after a couple-three decades of THAT?

I can’t not-think of that all-purpose mantra ‘the personal is political’, which apparently would include ‘polarization’ – which, by amazing coincidence, is one of the profound problems that recent commentators are suddenly realizing now bethumps so lethally American politics. We are ‘polarized’.

Yes, and it was part of the plan all along. Except that none of the Lefty whiz-kids, those gimlet-eyed cadres of Progress, imagined that anything would go wrong between the conception of their dampdream and its Best-Case-Scenario fulfillment. Sorta like the imperial whiz-kids of the Bush-Cheney imperium as they planned to be “greeted as liberators” in the “cakewalk” that would be the invasion of Iraq.

To the extent that We have been told to greet the cadres of change as liberators, then all of Us are Iraqis and sex-offenders now. And have been for quite some time.

But Alinsky is ready to quote some Scripture at you. “He that is not with me is against me” said Jesus. True enough, but that was an observation, not the coded Go-Word for a concerted plan of assault. Indeed, the same Person also pointed out that God prefers to let the tares grow up with the wheat until the harvest – and if THAT Scriptural bit is accepted as Gospel (so to speak) then no revolution would ever get off the ground. Imagine the look on Alinsky’s face if you were to propose to him that the Haves must be allowed to grow in the field with the Have-Nots until the Master of the Harvest comes and conducts His own winnowing. Like the devil dropping in on a cogitating Luther, you might find an inkwell thrown at your head.

Alas, Alinsky has been doing some ciphering. A leader struggle with his/her assessment that a “situation” is 52 percent favorable and 48 percent unfavorable, “but once the decision is reached he must assume that his cause is 100 percent positive and the opposition 100 percent negative”.

I can only wonder what effect THIS has had on pols, advocate-cadres, and all the assorted elements of the Regime.

This type of math is NOT capable of sustaining a deliberative democratic politics. The whole idea with such a politics is that you try to reach a consensus and that you therefore are open to the complexities among various views and ideas which are built into the whole project of forging a plan that will attract a consensus. Once you have gone to ‘war-mode’ then, as is famously said, truth is going to be the first casualty. Or, as is also famously said, ‘facts don’t matter’. Or, in the old Central European maxim: once the war flag is unfurled, all truth is in the trumpet. Which, come to think of it, is pretty much the theory of ‘revolutionary truth’: once the revolution is on, then ‘the revolution’ is the only arbiter of what is true and what isn’t. As Goering said: “Truth is what the Party decides is good for the German Volk”.

And with truth goes any sense of reality. And the Shape and boundaries that reality-based thinking imposes.
And in a bit of advice that surely was not lost on the whiz-kids of the Bush-Cheney neocon imperium, Alinsky then goes on to quote the Bard: that bit of Hamlet’s about “the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought”. Precisely what the neocons – and the cadres of the Left before them – wanted everybody to think. ‘Thinking’ is masculine, abstract, patriarchal and so ‘feeling’ is better. And only girly-men ‘think’; real men ‘act’ – from the gut (or thereabouts).

Phooey. Phooey and baloney.

Without the competence to deploy a serious and engaged capacity to assess and deliberate – which is the core of genuine ‘thinking’ – no genuine and robust deliberative politics can long survive. And, by amazing coincidence, it hasn’t.

It is “political idiocy”, Alinsky asserts, to come up with a problem and then grant that there is ‘another side’ to it. He’s wrong here: it is not political idiocy, it is idiocy in the eyes of any revolution. It is the essence of a revolution that the only reality and the only truth and the only good is that which furthers the objectives of the revolution. And if not, not.

Anyone who has tried to present a case for the dangerous potentials of this Regime may now understand part of the reason why it seems the most intelligent officials so intransigently continue to embrace and sustain it.

So while no revolutionary politics can ever truly accept that there is ever ‘another side’ to whatever it wants to get rid of, yet every democratic politics must accept that probability if it is to conduct a legitimate and accurate assessment as to what might be done.

But Alinsky is going to go with deliberate “polarization” – that there is not and cannot be any ‘other side’ once you have committed to your ‘war’.

But now no amount of Kool-Aid, no matter how artfully a batch is mixed up, can cushion or obscure the consequences of what has happened.

Sobriety is going to be a very painful thing indeed. But after a binge like Ours over the past 40 years, what else could you expect.

(There will be one more Post in this Alinsky mini-series, on his concluding chapter entitled “The Way Ahead”, wherein he shares his thoughts on what needs to be done starting in 1972.)

NOTES

*My copy is the paperback Vintage Books/Random House edition that reprints the original 1971 edition. The ISBN is 0-679-72113-4. All my quotations and page references will be taken from this edition.

SEX ADDICTION AS BUSINESS

This piece caught my attention since it exemplifies how vague and elastic diagnoses can become the site of entrepreneurial activity by ‘therapists’ and ‘experts’.

As is my method, I’ll simply go through the article picking out SO-relevant elements.

The therapist apparently received her basic professional training in marriage and family therapy. In 1997 she began advertising herself as a ‘sex addiction’ therapist. It’s not clear if she came directly from her training in marriage-and-family and decided for whatever reasons to set up in sex-addiction instead, or whether she had practiced in her specialty (not to be taken in the far more extensive sense used in describing doctors’ specialties) before, for whatever reasons, she decided to expand into the sex-addiction work.”For-profit” , by the way.

But at this point she has expanded her operation into a full-blown corporate business.

“Celebrities have been the greatest evangelists for treatment” she says, and her practice wouldn’t exist without them. And THAT is a revealing comment. There’s something disturbing and dangerous about blending the ‘evangelistic’ (not to say the ‘religious’) and the professional therapeutic.

‘Evangelism’ as it is used here bears the weight of hucksterism, that type of Elmer-Gantry self-assured confidence-man ‘ministry’ that cockily led to a false paradise those who were weak and gullible enough to jump onto the bandwagon.

This for-profit type of enterprise is “booming” now, thanks to the well-publicized troubles of various celebrity figures. Americans, it seems to me, are becoming increasingly susceptible to all manner of these frenzies. In large part, I would say, because they are growing up now with no sense of Mastery of themselves, no knowledge, and no genuine sense of Meaning, Purpose, direction, or perhaps even of an abiding ‘Self’ beyond whatever vitality can be dissipated into consumer-addled and primal-instinct-driven skittering along the hard surfaces of life’s appearances like fat globules on the surface of a hot iron skillet.

Americans have always been predisposed to some amount of this sort of thing, but there had always been some level of cultural, societal, and religious organization that could provide a supportive exo-skeleton or Trellis to help the energetic but undirected human vine achieve some sort of Shape, as individuals and as a cohesive social group. But the past few decades of sustained targeted ‘deconstruction’ of culture, society, and religion has profoundly weakened all of those ‘old’ supports.

And all that exists before the crystallization of forces and ‘interests’ under the ‘pressure’ of which legislators, jurists, prosecutors and law enforcement, ‘therapists’ and assorted ‘experts’ have all been cut in for a share of the action in a Mania that yet reveals a diabolically shrewd distribution of the many dollars the Beltway has made available. In a way it reminds me of the Cold War Pentagon strategy of military production: spread it out over as many States and electoral districts as possible to create the widest possible ‘support’ and ‘interest’ in Congress .

And all this has provided a lot of folks – ‘challenged’ in such competencies as relationships, self-mastery, and dealing with complexity, unpleasantness, and unhappiness – with a whole new arena for creating some excitement, movement, even – however falsely – direction in their days. Because ‘sex addiction’ “has led a growing number of Americans to conclude that they – or in many cases their spouses – needed treatment”.

There was a time when ‘you need to get your head examined’ was just an everyday barb tossed out, jokingly or in the middle of an argument. Now it is a magic coin that will play the interlocked juke-boxes of Law, Media, and Medicine (well, ‘therapy’ anyway).

AND all this despite the fact that “sex addiction [is] a controversial diagnosis not recognized by the medical establishment”. Come to think of it, neither is “sex offender”.

But it’s all led to “an increasing demand for services and the potential money to be made”. Now here you have a dubious diagnosis, a whole lotta people who through ‘empowerment’ feel authorized to be making some significant charges, and a whole bunch of licensed persons who stand to make a great deal of money by taking whatever is pushed toward them verrrry seriously.

THAT sounds disturbingly familiar.

As a result of recent corporate maneuvering you will soon be able, if you wish, to get yourself signed into a deluxe residential program at a treatment center that may resemble nothing so much as a 4-star resort, or you can sign up for a two-week outpatient program if you can’t afford the 4-star route. And there will be a national network of these things, so anybody who cares to sign up – or get somebody else signed up – won’t have too far to drive.

According to the entrepreneur-in-chief, “you have a backlog of people who need this treatment”. Of course.

But the article’s author is respectably skeptical: she points out that “just how many people are seeking treatment is unclear”. Still, that’s not going to help if this becomes a craze and there are more than enough factors in place for that to happen.

Especially since all this “exponential” expansion is taking place “without the government regulation that exist in drug and alcohol treatment”.

Now this IS a little different from the experience of the SO community, but then again maybe not. In the SO Mania Regime there’s been an awful lot of government involvement – legislation, programs, prosecutions, registrations, and lotsa lotsa shrewdly distributed government cash*.

But then again, although there has been much government involvement, there has been little government ‘regulation’, at least in the sense that any ordinary Citizen might expect: the government will use its bucks to engage the services of competent folks to make sure that services are provided that are accurate, cost-effective, and basically honest. (Government has not been providing THAT kind of regulation very much at all, as the economic situation clearly indicates.) The Mania laws are based on grossly inaccurate Findings, the programs are based on hugely dubious ‘science’ and ‘therapy’, the prosecutions are achieved through hugely dubious legal chicanery, the registrations need no introduction to the SO community, and the only good news is that the cash is running out and the pols are getting kinda twitchy (sorta similar to, I like to think, Italian government functionaries after mid-1943).

