BITTERLY, BITTERLY, BITTERLY

BITTERLY, BITTERLY, BITTERLY

This post is a reaction to a post by T. on Medium.com who just returned from failing to save one of his boys from death. Bitterly, bitterly, bitterly.

There are eleven years between T. and I. At one time that would mean I was too young to be his mother — not now that girls are getting pregnant at nine years old so that they have skipped adrenarche, the years in which people form their identities. Their identity is their baby and their black cocktail dress. The dress is a good thing because then they have something decent to wear to their son’s burial.

Deborah Kerr and John Kerr in "Tea and Sympathy"

Central casting always puts me in a bow blouse or a pastel sweater set. Pearl earrings. “Tea and Sympathy” casting — Deborah Kerr offering a therapeutic mercy fuck. No son and not quite a lover. Not even the Maureen O’Hara Irish shawl.

Maureen O'Hara

T. is right. I was up in the middle of the night to check his blog because I had an idea what was happening. AIDS doesn’t kill one directly, but sits on the sidelines (as long as the money for drugs lasts) and grins while the infections and traumas do the work, a plastic respirator on the mouth as though it were a ball gag and tubes going in, tubes coming out, in places that have better uses: arms and dicks for expressing intimacy. T. sits alongside desperate for the power to do more than hold a hand.

The part I play in this virtual world is the English teacher and the auntie. In actuality I didn’t do either one very well. As T. points out, I’m too much the narcissist.  (See above.)  Just as his own English teachers and aunties were. I think they saw him accurately, and their crime was failing to intervene to stop the torment. They knew his father was abusive, a near-killer, but they needed MAN power, like Woody Allen’s brother who thought he was a chicken and no one wanted to cure him because they needed the eggs. But this man was a rooster and he could kill with the spurs on his heels, aside from treading all the hens.

I’m not supposed to be me in the better version of this story — I’m supposed to be a man, maybe Jack, who can make an author notorious; or maybe that agent who pushed writers to go to extremes (esp. people who were already extreme); or best of all one of those original powerful SM leathermen who are dead or old now. Someone powerful enough to carry a young man’s body in his arms.

It’s not a sex change needed, but rather a cultural pattern they call “primogeniture” that goes back and back and back to when men were the heads of clans and castles, “landed”, in a time when men swore fealty to their lords by putting their hands under their master’s kilt to swear on his balls. No books.

Mr. Garnett

Two other deaths I’m processing this week are both men. One was my fourth grade science teacher, Mr. Garnett, who had been a sergeant in WWII. He was the only person to realize that my scowl was an effort to see. I lived in a blur but no one would believe my complaints until he simply called me to the back of the room and presented a vision chart. They say he was bitter late in life, but not why or how. Mr. Thuringer, who had lost a leg in combat, lectured us about the destruction of war and drove a knife into his wooden leg so we’d believe him. Then one day he disappeared.

Mike Burgwin

The second death was Mike Burgwin, my boss at Multnomah County Animal Control, where success pressed him to process his life. After we got to know each other, he’d call me up late at night and tell me stories, many of them terrible tragedies from his work as a cop. He was a big physical man, highly intelligent, with little formal education. I wrote about him on 3/28/16 prairiemary.blogspot.com. The memorial is soon so what I wrote is being edited for use. I look forward to hearing what others say, but I won’t be there.

T. writes with video, words read by Leighton, “Hypocrisy is my sacred lover and i suck his cock in old canoes/” Their work is not for the faint-hearted, the uninitiated, or the mommies except the ones who go to their son’s burial high enough to bear it. There is a community, but a shifting one, like a classroom or congregation. Still, it’s much bigger than anyone suspects, global.

“Anger is the new pornography.” It’s the old one as well. Dean. Brando. Pacino. “Father Knows best.” (Doesn’t watching it make you indignant? He was lying: he knew nothing, Jon Snow.) “Coronet Instructional Films.” Notice they just give instructions, not enlightenment or challenge. On and on and on, esp. on Friday afternoons when teachers are tired. All those classrooms with little chairs, accommodating the baby boom, boys obediently sharpening pencils (which can be weapons), seeming to be safe and happy.

