SO AND SAUL ALINSKY 3

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 3rd installment contains a discussion with all the page quotations.

Here I will simply get to the SO-relevant material.

In this chapter of his book Alinsky deals with Ends and Means: how do you determine what is an acceptable or unacceptable Means to achieve an End, a purpose?

Simple, Alinsky says: there is no general rule. In each particular situation, you have to apply your judgment to the particular use of a Means to achieve the End you want.

But this effectively rules out any Higher Law or any already-existing law as being allowed to interfere with that you want to do in this particular situation.

You can see where this could (and did) go when it comes to SO Mania laws: there is no Higher Law such as God’s, and there isn’t even the Constitution. You’ve got this ‘emergency’ here, this ‘war situation’, and you have to judge for this particular situation. (But, of course, he’s removed all the Law or law by which you must judge your options, leaving you with a wide-open choice of options for yourself. Neato!)

Machiavelli, whom Alinsky quotes even more than he does Marx or Lenin, came to the conclusion that as late-Renaissance European life and culture began to speed up, it was clear that ‘God’ wasn’t going to be a reliable referee for the game as it was now being played: God, as the gospels say, is willing to “let the tares grow with the wheat" until the Master of the Harvest comes at harvest time and separates the weeds from the wheat.

This doesn’t work for Machiavelli’s more human time frame, which – not surprisingly – seems to Machiavelli the more important time frame in Western culture as it was picking up speed and complexity in his day. The tares-and-wheat idea was maybe OK for a slow-moving, agrarian society built on agriculture and animal husbandry, but for a ‘world’ now building upon ‘business’ and ‘trade’, you needed referees who would reliably police the game in the here-and-now.

And clearly God could not be relied upon to do that.

The result for a Prince – responsible for governing and keeping safe and prospering his realm – is clear, in Machiavelli’s take on things: any Prince who tries to be ‘honorable’ and ‘virtuous’, trusting that God will vindicate him and keep him and his realm safe, is setting himself up to be a hot lunch for any opposing Prince who’s willing to ignore God’s rule and ‘do whatever it takes’. So, Machiavelli says, given the stakes of the matter, the only ‘moral’ thing for a Prince to do is to get down and get dirty and to get there faster than any opponent. Otherwise, not only the Prince but his people and realm will pay the price for his ‘honor’ and ‘virtue’. The only ‘virtue’ is to be the biggest, baddest guy in the valley.

You can see what might happen to a government – the Beltway, say – when ‘advocates’ start quoting Alinsky who is quoting Machiavelli.

Since God can’t do the referee work, then the government will just have to step up and take His place. That God – or the Constitution – might be working on a different frame of time and events OR that the Framers wisely foresaw the possibility of Stampedes and built protective speed-bumps and fences into the Constituion itself … those are not things Alinsky (or Machiavelli) thinks about; after all, the ‘stakes are too high’ to trust the situation to an unreliable referee or policeman like God, so the government will do God’s police-work for Him. And, no doubt the Beltway figured, do it better.

This, you might imagine, could set off some sort of race-to-the-bottom. And I think that with the SO Mania Regime it has.

Marx and Lenin, faced with the staggering complexities and incomplete justice of one of the world’s last great Divine Right monarchies (the Romanovs) that was at the same time developing into an Industrial power, though ruled not only by Wealthy businessmen but by a dense layer of hereditary Aristocracy … well, you can see where they figured they needed to give themselves all the space they could to ‘do whatever it takes’.

But Alinsky tries to ‘baptize’ the Techniques without all the ‘Communism’ and set this sort of dynamic loose in the US.

Yet the US is a constitutional republic with a democratic and deliberative politics. How can you deploy weapons that were designed to assault the rock-solid layers of a completely different type of society and polity? It’s like using a rocket-launcher designed to blow up tanks in order to open the door that’s stuck on your car … you’ve brought a lot more to the job than you can reasonably or safely use.

But the Beltway was eager to please a new powerful demographic, or at least please the Alinsky-trained organizers and advocates who claimed to represent the interests of that new big demographic. And it was the early Nineties, and the USSR had collapsed, and Billary was in the White House and there was no stopping ‘change’ now!

Alinsky had said that “The real arena [of life] is corrupt and bloody. Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruption fears life”. (pp.24-5)

Alinsky is a long long way from Carol Gilligan’s crowded but clubby breakfast table, with Mommy exercising her ‘intuition’ with all the authority of a Benevolent Despot to calm her squalling brood around the table.

And it didn’t do the Beltway any good to hear that ‘corruption’ is just a part of life and you make what use of it you can manage, as long as you mean well and it’s in a Good Cause.

Surely Bush-Cheney didn’t need to figure that they were being advised – and by one of the great and early ‘liberal thinkers’ (and Alinsky isn’t quite that at all) – that ‘real men’ embrace corruption and harness it; you can hear echoes of this in Cheney running up the flagpole the idea that America might just have to “walk on the dark side” to get her Great and Good Work accomplished.

But you can most certainly sense Alinsky’s presence in the SO Mania Regime. Here is a Great and Good Work, and an Emergency to boot, and if there’s anything that’s corrupt, it’s Sex Offenders, and so let’s do ‘whatever it takes’ and legislators would fail in their responsibility to their people if they let soething as general as the Constitution or some old abstractions like Due Process and Statutes of Limitation and Rules of Evidence and Presumption of Innocence stand in the way of doing the Right and Good Thing.

And if life is so corrupt (Alinsky) and Males are so permanently and naturally sexually violent (radical feminism) and if ‘victimization’ in these areas is running 10 or 50 or a 100 times more than anybody dares to think (Victimology) then you can see where there isn’t going to be too much left standing to slow down the Mania or at least try to keep it within some kind of proper channels.

By this point, Alinsky (like Lenin before him), in company with the radical-feminists and the Victimology types,has given so much away to the darknesses of human existence that he can’t imagine how any responsible man of action could in good conscience (so to speak) legitimately neglect ‘the low road’. (And does any of this sound familiar from the days of Bush-Cheney and the run-up to the Iraq War?). He draws an almost cartoonish pair of alternatives: you can either be some bloodless philosopher in an ivory tower or you can go out and do whatever it takes to accomplish some good in the world. Again with the adolescent oversimplification.

There is only the “low road” in politics, he says. Real men take it and don’t sit around worrying about it. Neither the radical Victimology types nor Cheney had to hear this sort of thing.

Alinsky offers several ‘Rules’ for determining the ethics of Means and Ends.

His first Rule is that the further away from being affected by a problem you are, the more you will waste time on ‘ethics’. The SO Mania Regime solved this problem by making Sex Offenses everybody’s problem because – it was insisted – Sex Offenders were everywhere, slavering like monsters or masquerading as ‘normal’ folks.

His second Rule is that your ethical judgment depends on where you sit. If you are in the middle of the bulls-eye drawn around you and your family by Sex Offenders, then you know what you have to do.

His third Rule is that in war, the End (Victory for you) justifies almost any Means. So there had to be a ‘war’ against Sex Offenders (or at least Sex Offenses, which is a distinction a little too fine for most folks). And Alinsky’s Revolution is more than just a ‘war’; it is and has to be a civil-war of Citizens against Citizens. Or at least against one group of Citizens who have been demonized to the point where they no longer have the rights of a Citizen and are, for all practical purposes, just another ‘enemy’. Call it a 'civic war'.

His fourth Rule is that you have to really be there in order to judge, and if you’re not there then you can’t judge. Neat – if you’re not part of the Stampede, you have no right to say whether the Stampede is a wise thing to set in motion.

He talks about Sam Adams, who played a great role in getting the so-called Boston Massacre going: heartless British troops firing on innocent colonial civilians. Unfortunately, one of the shot-up civilians, soon-to-be-a-martyr, confessed on his well-attended death-bed that actually, the Brits were just minding their business doing guard duty when a mob of tanked-up folks attacked them. This threatened Adams’s entire plan and so by extension threatened the possibility that there would ever be an America. What could Adams do? He had to denounce the dying man in public, calling him in a round-about way a drunken Irishman who was also probably a closet-Catholic. (Harsh words in those days – although, come to think of it, the ‘Catholic’ part seems eerily familiar, doesn’t it?)

Alinsky has no problem with that. And says nobody who was not in Adams’s shoes has the right to judge either. Which pretty much removes the entire rug out from under anybody who has to judge anything at all. But it’s war and stuff happens.

Do a bunch of folks have to be degraded and derided in public, even if the charges you are making against them aren’t really – ummm – true? If it’s in a Good Cause then it’s OK. This type of thing never ends, as anybody can see looking at the Sex Offense Mania regime.

The fifth Rule is that if you don’t have many Means available, then you really can’t waste your time passing judgment on whatever Means you do have. So if all you’ve got is a Hammer, then hammer away. Which explains, I think, why so many SO Mania laws don’t really seem to get at the source of such problem as there actually is.

The sixth Rule is that the more important the End, the less time you can spend on ethical stuff. But if this is a ‘war’ against the most heinous (perhaps evil) creatures on the planet, and if it’s an Emergency – then that means you don’t have time and cannot legitimately take time to think things through. In fact, legislators who might have objections to this or that SO Mania law have to be kept from taking up everybody’s time with their own ‘hang-ups’, don’t they?

The seventh Rule is that if you win, then nobody’s going to question your ethics. You can imagine easily that this is truly the LAST thing anybody should have told Bush-Cheney. But long before that, this was considered cutting-edge justification for the legislation – and the legislators – of the SO Mania laws. They figured that they’d be greeted as liberators and as the wise but efficient lawmakers who saved the helpless settlers from the terrible Injuns known as Sex Offenders; they will have cleaned up Dodge; or like Ben Cartwright and his boys, they will have come down from the Beltway-Ponderosa into Virginia City to clear out all the Sex Offenders.

The eighth Rule is that if you are losing and you have to do a particularly nasty thing, well that’s OK because you gotta do what you gotta do when you’re fighting a war in a Good Cause. Notice here that you have already declared yourself to be fighting a war in a Good Cause, so you have pretty much written yourself a free ticket for whatever you figure you have to do.