This article respectably provides the insights of a Boston psychiatrist, versed in the research of “compulsive sexual behavior”, who notes that there is “serious disagreement in the scientific community over whether humans could be addicted to sex in the same way they could be to alcohol or drugs”.

We are in – who can be surprised? – the murky, swampy, shadowy precincts of Definitions, an area that has been having a hard time of it these past few decades. The formal medical (and ‘scientific’, if you wish) definition of addiction includes a rather serious bit about addiction requiring a clear and verifiable physiological tolerance, built up over time, the withdrawal from which causes serious and very clear physiological problems.

And you don’t get that with ‘sex’. Which is probably why – who can be surprised? – there is “a lack of data” demonstrating such difficulties among ‘sex addicts’.

But of course, this won’t make any more difference to the entrepreneurs that it has to the assorted principals who designed and still maintain the SO Mania Regime.

Without any regulation, it’s now been “left to the industry to define sex addiction”, and I can’t imagine you’re going to get any more careful a result from the ‘industry’ than the country’s gotten from the architects and stewards of the SO Mania Regime.

The net is cast wide: the definition at this point is “any sexually related, compulsive behavior which interferes with normal living and causes severe stress on family, friends, loved ones and one’s work environment”. You’ll note that the definition is itself defined in significant part by another poorly and widely defined thing called ‘stress’.

There is and has always been a tremendous difficulty with the entire concept of ‘stress’ as a reliable diagnostic term. When does ‘unpleasant’ or ‘undesired’ shade over into ‘stressful’? What objective symptoms, observable to trained others and not susceptible to mimicry or manipulation, conclusively establish the presence of ‘stress’? What distinguishes the experience of frustration or dissatisfaction from ‘stress’ and what reliable diagnostic indicators are there? How can one establish a case of legitimate ‘stress’ from something merely perceived as or asserted-to-be ‘stress’?

And the “stress on family, friends, and loved ones” means that pretty much anybody you know can suddenly declare ‘stress’ and YOU are the Problem. Imagine a football game where anybody on the field is a Deputy Ref and can throw a flag or blow a whistle. Imagine driving in a city where any driver can ‘say’ whether s/he thinks the light is red or green; or where any driver can give another driver a ticket. Or, to use an example from an acquaintance well-traveled in a certain large and recently-modernizing country, any driver on an 8-lane freeway can stop wherever and whenever s/he pleases and open up the brown-bag for lunch. You see where this type of thing can quickly go.

These are not bickering trivialities; until they can be answered there is serious if not profound difficulty accepting the conceptual validity of the term.

From a business point of view, of course, an elastic or vague definition simply means that more folks are going to be stopping by to pick up a brochure or submit to an ‘initial test’ (which probably is going to find ‘stress’). Insurers will have to pick up the tab, although as a ‘medical’ expense it might also be used as a tax deduction so taxpayers will fund it indirectly.

But the ‘business’ or ‘numbers’ aspect of the SO Mania Regime did – as it were – quite well, consistently posting ‘good numbers’. And THAT seems to be the only aspect of the Regime that has been performing well.

There is even a “group” that “certifies” sex therapists, called impressively enough the International Institute for Trauma and Addiction Professionals (IITAP). In addition to the highly-fraught ‘addiction’ you also see those old deceivers, the “trauma” professionals. As you may recall from a recent Post about Dr. Paul McHugh, the ‘recovered memory’ professionals have now largely backed off that cottage-industry, claiming that they were – wait for it – taken out of context, misinterpreted, and that it was all “metaphorical” and never intended to be taken seriously. (Who can forget Rosanne Rosannadanna’s superb Nevvvvvvvvvvverrrrrrrrr Miiiiiiiiiind on ‘Saturday Night Live’?) And they have reinvented themselves as ‘trauma professionals’ (and, of course, ‘trauma’ can be whatever the therapist – or even the patient – wants it to be, and the whole thing becomes the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party held in and for the County of Through The Looking-Glass).

I recall that H.L. Mencken observed sometime in the early 1930s that even car-salesmen and realtors now had a ‘code of professional ethics’ but he still didn’t advise taking them at their word when you were making a big purchase.

Naturally, “some in the field say that 3-5% of Americans are sex addicts, while others say the proportion is probably greater”. Five percent of 300 million is 15 million; collect $7,500 bucks minimum (for the two-week outpatient option; 40K per month for the 4-star option) from each one and you can see how venture capital might be attracted. And the 7,500 is only going to get you in the door and doesn’t include further therapy and purchases in the gift shop (tee shirts, ball caps, relevant encouraging posters and bumper stickers, perhaps colored ribbons – if there’s still a color in the spectrum that hasn’t already been taken for this or that cause, besides some delicate shade of mauve or jade).

But you can be assured, the article drily reports, that someone who simply had one or two extramarital flings would never be diagnosed as a sex addict. Of course not. And Saddam had WMDs and we would be greeted as liberators and it would be a cakewalk and would only cost a couple-three billion max and sex-offenders are ravenous stranger-monsters with huge recidivism rates and – you could pray with Yul Brynner’s King of Siam – “et cetera et cetera and et cetera”.

I’m not so sure. Look at the bunches of folks classified as ‘sex offenders’ now. And the entrepreneurial therapy industry wouldn’t even have to adhere to such Constitutional requirements as are still, though holed like Swiss-cheese, standing like decayed speed-bumps against the road-rage of SO convictions and Registration.

What the entrepreneurial therapist types are looking for are the folks with “hundreds of sexual contacts and years and years of a double life”. Yes, that would be the more serious end of the spectrum, but there are a lot of less-serious cases.

And what if courts, even if in a well-intentioned effort to avoid imprisoning ‘sex offenders’, started mandating ‘therapy’ at one of these centers? Who’s going to pay for it? There seems to be a trend toward making the convicted SO literally ‘pay’ for his imprisonment or his Registration expenses, especially now that government agencies at all levels are running out of cash and nobody wants to admit that the SO Mania Regime should be dismantled.

Can your ‘medical records’ from these therapy sites be accessed for legal action and prosecutions? Do such ‘therapists’ (another verrrry broadly defined term) enjoy legal immunity like doctors do? Are possible sex-crimes still covered by ‘confidentiality’ in the first place? If one of these businesses is getting referrals from a court, will it protect your confidentiality if quietly threatened with a loss of official referrals?

Such are the complications in a time of Mania Law. Neatly, the effect is that everything said about ‘sex’ to anybody, and especially if notes are taken, must be considered from the point of view of turning up on a prosecutor’s desk for consideration as a possible ‘case’. This is the civilian version of the awful Catch-22 of prison ‘rehab’ programs: if you don’t participate, you won’t be considered for parole, and if you do participate anything you say can wind up on a desk for legal review with an eye to further charges and prosecution.

Indeed, “therapy often includes full disclosure of sexual encounters to spouses, including names, dates and locations, and a search for an underlying problem, such as childhood trauma or depression”. If your sex has caused a troubled marriage, and your spouse gets this information … give that some thought. Or if you name a partner, what are the chances that that partner will then claim s/he was ‘raped’ or ‘assaulted’ in order to save face?

Rent some videos of old World War 2 movies where Resistance agents are in the clutches of the Gestapo or the SS, or are trying to figure out what can be said in front of whom in a conversation (recall that in some cases your own kids can accidentally set the Gestapo in motion with chatter on a school playground).

Funny, too, is that the Boomers and cultural ‘liberationists’ were sure that once you could have sex whenever you wanted and however you wanted and as often as you wanted then you would truly be ‘free’ and no longer a boring, conformist stooge of (pick one or several: the system, the establishment, capitalism, imperialism, bourgeois phony morality).

Even more troubling is the fact that “more people think they have it”. Which is hardly surprising: since a) there are so many people who thought that ‘sex’ was somehow liberating and that they didn’t need to ‘mature’ because that was ‘oppressive’; and b) the definitions of symptoms are almost as broad and whacky as the old ‘self-tests’ to determine if your daddy abused you from 25 years ago (if you are nervous around hot coffee then you were abused by your daddy because daddies drink coffee – see, it’s science!). **

Even more worrying is the fact that although “sex addiction is not considered a legitimate psychiatric diagnosis [this fact] appears irrelevant to clients. They are finding rehab centers and outpatient programs through Google searches rather than referrals from their family doctors”.

Things have gotten so vague, fuzzy and mushy nowadays that everybody feels ‘empowered’ to decide when they 'have a diagnosis' and need therapy – which, of course, the for-profit therapy crowd will do little to prevent. I can’t help but think that folks have gotten this impression from watching the government declare that just about anybody can be a ‘sex offender’, and you shouldn’t let piffling matters like accuracy and objectivity get in the way of that.

“It is absolutely consumer-driven” says one of the entrepreneurs. Which was what the government said when it started the SO Mania Regime: it was simply providing a ‘service’ to folks who needed to know who and where were the SOs in their community (although anybody in the world could look up any State’s Registry or save time and trouble by conveniently browsing the one big central federal Registry comprised of all the States’ Registries).

You can take a computer-quiz online to see if you qualify. One of the questions is Has sex become the most important thing in my life? Without God, Meaning, Purpose, Family Responsibility, Maturity, or smoking … well, you can see how many folks might have fallen back on something more ‘basic’ and readily to hand (so to speak). And for that matter, does daily self-abuse make one a ‘sex addict’? If you want it to, I’m guessing the answer will be Yes.

“There are no independent studies on recidivism in sex addicts, but practitioners describe it as extremely high.” Well, what would you expect them to say? And since the government has been insisting on this for two decades now, in the face of all the evidence, then why would any entrepreneur burden a business with too much truth, accuracy, and reality? There are times, to paraphrase H.L. Mencken again, when businesspersons must “rise above principle”. Oy. (H.L. originally made the comment about politicians, which is also relevant here.)

