PEOPLE, COLONIZERS AND ROMANTICIZERS, AND ME

"Orientalism proposed that much Western study of Islamic civilization was political intellectualism, meant for the self-affirmation of European identity, rather than objective academic study."  (Wikipedia bio of Said.) So there's a rather cynical but provable criteria for postcolonial thought about a previously colonized people.  As a white Scots-genetic female from the Pacific Northwest, I should be suspected of colonizing Others, but somehow I've challenged that.

Partly it was my farm-girl mother's love affair with the Far East and local Indians (I'll call them NA's for short typing.)  The first came from the stories of Christian missionaries looking for donations and the second came from watching the seasonal workers who camped near enough to the house in Washington state where she grew up that she could watch them from her upstairs bedroom window.  Also, my fourth grade teacher in Portland was Mildred Colbert, an elder of the Chinook who took us through the NA collections of the Portland Art Museum.

Partly it was my love of myth and fairy tale, which then became soft sci-fi (no bug-eyed monsters).  This is romanticism, the love of exotic stories.  

Beginning in high school, my education was largely in terms of theatre, how to be "inside" another person expressively, which was a matter of human emotional knowledge framed by bodily sensation. (the Method).  My first job was on the Blackfeet reservation as an English teacher.  Students from that time shaped me.  Now they are dying of old age, ten years younger than white Euros would. It's not genetic -- it's poverty.

I married a man twice my age who was born in 1914 right there in Browning, MT.  His father came in 1903.  Bob Scriver grew up going in and out of the homes of Blackfeet of many types -- very old people born in the 19th century, very poor people, criminal people, drunks, artists, achieving professionals, Pentecostal evangelists, ordinary ranchers and cowboys -- or so they seemed.  I went right along, even as a ceremonialist.  His bronze version of "Orientalism", meaning the romanticization of Blackfeet, is a collection currently housed in Fort Benton, a re-creation of the original emplacement as far up the Missouri River as boats could go because of the Great Falls.

If you can imagine a boundary between peoples that is usually depicted as a circle, though that's not really what it is, those who are inside that "circle" are immersed and possibly unconscious of being part of it.  They are simply "we the people".  Just outside that circle are those who are interested in and attached to those people, even as clients.  The people, like Blackfeet, were treated as a colony.  They take their identity from it and use the emotion and injustice of it to express who they are.  

Some of that encircle of outsiders will be using the techniques of Orientalists to define and depict the people inside, picking out the most exciting qualities (the ones that sell the best) to depict and explain them.  They claim to be experts, have the only true knowledge, and get rich at it.  They may try to join the inside. Usually they are people uncomfortable with their growing-up culture, imagining they can find a new home.  Examples might be traumatized veterans of combat or gays, though only a certain kind of gay.

Some expected HIV/AIDS to go through reservations like wildfire, the modern Smallpox, killing many people.  It didn't happen.  The new disease was drugs.  It had nothing to do with HIV because the "virus" was meaninglessness, not mattering.  Alcohol was only first drug.  

The culture of the USA, colonizing by trying to capture the poor, has persecuted what was once secret and illegal until it burst out into a whole subculture of gays of many kinds, too soon attacked by both HIV/AIDS and drugs.  These forces are what created the Smash Street Boys, a loose group of young surviving sexworkers with HIV/AIDS.  They realized that their affinity for each other made them into a community that could reach out to others, which is a source of meaning.  Since their families reject them, they make their own family.  The early version was European, even global in some aspects, which meant it easily carried the eroticism of Orientalism, the lure of the other.

The US South version of this group -- some of which were still present as guides and helpers until Trump began closing down HIV clinics and safety net rules -- has been made into a diaspora.  But their computer expertise, their camera dexterity, has maintained much of their identity.  The Puritanical and poorly suppressed understanding of male sex is still colonial, denied, used violently and omnipresently, even in the highest levels of government where the stigma of nonconforming sexuality is a rich source of extortion and blackmail.

So there is a third circle around the insiders who are the first circle of the defined group, and the second circle of admiring and pressing would-be experts and "helpers" who are still colonial and therefore damaging.  A third circle looks at both sides of the original boundary and tries to understand from the "inside" without defining except in dynamic terms, because this is a moving boundary.  That's where I see myself.

I'll never be inside the circle of NA's or of struggling boys, but still partly qualifies me.  I am so deeply opposed to being controlled and told who I am that I easily identify with all peoples who feel that same way.  I try to go there, with thought and sensory response, but I don't want to imitate.  The truth is that some parts of their lives are so painful that short periods are all I can stand, even if they are compensated by times of rejoicing and freedom.