The ninth Rule is that anything you do that works is automatically going to be termed unethical by the opposition (and the people you use it against). So, of course, Sex Offenders will naturally claim that your Mania Regime is unconstitutional and corrosive of good government and of the integrity of legislation and legislators and jurists and prosecutors alike. But you just have to expect that sort of baloney from them – after all, you’ve ‘caught’ them.

But then too, as your integrity and the integrity of the entire ethos and edifice of Constitutional safeguards drains away, you’ve caught yourself in a terrible net as well. When Ben Franklin told everyone that America has a democracy if We can keep it – he wasn’t just referring to foreign enemies. In fact, he probably figured that the country was in greater danger from its own Citizens and elected officials than it was from any foreign invasion.

The tenth Rule is that you do what you have to and use nice words to make it seem moral. And anybody who has ever had to sit through an explanation of why this or that SO Mania law is ‘good’ will recognize this dark scam. (Although pols are verrrry careful not to talk – or be recorded talking – about their part in these laws, except at the particular rubber-chicken appreciation dinners thrown for them by the particular lobbyists and/or advocates.)

The eleventh Rule is that your goals and objectives must be phrased in nice and catchy terms that will get people to like what they hear. Packaging and appearance is everything, and don’t worry about the substance or the reality of the thing. You couldn’t read some of the pious legislative bleating that introduces the text of these SO Mania laws, or read some of the court Opinions and Decisions, without feeling like you were supporting the bestest thing in the whole world.

I haven’t overstated Alinsky’s Rules, although I’ve paraphrased them. You are welcome to follow the link to the other site and read them as quoted verbatim. It shocks to realize that this entire programme has been making the rounds of the Beltway (and assorted State capitals) as ‘cutting edge’ thinking.

But it explains, I think, an awful lot about where the stunningly repugnant SO Mania Regime and its laws came from and out of what noxious brew they were hatched. Alinsky is essentially deploying the ‘war tactics’ developed by Lenin for use against the Russian Czarist autocracy, and he is deploying them against the ethos of the Constitution. And, in a further ‘refinement’, his approach then passed through the filters of radical-feminism and Victimism, and the result is … what the SO community knows so well.

I think future generations of historians, when they look back at the period 1990-2010 in this country, are going to be amazed at how such a system came to be accepted with so little substantive and effective objection by the elites but also by the Citizenry.

Part of this is explainable by the fact that Alinsky’s system so cunningly and shrewdly masks itself – like the Trojan Horse or a chameleon – in the ‘acceptable’ language of democratic process that lulled so many into merely accepting the surfaces and appearances of the new policies without any serious Kicking of Tire.

And of course, for 20 or more years prior to 1990, the Goebbelsian technique of manipulating public opinion, itself a close cousin to the far more ‘innocent’ American approach to advertising (‘creating desire’ and ‘creating needs’), helped develop both the ‘Emergency’ that generated the Mania and the necessary public Stampede and also the Correctness that pre-squelched any skepticism and objections.

And Alinsky’s approach had, by 1990, already done its lethal work on American politics itself: a ‘war’ and a ‘civic war’ – some Citizens versus some other targeted group of Citizens – is all that American politics had to offer by then.

And in order to keep up emotions and precisely to avoid careful, objective, and even constructively skeptical Tire-Kicking and analysis and wide deliberation (which is exactly what any ‘revolutionary’ wants to avoid), that American politics had degenerated into a Manichaean us-vs-them dynamic, with each Party’s ‘base’ consisting only of those ‘true believers’ who were already convinced and were convinced that ‘facts’ would only confuse issues that to them were already ‘clear’.

So again I say to the SO community that the roll-back efforts do not simply help all of the persons caught up in the toils of the SO Mania Regime, but also help to recall the entire country BACK toward some more mature and effective politics than the lethal soap-opera into which We have descended, which is an abyss that will – I guarantee it – swallow the republic and the democracy and end that phase of American history that can legitimately be termed “The Great American Experiment” as the Framers envisioned it and “the last best hope of mankind” as Lincoln described it.

So much remains to be done.



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.

LINK

To chez orig http://chezodysseus.blogspot.com/2010/10/saul-alinskys-rules-3-i-continue-this.html

THE CONSTITUTION AS ROCK


This is a short Post but the matter strikes me as worthwhile.

Glenn Greenwald, attorney who comments on national events in his column on the Salon site, discusses the rule of law as the government is trying to avoid it in trials of accused terrorists.*

On the 7t of October, Judge Lewis Kaplan of the Southern District of New York refused to permit government testimony against a defendant because the government obtained information by torture.

In doing so the Judge said “The Court has not reached this conclusion lightly. It is acutely aware of the perilous nature of the world in which we live. But the Constitution is the rock upon which our nation rests. We must follow it not only when it is convenient, but when fear and danger beckon in a different direction. To do less would diminish us and undermine the foundation upon which we stand”.

I can’t help but think of how this judicial stance would certainly apply to the SO Mania Regime as well. And how much wrack and frak would have been avoided had some jurist said this in the early days of the SO Mania Regime.

Because the SO Mania Regime predates the terrorism matter by a decade or more.

For many years – although they said it mostly among themselves and didn’t publicize it too much –the Beltway elites complimented themselves on their ‘cutting edge knowledge’ that the Constitution was “quaint” and outmoded and insufficient, upon which basis the Mania was itself considered ‘cutting edge’ and ‘progress’.

Far too many judges have agreed for far too long.

But then the whole approach – and its cavalier attitude toward the Constitution – migrated to foreign affairs.

I strongly support this Federal judge.

And I hope all of his colleagues take note of his remarks. Can you imagine if a Federal judge or the Supreme Court had written this when the SO Mania Regime was just getting started up and facing major review back there in the early 1990s?

But there’s no cause for popping any corks just yet.

As Judge Kaplan goes on to note, even if this defendant is acquitted, he can still be held indefinitely under the government’s asserted authority to exercise “post-acquittal detention”. That assertion may remind you of ‘civil confinement’ as deployed in the Mania Regime.

And you might think back to the Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog) law of the Third Reich. When local courts were fussy enough about ‘law’ to release or acquit somebody the government wanted out of the way, this law made it legal to simply grab the person who would then disappear in the ‘night and fog’ of the nightmare that was Nazi Germany. This was considered ‘efficient’ and ‘necessary for the protection of the German State and People’.

You see where ‘progress’ can lead if it’s not honestly assessed and its tires robustly kicked.

NOTES

*The link is here. This will lead you to his columns. The piece to which I am referring is dated “Friday, Oct. 8, 2010 11:09 ET” and is entitled “More Terrorism Fear-Mongering Exposed as Frivolous”.

SO AND SAUL ALINSKY 2

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.

He opens his first chapter with a quote from the Book of Job (7:1): “The life of man upon earth is a warfare …” It is significant to note that this is a mis-quote, and one that (not by accident, I imagine) supports his overall approach. The actual text of Job here refers to life as being a “servitude”, in which human beings must learn to accept the fact that like servants, they are bound to the will of their master (God, in this case) regardless of their own actions. (Job’s friends had been trying to tell him that if bad things have happened to him then he must be responsible for them; but the Bible reader knows – as Job and his friends in the scene do not – that God, after a conference with Satan up in heaven – has allowed Satan to inflict all manner of disasters upon Job in order to demonstrate just how faithful Job is.)**

Alinsky chooses to characterize ‘servitude’ as “warfare”, perhaps on the basis of a possible translation of one ancient Hebrew term that uses as an example of having-to-take-orders and of having-your-life-under-another’s-orders the instance of a soldier drafted into involuntary military service. The point, in any case, is not about “war” or “warfare” but about servitude and being under authority; of not being the boss-of-you, as might be said nowadays.

But “warfare” is where Alinsky wants to go.

You have to notice how, in the service of his putatively ‘good cause’ Alinsky doesn’t mind misquoting important texts to get them to support his ‘good cause’. After all, in war – which is what Alinsky sees all life (and politics) as basically being – it’s the Outcome that counts and therefore ‘truth’ (or ‘Truth’) and integrity have to take a back seat.

As I have indicated in the preceding Post and in the master-Posts on the other site, Alinsky might solve this objection by claiming that ‘integrity’ and ‘truth’ are illusory abstractions that are deployed sleazily by the Haves merely to justify their extortion and oppression of Have-Nots.

Reading the Findings that are put forth by legislators (and by too many courts when they come to review the legislators’ handiwork) the SO community can see where there is this same attitude toward truth and facts. And this is increasingly so, even as more and more serious scientific and scholarly research turns up the weaknesses and wrong-headedness of the SO Mania Regime and its enabling laws.

Identity Politics is based in this Alinsky-ite vision and approach: each Identity claims itself to be, in some way, a Have-Not, and must identify an ‘oppressor’ who is a Have.

In the Victimist adaptation of Alinsky’s schematic, ‘victims’ are the Have-Nots. They are the ‘good cause’ for which a ‘war’ is being waged and therefore – war being what it is – ANYthing is justified in order to achieve Victory on their behalf and to ‘rescue’ them (as, perhaps, the country later would claim to ‘rescue’ the Iraqi people who were being ‘victimized’ by Saddam Hussein).

Again, and again, and again, let me say here that I am not taking lightly any human being’s ‘victimization’. BUT to deploy Alinsky’s terrible simplistic vision as the basis of a ‘war’ that need respect no Higher Law nor any existing laws or principles, can only wind up in a rule not of Law but rather a rule of Human Emotions and ‘Good Intentions’ (and again, you can see how mere Good Intentions were not enough in the military misadventures in Iraq and Af-Pak).

And by the same token, I mention again then-Senator Biden’s cavalier assertion in 1994 that as long as it’s ‘sends a great message’ (which, of course, is in support of a Good Cause) then it really doesn’t make any difference to him whether it’s actually a good (workable, well-conceived) law or not. And again, you can see how this attitude came to govern the national legislature in the erection of the SO Mania Regime, and thus spread quickly to the State legislatures and the courts (where several generations of law students had already been taught this approach and this attitude as being ‘cutting edge reform’.

If politics is ‘war’ then We are on the way back to a Hobbesian world.