The article decently points out a major conceptual problem: “For an alcoholic, sobriety is abstinence, but the goal for a sex addict is more amorphous: a healthy sex life. Part of therapy is reaching a personal definition of sobriety, and it is often a trial-and-error process”. What is ‘too much’ sex in a society where the individual is ‘totally autonomous’ in defining the quality of his/her life? If you have what once was quaintly called an ‘open marriage’ back in the Swinging Fifties and early Sixties, then on what grounds can X-amount of sex be labeled (or diagnosed) as too much by somebody else?

"It's really difficult in terms of people being able to get traction for recovery. Relapse is the norm" says a Marin County psychologist who treats sex addicts. Note that Marin County is that fabulously well-off enclave just north of San Francisco. Note also that since some amount of sex is natural – to say the least – then avoiding ‘relapse’ is going to be problematic. But it offers marvelous prospects for repeat-business.

Most of these operations get their business from the Web. You don’t have to bother with trained clinicians and face-to-face meetings; it’s like buying a car online, only this time you’re not going online to avoid a salesman but rather to open yourself up to one without any obstructive interference from actual trained professionals.

A shrewd marketing move.

“Although the overwhelming majority of those treated for sex addiction are men, the sites often seem geared toward their wives, with photos of couples engaged in deep conversation and women with pained expressions”. This is a shrewd reportorial observation. And a shrewd business move. And it reinforces a long-standing suspicion that somehow there’s a bit of the gender-war fueling this whole thing.

I wonder if they won’t soon be offering equally expensive ‘support’ programs for wives. Oops, they already do.

But it gets worse: “One Houston counselor promises follow-up polygraph tests so wives will know whether their husbands have changed”. The possibilities for mischief here are endless.

And what does it say about the relational competence and maturity of American adults that they require ‘therapists’ to administer lie-detector tests in order to somehow maintain the marital relationship?

The more reputable providers (as these things go) are concerned that the more whacky providers will give everybody in the business a bad name. Hence, they want government regulation (thus to assure the reliability of ‘the brand’ as the business schools like to say).

Otherwise "it sets up the potential for treatment to be delivered from a business milieu rather than what is in the best interest of the client", said one provider. And yet the SO Mania Regime’s safeguards and respect for the treatment of SO’s has been a nasty business from the start.

The same provider said that, in her experience, recovery took two or three years and that many people needed several types of treatment as well as regular attendance at 12-step meetings. I’m going to imagine that if you’ve got what is primarily a maturity problem (as opposed to a formal and genuine addiction problem) and a self-mastery problem is not going to be easy to resolve. And this will be as true for the younger generations who have grown up in a loosey-goosey culture of ‘total autonomy’ and profound Shapelessness as it ever was for the ‘macho’ generations of yore. A sex-therapist is going to need some serious competence in basic developmental psychology (and its repair) as in ‘sex’ (whatever that may mean in the therapeutic setting).

"We should be making it very clear upfront that a two-week program is not even scratching the surface," she said. I don’t think she realizes how very accurate she is.

All in all, this ‘sex addiction’ craze is surely a spin-off of the SO Mania Regime and all the shady stuff that underlies it.

I have the greatest respect for genuine therapy. I most certainly believe that every human being, male or female, is as responsible for the mastery of his/her sexual energies as a warship commander is responsible for the competent mastery of his vessel and its capabilities.

But I would be very judicious in how or even whether to make use of the type of entrepreneurial services being developed here. As is now clear from the misadventure in Iraq, good intentions and a trust in ‘business’ did not suffice to work well for the efforts in that wracked country.

NOTES

*If you have a moment take a look at this excellent site put up by RSOL; one of the reports analyzes in a single page just how the SO Mania programs have been constructed to seduce States to maximize their ‘numbers’ – very much by hook or by crook, as used to be said – in order to maximize federal funding.

**Don’t laugh. Although the two female authors of that frakkulent book (“The Courage to Heal”, see here) later back-pedaled, they brought out a 20th Anniversary edition (on top of the 3rd edition).

SO AND SAUL ALINSKY7

I continue with an SO-specific look at Saul Alinsky’s 1971 book “Rules for Radicals”*. There is a corresponding Post on my other site here.

As I’d said, the Master Post for this 7th installment contains a discussion with all the page quotations, and you can access it here.

In this Post I will simply deal with the SO-relevant material.

His sixth chapter is entitled “In the Beginning” (a nice Biblical flourish).

When an organizer (or in today’s parlance: an advocate and consciousness-raiser) approaches a group that has been quietly targeted as needing its consciousness raised, s/he shouldn’t simply start in professing a general love of people (or democracy). No, instead, the organizer should immediately start “with a denunciation of exploiting employers, slum landlords, police shakedowns, gouging merchants” and so the organizer will be “inside their experience and they accept him”.

Come out swinging, come out denouncing.

So, in the Victimology setting, where the Have-Nots are ‘victims’ and defined as being extorted and oppressed by whatever ‘enemy’ the particular subset of victimism has selected, then Alinsky-ite Technique calls for the organizers/advocates to start right in denouncing whatever ‘oppression’ they have decided is going to define this group of victims whose cause they are going to create and use as a ‘pressure group’ directly on legislators.

The Citizens, as you can see, don’t really figure in except as a herd of half-witted observers who will only be needed to add a little extra oomph to the ‘pressure’ by stampeding in addled outrage after they’ve been force-fed selected (mis-)information that has been ‘discovered’ by the organizers/advocates. So much for democracy.

The SO community, recalling the early days of the Sex Offense Mania Regime, can easily recall this phase, and how well it followed the Alinsky play-book.

“Love and faith are not common companions. More commonly, power and fear consort with faith.”

And again, where he is going with this is that Pressure is a POWER, and can generate FEAR. And so FEAR is a form of POWER, if you know how to start it and then wield it as a tool to apply pressure on legislators.

For Alinsky, as you can see from his quoted statement immediately above, things like ‘love’ and ‘faith’ (religious concepts, interestingly) and ideals of any sort, are merely illusions. He is not correct in this: the power of belief and faith, the power of ideals, are precisely what religions seek to inculcate (which may be why – as so often has been the case in modern and even historical power-struggles with the Catholic Church – governments will seek to destroy or undermine the credibility of the Church: it is a rival for the credibility that the government or the revolution wants to take for itself).

This worked well in synergy with the Victimist approach, which is to reduce the ‘perpetrator’ to something (someone, really) purely evil and incapable of possessing any potential for love or faith or ideals or any reliable capacity for self-control or rehabilitation.

Just as Alinsky asserts that Nothing Is On The Level and that Everybody Who Is A Have Is An Oppressing and Lying Phony, so too does Victimism presume all that to be true about any society or culture that ‘permits’ (or perhaps approves!) victimization and about any designated ‘perpetrator’.

Malignant and violent sexual-evil is as natural to the Sex-Offenders as Greed is naturally the core and only real motivating dynamic of the Haves. (And if you toss in the radical-feminist insistence that all, or mostly all, sex of any sort is per se ‘rape’, then things only get worse.)

Alinsky’s rock-bottom assumption is that Imperfection or Incompleteness Rules, and that the ‘bad’ reality of that situation must be taken as definitive. As must the tendency of all humans – in their way – to try to get what they want and keep it. Given that core ‘reality’ as he defines it, then only the most dedicated but ultimately cynical approach to politics can be ‘realistic’. And so you get Alinsky’s sempiternal war-politics.

And all of this is ‘weaponized’ to a shocking degree in the ‘war-politics’ by which Victimist and other advocacies erected the Sex Offender and the Sex Offense Mania Regime.

And the target of those ‘weapons’ were The People, the Citizens, and the Constitutional ethos (which had been specifically designed to prevent this sort of thing and really really had to be forcibly twisted in order to make ‘space’ for this whole gambit).

There was a functioning democratic polity in America. The application of a revolutionary Method forged in non-democratic European polities of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was not, I would say, called for – and indeed there existed huge possibility that the applications of that Method in this American polity would seriously derange it. Which, I think it can be seen by now, is exactly what has happened.

But as a hideous product of the synergy between the Left’s ‘progressive’ revolutionizing, and Victimology’s effort to redefine Alinsky’s Have-Nots as any species of ‘victim’ that some organizers were willing to ‘advocate for’, and the Right’s desire for law-and-order and some chance to stand up for ‘decency’ (which the Left had vigorously ‘deconstructed’ throughout the 1970s and the Flower Children and Hippies in the Sixties) … in that awful synergy the Sex Offender Mania Regime was forged, with something for all of the players whose ‘pressure’ cut them in on ‘the deal’ and whose lethal Technique sidestepped and then undermined serious and mature, widely-grounded public deliberation.

Alinsky continues that the Have-Nots have a limited faith in their own judgments while the Haves have all the ‘established’ truths going for them. Thus the Have-Nots must be encouraged to have confidence in their own judgments. This isn’t a bad approach up to this point. The Progressive-era efforts to ensure and support good education for the newly-arrived industrial working populations was precisely aimed at trying to realize the potential of those populations.

BUT the idea back then was to enable and ‘empower’ (to use a more modern term) those populations by educating them so that their judgments would serve them well in the democratic process of standing-up for their situation.

BUT it is precisely at that point that Alinsky – and far more the New Left incarnations of the “Have-Nots” – seeks to shortcut the whole ‘democratic’ thing by declaring that Nothing Is On The Level (including the American Vision) and therefore the Have-Nots must be encouraged simply to get mad and start applying whatever ‘pressure’ can be brought to bear. ‘Judgment’ doesn’t really enter into it.

The ‘revolutionary impatience’ that was so brutally evident in the Soviet approach, and even more relevantly in the ‘revolutionary chinoiserie’ of the New Left gaga-admiration for all things Mao in the late Sixties, had no room for democratic process. Because people can’t be trusted to function as The People, and additionally: since most people ‘just don’t get it’ then they aren’t going to do you any good if they retain the authority assigned to The People in the Constitutional Vision.