These kids are the age when they don’t just attract abuse for crying and messing and failing to go to sleep. Now the sexual predators get interested, because the kid is old enough to ask why — “Why are you doing this?” as they ask in “Game of Thrones” and “American Odyssey”. We ask it all the time: why are you doing this? Because it’s so much fun to make you hurt. Because I can control you. Because it means I’m superior because I’m cynical.

from "American Odyssey"

There are escapes and compensations. Today the kids can slip away into tech worlds that adults can’t access. They can directly confront porn as extreme as it can get, crossing over into death. The boys in particular take refuge in movement: surfing, skate-boards, parcours. The adults object, “Oh, that’s too dangerous! Why don’t you go in for football where you will only get concussions or basketball where you will only blow out your knees? Or you could be a wrestler with a big important coach like Denny Hastert.” But the boys go free-form, and around here ride fast on horses, dogs running behind. Fathers say, “I know best. Get out of my house.” Around here you go stay with your auntie a while.

Dangerous is the knife that cuts both ways. One gets respect for beautiful danger, esp. if there’s singing. One can be a movie star. It’s a bit of protection, even in a time when as soon as the new “Star Wars” episode comes out, fans begin writing pornographic versions. It’s arousing. It’s a kick of adrenaline, the true addiction of our time.

Clever danger creates double-binds that guarantee results. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Tell about these semi-secret, sometimes marketable patterns, and you will be accused of knowing because of participation. (That was in “American Odyssey,” the movie I marathon-watched last night. The heroine survivor witnessed an American atrocity but the perps said she only survived because she was a collaborator. So much for patriotism.)

Don’t tell about the seething pit of violence under our society, and you are accused of being stupid, oblivious, uncaring. Nothing that can be cured by wearing a ribbon or even getting on the board of a nonprofit. So the first thing to do is accept the idea of being damned, but at least out of choice. Observe. Testify. Take the consequences. Which may be death, not even your own. Bitterly, bitterly, bitterly. But with love. Because you can.

MIRASMUS AND INANITION

There are two technical medical conditions that are similar but not the same.  People tend to confuse them.  One is “inanition” or “failure to thrive” which comes from starvation -- either because there is not enough nutrition or because the body can’t process what it ingests -- and the other is “mirasmus” which is the same thing except emotional and tactile, a starvation of the skin and brain.  Originally I learned the term as it applied to orphan infants who were fed, cleaned, but never touched or talked to. They died.

Apart or together, the two conditions are efficient, silent, can easily be blamed on the victim, and result in large part from stigma that justifies neglect.  They happen because no one cares enough to intervene.  There will be no torture marks, nothing dramatic like water-boarding will have happened.  Even CSI would be hard-pressed to prove the cause of death.  It’s not so attention-getting as PTSD.  The victim just finds a place to hide and quietly dies, sometimes hidden in plain sight on a city street.

I only now found this second origin of the term “mirasmus,” which I had previously connected to infants.  This interpretation was developed from a particular kind of PTSD (sort of) found in prisoners of the North Koreans in that cold unforgiven war of my own generation.  More than a third of the prisoners died even when not obviously abused. “They weren't subjected to common physical torture tactics. In fact, fewer cases of physical abuse were reported in the North Korean POW camps than in prison camps from any other major military conflict throughout history. . .”  It was the war that invented “brain-washing.”  Not unlike washing a blackboard when you want it completely cleared, erased.

http://www.302aw.afrc.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123025632

“It was not uncommon for a soldier to wander into his hut and look despairingly about, deciding there was no use in trying to participate in his own survival. He would go into a corner alone, sit down, and pull a blanket over his head. And he would be dead within two days. The soldiers actually called it "give-up-it is." The doctors labeled it "mirasmus," meaning a lack of resistance, a passivity. If the soldiers had been hit, spat upon, or slapped, they would have become angry. Their anger would have given them the motivation to survive. But in the absence of motivation, they simply died,”

Four techniques were used to create hopelessness:

1.  Turning the prisoners against each other by rewarding snitches.

2.  Forcing extreme self-criticism, not just all the bad things they had done but all the good           things they had failed to do -- whether or not they were in their power.