The Australian author, J.M. Coetzee notes this in his 2007 book of essays entitled “Diary of a Bad Year”. In the vision of Hobbes, the world without an organized State and the rule of law is a rat’s nest of “internecine warfare without end (reprisal upon reprisal, vengeance upon vengeance, the vendetta” (p.3)*** You may recall in my mini-series of Posts on Victimology how often ‘revenge’ is discussed as being essential to a victim’s ‘closure’.

While there is a modest – but hugely incomplete – psychological value to seeing somebody ‘paid back’, Coetzee later points out that as best he can make out after watching the world – and especially South Africa after apartheid was abolished – ‘vengeance’ or ‘revenge’ simply continues the cycle of offense-revenge that locks BOTH perpetrator and victim into a darkling level of existence.

In that regard, by the way, Coetzee – no ‘religious nut’ – comes to the sober conclusion that Christ really is the only one to get it right by advising that one must ‘turn the other cheek’ lest the cycle of violence in interpersonal and societal and national and international affairs simply continue ad infinitum.

This reflection of Coetzee’s would no doubt be taken as heresy by the Victimologist school, but there it is.

Hobbes, of course, tries to solve this problem on a political level by insisting upon the acceptance of “Leviathan”, by which he means a Sovereign Authority (not necessarily a monarch; it could be a democracy) that will assume all responsibility for judgment and the exercise – carefully – of any violence necessary to ensure ‘justice’.

But as well, Western and Hobbes’s own native English, Law was moving toward a more Reason-based method for determining guilt. And it is precisely here that Victimology (even before it is merged with the Alinsky-ite vision and approach) seeks to RE-gress jurisprudence back to an era of revenge, even though the justification is made more pleasing to modern ears by claiming the need for psychological and emotional ‘closure’.

In the Christian vision one so victimized would primarily rely upon the individual’s relationship to God and Grace to absorb the psychological and emotional shock of being in some way victimized. The State would construe (to use Thomas More’s phrasing) as best it could according to the principles of sound Law, and do whatever was in humans’ “poor power” (Lincoln at Gettysburg) to restore balance. But the individual would A) be supported by Grace in dealing with any shortfall in the juridical outcome while also B) literally metabolize the experience spiritually (with the help of Grace) to come to a deeper and more intense bond with God’s Providence.

And thus the cycle of offense-vengeance would be broken.

It is, I think, no wonder that the Christian view, especially as it is so thoroughly comprehended in the Catholic vision, draws the ire of Victimology.

A society and culture increasingly alienated from such a vision would dwell in a Flattened world where Providence and Grace do not operate from some Higher Beyond, and would thus be left with no outlet or with no means of processing victimization except to demand State vengeance under color of law, in an ever-intensifying cycle of More Vengeance through More Vengeful Laws.

And this, surely, is precisely what is happening in the SO Mania Regime.

I note also – with apologies for not recalling exactly the article’s title and link – the US government’s recent submission to a court in the matter of some suspected terrorists here in this country: evidence submitted was a poorly-made home-video that largely showed feet and legs walking around, and in no way demonstrated any terroristical activity or conniving. The government’s position – and this is a very recent case, within the past few months – was that THE VERY ABSENCE OF EVIDENCE PROVED JUSTIFIABLE SUSPICION OF A CRIME because (shades of Alinsky!) WHEN IT COMES TO TERRORISTS, NOTHING IS AS IT SEEMS OR APPEARS.

The SO community can easily recall the many ways in which ‘sex offenders’, especially in the early days of the Mania, were considered to be both-and all the time: both madly out of control and capable of tremendous patience and cunning; both slavering, weird-looking monsters and the most suave and ‘normal’ looking folks; both mentally unbalanced and the most thoroughly debased of deliberate criminals.

Much like vampires. And, more factually, like the accused witches (male and female) of the Salem Witch Trials.

In that regard, Coetzee also opines, the police of 1970s apartheid South Africa – authorized and legally indemnified beforehand from prosecution – could “barnstorm” any home that they wished if they thought that some violation of the race-laws was being perpetrated or conceived. “Barnstorming” meant breaking in without a warrant and raising such hell as they considered necessary to decide one way or the other. Writing in 2007, and looking around the world, Coetzee decides that they were not “barbarians” really but rather “pioneers” since it now seems that this is increasingly becoming the norm in heretofore civilized nations.

Hobbes “Leviathan” is now not only established from the Right in the National Security State but also from the Left in the National Nanny State (in large part through the Good Cause of the State exercising ‘vengeance’ on behalf of ‘victims’). Worse, the concept of Law has been regressed to the pre-rational era of Western jurisprudence. All of the hard-won achievements of the West in the post-Medieval, Modern Era are being ‘rolled-back’: rules of evidence, statutes of limitation, presumptions of innocence.

And, of course, this is happening not simply in ‘barbarous’ regimes such as the Soviet and Nazi approaches to law, but in the very heart of the great model and example of Western achievement: the United States.

This is not going have good consequences, either for the United States or for the rest of the world that still looks to this country for cues as to what is the best way to proceed in governance and conducting a successful democratic polity.

And so there is much to be done.

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.

**A Victimist reading of this pericope (short passage from the Bible text) might quickly latch onto the fact that ‘victims’ (assuming Job is a ‘victim’ here) ‘aren’t responsible’ for what happens to them. This is not the point of the text and I wouldn’t get into a discussion about that Victimist assertion on the basis of it.

What the Book of Job is concerned with is demonstrating that human beings indeed live under the aegis of a Master and that they are therefore not the Biggest Guys on the block of Existence. Nicely, though, this also means that they are not Alone; and as the Bible proceeds – and especially as it gets into the New Testament – there is an intensifying assertion, reflection upon, and – if you will – revelation that humans are not only not Alone, but that the God Who Accompanies them also Supports them in their struggle to remain faithful to the most fundamental and Genuine human nature that is within them, which is the Nature that participates in God’s own life.

***Coetzee, J.M. “The Diary of a Bad Year”. New York: Penguin: 2007. The edition I am using is the paperback: ISBN 978-0-14-311448-2. This book is curiously structured: each page is divided into three sections, with the top section being his essays. They are well worth the read, especially his reflections on Thomas Hobbes and his vision and the consequences that flow from it.

SO AND SAUL ALINSKY 1

As I have been saying, I have finally gotten around in my life to reading Saul Alinsky’s 1971 book “Rule for Radicals”. (He was born in 1909 and died in 1972.)

I have to tell you now: it’s been a huge revelation. I say this especially with reference to my abiding interest in connecting-dots in American affairs.

It’s a shortish-book (196 pages in my copy)*, but well-worth the read.

I am doing the master-Posts on my other site, and for each of those Posts I will put up an SO-specific Post on this site. If you wish you can read, for example, the first Master Post (of which this is an SO-specific distillation) here.

Let me preface all this by saying that it has always been my thought that the SO Mania regime was never simply an honest-response to an accurately-perceived emergency. Rather, I have always felt that it was fueled by deep streams and truly toxic as well as highly flammable fuels. I recall Alinsky’s book from back in the day – and he had been working his Technique in the 1960s, before he wrote the book in 1971 (dying then in 1972). But I never read it back then; it seemed just one more in a great moosh of ‘ideas’ that were floating around back then.

I see now that I was mistaken. If you read Alinsky, and reflect simultaneously on what was happening to politics in the country, and especially if you recall the massive significance of the sudden and deep changes made by the Democratic Party, brought to first full light in the 1972 Convention**, you may suddenly realize that – alongside French Deconstruction theory imported from French university humanities classrooms – Alinsky was available to ‘creative’ and ‘cutting edge’ elite thinkers, offering a ‘home-grown’ American theory of ‘revolution’, drawn from his own experience as a Marxist-trained labor organizer and then general community ‘organizer’ in the Old Left era of his youth, the 1920s and early 1930s.

So I have been going through Alinsky’s book now not simply as a historical artifact but rather looking at it as a Shaper of events, and on the deepest and widest levels. This is also true of reading the book with an eye to the SO Mania Regime. Although that didn’t really get started until the early or mid-1980s, a decade after Alinsky’s death, his ideas by that time had quietly been embraced by all manner of elites – especially on the putatively ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’ Left (which had never been popularly imagined as the direction from which great threats to the Constitutional ethos would ever come; Identity Politics had matured and pride of place given to its mutant or perhaps quintessential variant, Gender Politics. The National Nanny Regulatory State was now assuming proportions as ominous as the traditionally-feared National Security State of the post-1945 era.

Well, let’s get to it. I will be distilling Alinsky’s ideas; if there aren’t as many page-references as you usually find in my Posts, that’s simply because everything is up with references in the Master Post on the other site.

This Post will cover Alinsky’s ‘Prologue’, the first 30 or so pages of his book (200 pages long at most).

All of history and politics, he says, can be reduced to one eternal element: the extortion by the Haves of the Have-Nots, and consequently the eternal need for the Have-Nots to be organized to wrest Power from the Haves.

You can see in this Alinsky’s Marxist-Leninist vision, born in contemplation of both an Industrial Capitalism that was growing in an unregulated way and creating tremendous damage to human lives (while also providing increased material benefit and resource) and – especially in the Leninist aspect – the frustration of a working-class who saw their economic status remain stifled not only by Wealth but by the inherited political power and authority of Aristocracy and one of the last Divine Right Monarchies among the great powers of the West.

You can also see in this Alinsky’s Marxist-Leninist training: the presumption that so large a human phenomenon can be ‘reduced to’ one core element; the presumptiveness that one’s own group (the Marxist-Leninists) can accurately do the ‘reducing’; and the actual assertion – offered as a belief rather than as a proven fact – that ‘war’ is the primary and most basic dynamic of politics.

And then, of course, ‘war’ brings in its train all sorts of awful sub-dynamics: the absolute primacy of Outcome over Process; the absolute primacy of Ends over Means; the absolute primacy of Winning over any question as to what Higher Law or Principle might limit the options you may exercise in order to achieve your victory; and in that case the functional rejection of any Higher Law that might limit your options at all – so that, when the flag is unfurled and the trumpet sounds, it’s merely a matter of ‘doing whatever it takes’ (and after you Win you can write the History so as to take the dark edges away).