Charming.

‘Victims’ – once their consciousness had been raised to ‘realize’ that they were victims and had been victims all along – were urged to get mad or – as they like to say now – ‘shocked’ and ‘outraged’. Then that shock and outrage could be used as a weapon or tool to exert pressure, backed up by the genuine fear whipped up in the public by the judicious public dissemination of selected bit of information or mis-information or dis-information.

Neat.

None of the players in these Alinsky-ite scenarios, especially under the influence of direct importations of Leninist and Maoist revolutionary thought unfiltered through Alinsky himself, are interested in ‘empowering’ the larger Citizenry. The larger Citizenry – The People – are actually envisioned as a troublesome herd of ignorant lumps, complicit in the perpetuation of the ‘oppression’ even by something as ‘innocent’ as having a doubt about what was being demanded.

True to Lenin’s vanguard-elite theory Alinsky asserts that “One of the great problems in the beginning of an organization is, often, that the people don’t know what they want”. (p.104) He’s going to try to solve that in a democratic-type fashion by having the organizers ‘educate’ people into what’s good for them and what they need to do and what they want (“consciousness-raising sessions”, a New Left staple, are one of the tried-and-true expressions of this assumption).

But since he’s already undermined the basis for any genuine democratic process by the rock-bottom assertions that Nothing Is On The Level and that the Haves (however your group defines them) Are Never Going To Allow You To Be Free (or get what you want), then Alinsky’s Method is not at all going to strengthen democratic process. How could it? More relevantly, why should it? After all, a whole bunch of your fellow Citizens – and Americans – are nothing but treacherous and purposeful oppressors and extorters. This is the toxic brew bubbling in the Identity Politics pot and has been bubbling there from the get-go.

But he blames this state of affairs on the American democratic polity: “It is the schizophrenia of a free society that we outwardly espouse faith in the people but inwardly have strong doubts whether the people can be trusted”. (p. 104) Which is a pretty accurate summation of his own position. But this is the enabling fantasy that grounds his entire Approach.

The Framers themselves had their doubts: can people be trusted to function as The People? But the entire American system of government and politics is premised on the assumption that in the long run the answer to that Question is Yes. The entire European revolutionary premise is that they cannot and that the answer to that Question is No.

How could anybody imagine that Alinsky could be applied widely and liberally (so to speak) in this country and yet NOT undermine a genuinely democratic politics?

And THIS is reflected in the Sex Offender Mania Regime, which got started with a whole bunch of deliberately calculated public manipulation about the horrors of something that looked bad at first glance but seemed to dissolve when you tried to analyze it intelligently and carefully. And that even now, as the public senses that something is fundamentally wrong with it, the Sex Offender Mania Regime is clung to by legislators, jurists, prosecutors, and – of course – the organizers and advocates and everybody who has found a place at the government funds-trough thoughtfully provided to create a ‘constituency’ for the Regime whether it was useful or accurate or validly-grounded or Constitutionally compatible or not.

People, Alinsky says, need “to have a reason for knowing”, otherwise they’ll just fuhgeddaboutit (a post-Alinsky phrase that stems, as best I can make out, from New Yorkers who had given up on their City government ever being able to get anything right).

As it stands his statement is true indeed. Human beings were given the ability to Reason and so they have a built-in desire and thirst to know. That’s where the ‘free press’ bits come into the Framing Vision. And the stuff about a solid shared education and a common fund of knowledge necessary for any Citizen to function competently.

But all that Alinsky means by ‘knowing’ is knowing that you are being oppressed somehow. It is a politics of suspicion and based on – as the academy would say – a hermeneutics of suspicion.**

This is not only a Flat world. It is a dark and swamp-like world. It will lead to no broad sunlit uplands and anybody residing in it is going to wind up becoming, especially for political purposes, a swamp creature.

But Alinsky is not really interested even in the dignity or independence even of the people he has declared himself desirous to ‘liberate’ by ‘organizing’ them.

It is revealing to read him as he recounts one episode from his personal files.

There was a neighborhood that had a high infant mortality rate; the neighborhood had had an Infant Welfare medical clinic but a decade before Alinsky’s arrival the clinic had been kicked out because the neighborhood didn’t like its disseminating birth-control information. (As Alinksy shrewdly tells it, the neighborhood didn’t kick the clinic out, “the churches” did – yet in the next sentence Alinsky says that the neighborhood folks “had forgotten that they themselves had expelled” the clinic).

Anyhoo, Alinsky checked things out and found that all the neighborhood had to do to get the clinic back was to ask for it. “However, I kept this information to myself.” Instead, he called an “emergency meeting” and got folks whipped up to form a committee that would go down to the Infant Welfare Society’s main offices and DEMAND medical services.

So down they went. Alinsky gloats that “Our strategy was to prevent the officials from saying anything; to start banging on the desk and demanding that we get the services, never permitting them to interrupt us or make any statement. The only time we would let them talk was after we got through”. You start to form a certain impression of the gentleman.

Down they go to the offices of this volunteer clinic society, and there’s this “poor woman” at the desk. Somebody whose volunteer work or job is to get medical care to as many infants as possible.

“With this careful indoctrination we stormed in … and began a tirade consisting of militant demands, refusing to permit her to say anything. All the time the poor woman was desperately trying to say ‘Why of course you can have it – we’ll start immediately’. But she never had the chance to say anything and we ended up in a storm of ‘And we will not take No for an answer!’”.

When the organized had finished their script, Alinsky continues, the woman said ‘Well, I’ve been trying to tell you …’ and I cut in, demanding ‘Is it yes or is it no?’. Naturally, the woman said Yes and then immediately Alinsky brayed “’That all we wanted to know’ and we stormed out of the place”.

Thus Alinsky.

And he’s rather very much pleased with himself.

There’s something deeply disturbing about this story.

It’s repulsive on an individual human level: the neighborhood was purposely deceived; the woman at the desk was put through an unnecessary and unpleasant experience; and the neighborhood committee was then quickly herded out before it might stumble upon the truth of the situation. Even back in the days of Alinsky’s youth this story would repel.

Worse, you get a sense here of how American politics was deranged and debased in the past 40 years as Identity Politics took this basic gambit to stratospheric levels.

And in this sense the ‘neighborhood’ was the American Citizenry, who started off 40 years ago with a decent assumption that if other Citizens were going to bring a problem to public attention (by a ‘free press’ and quite possibly with the backing of an elected official or ten) then they must be on the level and the problem must be real.

BUT AS YOU CAN SEE … none of that applied then or applies at all in Alinsky’s Method.

Years and decades of this scam, amplified by a melodrama-hungry media, backed up by a band of braying or bleating pols … it stuns and it repels.

The ‘script’ has worked its dark magic. American politics is polarized, sensationalized, infantilized, emotionalized, and nothing but a shell of a robust democratic deliberative politics based on even a modest level of communal trust that Citizens all have the common-weal and truth as a shared goal and purpose.

And you can see ALL of that in play and at work in the Sex Offender Mania Regime. Because not only are the Sex Offenders painted creatively as the most monstrously awful of evil perpetrators, but the public (victims not IN Alinsky’s vision but OF Alinsky’s vision) is manipulated into fear-based hasty and ill-considered over-reactions. With the help of legislators who might well see it to their benefit and advantage for the public to be distracted from more valid concerns about the state of grave public matters.

And the consciousness-raised designated ‘victims’ themselves become caught up in the toils of this thing, their vital cooperation absolutely indispensable to keep the tracks of this runaway train clear and greased.

Alinsky draws lessons. “Therefore, if your function is to attack apathy and get people to participate it is necessary to attack the prevailing patterns of organized living in the community . The first step in community organization is community disorganization.” [italics Alinsky’s]

Once again, I point out how profoundly corrosive this strategy would be in any polity that sought some level of shared identity as a Citizenry. Confronted with this type of ‘balkanization’ assorted strong-men in Europe or Eurasia have imposed commonality by force (Stalin, Tito).

But in a democratic polity such as the United States, the effect of Identity Politics must by its own dynamics fracture any sense of common identity and shared purpose among the Citizenry: if for all practical purposes your primary identity-loyalty is not to your country but to some erected ‘group’ (based on race, gender, preferences as to this or that, level of ability or disability, and on ad infinitum) then the ‘common-weal’ and the ‘commonwealth’ is effectively undermined and it will dissolve into parts along the fracture lines of any group’s self-definition as an ‘Identity’. Balkanization in essence and in effect.

And again, it’s not possible to read Alinsky here without realizing that he really is conceiving of things in terms of ‘attack’ and ‘war-politics’. THAT’S his programme.

So in the Sex Offender Mania Regime, despite the public declarations of how these laws and Registries will hopefully keep communities ‘safe’, the plan from the get-go had to be to DISORGANIZE a community. A sense of trust, or confidence in the community’s ability to administer its own affairs, a sense of proportion … all of these had to be overridden in order to instill a sense of incompetence among the Citizens and in that profound sense ‘disorganize’ their community.

We are a Citizerny united only by a shared 'victimization'. We have no other qualities.

Worse, of course, the Constitutional ethos equally had to be ‘disorganized’ – it too was standing in the way of this Stampede.

“All change means disorganization of the old and the organization of the new.” [italics Alinsky’s]

And in the SO Mania Regime, as in so much else, “old” is presumed to be no-longer-good and “new” is presumed to be nothing-but-good. Huge presumptions, un-grounded and unproven. But THAT is exactly why they had to be rushed in under the cover of ‘emergency’ and ‘outrage’ and the dust raised by the Stampede.

Yes but no. On its most basic level it’s so obvious that it’s a truism. But where Alinsky might have meant ‘change’ as the Old Left would have meant it (palpable economic deprivation of Labor in the generally accepted sense of the term, clear to establish and demonstrate), ‘change’ didn’t begin to do justice to the agenda of the Victimology advocacy.