3.  Breaking down all loyalty to larger groups -- never doing anything that was “not their job.”

4.  Constant bad news, suppression of good news.

The final dehumanized state of these men was like zombies:  they didn’t try to escape; when released they didn’t phone home; they didn’t take care of themselves. It is a state deep in the tissues of a body: animals do it.  But animals don’t do it to each other.  We do.  I see all four of these techniques in play around me, both through the media and just in the daily business of a small town.  Gossip, tattling, blaming, criticizing, claiming there’s no use in trying because everyone is against helping, saying that the town council is broken and can’t be fixed -- well, I’m doing it right here, aren’t I?  It’s a kind of self-protection against having to do anything.  I see it most of all in our handling of problem juveniles, simply because we can neglect them with impunity.

Sitting on my kitchen counter there’s a questionnaire demanding that I register for jury duty.  I don’t want to do it.  I hate lawyers, I hate people on juries who spew hate in protected deliberations and refuse to be reasonable or consider alternatives, I don’t trust the judges -- having been double-crossed by several in my life and I don’t mean by sentencing.   But my anger is a positive thing; my hatred makes me look for answers; I don’t go hide -- I confront.  I will not die of mirasmus or inanition, though I might have a stroke like that tree-cutting pastor.  Maybe he’s afraid to show his hot temper now, which is why he covered it all up with hypocrisy about “asking” and letting someone else do the dirty work.  Which popped MY cork!  I had to go apologize to the librarian for cussing in the library.  She laughed: she used to tend bar.  At least I wasn’t drunk.

I submit that the hunger strike at Guantanomo is an attempt by the prisoners to choose death over zombification.   I submit that our “high security prisons” are exactly like those North Korean prisoner-of-war camps.  I submit that the drug/street culture in squats is perilously close to this and mirasmus/inanition accounts for as many deaths as are caused by overdose or exposure.  I submit that the revolutions and terrorisms the world is experiencing are attempts to stay alive in the face of these ubiquitous contemporary conditions like refugee camps, since even in America people’s lives and homes are destroyed by catastrophes so that they have no resources or hope.  Living in a tent is bad enough -- a crowded camp of thousands of tents is another.

People are put on lists so they can’t fly, can’t get food aid, can’t go to school or to a hospital, can’t afford to have a traffic offense that will get them deported.  It’s so easy to download lists and alter them with computers that hustlers are making false sex-offender lists and using them for extortion.  Even the official lists are often wrong.  Lists are compiled by computers -- they say for marketing.  They want to know who we are so they can make us change, if only to convert us to a new breakfast cereal.  But bots, web-crawlers, are not people.  They don’t get angry.  They have no feelings.

Other than anger, what are conditions that would help resist mirasmus?  Let’s turn those four techniques for producing it inside-out, make them opposite:

1.  Solidarity among victims of oppression so as to present a united front.

2.  Dignity-- not the wimpy self-esteem of winning prizes and doing better than others, but the deep conviction of one’s own self-worth. 

3.  Doing what needs to be done and helping others with their tasks.

4.  Believing that there are good things in the world despite all evidence.  This does NOT mean being stupidly cheerful, but appreciating and looking for the positive even if you have to create it yourself. 

This last is the essence of courage.  Perhaps it is the hardest of the four techniques.  For myself, the most reassuring idea is being part of an enormous webwork of existence: me, the tree, the bee.  Give up the dominating fundamentalist idea that obedience to some big emperor in the sky will make a person live forever.  Don’t fear and suppress anger -- use it.

But I’m still nervous about leaving home long enough for someone to cut down the rest of the cottonwood tree.