You can see immediately why the Framers were verrrrry nervous about War: when you turn all this stuff loose in a democratic constitutional republic, then all of the dynamics of a deliberative politics, anchored in a laboriously-achieved majority consensus bounded but not minutely determined by the general vision of the Constitution, fueled by accurate information provided by an objective and detached ‘free press’ … all of these and more are swept away, subordinated to the overriding Necessity for Victory.

Worse, as the Framers saw, you never come back to your original Constitutional ethos after a war, especially a big one or a long one: like growing bones or trees, your conception of the Constitutional ethos and its principles and its vision will have been bent into such shapes for so long that they don’t ever spring back precisely into the pre-war position and with the same suppleness and vitality.

So to introduce ‘War’ as the governing dynamic of politics, especially in the American setting, is a recipe for possible ‘political’ catastrophe in the most profound and serious sense of that term.

If for no other reason, such a vision – as it did for the Russian people – called for what had to be not just an ongoing ‘war’ but indeed an ongoing ‘civil war’, Citizens against Citizens. Of course the Soviet revolutionaries did not look upon their fellow Russians who had doubts about the ‘revolution’ as ‘fellow citizens’: they were, in war-thinking, ‘the enemy’ and had to be ‘defeated’. For this purpose Lenin was perfectly prepared to use Terror, and there exist written directives he sent out to judges insisting that “Our revolutionary courts must shoot!” (exclamation point Lenin’s). For the same reason, the Cheka, great-grand-daddy of the KGB, “does not investigate – it strikes”; meaning that the police power existed not so much to investigate whether a crime was committed but rather merely to strike-down the perceived ‘enemies of the revolution’. (And in this comment of the 1920s Soviet leadership, you can get an inkling of the SO Mania Regime.)

In its Identity Politics setting, embraced for 1970s America as noted above, this Marxist economic division of the entire population into Haves and Have-Nots is expanded along fresh axes of division: race, immigrant status, and – under the aegis of the most ‘organized’ of the Identities – gender.

And in the feminist and Victimist variants of Identity Politics, both of which interacted in a lethal synergy, this Haves/Have-Nots conception became blended with the anti-colonialist thought of such French thinkers as Franz Fanon to produce Oppressors/Oppressed. And then the particular radical-feminist twist was to further specifiy that a major component of that ‘oppression’ was Male Sexual Violence, exercised – as I’ve noted in other Posts on this site – in both the public and the private/family/home venues, as well as in ANY interpersonal relationship interactions.

So if you roll that around in your mind for a bit you can start to get a sense of what sort of Imperfect Storm was being brewed up here. An Alinskyite vision in this setting would therefore not only describe but insist upon a permanent ‘civil war’ between genders, reaching into the most private elements of the Citizens’ lives.

And, in good Alinskyite fashion, ‘governance feminism’ took the route not of violent demonstrations (such as burning down the college ROTC building to protest the Vietnam War) but rather of “wresting political power” from the Haves and taking what Power it could get for the Have-Nots.Alinsky was not a ‘revolutionary’ in the usual sense of relying on physical violence; he did not approve of the Weathermen faction’s reliance on bombs and so forth. Rather, his ‘violence’ was his eternal political ‘war’, the struggle to “wrest Power” by one group (of Citizens) against another group (of Citizens).

And all of this, of course, made much easier by the Democrats’ formal and sweeping and urgent embrace of Identity Politics in the very early 1970s. The outcome of which was an increasingly Regulatory State that was passing laws specifically to redistribute Power and ALSO to broadly and deeply re-Shape – on the level of Star-Trek type ‘terraforming’ – the entire world-and-life conception of the Citizenry, and quickly.

This being the America, of course, the whole thing was spun largely as Constitutional ‘reform’ and ‘progress’, although it was not until – from the Right – Alberto Gonzalez publicly let the cat out of the bag in 2005 or 2006 by claiming that the Constitution was “quaint”. Although even Thurgood Marshall had long before opined that the Constitution of 1787 was “defective”, referring to matters of race, and his idea was simply taken-over by another Identity as well, such that the ‘defects’ of the Constitution were extended to include the category of gender as well.

Naturally then, the good Alinskyite – like the good Marxist and Leninist – must eternally ‘suspect’ the existence the Haves’ trying to extort (and oppress) the Have-Nots. This is not only a ‘war politics’ and a ‘civil-war politics’ but also a ‘politics of suspicion’. And THIS is what was embraced, whether the pols and political ‘strategists’ had realized it or not, in 1972.

Alinksy claims that he is merely offering a Techinique here, and not a ‘dogma’. But he has already asserted what he believes to be the core dynamics of how life, and the world, and history, and societies works: Nothing Is On The Level; the Haves will always be trying to extort (and oppress) the Have-Nots; and there is no more primary motive for retaining political Power than the motive of Greed. And from all this flows the fact that the ‘status quo’ (if you are of a certain age, you may well recall this mantra-phrase of the day) is nothing more than ‘hypocrisy’ and so there must also be an eternal ‘war’ by ‘organizers’ against the ‘status quo’.

And in light of all that, the Alinskite vision holds, there are no ‘Ideals’ in politics; Ideals (called ‘abstractions’ in current Correct dogma) are merely sheeps-clothing and hypocritical covers to lull the Have-Nots into passive acceptance of their being extorted (and ‘oppressed’) by the Haves.

There is in politics, he says, only “the low-road”; there is no high-road because Ideals are nothing more than hypocritical illusions deployed like an “opiate” (recalling the Marxist assertion that ‘religion is merely an ‘opium of the people’) to lull the Have-Nots into a passively accepting stupor.

And since folks won’t even realize that they have been ‘drugged’, then the first job of an organizer (having schooled him/herself in the Stance of Eternal Suspicion) is to raise the consciousness of the Have-Nots to the reality that they are being Extorted and don’t even realize it.

If that last sentence rings some vague bell with you, recall the Father-Daughter Incest phase of the Mania (about which I Posted recently as one such ‘Daughter’ admitted she was all wrong): numerous writers, ‘experts’, and just plain folks who were ‘concerned’ began writing all sorts of self-help books that were actually a form of Alinsky-ite ‘consciousness-raising’ books: their ‘revelation’ was that You, daughter, have been being ‘abused’ by your Father all these years and you never even knew it!


The term ‘abused’ could be substituted with any number of equally vague or far more lurid terms – feel free. The last phrase of the sentence could be done up more vividly (‘AND YOU NEVER EVEN KNEW IT!!!!’).

All of which were elements of necessary ‘consciousness-raising’: after all, you can’t ‘organize’ people if they don’t even know what’s being done to them that requires them to get organized. Although one would have to be careful: Alinsky’s point seem uncomfortably close to A) professional advertising’s objective of ‘creating a need’ and ‘creating a desire’ and B) the Goebbelsian gambit of ‘creating an emergency’ (‘to which the Regime must and will respond!’, and so forth).

In addition to which Alinsky added in 1971 a thought to which every Boomer adolescent could relate, BUT which also ominously mirrored revolutionary impatience with opposition or even simply doubt, hesitation, and further questioning: “The older generation doesn’t understand and, worse, doesn’t want to”. Now in the revolutionary scenario, as it played out in Russia and in Fascist Germany, no ‘opposition’ could be entertained or tolerated since the Revolution (Russia) or the Reich (Germany) already was in full possession of all the truth that the country and the people needed to know. Thus anybody who objected or even doubted was an ‘enemy’ of the Revolution or the Reich (or both) and, come to think of it, of the Leader too (Lenin or Stalin, Hitler or Mussolini).

While you couldn’t say that adolescent authority issues with parents is at core a political issue (more of a human psychology and family dynamics issue), yet it is the genius (so to speak) of Alinsky that he ties the two in together for the Boomer generation: the grownups don’t know and they don’t want to know. At which point – almost in a whackulous imitation of a John Wayne character – the Boomer must say ‘Well, then, it’s up to me’ (or, more accurately, the Boomers as a group must say ‘Well, then, it’s up to us’).

Now put this dynamic into the ‘gender revolution’ and ‘gender war’ context and you’re calling for all ‘women’ to tolerate absolutely NONE of whatever the Male says because it’s just a form of Have/Patriarchy extortion hiding under the sleazy illusions of Tradition, Common-good, Prudence, or whatever.

Now refine that tactically into some ‘issue’ which you can make a sure-fire ‘emergency’ and you will soon realize that a problem that Males can be plausibly claimed to create that Females are always ‘the victim of’ is Sex. Or – more usefully – Sexual Violence (which to some radical-feminists meant any sexual contact or relationship whatsoever, anywhere, anytime).

Now put ‘pressure’ on the politicians (already desperately eager to please) to DO SOMETHING and you quickly get to the Mania Regimes (Domestic Violence and Sex Offense) and all the stunningly frakkulent laws passed to ‘control’ the out-of-control Males.

Alinsky will also say that a good organizer “must always keep the pressure on” (since Haves of any sort will always try to take back whatever Power has been taken from them by the former Have-Nots). And you get ‘emergency’ and ‘outrage’ in steady and apparently endless succession, each requiring a ratcheting up of the applicable laws and regulations, law upon law, ‘emergency’ upon ‘emergency’, phase after phase.

And here you are.***

Also, naturally, Alinskyite thought holds that “all values and factors are relative, fluid, ever-changing”. And, consequently, that everything is “fluid” and ‘totally changeable’ (as is said nowadays). So good ‘organizing’ must not allow itself to be limited – let alone ‘judged’ – by any appeals to an illusory Higher Law: what the revolution imposes is its own Law and cannot be judged by any ‘status quo’ authority because such authority is illegitimate and hypocritical in the first place. The revolution justifies itself and needs no further ‘validation’ by illusions such as Tradition or Higher Law or Prudence or anything else.

Which dovetails nicely with the 19th-century European development of the theory of Legal Positivism: that whatever laws are made by a government in power are in and of themselves justified merely by virtue of having been enacted. There is no appeal from them, there is no Authority to whom appeal can be made, and – in the Revolutionary scheme – there is no other earthly Authority that is not ‘hypocritical’, is not merely a tool of the Haves in the ongoing extortion of the Have-Nots, and therefore has no legitimacy anyway in the first place.