Most clearly this comes from the Sixties in Montana, when the art was a source of income, a philosophy of value in terms of life, and a community of cowboy artists.  Then the latter began to harden into a bureaucracy and the limits of loving the West closed in. It became mercantile.

By Ned Jacobs

By Ned Jacobs

I'll close by "picking on" Ned Jacob, an artist who is my age, who came to Browning very young and then moved on.  He was excellent at the most appealing romanticism of Blackfeet, usually authentic.  But he also loved indigenous people in the most direct and intimate way.  He was just outside the boundary, looking in.  We can see with his eyes.

ART ORIENTALISM

Here is the origin of "Orientalism", families who are cloaked to us, like those depicted above. I am presenting three paintings by Lalla Essaydi, a Moroccan woman now living in the USA.

Here is Lalla as she is in reality.

This is a painting by Lalla that is Orientalist.  It is currently up for auction at Christies and has the estimated value of more than twenty thousand dollars.  What makes it "oriental" -- to my mind -- is that it draws on a long tradition of beautiful reclining women (sometimes nude) hinting at harems, receptiveness, and a material culture of beautiful fabrics.  There is probably more.  The undercurrent of eroticism is part of Lalla's vocabulary and is specifically female.

In fact, I post this as a counterpoint to the many things I want to say about unique, nearly cloistered, communities, specifically the Blackfeet and Smash Street Boys.  Often art is one of the bridges that allows us access but does not tell us how to react.

ORIENTALISM: A STRATEGY FOR DEALING WITH THE OTHER

"The Snake Charmer" by Jean-Léon Gérome

A master of romantic Orientalism

"Orientalism" by Edward W. Said was published in 1978 but written over a long time of formation in Said's mind but it is most often misunderstood. It is not about the Orient. This mistaken belief has been so powerful that "Oriental" is a word no longer encouraged -- I'm told I should say "Asian" but that would be appropriate only if I were talking about "brute facts" or truly existing phenomena.  "Orientalism" is not about that.

Said was reflecting on a sociological/psychological/military/economic/media construct by people who were not actually part of the "brute world," but rather the periphery that formed around an "Other," which they fancied was a certain way. They were privileged, entitled, powerful, and at the top of the hegemony created by colonialism and imposed on an identified category of people (brutes). The strategy was so collaborative and so endorsed by politicians, writers, merchandizers, artists, and all the other second-level self-appointed "experts" that the IDEA of the Orient took over and blotted out what was really there and its history, the understanding of the people who were and are still there.  

"Orientalism", as happens with these ideas, was once a privileged idea of the educated and entitled.  Over the years it wore thin, proved misleading, and died of irrelevance except for certain people.  Everyone wandered off.  it's still wonderful stuff. 

Said came to the U of Chicago while I was there ('78-'82) so I saw him and his wife.  He was on a day-long collegium: proud, setting his own schedule (late returning from lunch), handsome, wearing the putty-colored high quality clothes of the sophisticated. I did not read the book. It was not on the bibliography of future UU ministers.  It should have been there.

"Orientalism" is to define by geography, income, social category, persuasion, or denomination any group, creating around it a fiction so vivid that it persuades everyone that it is a true essence, and then acting out or depicting the construct instead of the reality. It's almost a description of where American politics go wrong and how we lose wars that never should have begun. But it is a terrible (in the root sense) struggle to face our own "brute" reality.  (Said likes that word "brute" and so do I.)

So we escape to this strategy about the Other: the criminal (oh, how we love our fictions about mafia and drug deaiing), the Mexicans, the women, the Russians, the Canadians (!), the artist, the . . .whatever we know only as a big block without considering their multitude of inner categories or their context, including their specific history.

For a decade I have chosen several groups that are the sources of fantasy, some of them long-lasting, close to eternal, and always a little scary which is excellent for sales.  Often infused with suffering.  This happens organically with colonies, where by definition a superior power goes in to control a foreign population with force.  But it also happens within the US, often because of economics.  One of my chosen groups is Blackfeet on the Montana side.  Another is young male sexworkers with AIDS.  Specific as they are, the fantasies about them can be countered with individual testimony from people INSIDE the reality, but also is sometimes endorsed by testimonies or first-hand observations rather than library studies. The main thing I see is how unreliable the latter are. But I have been convinced that the "inside" often sees its only safety in secrecy.

