THE GREAT HYDRAULIC MORPHING OF GRIZZLY BEARS

Grizzly management in Montana (necessarily in Montana because that’s where the grizzes are) is very much like the story about the wise but blind men deciding what an elephant is.  Each had a different idea because each had hold of a different part of the animal:  a fly whisk, a hose, four trees, two fans.  In fact, there seems to be war among the wise men when it comes to bears.  

I could not understand the term “Wildlife Services”, not even the fact that it is a United States bureaucratic entity, a subcategory of the USDA and APHIS until I saw the organizational chart.  To them a grizzly bear is an agricultural issue about protecting product (livestock) from depredation.  The bureaucratic flow chart includes rabies, genetically altered seeds, insects, birds on airport runways.  

More traditionally, grizzly bears in the Montana bureaucracy are dealt with by “Montana Fish Game and Parks”, in which wilderness with its attractions includes big game but must also deal with safety for people who are hiking or fishing.  Much of it is a boundary problem, defining and maintaining territory.  But that it is based on recreation income is not usually mentioned.  A brief effort to figure out how much a grizzly sighting is worth to the tourism industry crashed when an anti-grizz rancher offered to write them a check per dead bear.

Then there’s the reservation where the BIA has to deal with fish and game, but collaborating with the Blackfeet Tribe, which contains many points of view, now including the traditional culture and the glamorous contemporary virtual memes that have developed about the spiritual and psychological dimensions of charismatic mega-mammals.  Bears suggest humans and humans identify with bears, always have, especially when the bear stands up.  Some famous writing has been about bears: novels, poems, short stories.

Weaving through this are the bear biologists, both hands-on, and those who study not just the molecular and tissue constituents of a bear body and life path but also the "intraguild predations" of the bears in their ecology.  (It means predators who compete for prey and who will make lunch of their competitors.)  Physiologists are very interested in things like hibernation, bear gestation, and how bears handle fat.

There is a thriving market for bear parts used in Asian crypto-medical practices.  A certain kind of person wants to hunt bears and then keep the trophies in their house.  Not many people want a bear coat these days, but a bear carcass CAN be commodified.

Not many people want bears prowling their streets at night, though many of the East Slope towns have always co-existed with bears.  But it's a great commodity for those who market fear.

Order has been kept in the Western world for centuries by devising written rules for human behavior in the form of laws and regulations.  They generally address problems and thus include assumptions about what IS a problem and also the dimensions of response to it.  We classify crimes as disorderly conduct, misdemeanor, felony and capital — and we impose a certain level of obligation on non-criminal people to not provoke, over-react, or misinterpret what happens.  Also, there is a cultural level of manners and wise withdrawal.  We draw boundaries and say,  “Inside you can do this, but outside you must do that.”  So hunters bait bears to come out of protected parks so they can be shot.  But that’s also in a code with penalties.

Bears have their own culture, responding to the ecology and what they learn from each other, particularly their mothers.  A change in memes can be as violently forced as the sudden closing of the big hotel dumps in National Parks, or as clever as teaching cubs how to lift latches on shed doors.  Sub-practices of bears responding to their knowledge of "what works" means that a Yellowstone bear is subtly different from a Yaak bear. A bear specialist from over West tells me that "his" bears in the Selkirk were smaller but with nastier tempers than bears around here. 

The interface between the individual bear’s experience and its ecology, particularly that of the humans and their structures, has a lot to do with what happens.  I have a vivid memory of  driving along a stretch of highway out of Montana to the West, a place where the timber had been cut back along the roadway.  A bear was sitting on its butt with its “arms” relaxed and head up, just watching the traffic.  It was so easy to see that he was thinking “where are all these big shiny wheely things going and how to they travel so quickly?”

Of course, we love to watch bears and one of their uses is in zoos and circuses, which is better than watching bear-baiting, once considered to be legitimate entertainment.  Now we just video them for YouTube and consider it very funny if they try to do something like humans but fail.

Neurologists are opening up the parallel ecological evolutions of bears and humans in terms of “wiring.”  We are "intraguild predators", though we don’t eat many bears these days.  And what is that killing frenzy that can explode both bears and humans into destruction?  Road rage.  Spaniel rage.  Something snaps in the brain.

