NO JOKES FOR CEBULL

Since Federal Judge Cebull has set the standard for what can be joked about on the Internet so low that almost anything can pass, I might as well take advantage.

I’ve had this story about bestiality floating around in my “to blog” file for quite a while:

White House press secretary Jay Carney fielded a question about bestiality during the daily press briefing:

Q: The Family Research Council and CNS News both reported a 93-to-7 U.S. Senate vote to approve a defense authorization bill that, quote, "includes a provision which not only repeals the military law on sodomy, but also repeals the military ban on sex with animals, or beastiality.[sic]" Does the commander-in-chief approve or disapprove of bestiality in our armed forces?

In short, have you soldiers stopped fucking your camels? (And don't put any beans up your nose, either.) Of course, clever PETA never fails to jump on any issue that involves animals.

In watching last night's news briefing, we were upset to note that you flippantly addressed the recently approved repeal of the military ban on bestiality. With respect, this is no laughing matter. Our office has been flooded with calls from Americans who are upset that this ban has been repealed—and for good reason. As we outlined in the attached letter sent yesterday to the secretary of defense, animal abuse does not affect animals only—it is also a matter of public safety, as people who abuse animals very often go on to abuse human beings.

Colleen O'Brien
Director of Communications

I’m amazed that so many people think that such a law has anything to do with real events. I assume they were raised to believe that a law immediately changes everyone’s behavior. What Mama says, goes. So where are the statistics about military animal rape? I’m sure there are vids on YouTube of species boundary violations, but where are the numbers? Or the theory about why such things happen? But the post-modern thinkers are as alert as HSUS. This call for papers arrived via an academic listserv about animals.

Call for papers for Carnets de Géographes

“Towards a ‘humanimal’ geography”

«Ironically, both the pleasure of bestiality for the practitioner and the horror/humor of the shocked observer rely upon this projection of humanity onto the animal. This calls for thinking of potentially other relationships to animals in which we seek not to exploit human-­‐animal difference but pleasure in exploring the breaking down of this boundary [...] Such a queering of the boundary between human-­‐animal may serve a valuable role in reconsidering our ethical relationship to animals,which has previously hinged upon human-­‐animal difference and hierarchy. This ontological certainty must be undermined to establish a nonhumanist approach to animals in particular and to otherness in general.

(Brown and Rasmussen, 2010)

I’m nearing the end of the first volume of the magisterial overview of the history of the novel by Steven Moore and have finally come to my mother’s favorite childhood novel. “The Tales of Genji,” the Japanese Sheharazade. (It’s very much a novel of adolescence, the struggle to come to terms with sexuality.) On page 551 I come to this story. A man “yearns for an unobtainable woman, so turns instead to her cat: ‘To relieve his powerful feelings the Intendant. . . called the cat and cuddled it and with its delicious small and its dear little mew it felt to him naughtily enough like its mistress herself.’”

“. . . So he had the cat at last and he got to sleep with him at night. By day he caressed it and fussed over it. Soon it was no longer shy, and it curled up in his [kimono] skirts or cuddled with him so nicely he really did become very fond of it. He was lying against a pillar near the veranda, lost in thought, when it came to him going Meow, Meow ever so sweetly. ‘My we are eager, aren’t we!’ He smiled and stroked it, then gazed into its eyes. . . .

“‘How odd of him all at once to take such a liking to a cat!’ the old women muttered. ‘He never cared about such creatures before.’

“The Heir apparent sent for the cat, but the Intendant never returned it. Instead he kept it to whisper sweet nothings to all by himself.”

Hello, kitty! Once a person is alerted to such phenomena, they are clearly everywhere, though often in diluted form and especially in history. Are we to forbid people to love their animals? Or even other people’s animals? We aren’t having much success in getting folks to love each other in any sense except entwined with violence. We are having such a hard time understanding how humans as a species are different.

When I was an animal control officer in Portland, OR, we generally got two or three bestiality complaints a year and no one ever knew quite what to do with them. One was a public event about which PPD asked for advice: a stripper had two Great Danes in her act. Was it cruelty? Resorting to French philosophy, we said it depended on the reaction of the dogs -- mutuality as a principle. Of course, it’s an open question whether any animal can give informed consent, so that would mean the act was statutory rape whether the dogs like it or not. I think the stripper simply moved to another city. Evasion can be a good law enforcement strategy.

I would recommend it to Judge Cebull, but earlier in the sequence of events. Evade friends who want to send you dirty jokes at work, esp. if they demean the very context that makes one’s work dignified. If they fail to get the hint, use your delete button. Everyone in Montana knows a lot of sheep jokes and no doubt they are problematic for sheepherders, but their jobs do not depend on social respect -- only respect from their dogs, which insist on respect from their sheep, even the black ones.

If a judge damages his own dignity and that of his position, who can trust him with their camels? Is this joke of Cebull’s not an abuse of human beings? Ruptures of social conduct are sometimes seen as the private privilege of esteemed persons, the enforcers not having to enforce the same rules on themselves. It is a major mistake, but hardly a rare or unusual one. Making a law against it cannot prevent those who enforce the law. Which implies a certain level of contempt for law. Can a contemptuous man serve the law?

LOOK AT ME!