The next thing I see is how passionately people from outside the "circle of actuality" can be if you question them.  Some people believe that the "Indian" described by James Willard Schultz actually still exists somewhere.  They have no understanding that he was a fellow with a bad back making a living by giving people what they want.  Likewise, they will not accept that Mary Renault's idealized young male lovers are produced by a lesbian woman denied the openness of her own story.  But others, thinking they are superior in the hegemony of thought, believe that only exposée is true.  They forbid the enjoyment or sales of idealized fantasy and insist that only misery is true.  And only true if sourced by a member of the category.

Said says, "Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point, Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient -- dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient."  Then he admits he is relying on Foucault.  (P.3, Intro)  He feels the Franco-British sort of anthropological "discipline," an excuse for resource seizure, was much energized by WWII.  

This is the matrix for Trump, who still suspects anyone not like him is from a different species, including women -- merely resources. He used the American myth of coming up from riches, the self-made man, an "Other" that small down moguls endorse and the NYTimes reveals.  Kavanaugh relies on a parallel myth, the man in the smoky back room card game with the rich and powerful, puffing cigars and sipping whiskey, but still clever enough to win with a bankroll from a sponsor.  Both these "types" with their supporting myths are well-represented in our media, sometimes presented as "brute reality."

Said cautions, "One ought never to assume that the structure of Orientalism is nothing more than a structure of lies or myths which, were the truth about them to be told, would simply blow away."  He means that the possibility of portraying an Other in this picturesque oppression justifying style is only possible because the group is vulnerable in some way. Maybe it was smallpox finding the indigenous or HIV finding the MSM ("gay" is the construct name, not the reality) that made them vulnerable, even though both diseases had been killing many other people all along.  Maybe it was the industrial revolution with its destruction and concentration of peoples.

Or maybe it was morality. Boys on the edge are bad. People who drink are bad. People who are poor are bad.  People who used to war with us are bad. Bad means eliminated or fictionizable into an imaginary Other we can pretend to understand.  

Another current runs the other way: rural was bad but now it's good. Boys who survive are Tom Sawyer, or at least Huckleberry Finn. Men pressed into drug dealing are noble victims. Former Japanese generals are now worthy warriors.  The Outsider version of the Inside is always full of judgment. Or love.

PS: MSM (Methylsulfonylmethane) is stuff you put on food, The abbreviation can also mean MainStreamMedia. When I use it, it means Men who Sleep with Men.

BOOKS WRITTEN BY THE MISTRESSES OF PRESIDENTS

It's a bit unclear why I should even care about this subject since I couldn't be farther from the demographic (I'm an old tubby small town former cleric. The group addressed here is announced in the title:  "I Read Every Memoir by a Presidential Mistress. Including Stormy’s" by Bill Scher in Politico.com, a bold website.  Clearly the gloves are off, so part of the attraction is finding out what has been censored.  My friend calls me "Miss Marple" because of my appetite for such things, which is linked in my experience with the opening of doors into another world, sort of like learning to read.

I've talked earlier about some of the things revealed to Animal Control officers and other emergency responders like police or ambulance attendants.  AC was specific about bestiality though at the time I was there no law existed against it.  When "Blaze Starr" had an act with two great dane dogs, the police asked us for help, suggesting cruelty to animals, but all we could say was to consider the expressions of the dogs.  They seemed happy.

But we also sort of accidentally knew who was sleeping around "humanly."  That is, big shots and politicians.  This was the time period when the mayor was screwing the babysitter (13), something that has haunted him ever since.  He had a second marriage after that which has been removed from Wikipedia.  About the same time we once spent an interesting hour watching a county commissioner with his lady friend in a nearby booth.  He was a regular every close-of-business in this hotel bar.

It was less interesting to realize that the stuff on our AC truck seats was semen.  The manager at that time was earlier than the conscientious one that replaced him.  The earlier one was separated and believed in taking advantage of sex workers since he had the money, not from the job but from an inheritance.  He was related to a county commissioner.

This was the beginning of the sexual revolution, but it was a very mixed and incomplete change.  One of the first sermons I heard at the First Unitarian Church was a guest preacher, a female and highly prestigious lawyer, who made an impassioned plea to save a handsome young man who had gotten his underaged girl friend pregnant.  I still remember this sleek older woman's vivid description of his despair behind bars and her belief that he had been prevented from his noble natural destiny.  She didn't say anything about the girl.  I remember her own fine suit and flashing jewelry.  Like Trump, she simply didn't consider the offence that important.