Teddy bear after brain surgery.  None was found.

These are all generalizations.  Game wardens work with specific bears in specific circumstances, each one unique.  Their tools, from helicopters to foot snares, and their methods often have a militaristic feel from carrying sidearms and wearing uniforms.  Much of their work belongs to the “Theory of Mind,” understanding how a bear thinks in the same terms as trying to understand what an enemy is planning on the field.  Terrain, strategy, logistics, are necessary and some things come directly from the battlefield, like shooting a bear from a helicopter, a bear that can be found because it is wearing a radio collar that will show up on a computer map as well as a handheld antenna.  

The technology of the tranquillizer gun is as demanding of skill as any other weapon.  No drug is entirely predictable.  Children die from an anesthetic when they are having their tonsils removed.  For a while when street drugs were so popular, there was an idea that “angel dust”-- which was the same as the ketamine used to tranquillize bears and which people knew was hallucinogenic -- was making bears psychotic and more dangerous.  It wasn’t so much resolved as it was irresolvable.

Tranq guns are propelled by compressed air, once to propel the dart and — in some models — again to make the syringe plunger inject the liquid.  Compressed air can’t be regulated in the way that a bullet can be made standard by controlling the gunpowder load, so sometimes the dart will fall short and other times, completely penetrate the animal, through and through.  It’s very hard to get accuracy on the target location.  The Portland Zoo veterinarian used a tranq gun to try to address health issues on a giraffe.  He accidentally hit the major nerve through the animal’s thigh and caused that giraffe to limp for the rest of its life.  He wept.

Variation in the chemistry of animals means that the amount necessary, the depth of the unconsciousness, the time lags in how quickly the drug works and how long the animal will stay “under,” can only be approximated.  Transportation of an inert animal can be problematic, esp. when using a sling to air lift them.  Animals can die simply from being handled, but not usually bears, I think.

Tranquilizer pistol kit

When we started researching tranq guns at animal control, I called an advertiser in Texas.  It turned out that he ran a ranch that sold hunting of African animals.  He had a pretty cavalier atttitude:  "Come on down and try out our gun!  If we make any serious mistakes, we'll have 'em for dinner!"  The absolute opposite would be the megamammal cuddlers of some humane groups.

The media is a mess.  They are worse at handling bear stories than they are at not taking a distorting attitude about pets for the sake of a story.  Often they are joking or childish.  But then, they have the same bureaucracy problem of the split between the culture and knowledge of office dwellers -- who demand profit -- versus whose whose experience is directly, sensorily, immediately based on the events. 

Dealing with bureaucratic but emotional issues like “de-listing,” “threatened,” and “extinction”, I hurry to turn out as much reading and writing as I can before the internet and free blogging get closed down.  Many powerful but unacknowledged forces are at work.  The main player governing all else is the surface of the planet and the inevitable morphing flow of life finding its own survival paths, not always the ones humans would prefer.  Maybe not humans at all.  "Intraguild predation."  Hmmm.

THOUGHT ARROWS LEAVE US QUIVERING

At one point it was suggested that we could reconcile cultural differences by making our central defining point the getting and spending like the fur trading posts so vital to the frontier.  After all, economics is what it’s all about.  (Too bad we can’t seem to figure out what economics is about.)  So now the Global Ferengi have us in their grip.  The pirates win.  The most important and reliable news source is “The Economist.”

The Internet was thought to be a way to get us all talking to each other, therefore understanding each other and transforming the world.  But what does a resentful snide little high-heel wearer with the mental equipment of a 7th grader have to say that isn’t the online equivalent of her slam-book?  (A slam book is one that assigns a coded page to a frenemy and invites other girls to write accusations on it.  It’s semi-anonymity.  Like the Internet.)

What I’m talking about is a phenomenon of print -- the line of the sentence is the shaft of the arrow.  Those who can write a piercing sentence that matches straight logic with a smooth rhetorical shaft are those that kill nonsense.  Of course, there are always the feathered fletchings of religion -- plucked from angels, no doubt.  And the nock of the author’s fingers on the pen.  I’d make up something cute about the “crest” but I don’t get what it is and don’t care enough to find out.  It’s just a simile and a bit of a parody.