Situations where one person tries to shift the consciousness of another person abound in ordinary daily life.  Trying to get someone else to go for a walk, to play a game, or to get amorous are pretty usual.  Living with a toddler means constantly distracting them from unwanted behavior based on untrained intentions.  “Oh!” one exclaims enthusiastically, “Look at this!”  One even learns the triggers for pets to keep them -- well, not under control exactly.  More like in sync with one’s own purposes.  Of course, pets reciprocate so that my cats have taught me to go dish out some cat food when they rub against my shins.  They can even resort to negative reinforcement:  a terrible yowl if I fail to respond.  But babies and dogs don’t usually operate on more than one level of consciousness at a time, as adult humans do.

There are a few occupations where the direct management of someone else’s consciousness is the business at hand.  Not just their behavior, as one might think a cop or trainer would want, but the person’s attitude, the way they look at what’s happening, which hopefully makes them participate in the goal, desire the same end as the person trying to move their consciousness -- not just rationally because it’s the right thing to do -- but really collaborating with enthusiasm and shared desire.  Yeah, seduction.  Or advertising.  Religion.  Politics.

Actors think about this all the time, whether they say so or not.  Acting classes might do an exercise where two people face each other across a table and one tries to get the other to change their emotional state.  Some of it will be body language: always eye contact.  Another effective method is evoking memories, maybe rather universal ones like the struggle to learn to ride a bike.  Sense-based images.  Stories, if properly chosen and told, can change someone’s attitude for life.

I’m working my way through “Slings & Arrows,” the Canadian series about a company of Shakespearan actors.  It’s intelligent and complex, dependent in part on knowledge of a different play each set of episodes:  first Hamlet, second Macbeth, and third Lear.  One soon becomes very aware of how much levels of consciousness are the subject.  Shakespeare himself was preoccupied with what is real: ghosts, murderous ambition with resulting hallucinations, and frank madness.  The same conceit that a dead impresario -- older, wiser, and oddly happier in death -- is used in this series as was present in “Being Julia,” the movie featuring Annette Bening who ends the show with a tour de force scene on the stage that is packed with layers of emotional reality, irony, professional skill, phony pretensions, audience reaction, turning the tables, and stage gimmicks for maintaining the power of focus.  Under these amusing situations in both contexts are many questions of consciousness, like falling in love, misunderstanding others, and the exhausting corrosion of constant attention to inner life.

The idea of a dead person speaking to one is not hard to understand.  We all know what influential people would say if they were still present.  (Even God, though we have a notable tendency to conjure different aspects.)  To debate with someone in one’s head is not unusual.  A writer is often doing exactly that on paper.  This inner management of one’s own consciousness can approach something like prayer or might simply be a demonstration of the ability of humans to create inner persons while not losing their own identity.  Sometimes this is conscious and other times it is not.

The work of a therapist is to allow those inner dialogues, which are sometimes half-submerged in the swampy dreamland that underlies what we think we’re doing, to come out onto the “stage” where they can be engaged and explored.  How much is old scripts?  How much is based on fantasy or situations long gone?  So much of adult identity comes from forms invented in childhood and never altogether put away.  The novelist covers much of the same ground but does it alone.  Then the readers pick up the narrative, run it through their own individual consciousnesses and produce a new thing, a kind of collaboration that invites their own ghosts.

A few days ago I watched a TED video made of Oliver Sacks talking about people who are blind but who “see things.”  That is, their brain is throwing up images but they are not generated by sensory contact with the real world in real time.  In the course of explaining this, he mentioned that there is one part of the brain where cartoons register.  I’ve had no luck following this up.  I don’t know whether he meant the mind-rotting capacities of “Spongebob Squarepants,” or the fMRI research that suggests women get more out of amusement at cartoons than men do, or the idea that there is a strange reality in a drawn world that might be related to our ability to “suspend disbelief” when we watch acting.  Certainly my own self-observation is that cartoons, especially the kind we call “comic strips,” can create a world with its own convincing integrity.  I don’t know how to describe the feeling of watching a CGI combination of familiar drawn characters with real actors.  A kind of irresolvable absurdity.

Some of us have that sensation when we confront religious concepts and stories that once worked when they were drawn from the reality of the person using them to affect the consciousness of the listeners -- either persuading or confirming their ideas.  (Lambs and kings.)  Theology doesn’t address this situation because it is focused on logic (-ology) and only considers the theos in those terms.  But an active preacher or evangelist is trying to use a personification in a way that will make it a role model -- an inner voice that can accompany the believer for the rest of their life as a source of courage and a moral guide.  This is entirely honorable.  But it is not a reality connected to the sensory world that obeys the laws of physics.

Leadership is the ability to embody a consciousness that makes people want to willingly follow, to share that view of the world.   I would suggest we are currently stuck in unreality:  too aware of people suffering on the one hand and too afraid of our own possible destructive fate on the other hand.  We mistake the representations in our media for real life.   We simply are not available to rational discussion of alternatives.  The persons wanting to be our leaders have not gotten enough of a grip on our shared consciousness of risk to move it out of defensiveness.   They don’t quite know where we are and neither do we.  Where’s Shakespeare?  Where’s the inner voice of the sadder but wiser dead impresario we refer to as God?