There are revelations in this article by Bill Scher, who is liberal but on his own terms.  I haven't read any of these books, but I'll make you a list of what he read and treated as much literarily as historically and politically.  If you want to read the article, here you go: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/09/30/stormy-daniels-memoir-220804

"Full Disclosure" by Stormy Daniels

"Passion and Betrayal" by Gennifer Flowers

"My Story" by Judith Exner

"The President's Daughter" by Nan Britton

"Past Forgetting" by Kay Summersby Morgan

"Love, Jack" by Gunilla von Post

"Once Upon a Secret" by Mimi Alford

"Texas in the Morning" by Madeleine Duncan Brown

From the article:  "It took 88 years, but DNA tests showed that Britton was telling the truth when she said Warren Harding was the father of her daughter. Love letters revealed years after publication backed up the stories of Summersby’s wartime affair with Dwight D. Eisenhower and von Post’s pre-presidential fling with John F. Kennedy. Alford’s affair was documented in a 1964 oral history interview given by Kennedy’s deputy press secretary and publicized decades later by historian Robert Dallek."

Past Forgetting: My Love Affair with Dwight D. Eisenhower was written by Kay Summersby Morgan (with the help of ghostwriter Barbara Wyder)  Morgan wrote as she was dying of cancer.  Claims include Eisenhower's struggle with erectile disfunction and Truman, who evidently had no mistress and didn't consider it proper, denying Ike permission to divorce Mamie and marry Morgan. Lyndon Johnson, as we already knew, was crude and outrageous.  Once in Manhattan I happened into a dirty book store that included photos of famous woman getting out of cars with spread legs.  Part of the appeal of these books is like that, but there's more.

The Kennedy stories are sad.  In some ways it is a father/son story and it is the prospect of inheritors that curbs Jack's appetite.  It is tragic in the sense of a Greek tragedy that Jack Jr., his heir, evidently died of hubris, believing he could fly into a storm in a small under-equipped airplane.

This article's political relevance is obvious.  It makes Kavanaugh look juvenile and silly, which he is.  No adult mistress has been revealed.  Maybe he isn't important enough to attract one.  Maybe he prefers the company of men.  In the immature event we're examining he requires a witness or accomplice -- an act that is witnessed.  Boasting is natural to him, but it doesn't require actually achieving anything to boast about.

Notice that we still don't talk about male "misters" though there surely must have been some back through history.  Are there books?  Several by Renault.  I mean, this side of Greeks and Romans in the time of the Emperor?  My mother's favorite book as a high school girl was the pillowbook of an historical Chinese inamorata.  There has always been freedom to read about such distanced sexual power.  These tales were always related to politics, often at the level of war.  Or maybe just murder.  Consider Japanese movies and stories about theatre genres where men play women.

Often these stories are about power on the personal level, where one is big and the other is little.  The big uses and subsumes the skills of the little; the little is protected and present in the life of the big.  This is what worries me about Kavanaugh.  I don't care about his physical or even emotional sex life.  I worry that he's always been a "second" to powers, men who control him.  Emotionally he is so underdeveloped that he could be dangerous to mentors who feel betrayed.  There's such a thing as being so small that a big can easily dispense with him when he's no longer useful.  

So -- would Kavanaugh be useful on the Supreme Court?  Maybe, but already he has become a door into the world of the insane men pretending to be Republicans.  Maybe he could reveal the sex lives of his powerful controllers, but it would be Sampson pulling down the Temple on his own head.  Maybe it already is.  Classic drama.  Many books.

AMERICA RESHAPING

The good thing about our national crisis of trust and cooperation -- which I believe from the evidence is world-wide -- has the advantage of stimulating a lot of ideas and strategies that were being ignored.  Even on the small scale of "village" some of this work has relevance and is useful.  Last night Valier had a review of Montana law led by John Clark, who works for the Local Government Center in Bozeman.  He's been the mayor of Choteau and has been here before.  http://www.msulocalgov.org/about/index.html  

This information needs to be constantly renewed because the people come and go.