The quiver contains “kinds” of arrows, usually relating to the academic history of nationalities.  Of course, those who have NO SUCH THING, because their language and heritage is oral, must resort to throwing rocks.  Nevertheless, there are interesting variations in the arrows:  The English ones are about the entitlements of hegemonies.  The French ones are about the suffering of the oppressed being bled to death.  (They admire de Sade and Saint Sebastian.  There’s also a strange cult about pelicans who feed their young from the wound on their side which is somehow connected to the crucifixion of Jesus.)  The German ones are about the sacrality of nature.  It’s hard to tell about the Italian ones because everyone is yelling at once -- or is that opera?

Now I’ll be a little more serious.  Many word arrows have been exchanged with North American indigenous peoples.  Most of them have become bent or broken by now.  The problem is that the peoples of any continent are not defined or shaped by their relationship to the whole continent, but rather by the various ecologies, which are the basis of the economies of survival.  This is true of everything from genetics to religion.  Fish-eaters to corn-raisers to bison-hunters.

The Big Empty

First Contacts with Europeans, who wrote everything down on their terms, was governed by “otherness.”  This was rooted in the unwritten native cultures, elaborated, definitive and place-based. Organic.  The Euros saw them as all alike -- a big mass called, mistakenly, “Indians,” who soon conveniently died and left an “empty continent.”  Everyone still thinks the prairie is empty.

These ideas are so potent that even teaching on a reservation in the Sixties one met whites who said, “Well, we only took the land because the Indians weren’t using it.”  (Using means exploiting.)  And only a few years ago when a law was passed requiring Montana schools to teach Indian history, a librarian said to me, “I don’t see why WE would have to study THEIR history.  There isn’t any anyway.”  It was again the hegemony of the written.  It was a puzzle to her how anything could exist if it weren’t in a book.  After all, her work was books, not stories told out loud.  (That was before the row of computers now in the library.)

The transition from oral to written has been a rocky one and often confused by the belief that certain cultures only write certain kinds of writing.  The early writing-down of Indian matters was done by helpful whites, often Victorian women or clerkly sorts of white men, who were influenced by Grimm and Anderson writing down the oral literature of Europe.  So “myths and legends” became the definitive genre of Indian literature.  But then the “scientific” -- well, “natural history” people -- came along, taking a great interest in material culture, and soon the whites had captured back through description the implements, the clothing, the shelters, in anthropological compendiums of the contents of museums or the paid reports of informants needing to feed their kids.

Young musicians playing for a wake.

In the meantime the “Indians” were going to government schools which intended to make them white, but instead created an underground Pan-Indian culture that is still carried along on the Pow-Wow circuit and the many political alliances of tribes, different as they can be.

You might know all this.  But have you considered the dilemma of a person who wishes to change cultures, the trans-culture person?  (Is that parallel to trans-gender?)  Adolf Hungry Wolf has an excellent Euro-education but a place-based lifestyle from the frontier between white and indigenous: a log cabin with a photovoltaic array to power his computer.  He is attacked from both sides, at least by those who cannot accommodate any sort of hybridizing, thinking of it as disturbing the order of the world.  Or maybe the diminution of their own power.  Remarkably, Adolf is peaceable about all this.  

Others are not.  One of the most interesting cases is Sherman Alexie, a bit of a misfit among his own tribe, who has managed to be on both sides by aligning himself with whites who romanticize Indians and believe they are a definable “something” in spite of being removed from the context that shaped their ancestors, but also aligning with the subcategory of Indians who resent having to conform to white hegemony and try to claim their molecular cell nucleus DNA trumps all environmental and cultural influences.  As time goes on, Sherman has to shift his target audience to a younger and younger demographic to keep his mockery from rebounding on himself.  