All very nice and neat: caught up in the toils of such ‘revolutionary law’ you are indeed stuck between a rock and a hard place. So very similar, you might already be thinking, to the situation purposely built into the SO Mania Regime laws: once targeted, there is almost no defense and precious little appeal, especially since American courts and the legal system are now staffed by generations of law-students raised not only in this ‘theory’ of Law but also in the shrewdly spun illusion that such thinking is ‘reform’ and ‘progressive’ and that there can be no Bad Consequences when you are busily doing whatever it takes to Achieve A Good Thing (and can you say ‘Iraq War’?).

And - if you recall the megafilm ‘Waterworld’ of some years ago – it becomes clear just how impossible it is to keep a society and a civilization going if you are working in a totally fluid environment. If there is no reliably ‘solid ground’ then anything goes, anything can happen, and it can happen whenever, with no warning. But of course, in the Alinskyite vision, whatever is ‘solid’ is merely a Greed-hardened hypocritical illusion deployed by the Haves against the Have-Nots.

And all of this may also help provide a ‘deep’ explanation as to why nowadays, even with the profusion of reliable and genuinely scientific studies demonstrating clearly the wrong-headedness of the SO Mania as well as of its laws, the pols often behave like revolutionary ‘true-believers’, refusing to be confused by ‘facts’ because they are so certain that they are Achieving A Good Thing.

Alinsky, I am saying, reigns and has reigned for quite some time, in the national political consciousness, even though few might recall his name.

(Naturally, at this point, having made such a mess, there are also many in authority who cannot afford to admit what they have done or supported. Much like the war in Afghanistan, the elite leadership now can’t figure how to back away, let alone dare to admit that it needs to because its policies have gotten the country into a foreign version of the Little Big Horn – which is my take on all of that. In this way, Afghanistan and the SO Mania Regime are two fruits of the same poisonous tree, watered and nurtured by Alinsky’s dark visions and ‘techniques’.)

Well, that’s the SO-relevant material in Alinsky’s ‘Prologue’. He will draw those thoughts out in subsequent chapters and so will I in subsequent Posts.

I think that under all of this, from a legal point of view, there lies the huge question: is it within the scope of a democratic government in a Constitutional republic to deliberately pass and impose laws (regulatory, administrative, civil, criminal) that are designed to ‘change’ the most fundamental and profound habits and attitudes of the Citizenry?

OR must the path be, in a democratic government in a Constitutional republic, only that the government can pass laws based on the expressed Consensus reached by The People as to their most profound lifeways and folkways?

In the Alinsky-ite vision (adapted from Marxist and Leninist models) and in the Identity Politics vision (adapted from Alinsky) ‘The People’ is itself merely an illusion, an abstraction, and a sinister abstraction in the service of the Haves continuing to Extort the Have-Nots.

Hence the Alinsky-ite vision treats the Citizenry and The People as part of the problem, so to speak. And as a sinister and illegitimate illusion. Which may be one big reason why 30 years after his thought was forcefully injected into the bloodstream of the nation’s politics, the democratic and Constitutional ethos and its politics seems indeed to have become insubstantial, a thing of fantasy or memory more than vital, robust, efficacious real-ness.

And I think the SO community sensed all of this from the get-go of the SO Mania Regime.

And, I believe current events now demonstrate, the SO community has been right all along.

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.

**It is not often recalled that when the Democrats unveiled their new and still-nascent Identity Politics approach in the Party platform of 1972, their presidential campaign of that year was utterly trounced by the Citizenry: they only carried one State, Massachusetts.

I hold no large respect for Richard Nixon, but reflecting now on the deep skullduggeries of LBJ and on the breath-taking war-making of Bush-Cheney, ‘Watergate’ seems a very inflated matter in comparison. But it was essential, I think, that the Democrats of the era recover some semblance of ‘credibility’ for their new Identity Politics approach, even though it had been so utterly rejected at the polls. Hence there was a great deal of subterranean – truly tectonic – pressure to somehow discredit Nixon as awesomely as could be managed … and thereby create a little more ‘space’ for the Identity Politics to which the Dems of the day had so quickly and sweepingly (and desperately) committed their Party.

***Notice also, and it’s always a happy thing in pork-barrel politics, that Alinsky has provided the underpinning for what the Pentagoons like to call “the self-licking ice cream cone”: a program or situation that keeps creating the need for its own continuation and expansion. You have created ‘constituencies’ who will now accuse you of treachery or insensitivity if you try to correct your legislative mistakes and pull back from the abyss (as the Chief Judge of the Salem Witch Trials accused the Governor (although not the Crown – he didn’t dare go that far) of reining him in just as he was in the process of “clearing the land of witches” by hanging as many as he could get close enough to Find Guilty); you have also funded any and every ‘cottage industry’ that springs up to nurse itself on the government dime; and you have made a Faustian pact with influential media outlets that are happy to have ‘real’ melodramas and soap-operas on which they can luridly ‘report’.

THANKS TO CONSTITUTIONAL-FIGHTS

This is my third Post in as many days. I don’t like to put so many up so quickly since folks have a lot to do besides keeping up with sites.

But as of today the excellent Constitutional Fights site is going into Archive mode – meaning that it is ceasing active and on-going operations and will simply retain its already-amassed corpus of Posts for historical reference.

The site’s founders say that they had originally started up in order to fight the good fight in Ohio and at this point they see that as done, given the recent roll-back of the SO registry there, such that the large number of higher-graded Registrants called for by the national AWA legislation has been rolled-back. (Although the State authorities, so quick to set up Registries in the name of law-and-order, are not acting at all so quickly when the ‘law’ now says that they have to roll-back their Registrations; which is an indicator, I would say, of just how corrosive this whole Mania is to professional law-enforcers and State agents, and how politically difficult it is to move back from the brink once you have started and surfed a public stampede.)

They also note that the federal AWA is now “on life support”. And it is encouraging to hear somebody who has access to as much information as they do say that. Certainly that is true. My own examination, such as it was, of the recent internet Act indicated that the federal legislators are coming to realize – for one reason or another – that their AWA, if not also the entire SO Mania regime they helped to fan, has gone far too far.

Blessings and peace on the Constitutional Fights staff – and many thanks.

They also note that they have received few contributions and more queries for help than actual substantive Postings. And heaven knows there are many in need of help and few with the time and resources to do the work necessary to help such a comprehensively informative site fulfill its objectives.

I’d add on a personal note that I don’t often contribute to other sites. That’s not because I am a ‘loner’ but simply because it is the nature of my take on things to look acutely at matters that are still ‘hot’ in terms of ‘sensitivity’ and to say things – all of which are as careful as I can make them – which might well ruffle feathers. And I don’t want to put anybody else’s site at any risk of too many unnecessary ‘flaps’.

And my approach is to go a bit deeper – maybe be a bit more ‘abstract’ – than the indispensable ‘information and news’ sites, such as Constitutional Fights. My Posts are actually more like essays than they are like the more numerous ‘blog posts’.

And for sites that are run by groups that are actively engaged in face-to-face interactions with potential political and non-SO community supporters, I don’t want to complicate their efforts by having to answer for some of the thoughts that I express (confidently and with as much care as I can muster).

That being said, and with complete respect and gratitude for the Ohio-centered mission of Constitutional Fights, I will say that the SO Mania regime – its laws, its policies, its assumptions and dynamics – is still very much alive in the country.

AND it has now spread its corrosive influence into the very warp-and-woof of the nation’s politics and policy, foreign as well as domestic.

AND I affirm here my respect for those law-enforcement personnel and judicial and court personnel who find themselves with the awful (as well as awesome) task of trying to decently enforce the legislation that has been passed, while trying to avoid the corrosion and frakkulent complexity that such legislation imposes upon them as they try to conscientiously fulfill their tasks.

Which is not in any way meant to minimize the awful experiences imposed upon everyone who is caught up in the toils of the SO Mania regime, or their families and friends.

The entire Citizenry and the entire country is now included in and encompassed by the dark shadow of this Mania regime.

And that darkness – which has always constituted a fundamental attack upon the Constitutional ethos upon which the country was Founded and by which this country and The People continue to derive their identity as a great if experimental “hope for mankind” – is, as I have said, spreading.

So I conclude this short Post of recognition and gratitude with the sublimely conceived and stated thought of Abraham Lincoln in his Second Inaugural. In that Spring of 1865, looking now beyond the pale of an awful War, he sought to Shape the life and actions of the nation as it would have to reconstitute itself and recover itself after the exertions of waging that War: “to achieve a just and a lasting peace among ourselves and with all peoples”.

No human being should have to be subject to the unwanted imposition of sexual activity or experience by any other human being.

Anybody who finds him/herself compelled to attempt such imposition is under the acute moral – even more than legal – obligation to master such impulses or compulsions.

But human beings are imperfect, and it was the abiding wisdom of the Framers that no government can assume the authority to do what not even God has chosen to do: impose an immediate perfection upon humanity at any cost, and to try to achieve that impossible objective merely by relying upon “our poor power to add or detract” (Lincoln again, at Gettysburg).

In that sense, as I have often said and will continue to say, the SO Mania regime is not only lethally wrong-headed in and of itself, but also represents a lethal and wrong-headed approach to government, especially to the American form of government envisioned by the Framers and bequeathed to Us as stewards, for the time that each of Our American generations walks upon the earth.

So, as Ike put it in his Farewell Address, “so much remains to be done”.

And thanks to Constitutional Fights, whose efforts that great task “have thus far so nobly advanced”.

RON JOHNSON AND STATUTES OF LIMITATIONS

Before I begin, let me repeat: I do not want to politicize this site and I recommend nothing in regard to voting or supporting this or that candidate or Party.

But in the Senate election between veteran Russ Feingold (D-WIS) and his Republican challenger Ron Johnson, the matter of statutes of limitations in child-sex abuse cases has come up suddenly as a campaign issue and THAT makes it of interest to the SO community, as best I can see.

Let me point out the immediate context: Johnson has suddenly opened up a hefty lead in the race and is – as of this writing, as best I can determine – now neck and neck with Russ Feingold.