This was not Alinsky’s way. And that’s OK.

This was not what the Victimists wanted. And that’s OK – a democratic polity is set up to handle such developments.

BUT when the Beltway figured that their most rewarding course of action would be to put their full weight behind these things without further ado … THEN that was not OK. These demands were hugely dubious in terms of justification; quite possibly unworkable in terms of fulfillment; and in any case were going to require such broad and sweeping change – imposed by an increasingly impositional Beltway – that the entire Framing Vision and the mechanism of a democratic deliberative politics would be not simply temporarily thrown off-balance, but profoundly deranged and perhaps permanently undermined. (And in 2010, does any of that appear NOT to have happened?)

A broad-based, consistent, and profound multivalent campaign of “disorganization” cannot help but – ummmmm – disorganize a society, a culture, a polity, a country and – who knows? – an economy too.

And at some point in there you pass the point of ‘constructive disorganization’ in the service of a reasonable expectation of positive achievement that will strengthen and not weaken the common-weal. At some point you tip over into Deconstruction as a runaway buzzsaw that is simply chewing up and chewing up until there isn’t enough left to hold the whole together.

“No one can negotiate without the power to compel negotiation.” [italics Alinsky’s] Who can forget the sage insight of that great American businessman and entrepreneur, Alphonse Capone, deceased: “You can get more with a gun and a kind word, than you can with just a kind word”. That’s an excellent maxim for conducting a Mob racket. But it’s hardly the type of advice likely to sustain a democratic politics.

Notice that We seem to have been frog-marched right past deliberation and persuasion. Alinsky is good at that sort of thing – recall his bravura performance in the matter of the children’s medical clinic.

Do you want to help a “low-income” community (Alinsky’s own example here) to see that they have a “bad scene” and then help them to see that it’s an “issue” that can be addressed? Sure. So long as you respect them as Citizens and give them good and accurate and worthwhile information and teach them genuine skills and don’t simply manipulate them so they can be herded around like a portable stampede that will do its thing on cue.

And introduce them to the democratic process and see where things go – that’s how a democracy changes without ripping itself apart.

“Organizations must be based on many issues … organizations need action as an individual needs oxygen.” But once you’ve started what must now be an endless series of emergencies and outrages and assorted confrontative manipulations, then any hope of a deliberative and serious democratic politics is thoroughly undermined.

After a while the Citizenry is simply bombarded with a steady stream of crises and outrages and emergencies until finally it is impossible to process them all, the government or the relevant elite ‘experts’ are left to do what they will, and folks – maybe even upon Presidential advice – just go shopping. (Ooops, that’s not going to work any longer, either.)

Thus in the SO Mania Regime the ‘problem’ can never be allowed to be solved, can never even be slowed down. So all sorts of tricks are deployed against the Citizenry: elastic definitions that are quietly changed although the public isn’t informed, skewed if not outright incompetent or jiggered ‘research’, ‘statistics’ that are as much a figment of deliberate imagination as they are anything else.

“Many issues mean many members.” Yes, and it’s the same principle as the old MIRV-ed rockets: you can stuff many warheads into one rocket nose-cone, and the more the merrier. It was a neat trick back in the Cold War but you can’t really call it progress.

Interests on the Left, interests on the Right, the government’s abiding interest in expanding its power to control and intimidate, the pols’ abiding interest in votes (when things look good) and avoiding responsibility (when things prove to have been badly enacted), the prosecutorial and jurisprudential desire to look like they’re earning their salaries, the many academics and cottage industries who make a tidy sum from all that government money.

An organizer must understand that “in a highly mobile society the word ‘community’ means community of interests, not physical community”. NOW you are really getting into some dark and tricky waters: it is possible, but by no means established, that a democratic politics will function beyond a certain level of complexity and Citizen familiarity: in that sense, all politics is local, as Tip O’Neill said.

BUT it is largely probable that a polity is not going to function well – if at all – when the ‘community’ is scattered all over the country and is united only by an ‘interest’ which – as in the Sex Offender Mania Regime era – may or may not be an exaggerated and manipulated ‘emergency’ or ‘outrage’.

And if the organizers are always going to have to be stoking the fires, coming up with more and more ‘instances’ and more expansive definitions of what the ‘emergency’ is, then this is going to turn into the type of defense-contractor tailspin where you make expensive military hardware, sell it to other countries as well as the US, and then claim that the US now has to pay you to develop even more ‘advanced’ weapons to counter what your company has scattered far and wide to other countries.

Not an actual ‘community’, and perhaps not an actual ‘issue’ – but still you want to sustain a reality-based politics? Did anybody in the Beltway think this thing through before they bought into this thing?

Alinsky concludes his chapter with a revealing bit of High Thought: the organizer must learn that “when we respect the dignity of the people, they cannot be denied the elementary right to participate fully in the solutions to their own problems”.

True indeed.

But how can he really believe this? After what he pulled, and proudly so, at the headquarters of the infant medical clinic?

The dignity of The People is the Ground of the Constitutional Vision: so much so that it is they who get to deliberate about what should be done and then respectfully if urgently seek to persuade the Citizen compatriots. And thus “participate fully in the solution to their own problems”.

But Alinsky is using code here. ‘Participating fully’ means that they get to say what the bureaucrats are going to do – which can work for a while or occasionally, but can’t become the default position of daily politics. They can use the vote, although – in the balancing mechanism of a democracy – this or that demand or wish may not be workable.

But there’s no other way to handle this sort of thing without manipulating people and relying on the government to impose the resultant ‘deal’ rather than build a broad consensus of support.

And in the long run you can’t sustain a robust and healthy democratic politics that way.

But then, at the end, Alinsky demonstrates just how Old Left he is: “Self-respect arises only out of people who play an active role in solving their own crises and who are not helpless, passive, puppet-like recipients of private or public services”. 

In the modern American politics that has developed in the decades since his death, Victimism has worked toward deploying Alinsky’s Methods and incorporating his presumptions into national policy and even law, BUT all the while creating not a more robust and productive Citizenry but a far less competent and far more dependent Citizenry.

This emphasis of Alinsky’s on the dignity of people is sincerely felt, I am sure. But it is impossible to reconcile it with his Methods and it is even less possible to accept what has happened now that his Method has mutated into the Sex Offender Mania phenomenon.

NOTES

*My copy is the paperback Vintage Books/Random House edition that reprints the original 1971 edition. The ISBN is 0-679-72113-4. All my quotations and page references will be taken from this edition.

**The underlying principles of a methodical approach to understanding some topic. In this case, the underlying principle is that if you Suspect You Are Being Screwed and that a major chunk of your fellow Citizens Are Screwing You And Intend To Continue Doing So Until You Forcibly Stop Them then you are perfectly well –equipped to assess any public matter. For quite a while over the past decades, I would say, the Beltway fostered this so as to distract folks: people constantly agitated over suspicion of this that or the other group of other Citizens wouldn’t have time to suspect the government of anything at all. And here We are today – the failing wars, the economy a train-wreck, and a politics reduced to cartoonish levels of symbolism and appearances.

SO AND SAUL ALINSKY 6

I continue with an SO-specific look at Saul Alinsky’s 1971 book “Rules for Radicals”*. There is a corresponding Post on my other site here.

As I’d said, the Master Post for this 6th installment contains a discussion with all the page quotations, and you can access it here.

In this Post I will simply deal with the SO-relevant material.

His fifth chapter is entitled “Communication”.

Alinsky defines communication taking place “when they understand what you’re trying to get across to them”.

That’s a narrow and limited approach to communication; ‘sharing’ or the exchange of views isn’t in it. But then, if those whom you have targeted for ‘organizing’ don’t really know what’s good for them and if you are there to move or manipulate them toward where you are sure they need to go, then why waste time?

It’s this type of ‘communication’ that lubricated the Mania Regimes: it’s not ‘communication’ in any ‘civilian’ sense (such as you might find in a reputable dictionary); rather, it’s more the one-way pumping of selected information (or spin or what-have-you) being aimed at recipients not for the purpose of informing them so they can make a reasoned decision but merely to stampede them. (Which means that any government office-of-communications has a purpose not covered in a dictionary.)

Naturally too, this has the effect of habituating the government to a certain dishonesty (to put it nicely) when dealing with the Citizens: dishonesty and manipulation are simply folded into the concept of ‘Communication’, which is a good thing that everybody thinks a government should be doing.

Which is what the Beltway wants everybody to think.

“When you are trying to communicate and can’t find the point in the experience of the other party at which he can receive and understand, then, you must create the experience for him.”

In other words, you know what s/he SHOULD be experiencing, so you have carte-blanche to ‘create’ what you are already sure should be there. Thus, among other things, the unending series of ‘symbolic incidents’ that are designed for no other purpose than to convince large numbers of people (modern communications technologies are far more efficient in pulling this gambit on masses of people rather than the slow one-person-at-a-time approach) that derange a democratic politics, derailing it from a ‘politics of substance’ and rendering it merely a ‘politics of symbolism’ and ‘appearances’.

The SO community will be familiar with this phenomenon, even if at least at the beginning its origins and precise causal dynamics were not clear. Having made up their minds what SHOULD be ‘there’ (because they believed it was there OR because the wanted and needed it to be there) then advocates and ‘experts’ made the Alinsky-ite pressure-moves on legislators who were eager to have such ‘cover’.

And so in the Mania Regimes of DoVi and SO you see a ‘politics of appearances’ rather than substance mutate into a ‘legislation of appearances’ rather than substance: in terms of the what the statistics and ‘stories’ claimed, in terms of the purported monsters that were committing them (whether a few hardened recidivists or millions of lumpish unripes, take your pick) … there is no ‘there’ there.