Sherman Alexie

Mocking whites who try to ennoble themselves by alliance with an imaginary “noble Indian” is to choose a soft target, mostly German, these days often female.  But Sherman has a hostage to the white medical establishment that tends to he and his son with their hydrocephalus.  They saved both brains.  But it means he has to keep the money coming and more whites have money than reds have.  Indians on reservations do not buy books, even his.  He gives respect and authority to whites and white publishing, enabled by political correctness, and dances to their organ-grinder tune -- not the drum.  

After all, his tribe bullied him and the other tribes only admire him now because he is a success in a white world, the way they want to be.  Wannabe-ing works both ways.  Dissolution of identity is not a happy thought, but the arrows puncture us right and left.  We are like the wounded buffalo, still running but destined to fall and rot.  The fish are dying in the drought the cities may cause, but everyone crowds into the cities.

Russell Means

There’s another influence: in the French-Algerian post-modern-influenced context, political correctness targeted governmental, academic and literary whites who soon discovered that the best way to avert disaster was to hire the troublemakers to be professors and actors.  Just don’t let them have any power.  In a while, they’ll discover what they thought was privilege and authority is nothing of the kind, and then they’ll go home.  

If you don’t dare fire popular individuals, in spite of claiming that the once accepted credentials are now worthless, don’t fund their department.  Native studies, queer studies, women’s studies, border studies -- whatever.   Asian studies . . .  are you kidding?  That’s where the MONEY is!  Do you want this university to survive?  And how do the now unemployed indigenous, mock or not, make their living?  What color was the parachute of the president of Harvard who was driven out of his job because he said that women were not like men, which enflamed the arrows of the hard-core feminists.

Is politics a living?  Is that quivering orgasmic?   

CRUISING IDEAS

Some assumptions simply are not true.  But I can find confirmation in media reports and formal “papers” of at least the following:

Not all homeless kids are impossible to handle or mentally ill.  Some are.

Not every kid who has been sexually abused becomes a sexual abuser.  A few do.  It’s the ones who sing “I’m depraved on account a’ I’m deprived” who produce the illusion.  But there IS truth to it -- just not universal.

Not every family is destructive, neglectful, violent, or chaotic.  Too many are.  And it has a lot to do with poverty.

Not every single-parent family with only a mom is dysfunctional -- they just are a lot harder and take more energy.  Same for military families, 2 career families, single-parent families with only a dad, and so on.

Not every baby is born out of wedlock.  Last year 42% were.  In the US.  All social categories.

Not every male is sexually harassed/abused/raped/violently raped to the point of death.  At least one in six is somewhere on that continuum.

Not every girl on a campus is sexually harassed, abused, raped while drunk and unconscious, killed in an act of sexual violence.  At least one in eight is.  Many more than that just clam up and take it.  

So how do we know?  Sometimes there are pretty reliable studies but you could probably challenge everything above if you were looking for exact figures.  Those of us who live near or on Indian Reservations, whether or not we are Indian, realize that there is a LOT of violence and much of it is against women and most of it is mixed with drug and alcohol abuse, esp. the latter.  Ask any Tribal Cop.  Try to get figures?  Impossible.  The victims suck it up.  They hide.  They scatter.  They trust no one.  Today a cashier in my bank, female with a brother who is a deputy sheriff, told me that there were deputy sheriffs she knew of who stalked young women enough to creep the girls out, including her daughter.  She said now those rats had been pushed out, moved on.  I wonder.

Plenty of deprived kids -- hated, beaten, raped, starved, tethered and caged -- still manage to become decent human beings.  Some have help and some don’t.  They have to think of it, know what it is they’re trying for, have some examples (“modeling”).

How many people keep in mind that the whole LBGTQX thing has so many letters because they are so assorted?  It’s a rainbow -- not a checkerboard.  A recently arrived minister in Montana declared there was no race problem in the prisons here -- because all she knew in the big city was black and white -- to her, red was invisible.

So, the varieties of “gay” include  (I sorta clumped ‘em):

1.  People who sexually desire other people of the same gender who are also gay.

2.  People who sexually desire other people of their own gender who are straight.

3.  People who are vanilla in all ways except sexual desire.

4.  People who don’t feel as though they are the right gender: their bodies don’t match their psyches.  They may want surgery to be consistent.