Suddenly, a video has been unearthed of testimony that Johnson gave against a Bill (that subsequently failed to gain passage in a Democratic-controlled Legislature) that would remove any Statutes of Limitations (SOL) for a civil action brought by someone claiming to have been the victim of sexual abuse as a child. Additionally, the Bill would have re-opened any such civil lawsuits filed within the past 3 years that were dismissed because of SOL problems.

The Bill was filed in September of 2009 and Johnson’s testimony was given in January, 2010. The pdf of the text (only 2 pages long) is here.

It is interesting to note the short “Analysis by the Legislative Reference Bureau” that precedes the text of the proposed legislation itself: “Under current law, the time a person has to bring an action (the statute of limitations) for an injury resulting from being sexually assaulted or subject to incest as a child, or from being subject to sexual contact by a member of the clergy as a child, is any time before the injured party reaches the age of 35”.

I couldn’t help but notice that in its review of relevant and current Wisconsin law, this Analysis paragraph opens with a sweeping phrase about being “sexually assaulted or subject to incest as a child” but then goes on to specifically add – unnecessarily from a logical point of view – “or from being subject to sexual contact by a member of the clergy as a child”.

That addition gives a bit of a clue as to what may be going on beneath the surface of the Bill, and under the surface of some relevant chunk of Wisconsin law.

I have not been able to locate the Legislative History of this Bill online, which might give some further insights into the discussions in the Legislature that preceded the vote on the Bill. There is a video clip but I’m not having any luck loading it (I’m not exactly a computer whiz).

If you wish you can use the Google or other search engine to review the extensive outpouring of outrage – by mostly leftish but also some rightish groups and sites – to the effect that Johnson is a reprehensible monster for ignoring the plight of such victims in favor of “an elite few”.

That “elite few” – in the phrase deployed by the Feingold campaign – consists of – in the words of the Bill – “an individual, corporation, business trust, estate, trust, partnership, limited liability company, association, joint venture, or government; governmental subdivision, agency, or instrumentality; public corporation; or any other legal or commercial entity”.

In effect, then, the Bill had sought to open up every single human being and business entity in the State to anybody who wished to try his/her luck at the legal track by claiming to have been sexually abused as a child. It is, I would say, a hopeful sign that the Wisconsin Legislature declined to create such a situation.

Given the condition of “repressed/recovered memory” within current jurisprudence, there is still a large chance that just about any ‘memory’ can serve as ‘evidence’, especially since the burden most often winds up on the accused to prove that he (most often) did NOT do it. And, neatly, of course, ‘proving a negative’ is logically impossible – leaving a nice neat ‘door’ for a judge or jury to say What the hey, let’s assume that if it was not impossible then it probably happened. (Which is also not at all a logical conclusion.)

From an economic point of view, such a Bill – if passed into law – would have opened up every person and business entity in the State to the costs of trying to defend themselves on what has become a field of Mania law and thinking. And in these troubled economic times, there is some logical probability that troubled souls also in need of cash might cross their fingers (in more ways than one) and hope for the best, securing the services of an attorney also game for the gambit.

And with the SOL removed, the alleged action might have taken place years or decades – perhaps even half a century – ago.

And of course, to wonder how psychiatric science could accurately distinguish the wrack of a life caused by the alleged sex-assault from the wreck of a life that for any semi-infinite number of reasons has not ‘worked out well’ … you would not be beyond the parameters of sober reason to wonder.

Here and there in the online articles and comments there is the yawp that “justice” should not be impeded by such fuddy-duddy things as Statutes of Limitation and other legal ‘stuff’. Especially (the Feingold campaign and the progressive commenters are shrewd in this) since the accuser is presumed to be ‘poor’ and the accused ‘wealthy’ and – as aforementioned – the member of “an elite few”.

The SO community will be very familiar with this deployment of the term “justice”.

So let me point out again what many in the SO community already know: when the gods are dispensing justice, they presumably know everything relevant to the case, know what actually happened, and nothing can be hidden from them; they see all, and on that basis make a determination of “justice” and enforce it.

BUT when humans have to do the determining of what the “justice” of a case will be, they have no such superpowers of knowledge (known classically as “omniscience”). Hence over the course of its millennia of existence, the species has evolved assorted methods of determining Just What Happened and Why so as to be able to Determine what the “justice” of the case will be.

For quite some time in the early millennia, ‘magic’ or ‘divination’ was used, and up through the Medieval period in Europe that approach retained some authority. From the time of the Greeks (in the West), up through the Romans there had been an effort to impose a more rational approach to determining guilt and innocene. But with the Fall of Rome and into the Dark Ages, the simple Will of the Sovereign (the local lord or later the Crown) was considered sufficient to make the determination of “justice” in a case. But with the continuing evolution of written laws – by which even the Sovereign must be bound – there then evolved a reason-based process by which provable evidence of action and intent could be matched against the elements of the law that was alleged to have been broken.

And then either a judge or a jury of peers would make the determination.

As I have often mentioned, the English from before Magna Carta and on up into the Enlightenment had made much progress in establishing this objective, rational, evidence-based process. Indeed, what finally stopped the emotional, hysterical lunacy of the Salem Witch Trials in Massachusetts in 1692 was London’s refusal to countenance in its New World colony an outbreak of the same sort of irrational, primitive, ‘spectral evidence’-based jurisprudence that the mother country was already evolving beyond. (And this was less than a century before the U.S. Constitution was put in place.)

For numerous purposes – the political being not least among them – the Victimology Movement of the past three decades was suddenly ‘valorized’ (as progressives like to put it) and the hard-won Western tradition of rational and evidence-based jurisprudence was assaulted in favor of the more primitive and primal emotion-based, vengeance-drenched ‘justice-making’ of an earlier era of Western life and law.

Rules of evidence were weakened to make room for ‘stories’ that were to be given as much weight as actual, factually reviewable evidence; statutes of limitation – imposed for the unavoidable reason that memories fade or are subject to distortion (willful or otherwise) and physical evidence degrades or is lost – were lifted on the fevered assertions that ‘stories’ never fade, ‘memories’ can be repressed and recovered in perfect shape after the passage of decades in a human life.

AND on the subtle derailment of the definition of “justice”: whereas it had been classically defined as the process carefully deployed to most reliably determine facts, it NOW became the simple State act of punishing somebody (who, conveniently, was simply PRESUMED TO ‘deserve it’).

This batch of recent ‘reform’ constitutes the most profound regression of Law in the arduous history of Western civilization. And it was done deliberately.

Although many might be forgiven for thinking that it was all Good because it was Change and Change is always Good. They did not think of context or consequences, but their heart was in the right place: they were moved by the claims of pain, and Pain had become the preeminent Status-giver of the age.

Ron Johnson had opined – rationally enough – that he was concerned for “unintended consequences” that might cause more damage and harm than any good they might accomplish. (And can you say Iraq War?) For which – again you can use the Google search engine to sample the stuff – numerous persons go into the ‘supports child sex abuse’ mode or scream that he is ‘insensitive’ to the ‘outrage’ and ‘the children’. Which are conclusions that cannot be drawn from the evidence of what he said. But then again, you’re back to the ‘evidence thing’ again, no?

And it is claimed that ‘victim rights’ are not his highest priority. Again, I point out the hugely regressive inroads – no matter how ‘sensitively clothed’ – Victimology’s profoundly regressive agenda has wrought in the years since it was adopted by politicians for their own purposes.

Is a ‘victim’ – assuming the status to be genuine – served by the State rushing to commit a further injustice, on the sovereign authority of the Law?

Any aggrieved Citizen’s right to ‘justice’ is – I would think – a right to have the case heard in a well-functioning court of Western and Constitutional justice. Nobody has a ‘right’ to Get What They Want, especially when in order to give it to them the State hastily degrades itself by inflicting sovereign harm on another Citizen.

And any persons or parties or organized interests who attempt to corrupt, corrode, weaken, or otherwise undermine the long-evolved, painstakingly rational and evidence-based processes of Western (and American and Constitutional) justice are surely not ‘reformers’ nor ‘progressives’ but are rather ‘regressives’ in a most lethal sense.

Persons unable to defend themselves on such a skewed – perhaps even rigged – field might be victimized by persons who could bring no proof to the courtroom. (Of course, it is precisely a clarion symptom of the legal regression to primitivism that even to mention anything that might slow down the rush-to-assuage-Pain is presumed to be evil, insensitive, and collusive with the alleged evil itself.)

And – from an economic and ‘business’ point of view – it might make Wisconsin’s atmosphere more unattractive to businesses if they realized that anyone at anytime could come up and file legal claims for large amounts that were, essentially and for all practical purposes, impossible to defend against.

It is not surprising to see such dirty-pool in a close and important political race.

What is of more relevance is how the SO Mania – especially in its tripwire ‘Children’ variant – having been laboriously constructed by the government, is now available for general use as a weapon or tool by which to manipulate and stampede public opinion. *

There is much easily-available conventional ‘outrage’ material for you online, so I will include this article for a more balanced view. (You have to scroll down to the particular entry entitled "WISC SEN RACE TAKES UGLY TURN" dated for 29 September, Monday.)

Again, I take no position on the political race itself and do not presume to urge you or move you in the direction of any particular political candidate or party.

But you can see how the SO Mania has now taken up residence, corrupting and stampeding public deliberation and discourse.

There remains so much to be done.

NOTES

*I had Posted several times recently about Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder, who was poised to publish 15,000 or so more leaked documents about the US military in Afghanistan that would be most unwelcome politically just as elections were coming up. He was suddenly accused of some form of sexual-assault and all of the panoply of the SO Mania was deployed against him. As of this writing, Wikileaks is still poised to release the documents and suddenly the sex-offense B-line (as the scriptwriters would say) has disappeared.

VICTIMOLOGY 7

We continue reviewing the 1986 book entitled “The Politics of Victimization” by Robert Elias, then of Tufts University.*

We come to Elias’s section on ‘Battering’ (begins on  p.49).

The section is headed with a quote some might remember from Jackie Gleason’s 1955-1956 TV comedy “The Honeymooners”; Gleason played a New York City bus driver living in a spare flat in a tenement with his wife Alice. A likable and decent guy, but very much a man who substituted bluster for lack of self-confidence, his signature line was ‘Wunna deeze days, Alice, wunna deeze days … Pow! Right tah da moon!” which he would accompany with a fist swinging in the air.