And from a ‘legislation of appearances’ rather than substance you mutate further into a ‘jurisprudence of appearances’ rather than substance, by way of a ‘law enforcement of appearances’ rather than substance.

And the whole thing becomes a hall of mirrors. Only lethally so.

Alinsky’s vision floods wide and deep. His vision spreads like a toxic flood: “For another example of the same principle, here is a Christian civilization where most people have gone to church and mouthed various Christian doctrines, and yet this is really not a part of their experience because they haven’t lived it. Their church experience has been purely a ritualistic decoration.”

He echoes many serious religious thinkers, whether he knows it or not. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the intense and acute German pastor who would take part in the plots against Hitler and be executed just a couple of weeks before the Nazi surrender, visited New York in the early 1930s. What struck him were the shallowness and superficiality – although buttressed with an optimism and enthusiasm that he found to be unserious – of the theology and ministerial students he encountered in his year of study at a great metropolitan divinity school.

But it was one of the abiding themes of his vision, and he preached this in 1932 at the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin on Reformation Sunday of that year, that they were all there not to celebrate Martin Luther but to bury him and his spirit, and with it the spirit of a genuine religious commitment lived out with the entire mind, heart, and soul of a human life.

This accusation can be leveled at just about any congregation of believers at any time in any religion, but coming as it did on the last Reformation Sunday before Hitler took power (January, 1933) the message bore a special intensity and focus.

Yet Alinsky is no minister. His observation about the abiding distance between living a ‘genuine’ and a ‘conventional’ religious life is not made to encourage or exhort folks to a less-incomplete or more perfect religious or spiritual commitment. No, it’s to justify the adolescent simplistic reduction, the one precisely made by Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye”: everybody is a phony.

And therefore everything they do or preach or believe is phony.

And if they say that they are not phony then you can’t believe them because they’re phony.

You can see why adolescents can be so moody, being convinced that they have brilliantly figured out the ‘real’ nature of life and yet then have to live in so phony a world. And perhaps with the fear that they themselves are phony – which terrifies them … and yet, it never ever occurs to them, even in the depths of their Angst, that their analysis itself might be wrong: THAT never occurs to them. Funny how the psychological night moves.

The dissatisfaction stemming from the imperfection or incompleteness of human existence – the dukkha of Eastern mysticism – is for the revolutionary merely a useful pretext for his/her adolescent reductionism: what is there is phony, which justifies our doing whatever we have to do to clean up Dodge by bringing the revolution to fulfillment for everybody’s good.

The revolutionary does not want to improve anybody: a little improvement here or there, the very stuff of daily life, is nothing but evasion and postponement of the Inevitable Struggle that will bring about that creative destruction which will smooth and clear the path of the revolution toward Perfection.

I suppose Lincoln ran into this sort of thing when the Abolitionists realized that he was saying he was Anti-slavery but not Abolitionist – and it enraged them that he would try to make such a distinction. Abolitionism shared the revolutionary impatience: if you find wheat growing with the tares, you must immediately rip out the tares (exactly what Jesus said God has chosen NOT to do).

It’s not just impatience in the sense of time; it’s an existential impatience, an impatience with the very existence of an irritating or undesirable or disliked state of affairs (and – always dangerous – with the human beings whom you associate with that state of affairs).

But Lincoln was a leader, not a revolutionary: as a human being he was and always had been Anti-slavery; but as a leader he knew that (at least up until the circumstances of military success made it possible) Abolitionism could not be embraced as national policy because it would rip the nation apart.

The SO Mania Regimes participate in this Alinsky-ite simplistic revolutionary reduction: ‘men’ are phony, and sex-offenders are the worst of ‘men’ so they are the most evilly phony of all and you can’t trust them. And in the Abolitionist existential impatience: they must be Abolished because their ‘evil’ must be Abolished and it must be done now because it is so evil or at least could become even more evil if allowed to continue.

Of course, you then have to factor in Alinsky – who draws on Lenin but also on advertising and marketing strategy, especially as those strategies were applied to the manipulation of public opinion by that dark master, Joseph Goebbels – and once you’re dealing with Alinsky-ite Method (and almost all of today’s ‘advocacy’ is rooted in it, whether the current practitioners realize it or not) then you have to consider the elements of exaggeration, selectivity, and outright ‘manufacture’.

Whenever you’re dealing with the Alinsky Method, you have to be on your guard. That’s not suspicion of an irrational kind: he wages ‘war politics’ and if you are in his sights, and the sights of those whom his organizers have organized, then they have already decided that you are a Have, that you Have something – even if what you Have is a ‘monstrous evil’ that, for everybody’s benefit (including their own, nicely) must be warred-upon until it is thoroughly abolished.

And in the SO Mania Regime, that’s exactly what they are aiming for.

NOTES

*My copy is the paperback Vintage Books/Random House edition that reprints the original 1971 edition. The ISBN is 0-679-72113-4. All my quotations and page references will be taken from this edition.

CLYDE RAY SPENCER AND 20/20

 I’ve just viewed the 20/20 TV piece on the Clyde Ray Spencer [hereinafter: CRS] case. *

CRS, now 61, was a police officer in Washington State, thought of as cocky, which he doesn’t deny. By his own admission a bit of a womanizer he was married to his second wife (she had a young son of her own); his first wife, divorced from him, with primary custody of his own son and daughter, was also in contact, and he had kept up increasingly infrequent visits with the kids who were now living in another state (CA).

At some point in the early 1980s (recall that the Satanic Ritual Abuse Day Care mania had taken place just a year or two before), his 5 year-old daughter, visiting her father in WA, said to Wife 2 certain things that Wife 2 ‘knew’ was a signal of sexual abuse. CRS imagined that his daughter’s statements referred to the boyfriend living with Wife 1; he contacted CA and Clark County (WA) police. CA dropped the matter but the Clark County police kept at it, conducted by a female detective whom the 20/20 team describes as wanting to make a name for herself.

This detective’s investigation resulted in CRS’s being accused of abusing both of his children PLUS the young son of Wife2 (amazingly, after quickly separating from him after he was accused of raping his own children, she asked CRS to host her child overnight in his motel room while he was under investigation, and CRS even more amazingly allowed this, resulting a few days later in THAT child, his step-son, also accusing him).

And eight months later his own son – finally – joined in the accusations (after, he would later claim as an adult, being threatened with a polygraph test, at which time he suddenly implicated not only his father but several other police officers).

CRS voluntarily took some drug-induced truth-serum test under the supervision of a forensic physician, which led that physician to declare that nothing in his examination supported the accusations of the children.

However, this being Washington State (which, if I rightly recall, was among the very first to set up SO registries in 1990), CRS felt that his defense of his innocence could not overcome “three children” and he made an Alford Plea (you admit to sufficient facts for a Guilty finding, but without actually admitting guilt). The judge, following the cutting edge, sex-offense psycho-babble jurisprudence of the day declared that since CRS ‘refused to take responsibility’ then he would be given the maximum sentence (several concurrent life sentences plus 14 years).

Thus in 1985 he began what would be 19 years of imprisonment (as an ex-cop, a sex-offender, and a convicted child-molester and – on top of all that - of his own children).

He wrote to a nurse he had met in Hawaii when he was a 20 year-old Air Force air-traffic controller; the only woman, he says, that he ever loved. She reciprocated, they married while he was in prison, and she began a campaign, funded by her working two jobs, to have the case overturned.

His efforts at parole were rejected because, according to the Catch-22 operative in these matters, he hadn’t ‘accepted responsibility’ and instead had the evil effrontery to maintain his innocence.

At some point in the early ‘00s, his own two children began to have second thoughts. To the attorney and private-investigator Wife 3 had engaged they eventually admitted that they had not told the truth, and that he had not molested them at all. Their mother, Wife 1, remained adamant and remains adamant that CRS had done ‘something’.

The team had amassed enough information to petition the Governor of Washington to commute his sentence, and after about a year of consideration, the Governor did so in 2004.

In the official Order, the Governor cited the large number of corroborated and validated discrepancies in the prosecutorial case.

These included: A) the female detective went down to CA and interviewed the children in her hotel room, with no recording and only her own handwritten notes to show for it; she plied them with ice cream and candy and other gifts; B) a tape made of the prosecutors’ interviews with the daughter (then a very young child) and the anatomical dolls, showing the child sitting on her mother’s (Wife 1) lap and being coached, while a (what I would consider queasily young and frippy) male prosecutor nuzzles up to within a few inches of her face to ask questions and manipulate the dolls, to whose questions she answers No firmly even with her mother’s coaxing, although there is then a 1-hour hiatus in the film (the camera had a date/time-signature capability) and in the second section she starts suddenly pointing out all sorts of bad things on the dolls; further, C) the tape was never showed to the defense and only came to light in 2009, when the now-retired female detective ‘discovered’ it (no doubt under legal pressure) in her garage; D) that detective’s supervising sergeant was having an affair with Wife 2 while the investigation was going on (which would certainly go to the weird request by Wife 2 that CRS entertain her son overnight in a hotel room during the investigation, and the subsequent immediate added charge of molesting that child); E) reports of medical examinations of the children showing no evidence of such abuse were kept in a file and never revealed to the defense.

By amazing coincidence, the primary detective refused to speak to 20/20 on or off the record for this report. By equally amazing coincidence, so did Wife 2 and her alleged lover, the supervising detective. The step-son, then 5 and now 30, allegedly abused in the motel, is sticking to his story.

The case was finally thrown out and CRS is now free (and that includes any eligibility for the Sex Offender Registry).

The Prosecutor’s Office that originally handled the case remained adamant that it was still a respectable case (although, the current Prosecutor admits, there was a “bad decision” there on the part of the supervising detective) until the last moment, when it told the court it would not re-try the case.

A few thoughts:

It is stunning for a country that is allegedly civilized and mature that an adult – and a police officer – assessed, probably rightly, that his word would not stand against the claims of three tykes. And it is a sign of the extent of the Mania Regime even in that early period of 1985. Although Washington and California are two States that demonstrated remarkable susceptibility to the Mania early on.