5.  People who are fine with being their gender but don’t fit the way their culture assigns gender traits and roles.  (Girls who want to be scientists, boys who want to dance ballet; tough tomboys, quiet library gents.)

6.  People who like to dress up as the opposite gender.

7.  People who just like sex and don’t particularly care which gender the hole might be.

8.  People who were forced into same sex performance (prison, isolation) and got used to it.

9.  People who would just as soon take care of matters themselves.

10.  Paraphilias: displaced preferences, fetishes.

11.  People who conflate sex with violence, control, mastery, domination, pain with them only dishing it out, never being hurt themselves.

12.  People who long to be hurt, controlled, dominated.

13.  People who just want to watch.

Sex is a force, not an object.  A verb, a tide, a wind, a process.  NOT a “thing” that stays the same.  In fact, the human race only persists because sex is a force that adapts, that sneaks through the cracks, an opportunistic irresistibility.  It cannot be managed by force without snuffing out people.  It is often cleverly disguised as something else.  That's called sublimation.

Not all gays are pedophiles.

Not all gays who are pedophiles want sex with little children or babies.  There are KINDS of pedophilia.  It means “love of children” and doesn’t necessarily have to be twisted or inappropriate or damaging.

Adolescents of any gender may be okay with relationships with their preferred gender with age differences.  Much older people might be okay or not.  (Older means access to “adult” things like booze and big money.)

Adolescents want to be responsible for their own sex lives but may be unable to protect themselves from predators.  Sometimes they don’t survive.

Criminal laws are decided by cultures.  They have the power to imprison and thus impose their standards.  Like any other difference across boundaries, those who identify and enforce laws can use that to their profit.  Power means the ability to break laws and to use exemptions for bribes.  Every culture pretends their way is the only way to go, because they figure if people know there are other ways, they won’t conform.  They’re right.

This North American culture expects sex to define identity, success, wealth, worthiness -- why else would a college student, son of a movie director, shoot girls dead for not “putting out.”  Boys can be shot for the same reason -- not usually by girls.  

In our culture sex is attached to appearance, not to capacity for intimacy.

Violence is worse when it’s intimate.  

Intimacy is worse if there’s no consent.

Violence is worst if it’s intimate, there is no consent, and it’s a family member.

Being blood related is not the same as being attached, bonded, protective and protected.  Genetics means nothing if the emotional relationship is missing.  The Western fascination with “blood” (really meaning genetics) is because ownership, entitlement, and governance are linked to genetically-based inheritance.  It's a way of keeping order.

Economic and/or political forces push people into certain roles and behaviors.  If there are a number of people in a category, it is possible to speak of them as a group and give them a name, particularly if the category is based on power, sex or religion.  So people who were attracted to a life of strict self-discipline, celibacy, simplicity, and devotion which they expressed ecstatically in a communal context, became “Quakers” because they quaked.  It was a pejorative name, meant to be mocking, which they claimed for themselves.  Now it is a name that has lost its negative overtones and is a rather large complex of people who have developed variations and subgroups from the original root.  In some ways, assuming that a “name” means a real entity is totally misleading.  Names “create” entities that are fantasies.

The term “gay” seems to be something like that.  At first a term about a carefree attitude, then prostitutes, then an endorsement of hedonism, then slipping into a euphemism -- first used evidently by Gertrude Stein in regard to female pursuits -- then to wildly carefree males, with a scornful sub-category by kids that means stupid or weak.  But in recent decades it was politicized in something like the way “black is beautiful” became a rallying statement.  (But how black do you have to be to be beautiful?)  

Gay was a cry of freedom and letters kept being added until there was a “rainbow.”  It was a defense, and a demand.  The connection to human hard-wired desire preference or body identity was subsumed by the demand to set one's own terms  in the face of culturally imposed rules and expectations.