Let it be clear here: He never struck her and nobody in that era would have stood for it if he had. Men who beat their wives were not considered ‘gentlemen’, even as that term transmuted from Victorian England’s middle-classes to the immigrant working classes that populated America’s industrial cities.

Which is not to say that one should ever go around committing common-assault (threatening, but not committing an act of, physical violence).

But Elias includes it here, and I recall it was often used in the early days of feminist advocacy as an example of male business-as-usual bullying (although males would far more often commit common assault – and with the accompanying act, which would make it assault-and-battery – against each other with more frequency; it was a badge of masculinity among certain groups in those days … and I’m not sad that it’s passed into history).

“The most frequent and perhaps most serious family crime is battering.” (p.49) Which statement holds several interesting points within it.

First, Gleason never struck his wife. You were more often wondering if he was going to get hit with the proverbial frying-pan than you actually ever expected – or even imagined – him to go and hit Alice. So the quotation is not actually apt in this context in which Elias deploys it – but it was a well-known pop-culture icon statement, and was useful in its way as a ‘consciousness-raising’ tool.

Second, there is a difference between assault-and-battery in the form of striking someone after threatening to do so, and ‘battering’ – which to a consciousness not yet ‘raised’ would imply a syndromal habit of seriously and regularly beating a woman.

This latter situation – even back then – would have indicated a seriously disturbed man. But again, not ALL men would be imagined to be so significantly disturbed.

Third, we note now the deployment of the term ‘family crime’. Although the violent-crime rates were declining, the ‘family’ was suddenly raised up as a crime ‘site’ or ‘venue’ completely distinct from violent-crime as it occurred in the more ‘public’ venues.

As I have noted in previous Posts, it would not have occurred to a lot of folks to imagine the police as vigorously involved in ‘family’ matters as they would be in ‘public’ matters. One reason for this, not often mentioned, would have been a residual if inchoate (by the 20th century) concern for ‘government’ getting involved in such private matters.

It was from the get-go a major objective of feminist-type efforts to tear down the ‘wall’ in public consciousness that kept the government police-power out of the ‘home’ and the ‘family’. That wall, of course, has now been rather largely demolished. There have been numerous unforeseen – or strategically ignored – consequences for the nation, and the intrusive and indeed invasive police-power of the Sovereign Authority has now burst its bonds not only in matters domestic but matters of foreign policy as well. These two developments are hardly unconnected.

Elias then moves quickly into more dubious territory as he asserts that “we might view this as a sexual crime, since although a sexual act need not be committed, the crime emerges from sexual relations”. (p.49) What I see reflected here is the presumption – widely held by early advocates and constituting even today something of a dogmatic essential of the properly-formed ‘consciousness’ – that all male violence, especially toward females, is somehow ‘sexual’ at its core.

There is more than a hint of Freud here and I don’t think it’s accurate.

While marriage involves a deep element of sexuality since males and females come together in no small part because of sexual attraction, yet the ‘sexual urge’ is not the only dynamic in the relationships of the male and the female in the marriage setting, just as ‘sex’ is not the only urge driving human beings in any other arena of life’s undertakings.

The male – from an evolutionary point of view – is prepared by Nature both to propagate and to defend, which requires a certain assertiveness and even aggressiveness. But these characteristics are not merely or purely sexually-driven: soldiers are sent into battle precisely to exercise a certain violent assertiveness and aggressiveness, and yet you can’t really imagine that all war is ‘sexual’.**

But from the point of view of constructing a useful political strategy against an ‘enemy’, it would be most helpful if one were to paint the ‘male’ as aggressive (and thus ‘assaultive’) merely and purely because of ‘sex’: since all males were possessed of an assertive-aggressive potential, especially in matters of vigorously propagating the species, then you could simplistically link male-sex-violence in such a way that there seemed a clear causal linkage. Which is precisely what was done, with great help from a media that knew a simple and vivid script-dynamic for its ‘stories’ when it saw one.

Men ‘beat’ people – and Elias immediately goes on to note that “along with childbeating and ‘granny’ beating, wife battering has become a crime of enormous dimensions”. (p.49)

A bunch of thoughts occur.

First, ‘men’ are prepared by Nature to have the skills and capabilities to ‘beat’ folks – and it was precisely ‘civilization’ that was evolved by humans to somehow channel those natural capabilities in useful ways. The medieval Catholic Church – often nowadays belittled for creating complicated and irrelevant social and religious customs – specifically instituted a complex system of graded ‘saints-days’ and ‘feast-days’ to address this: there were numerous such ‘days’ in the medieval calendar when organized violence was prohibited.

I point this out since somehow it has become a key element in numerous agendas to ‘Deconstruct’ very old and deep civilizational structures.

Second, I note the distinction between a single act of hitting, and ‘battering’ as a symptom of emotional or psychological disturbance. And now this third term – ‘beating’ – is introduced. This is sloppy conceptual (and ‘scientific’) thinking, although it serves the neat rhetorical purpose of connecting all of these words in the public mind as ‘all the same thing’ – when in actuality they are not.

Third, of course, is the almost utterly-ignored reality that females are the initiators in many instances of domestic violence. This reality throws a wrench in the ‘men=sex=violence” equation. Although later dogma attempted to explain such instances as merely responses to a pre-existing male violence exercised by women at the end of their rope (a classic script-trope of the Lifetime Channel and such).

Further, there is the equally troubling reality of dyadic violence among lesbian and homosexual couples. While you can make the case that lesbian females – especially of the ‘butch’ kind – may have an extra dollop of male chemistry, and homosexual males – especially of the ‘girly’ (sorry) kind may have an extra dollop of female chemistry , or some such, yet it seems obvious that the realities of dyadic violence - sporadic or syndromal – are grounded in far more complex and nuanced realities than the simple ‘male sexual violence’ explanation can conceivably handle.

Also, Elias too easily slides into the thinking that these assorted types of ‘beating’ have somehow just recently become ‘crimes’ (let alone crimes ‘of enormous dimensions’). Rather, they were always considered crimes, and persons convicted of them would suffer social opprobrium in most middle-class venues even in the bad old days before the ‘consciousness raising’.

But it’s true that all of this domestic ‘beating’ was, while criminal, not high on the priority list of police and prosecutors.

There were and are numerous reasons contributing to that.

First is the abiding American concern to keep government-police power from overflowing its bounds.

Second is the hugely-fraught complexity of courts trying to establish actual facts. This is and always has been so in ‘rape’ assertions, but – more unnervingly – is and has been true even when there was clear physical evidence of violence (the woman with obvious injuries, most often). Often the female would not claim that the injuries were caused by the husband, substituting some ‘accident’ explanation. Correct dogma ascribes this to females who have been raised to be submissive, and/or to a lack of options for living life independently if she escaped from her relationship with the accused male.

The result has been two-fold: in the first place, a concerted effort (supported by vote-eager politicians) to weaken rules of evidence and procedure and indeed the entire Constitutionally-derived ethos that seeks to carefully boundary government intrusiveness. And in the second place, a concerted effort to literally Deconstruct the entire civilizational structure of Marriage and Family itself, as being merely enabling sites for domestic violence.

I can see the good intentions – or certainly the cause for concern – but I can’t see that such wholesale fundamental Deconstruction can avoid creating lethally corrosive weakening in the very fabric of American society and American civilization, let alone in the specific structures of a hard-won Law and jurisprudence. (Granted, many of the advocacy dogmatists would claim that such weakening would be a good thing, and perhaps assure everyone that a civilization can get along quite well without Family and Marriage and, in an ominous coincidence, on the economic scene, without a functioning industrial productive base).

In a Note (Note 231 on pp.274-5) Elias supports the “enormous dimensions” by quoting numerous articles … almost all of which are from the Victimology movement’s own magazine/journal or from Victimology-sponsored speaking events, with some of those popular books of the era (see my recent Post on “The Courage to Heal”) that were put together by ‘concerned’ persons who felt that the emergency was too great to take time to do careful research.

Again, there’s so much danger here that an ‘echo-effect’ is created (and, even more ominously, perhaps on purpose): you get a whole bunch of persons, all similarly convinced but seemingly unconnected, and all possessing in some form (no matter how rudimentary) a claim to the status of ‘expert’, ‘scholar’, or ‘author’, coming together. And in this way, to the innocent and unsuspecting public observer, it might seem that a shocking and convincing number of independent, competent persons have suddenly come across a problem so huge that it demands instant emergency response.

Sort of like if lightning and wind suddenly sparked a huge wildfire and the Fire Department started getting numerous calls from persons on all sides of the fire: the dispatchers would figure that if this many folks, from so many points of the compass, are calling in then the fire must be huge.

But you could also spook the Fire Department into a major response simply by getting a pre-arranged set of folks to all call in at the same time claiming to be at distant points and separate from each other. THIS, actually, is uncomfortably close to what Saul Alinsky, the noted ‘organizer’, recommended in 1971 in his book “Rules for Radicals”. Although Alinsky (about whom a Post with SO implications will be going up shortly) would consider it simply ‘shrewd tactics’ in a ‘good cause’ and focus merely on ‘technique’, and not on the justice or integrity of the gambit.

And again with the curious statistics: “One estimate puts the number of wife battering at 3,759,193 in 1980 …”. (p.49) This is an oddly precise estimate. And were these single-hit instances or instances of full-blown syndromal battering? There’s the sticky definition problem that so often is finessed, or bulldozed, by ‘advocacy’.

But, rather stunningly, Elias runs fast and far with this gambit here. He continues with the sentence “… and yet, as with rape, many more occur than women have reported.” We have dealt before in this mini-series with this matter of the ‘proof’ (or lack of it) in these claims of ‘unreported’ incidences of this or that act.

But then he immediately ratchets things up even further: “Another estimate shows wife-battering occurring ten times more than rape”. (p.49) But since the ‘rape’ figures are themselves hugely questionable – especially if you take as real the ‘unreported’ incidences – then can you imagine how many wife-batterings he is claiming?