It can hardly have been unpredictable that when the careful evidentiary procedures were undermined by the public Stampede and the Mania, all sorts of manipulations of the law – to include false accusations, grossly illegal manipulations by police officers and prosecutors eager for a high-profile ‘win’, and the resulting complicity of the Law in the most puerile and nasty of tit-for-tat revenge games – would be invited in through the front door. And had it come down to a full trial back in 1985, no doubt even at that early date any number of ‘recovered memory experts’ and God knows how many Friends of the Court would have popped up to help matters along their crapulent path. A bitter ex-wife, another wife looking to please a paramour (himself a police officer of rank), and the young kids caught between ‘mom’ and truth.

And can you imagine then what happened when the Feds, and Congress itself, erected the whole mess into a Plan and into Law by outrageously inaccurate Findings and by making substantial amounts of money available to anybody willing to throw their well-waxed boards into the surf as ‘experts’ and successful prosecutors AND also wrote in a specific provision that police officers could not be held legally responsible for any misdeeds they committed in the pursuit of sex-offense convictions? (Recall from my immediately previous Post on the White House and Domestic Violence that one staffer let the cat out of the bag by braying that the whole objective was really to “increase convictions”.)

But of course, when you are combating ‘evil’ then anything is OK. Which is a philosophy that later ‘went international’ when Bush-Cheney deployed it to start the war in Iraq.

And even now, nobody but the man’s two natural children is willing to admit the truth of what they perpetrated (or even talk to the media). Of course, there’s a perfectly legitimate legal reason for that: civil and even criminal liability now hover over them all, now that everything they had hidden has come to light.

You are free to wonder – or consult your own experience and acquaintances, perhaps – just how many times this has happened over the course of a quarter-century, how many lives wrecked, how many families shattered, how many are still caught up in the toils either through incarceration or Registration.

It has been done in Our name and on Our authority, and if this country is ever to remain a mature and competent democracy then THAT has to count for something with Us.

And all of it as part of a legal scheme that does not protect ‘children’, that does not address the actual problem, and that most certainly does corrupt the legal system and the legislative system and undermines the Constitutional ethos profoundly.

There is much to do.

NOTE

*You can access the 20/20 site with all of its supporting information and videos here.

ADDENDUM


By coincidence I also just came across an episode of the animated comedy “South Park”: the town’s parents watch TV new reports to the effect that ‘strangers’ abduct and molest children – the parents erect a wall around the town and don’t allow anybody in; the town’s parents then watch TV news reports that new findings indicate that parents are really the ones who molest children – and the town parents now stop talking to other parents in the town; the town’s parent then watch TV news reports that new findings indicate that children are molested by their own parents – and the town parents decide to send the children to live with – wait for it – strangers!

WHITE HOUSE AND DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

In an article on Truthout, assigned to a female intern writer and dated October 30, 2010, it is announced that “the White House acknowledged October as Domestic Violence Awareness Month on Wednesday”.

It’s not worth my time or yours to conduct a stereotypical blog-investigation to find out whether this is a typo or not.

Perhaps it is a typo, although the site didn’t put it up until the end of the month. Perhaps it isn’t a typo and the site put it up at the end of the month because the editors figured it wasn’t all that important. Or perhaps the White House announcement itself was put out at the end of the putative Awareness Month as an election ploy (the ‘base’ presumably not having the memory capacity to remember at the beginning of November what it read at the beginning of October).

When anything’s possible, then not even the Powers That Be can control what might be considered possible. (That was the premise of many an episode of the comedy “Hogan’s Heroes” back in the 1960s: since life in the Third Reich was so far beyond rationality in the first place, then no Nazi colonel in a remote camp could afford to imagine that Hitler or Goering wasn’t out in the yard to conduct a distracting conversation just for the hey or that Himmler himself hadn’t come to Paris just to take a buxom Resistance prisoner out of Gestapo headquarters .)

At any rate, there are some classic ploys deployed in the whole thing that make it of interest to the SO community, just as a handy drill for honing your field-recognition skills.

“Many advocates” report themselves “heartened”, although the only one quoted is Eleanor Smeal, formerly of NOW and currently President of the Feminist Majority Foundation, who opines that “they’re really doing a lot on the subject”. Stupendously faint praise indeed.

It was a “government-wide effort”, although this should not be meant to imply that the government had organized itself to total and ultimate victory like it did in late 1941.

Rather, it appears that the President or his staff was in need of whatever ‘progress’ might be cobbled together that would satisfy the demands of some snippet of ‘the base’ but that wouldn’t cost much in the long run and that wouldn’t expose the government to having to defend yet more Constitutionally-dubious laws (the torture and Guantanamo stuff, itself following the same ‘emergency-necessity’ path as the original DoVi legislation in a hell-hot irony, has cost the Pres dearly in both image and substance and at this point the damage is probably irreparable).

So a Senior Adviser said “in a press conference call Wednesday” (there’s that date thing again; and this is only a call) that “various federal governments have taken a solid approach to how we have tried to manage [the] challenge” of domestic violence. The punctuation and placement of quotation marks is confusing, but then she herself seems confused in her comments, referring to what appears to be more than one federal government. And since Our Modern American Reality is so far beyond rationality, especially in the matter of the Mania Regimes, who can say, really?

This Senior Staffer also “chairs the White Council on Women and Girls” then went on and “lauded the accomplishments of the Violence Against Women Act, passed in 1994” which, in the event, ran into Constitutional problems in the eyes of the Supreme Court. But it provided over a billion dollars to “support the investigation and prosecution of violent crimes against women” (about which more later).

I don’t think there’s that kind of cash lying around any longer.

She tries to re-frame the thing: it’s not just a women’s issue – it’s a national issue”. I was half-expecting the next phrase to be “it’s a national security issue” but apparently things haven’t gone that far inside the Beltway.

I would think that to the extent it’s a legitimate issue it’s also a men’s issue, but she doesn’t go there.

It’s a “tragic and senseless crime”, she says – which I would say is true of almost all crime.

AND THEN We are treated to – wait for it – “statistics”. And “the statistics noted in the White House report are grim”: “One in four women will be the victim of domestic violence in the course of their lifetime” – and nobody familiar with the mini-series on Victimology on this site can help but wonder just how reliable such a statistic really is. Ditto that “one in six will be sexually assaulted” – presumably by a husband, significant other, or person staying overnight. Or whatever.

There is no mention of how many of these assaults – and (see below) they are verrrry broadly defined – are committed by same-sex partners and thus perpetrated by females. Nor is there any discussion of how many of the victims might be males, with the female initiating the assaulting.

“Currently more than twenty million women in the United States have been the victims of rape” – which is again a statistic that seems rather inflated, although the definition of ‘rape’ nowadays is broad enough to encompass an awful lot of behavior and situations that wouldn’t strike somebody as ‘rape’ in the dictionary sense of the word. Nor is the statistic completely relevant here, since there is no indication that these ‘rapes’ took place in the ‘domestic’ setting – although ‘domestic’ is itself perhaps broadly defined. It gets to be a hall of mirrors, as so often is the case in the Mania Regimes.

But “since fewer than one in six rapes are reported to police” than this number “may not reflect reality”. That ‘reality’ would then be that there may be 120 million rapes, although how one arrives at reliable numbers of un-reported acts is anybody’s guess. The evidence might be ‘anecdotal’ – which means that somebody ‘says’ it at some point afterwards, or the evidence might be arrived at merely by taking the number of reported ‘rapes’ and multiplying by a factor of somebody’s choice: two, ten, a hundred or more. Once ‘facts don’t matter’ then you are into verrry fuzzy territory indeed.

Ditto that “nearly 15.5 million children are exposed to domestic violence every year” – and how that number is arrived at is equally curious. But of course it gives the opportunity to bring ‘the children’ into the matter – almost a requirement of the form nowadays.

These are the White House equivalents, I would say, of legislative Findings, those weird and deathless creatures by which the SO Mania Regime has been fueled from Day One.

So then, true to the form, the White House must “address” the emergency.

There are – gently put – “several initiatives to strengthen the legal system”. And nobody in the SO community can read that bit without concern and a dark sense of déjà-vu. Especially since the police-state gambits already enshrined in the DoVi Regime (the ones that survived the Supreme Court’s scrutiny) are already ominous and lethal enough: police intrusion into the home; deprivation of property and family and residence on the say-so of a single (and hardly uninterested) party; removal of any discretion on the part of investigating officers or prosecutors; the placing of an impossible burden of proof (that he did NOT do it) on the accused; the truly frakkulent scam of claiming that the entire process is ‘merely civil’ (although the violation of any court Order resulting from the foregoing is instantly and most assuredly and lethally ‘criminal’); and the erection of nearly-ineradicable ‘registries’ of all accused persons even if they are found not-at-fault by the court Hearing.

The goal is “to increase sexual assault arrests”, charmingly. Although again, whether this refers to DoVi incidents or incidents of the even more broadly and nebulously defined ‘sexual assault’ is unclear. But then, clarity has never been a major concern and – in Mania dynamics – is considered something along the lines of obstructive and counter-productive. Reality and ‘facts’ are the enemies of Mania Stampedes as a result of the very dynamics of Mania and Stampede.

“There has never been this kind of focus on sexual assault” says a “domestic violence policy expert and the first-ever White House adviser on violence against women”, although she apparently has forgotten about the previous two decades of the DoVi Regime. Or doesn’t figure anybody will remember. And again, the confusion in terms between ‘domestic violence’ assaults and ‘sexual assaults’.