So far, no one has really analyzed the relationship of gay to heterosexual “Pick Up Culture” as has been shockingly claimed and illustrated by media dealing with the recent shooting of women who scorned a Pick Up Artist with a pretty face and an ugly attitude.  Pick Up Culture asserts that all women should go to bed with any man who asks, an amazing reversal of the old “I’m Okay, You’re Okay” male psychologist’s claim that he would go to bed with any woman who wanted sex from him because he had counseled so many neglected and ignored women.  (And that was BEFORE Viagra!)  PUC claims the idea from men-on-men sex -- that could be musical chairs because no one could get pregnant -- but then came AIDS and death.

Recently I watched a film that was supposed to be about recreating a section cut out of a movie called “Cruising.”  Then I watched “Cruising” -- they’re both on Netflix.  And I watched the voice-over version by the writer/director, who claimed he had the brilliant idea of attaching an ordinary murder mystery to the leather bar scene in Manhattan and exploiting the whole connection until it became a public conviction.  He named it, he said -- not “leather bars” but “leather bar murders,” as an inevitable entailment of cruising.   He claimed that he filmed extensively in real leather bars (imagine that!) but that the footage was mysteriously lost, but they re-enacted it, but then that disappeared, too.  His assertion was that most of the men in the leather bars, so costumed and menacing, were in fact bored young professionals who never went much farther than a little pinch and tickle, letting their butts hang out, etc.  Maybe so.  Any statistics?  Standard deviation?

High class homosexuals, thanks to so many witty playwrights and novelists, have had an image of being Oscar Wilde if not Ambrose Bierce -- insightful, elite and acid.  They are a genre.  The leather stuff came in via the bikers, Marlon Brando and the Wild Ones.  The two attitudes -- when rightly-blended -- were fire and gasoline.  Nevertheless, they were as much a sales platform as a lifestyle, and as always the buyer should beware.

NEEDED CHANGES IN THE WAY WE THINK ABOUT SEX

Many laws are based on gender and still assume women and children are property, which is likely to be damaged or stolen by men other than the “proper” owner.  This lingering attitude is reflected in both laws and behavior.  Some men only abuse their own children because they “own” them.  Some wives will accept this -- until they are murdered.  Who owns the bones?

We are deeply ambivalent about each other’s physical bodies.  Nurses, who now may be male, and doctors, who now may be female, have access to our most intimate functions.  Modesty protocols which previously were in place -- things like draping, wearing gowns or white lab coats, asking permission, using formal terms of address -- have somehow evaporated.  However, gloves and masks are as ubiquitous as for burglars.  It used to be that women got a “free pass” when looking at any naked bodies because since the Civil War they have been the ones to give baths and change bandages.  Women are not suspected of hurting children because they are the caregivers who gave birth to them, but what if they don’t care?  Once patients were in open wards where everyone saw everything, but now it is considered desirable to have a private room.  Resistance can cause you to be denied care.

An intractable social problem has always been the mixing of violence with sex, especially when sex is not a matter of mutual consent but rather an act imposed on someone, without consent, by force, and with physical damage.  The question of resistance on the part of the receiver can not be an indicator, since some attackers consider overcoming forcible resistance to be arousing: it’s what they are really after rather than “sex” per se.  The Fifties movies used to show “lover’s quarrels” and face slaps as legitimate foreplay.

By now many know that rape is a matter of power, not eroticism, and is imposed on males as well as females.  Children but not dogs.  People would be upset.  It is a constant trope in cop shows: insisting that being incarcerated will automatically mean rape, possibly gang rape.  Sometimes it’s a plot element and sometimes it’s only part of the dialogue, but everyone assumes that this is unpreventable in a prison setting and is even a legitimate part of the punishment, esp. when it is a matter of bringing a formerly high status person down, whether they were male or female.

When I was teaching twenty-five years ago, big boys routinely gave little boys “swirlies” by forcing their faces into toilets.  This was rape: something revolting and dangerous done to a private part (a face is intimate) in a normally protected setting to a unwilling victim.  If the problem is where to draw the line between horseplay and assault, between misbehavior and criminal behavior, I would put this on the criminal side.  (The big boys were put on detention for a few days.)  The consequences, aside from broken teeth and contagious diseases, was emotional damage.  It is the kind of behavior that becomes “linked” over time from big to little, who grow up to repeat the behavior on the next generation of little, until no one challenges it.  In fact, it is often cloaked by shame so that no one even finds out.  Again, it shows up in screenwriting, sometimes as a means of murder.