He gives only one reference for this assertion, in Note 232 on p.275. The source is one “Del Martin”, who is actually Dorothy Louise Taliaferro, who married a fellow named Martin but then divorced him, keeping his name, and married her wife Phyllis Lyon (according to the Wiki text). Her key insight of relevance here was that domestic-violence was the result of “institutionalized misogyny” about which she wrote a book in 1979. She had a “Doctorate of Arts” from something called “The Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality” and lived in San Francisco, where she spent most of her life as an activist and organizer for women’s and lesbian issues.

‘Del Martin’ as an individual had every right to voice his/her opinions and to write about them. I give these biographical points for no reason other than to point out that even with so seemingly reliable a professional academic as Elias, you can find yourself stampeded by ‘facts’ from sources that are neither professionally reliable nor objectively derived. (And yet which, from Alinsky’s point of view, are quite justified and ‘successful’ if they merely achieve the stampede they were designed to achieve.)

Which indicates that although Elias’s book is very impressively written in an academic and professional format, replete with literally thousands of ‘works cited’ in hundreds of Notes, yet many of those ‘works cited’ are of a quality that can hardly be characterized as ‘professional’ and genuinely ‘scholarly’.

But you can imagine that to wave this book around, or even to carefully read it, would provide legislators and their staffs with either the honestly-held illusion that they were truly in possession of carefully-achieved ‘knowledge’ OR with the ‘cover’ that they were constructing and passing legislation and an entire regime of laws only on the basis of the most serious and careful ‘professional’ and ‘scientific’ ‘knowledge’.

And all of this applies as well to the SO Mania regime and so very much of its supporting ‘statistics’ and ‘science’. Which also seems to explain a great deal of the otherwise incomprehensibly obtuse stance of legislators as more and more actual knowledge about sex-offending (to the extent that the term is of any use in addressing the phenomenon) indicates the profoundly questionable integrity of their asserted Findings and consequently the profoundly misguided nature of the laws that they have passed.

I think, also, that at this point then, another dynamic must be operative among legislators: much like the country’s involvement – grossly misconceived and now failing – in its present military misadventures, legislators and political authorities now can’t figure how to back off or get out without admitting that they have made a monstrous – and hardly unpreventable – series of mistakes.

And just as those mistakes in the foreign-policy and military settings have cost so much in blood and treasure and national integrity, to say nothing of the ‘victimization’ that has been and continues to be inflicted upon so many people in the foreign lands and nations that have been invaded, so too in the SO Mania regime so many ill-consequences have been inflicted on the integrity of the legislative and judicial and law-enforcement authority, as well as on so many of those caught in the toils of the regime’s laws and regulations.

It reminds me so much of the Vietnam War and that era, when so much further damage was done simply because the authorities could not figure how to extract the country from the initial errors without admitting so huge a collection of mistakes. And as a result the whole awful situation went on and on.

“The home and the family have become the most violent places in society”, declares Elias. (p.49) That assertion, again, is footnoted (Note 236, p.275), but that Note merely references more Victimology sources. The Echo Effect is well-established here. And again, you can see where what is developing here is precisely what some concerned political commentators have nowadays accurately noted as the ‘echo chamber’ that Our national politics in general have become.

He continues immediately: “One in ten married women has probably been beaten.” (p.49) Again, note the “probably” and the vaguely-defined but vividly-suggestive “beaten”. The Note supporting the statement (Note 237, p.275) is – again – a Victimology source.

He then says that “about 282,00 men get beaten by their wives annually” – which is interesting indeed, although it is a point that received little enough attention over the ensuing years and decades. His references supporting the assertion (Note 238, p.275) are again Victimology sources.

And then he follows that assertion up immediately with the assertion that “violence of all forms probably occurs in at least 60% of all households”(p.49), supporting that with a Note (Note 239, p.275) that references a 1978 publication of the National District Attorneys Association, which even at that early date could not be considered an objective and scholarly source.

And again, in that “violence of all forms” there is no distinction between the occasional physical blow and full-blown syndromal ‘battering’ or whether the aggressor was the male or the female.

But he then immediately goes on to assert that “When women get battered, it dramatically increases their tendency to beat their children” (p.49), citing (Note 240, p.275) Victimology sources as his authority.

AND THEN immediately concludes “Yet for all this violence we treat the family and the home as sacrosanct” (p.49), again citing (Note 241, p.275) only a Victimology source.

This is a huge and hugely fraught conclusion. He is opening the door to a profound Constitutional change (‘reform’ is grossly inaccurate, insufficient, and misleading a descriptor) and – indeed – this idea constitutes nothing less than a huge and profound challenge to the American Constitutional ethos itself.

And while I am not saying that his idea here is wrong simply because it is so hugely portentous a challenge to the established bedrock Constitutional ethos, I most surely am saying that so huge a matter should have been – for reasons of political integrity as well as scholarly integrity – given far more accurate and widely publicized a treatment.

Rather than simply being tossed in as an indicator of the direction in which the stampede created by his ‘innocent’ and ‘scientific’ book must immediately go.

But in this Elias gives – knowingly or not – a clarion and clear example of the type of dynamics which would purposely drive the regimes of mania-law and the Mania itself: the monstrously profound consequences and implications of his ‘findings’ are simply blanketed in the emotional ‘dust’ raised by the stampede. And then, all too quickly, legislators – knowingly or not (neither alternative is appetizing) – cashed in on the trust of The People by casting and trumpeting their legislation as mere ‘changes’ or ‘reforms’, selling Us in effect a grossly defective and dangerous car, in a Deal effected in the Politically Correct equivalents of the old ‘smoke-filled rooms’ of the Beltway and State capitols.

Deployed in this way, the ‘art of the deal’ has not served the nation nor its politics nor its People well.

In seeking to bulldoze down that fuddy-duddy ‘sacrosanctness’, I would say that these dynamics operated basically – and lethally – as the horribly wrong-headed policy of cutting through the watertight bulkheads to make the ship more ‘accessible’ to various agendas, or of burning away vital chunks of the hull of a wooden sailing ship to rid the vessel of rats. There are worse problems than rats on a wooden vessel at sea, and burning up the hull or cutting away chunks of it are most certainly guaranteed to bring those problems into lethal reality. Which is precisely what has happened.

This Post has covered only one-half a page worth of text in Elias’s book (the bottom half of page 49). But you can see, compressed in such a small amount of text, many of the dynamics that are operative in the book, in Elias’s fraught approach of trying to combine ‘advocacy’ and ‘objectivity’, and in the formation of Mania regimes themselves.

And Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” – which rocketed to popularity when it was published in 1971 – were already the adoptive Modus Operandi of all too many ‘advocacies’ long before Elias published this inflammatory stuff in the seemingly ‘innocent’ form of a scholarly compendium in 1986.

For Alinsky – coming from a Marxist-Leninist background, but whose recommendations eerily parallel the Modus Operandi of the stereotypical used-car salesman – the Technique is justified merely if it succeeds in getting itself enshrined as law or policy. Which explains how so many advocates and legislators and their staffs – and now so many jurists and legal personnel as well – can consider themselves ‘successful’ and having faithfully discharged their duties if they merely ‘succeed’ in passing laws and enforcing them. There is for them, as for Alinsky, no larger (let alone Larger) consideration upon which they need waste their time: the Outcome, so narrowly defined, is all.

Alinsky, dying in 1972, never had to face the awesomely awful problem that now faces Us 30 years later: What happens when the Outcome – or a whole mess of Outcomes – turn out to be wrong and to have created a lethal complex of profoundly bad consequences?

And, having read his book and little else, his disciples and those shaped by his ideas – whether they know it or not – are now unable or unwilling to consider what to do next.

The SO community, as I will continue to say, is remarkably positioned to help them – and the country – deal with the dilemma that they have created for all of Us. And not simply in the specific SO Mania regime but in the wider realms of national policy and the very integrity of the nation’s politics.

NOTES

*My copy is the paperback version put out by Oxford UP in 1986. It bears the ISBN 0-19-503980-7. It will be unwieldy to include both Chapter Titles and sub-headings as well as page numbers, in case you have a different edition. I will stick to only using page references when I make quotations, but for especially important points I will do so.

**It is a sign of great conceptual confusion – you could call it conceptual incoherence – that in matters military the feminist agenda is simultaneously to” demasculinize” the military while claiming as well that the female is as reliably capable of conducting combat activity as the male. Thus, while male aggressiveness is decried as an outrage in the family setting, yet it is claimed that in the military setting the female is equally as competent as the male to sustain its exercise. What is claimed to be an outrageous and purely male oppression in one venue is claimed to be equally the competence of the female in another venue.

Nor does it help clarity to simply claim that ‘there are many feminisms’, as if that claim – itself unhelpfully vague – can resolve the questions at a stroke.

What does offer some plausible explanatory value in this highly conflicted matter is the possibility – quite acceptable in the Alinsky Method – of deploying whatever justification appears most likely to ‘work’ toward achieving a particular goal in a particular venue. Thus in the ‘family’ venue the agenda is served by characterizing the male as uncontrollably and almost naturally violent (the female thus being implicitly presumed to be ‘nonviolent’), while in the ‘military’ venue the agenda is served by claiming that the female is equally as capable as violence as the male (the female here being implicitly presumed to be as capable of sustained violence as the male).

It is a sign of just how torturously rickety this whole conceptual construction is if you try to apply the presumptions active in the military venue to the family venue: that both the male and female are equally capable of exercising violence. But this possibility is precluded – neatly enough – by quickly and simply asserting that such conceptual examination would ‘re-victimize the victim’ and simply cannot be done.

Thus you can see how the ‘politics of domestic violence’ are skewed by the conceptual incoherences that are active in the fundamental casting of the ‘problem’.

And such conceptual incoherence, once accepted in the ‘politics’ of domestic violence, is then so very usefully presumed as ‘normal’ as the ‘politics of sex offenses’ began to develop: incoherence is considered ‘normal’ and not-worthy of notice, as policy and law are formed free of any of the braking and limiting influences of ‘coherence’ and accuracy.

And then – of course – the verrrry bad habit of forming policy without any concern for accurate and coherent conceptual groundwork spreads – and has spread – to other areas of national activity such as foreign policy and the formulation of military campaigns and war.