Getting a bit more specific as to just what is being newly promulgated now in this White House activity, We are told that HUD will now “provide guidance to housing authorities and landlords, allowing them to ‘evict perpetrators of abuse, keep their properties safe and make sure victims do not lose their housing due to crimes committed against them’". Just how “perpetrator” will be determined (Accusation? Conviction?) is left unsaid. Just what housing authorities and landlords will be empowered to do to “keep their properties safe” is also left unsaid.

Further, “the Department of Justice Office on Violence Against Women is launching a national campaign against sexual assault, holding regional forums throughout the country to stimulate public dialogue”. I am going to imagine that ‘public dialogue’ isn’t really going to be the objective here, but rather a bunch of ‘consciousness-raising’, klatschy type sessions which since the beginning have been the source of ‘stories’ and ‘anecdotal evidence’ that fuel – far more than any stringently-conducted research – the fuel to keep the fires burning among the faithful.

And I am going to imagine that staffers of this Office are not going to take kindly to any information or opinion to the effect that things might be somewhat overstated. Government ‘Offices’ erected specifically to deal with X are not greatly interested in evidence that there isn’t so much X out there.

Meanwhile “the National Institute of Justice will investigate the root causes of backlogs in rape kit processing”. At this point, after almost two decades of government pressure, I’m going to imagine that the reason for the lack of prompt processing is not that the police are a macho, rape-friendly organization besotted with ‘patriarchy’, but rather that there are now so many accusations – allowable under the broad and vague definitions and conflations and conceptual confusions – that no police department larger than Mayberry can handle the load, especially given the other crimes which the police must also handle.

But given the fact that accused persons might actually be exonerated – at least in those cases of rape where sexual penetration and ejaculation was achieved, which is not necessary in all definitions of ‘rape’ – then it would help to move the processing along.

Smeal asserts that “One of the major [excuses] we got was that there's not enough money" to process rape kits, Smeal said. "Police departments find another reason to spend it... now [that] money has been appropriated, they say there's not enough scientists and labs to process them." Which could well be true. It’s possible that the police are finally realizing that this type of beyond-factual evidentiary Mania is impossible to keep up with, and it’s highly probable that not even the labs – civilian as well as official – can keep up with it.

But the kicker in this whole Mania type of thing is that even when the plan is proving to be unworkable in the field and on the ground, the advocacies can simply claim that the ‘badges on the ground’ are dragging their feet and diverting funds and coming up with “excuses”. Perhaps they might take a lesson from the ‘boots on the ground’ in Iraq and Afghanistan: when you’ve been tasked with a poorly-conceived and impossible mission, ‘victory’ is not going to happen.

Then things get interesting indeed. A 2009 Navy ‘study’ is mentioned, by way of a study of the study by a sociology Ph.D. candidate. Apparently the Navy interviewed 1,146 newly-enlisted recruits in 2009. And apparently from the answers that these gentlemen gave in some form of questioning or questionnaire, the ‘study’ decided that “repeat offenders committed 95% of completed or attempted rapes”.

Thus, the White House is apparently convinced, “because of the high rate of recidivism” something has to be done about the rape-kit processing problem.

“High rate of recidivism” is a phrase that should set the whiskers of any SO community-member twitching.

More curiously, the 2009 Navy study – itself a replicant of a 2002 college-male study – seems clearly focused on non-domestic ‘rapes’ (and given the ‘college’ setting, probably a lot of the verrry nebulously defined ‘date rape’). So its relevance to a DoVi initiative seems tenuous at best.

Even more curiously, the gist of the 2002 and 2009 studies appears to be that only a small group of repeaters – between 4 and 9% - are responsible for the rapes. Which seems to work directly counter to the DoVi claims of millions of incidents and, given the DoVi setting by definition, millions of (male) perpetrators.

And the studies asked about incidents that fit “or approximated” the definitions and legal elements of ‘rape’ or ‘attempted rape’. So they are casting a net that will ‘approximate’ the incidences of what are already nebulous and elastic terms (sexual assault, rape, attempted rape, and date-rape). The possibilities for conceptual error – let alone mischief – are stupendous.

Further, you wonder if the Navy kept the fellows that were apparently witless enough to admit to such things or so morally challenged as to perpetrate them. Although, the researchers crow about how they cagily asked only questions about ‘activity’ without mentioning that to answer the questions in the affirmative would be admitting to the elements of a crime – such as these crimes are defined nowadays – and presumably didn’t give their game away by asking about ‘intent’ (i.e. Did you intend to rape the woman?)

Further, since the studies found that the majority of the repeaters said that they knew their partners and were not strangers, it’s legitimate to ask if ‘domestic’ has been expanded now to quietly include anybody who isn’t a stranger. That’s how far things have become debased in these matters.

Further there's a bit about some of the 'rapists' going to the trouble of "drugging" their (intended?) partners, although I'd want to know if alcohol is considered - at least in DoVi-land - a 'drug', especially since college and college-age folks seem rather familiar with alcohol. These are the type of suble definition-shifts that don't make it into the scare-stats, the 'reports', the Findings, and the press releases.

And as I’ve mentioned in prior Posts, the definition of “battering” in DoVi-speak includes not-talking-on-a-phone, so you really have to be inquisitive in order to get an accurate picture of the claims and assertions that are spewed into the air like smoke-stacks used to do it in the pre-EPA days.

Another piece by this same sociology Ph.D. candidate (not part of the White House material) gives you an indication of just what might be included in the range of DoVi actions: at the extreme end, there is “forcing a partner to have sex when they did not want to” and “threatening a partner with a gun” or “beating up a partner” or “choking a partner”. So far so good, as it were.

However, you then can wind up at the lower end of the spectrum: “slapping or hitting”, “pushing, grabbing or shoving a partner”, or “throwing something at a partner that could hurt”. It is hardly beyond reason to imagine that if these latter categories are feeding into the figures of ‘twenty million’ and such, then there is a big problem here – and it’s not domestic violence itself. Because if the advocacies and advocacy-friendly ‘researchers’ are including in their actual or statistically-derived ‘numbers’ every incident where two humans in a relationship push, grab, or shove … well, yes, I would imagine that you could easily reach a figure next to which ’20 million’ would be conservative.

But there’s no word – and this couldn’t be an oversight – as to where most of these incidents lie on the spectrum.

And there’s no word – ditto – on who initiated the violent act. Or – and this would be of more than passing interest – to what extent individuals, especially females, in same-sex relationships are involved in this sort of thing.

And, as a matter of good research procedure, it has to be said that if you’re only going to study males in regard to perpetrating ‘rape’ (however defined) then you are only going to wind up with male perpetrators. But you aren’t going to wind up with an accurate picture of the overall ‘rape’ situation in the country.

Joe Biden is mentioned. You may recall him as the Senator who, in response to an objection to his original Violence Against Women Act (later found to have notable un-Constitutional elements), brayed that “it may be a bad law but it sends a great message”. This gentleman is the former used-car salesman who also professed himself greatly “bored” during his time at his not-first-tier law school.

In 2008, angling for a higher office, he promised to introduce a bill in the Senate that would “train 100,000 lawyers to represent domestic violence victims”. I don’t know if he ever introduced it, or if he did, if it was ever passed.

But it isn’t hard to imagine that such a promise could be fulfilled by simply printing up a brochure or mailing out a Power-Point Presentation to every Member of every Bar Association in the country. Although you would think that the already-graduated attorneys would know how to conduct a case.

But then, of course, given the numerous hidden agendas, elastic definitions, systemic biases against the accused, and the general complexity of he said-she said (or he-he, or she-she) legal proceedings, perhaps even in these degraded times law schools don’t provide attorneys with clear training in the particular treacherous waters of DoVi cases. Or of any of the jurisprudential challenges that arise when trying to administer the laws in a time of Mania and under a Regime of Mania.

The article concludes by noting that Obama has put 130 million dollars into the budget for 2011 for all this stuff. But, the article hastens to add, 100 million of that will come “from the Crime Victims' Fund, which is supported by criminal fines, penalties and forfeited jail bonds rather than taxpayer money”.

That’s about one-seventh of all the monies available for annual distribution in the Fund (which holds about 4 billion this year) and if you take a look at its responsibilities, that money could – and apparently does – go quickly. (It also got itself into the Patriot Act, somehow.) I’m thinking that there’s going to be a lot of ‘resistance’ organizationally for dedicating a full seventh of its disbursable funds to so nebulous a crime-category. And no doubt that will fuel the claim of even more “excuses”.

Well, that’s my take on this curious article and even more curious ‘initiative’.

My assessment is that it’s yet another political effort to keep part of ‘the base’ happy in the run-up to a difficult election.

But it’s a sad state of affairs that the Mania Regimes are part of that ‘base’ to begin with, and a direct result of ‘pressure’ (in the Alinsky-ite sense) from various elements in that ‘base’.

ADDENDUM

Let me say again and again and again that I do not support the infliction of violence by any human being upon any other human being, sexual or otherwise, in the 'domestic' or any other setting. But when the Mania Regimes of Sex Offense and its immediate predecessor, Domestic Violence, are so arranged as to create Stampedes in public affairs and in law and law enforcement, and highly dubiously justified Stampedes (which almost goes without saying, given the nature of Stampedes and Manias) then I think a certain amount of Tire has to be Kicked.

NEW CLYDE RAY SPENCER

On July 12, 2009 I put up a Post about one Clyde Ray Spencer, a police officer who was accused by his children of Child Sexual Abuse and then, years later, his children have recanted their testimony, claiming that they told a determined female police detective what she wanted to hear just to get her ‘off their backs’, as they said.

I have just received the following Comment which I added to that Post’s Comments. But since it refers to an upcoming (November 5, 2010) TV presentation on the show “20/20” I also want to put this Post up to advise readers. The text of the Comment follows:

"On September 29, 2010, in the Superior Court of Clark County Washington the case against Mr. Spencer was completely overturned and all charges dropped. On Nov 5, 2010, 20/20 will air the case of Mr. Spencer's false conviction. Watch it and see how much overt corruption was involved in the case."