Most people think of pornography in terms of “Playboy” magazine:  nubile girls willingly teasing men who are undescribed.  I’m watching “Deadwood” because it is a “Western,” but I’m hating it because women are consistently portrayed as sexually accessible -- the “good” women for free, out of “love.”  The actresses are usually half-naked -- bosoms exposed -- but the men only flash their fannies very occasionally.   The main villain wears long johns even in the throes of stimulation. Is this to protect the viewer or the viewed?  The writers would say it’s meant to indicate the psychology of the character, esp. if he's suffering from childhood abuse.  Huh?

Peeping “toms” are often defined as males who go around trying to peer in at women.  These “toms” are described as boring holes in shower walls or setting up video cameras in bathrooms.  Granted there have been fewer cases of women peering in at men, but there HAVE been men convicted of peering in at men and children.  There are reports of “glory holes” between men’s lavatory stalls or even in confessionals, some of them big enough to push bits of anatomy through.

Yet these bits of anatomy which surely by now we’ve all seen (if you haven’t, go to Wikipedia which does not exercise any of the restraint that used to send kids circling through the dictionary -- no longer any need to look for porn websites)  are exactly the ones the fundamentalists and super-conservatives try to eliminate from works of art, as though this will prevent paintings from presenting any unwanted thoughts about what goes where.

At present there is a growing denial movement coming from new immigrants to modern nations; they have been used to repression and censorship.  But how can we explain condoms to them without reassuring them that American men don’t have bananas growing out their fronts.  How can we explain that women have two places to put bananas (or other contraband) without them finding out by watching nasty cop shows?  Snatch pockets and rectum storage are another fav way for screenwriters to show how hip they are.

Which brings us to another major dynamic as troublesome as violence: the idea that only “nice” people can make things civilized and that “nice” is a moral concept that involves more not-knowing than real understanding.  If you go to a workshop for public health and AIDS outreach workers, part of the agenda will be teaching recognition of the practices and lingo that no respectable people would admit they know.  And yet one of the markers of the sophisticated, whether cops or writers, is knowing all this stuff.  Part of their stock-in-trade is telling it to you so you’ll be shocked and intrigued, impressed that they are such veterans of the war in the streets.

And that’s what it turns into.  One of the rules of human beings is that if something is outrageous enough, it will be automatically denied -- never "seen".  Therefore, when cops in Rio de Janeiro began shooting street kids as though they were rabbits, no one could get their head around it, anymore than they could comprehend the gas chambers of the Nazis. The stories seem like urban legends, like people found in hotel bathtubs with their kidneys removed for transplants.  The kinds of taboos that used to shield the human body, like the belief in Sin or the Soul or the Devil or Divine Retribution, have dissolved in the modern world so that now our youngest kids gaze calmly at the most gruesome results of war and hear about cannibalism in our midst.  (Great Falls, for instance, where a man killed and ate neighborhood boys, which no one could believe, so didn’t stop until too late.  http://crime.about.com/od/murder/p/db_barjonah.htm)

After thinking about such extreme atrocities, which are certainly pornographic, the date rape, hazing rape, and rape of passed-out co-eds at universities, seem almost . . .  well, not harmless, certainly distasteful and rude, but . . .  well, how were they dressed and why did they drink?  And top athletes have the same privileges as warriors, right?  I need to state outright that these things are wrong because so many people think they are right.  Or at least excusable.

If morality is so negotiable and religious rules are so easily ignored, where are the sources of restraint that can protect the vulnerable in our society?  It’s got to be a matter of criminal law, but if those who enforce the laws have little respect or motivation to provide protection even in jail, what hope is there?  Now we have a new factor in the equation:  citizen observation.  Smart phones and internet publishing are everywhere.  Maybe a vulnerable person can turn the tables.  Maybe photographing attackers and publishing their images is more effective than bear spray.  There are other elements.  DNA.  HIV-AIDS.  Molecular fingerprints.  Let's hold hands.