"There are two fundamental rules: Everybody wants to be a part of something bigger than themselves, and everybody wants someone to tell them what to do so that things will turn out OK. With that in mind, our understanding of what conspiracy theories are and why they work comes into focus. Conspiracy theories aren't something that stupid or uneducated people fall for—they are something that people who want to believe in something latch on to."

https://www.wired.com/story/information-terrorists-trying-to-reshape-america/

It's only human that people come to these meetings looking for ways to make things be the way they want them to be without quite asking themselves why they want that.  This time one of the issues was the library: who it belongs to, what is the role of the board, how to discover shared values, and so on.  There had been turnover during the time the new addition was under construction so that the talk about what was needed and why wasn't shared by new people on the board.  But also there has been a generational shift both in the local library and who it serves and across the national culture from the older pattern of a hushed book-based place to a lively -- maybe noisy -- computer-supporting, international portal sort of center.  

Specifically, it was a shock to some for the library to be crowded with noisy kids doing art projects, which the librarian managed.  One former mayor and board member defended the idea strongly, on grounds that it was a great benefit to bridge the gap between when school ends and parents arrive home from work.  Valier is becoming a "bedroom community" so that driving time from work and even distance to home are longer than they used to be and take more time.

Cultural awareness would increase awareness of uses that aren't middle-class-white-people ideas.  Valier is 30% "American Indian" in demographic surveys.  One of the steadiest and most enthusiastic groups that use the library are Hutterites, esp. younger woman.  Christian romance is a major part of the library holdings.  I personally, a sort of scholar/blogger, value the interlibrary loan program and the librarian's skill in finding and bringing very expensive research materials.

One wouldn't like to embarrass anyone by mentioning too specifically aspects of being a librarian that are not always known by most people.  Valier has some older, single, retired men who get lonesome, as well as women with sub-therapy knots to work through at home.  I can name a few juvenile girls who trust this librarian, but few other adults.  The librarian is often consulted for reassurance, such as when rumours are circulating.

A number of cultural aspects of our country in crisis cropped up in my mind as Dan talked.  One was how intolerant we are of kids, underfunding programs for their welfare, caging other people's children, failing to convey realistic terms for behavior.  Dan spent some time on the changes in our internet opportunities in terms of conforming to existing laws.  What is a quorum when one person is present only on Skype?  Can a committee meeting be held entirely on the phone?  It also struck me that Lakoff's distinction between people who believe in leaders who are "strict papas" -- those who lay down the law and enforce it -- versus "lenient papas" -- those who are more elastic -- seems to be one of our persisting causes of dissension.

Dan recommended four steps:  

1) discover and reconcile values.  

2) develop strategies for going ahead,  

3)  Establish structures that support the previous steps.  

4)  Take action.  (Writing a check is action, too.)  

They aren't really so much steps as a continuous loop, though things like structure dictated by larger oversights in terms of law can be slow to change.

A public strategy that is troublesome is what might be called telephone politics.  The fact that most demands made to committee members are by telephone, often rather late, rather than sent by email points to the idea of older people disturbed by change but unwilling to show up for public meetings.  This town probably needs a public visitor, sort of like a public nurse, who drops by to chat with isolates.  That's a strategy, too, but it asks for money which is a problem.

A structural problem is much more difficult to solve, particularly in the broad rural areas of Montana.  The library is defined and supported by community, but the patrons come from the "service area" like those served by gas, electricity, telephone, internet, roads.  The service area of the library is thought of as being like that for potable water, bordered by the limits of the town.  But it more like the service area of the school district, and quite closely linked since some teachers bring classes to the library.  

One could say, rather poetically, that the library is more like the irrigation system that helps things grow over a service area, but one must buy shares in an irrigation system.  Maybe libraries should ask for shares!  Except that since the days of Carnegie they have always been a universal service to all people because of benefiting society as a whole, even nonreaders since they will be in the company of people who ARE readers and share information and attitudes.

One of the disservices to the larger society is the gradual but widespread reluctance to leave home except during working hours.  Face-to-face interactions don't happen, even if you serve cookies.  (Too many people are diabetic, esp. in older communities.)  Contention discourages attendance, but even the happy chosen groups, like book-reading clubs, are under-attended.

Dan needs some new tricks for a new round of people and problems.  Luckily, Bozeman is a good place to find them.  I hope he got back safely in our icy weather.

SEX IS JUST A DISTRACTION

Sexual stigma is out-dated and a source of criminal level behavior.  It creates opportunities for profit at the same time as it motivates rape and murder.  Once based on fertility so that it shamed sterility, now babies have become a commodity for surrogate mothers, gay partners, and sterile professionals.  A nearly irresistible force in some emotional lives, it can also be nearly missing in otherwise satisfactory lives.

We've begun the try to create human beings from cells not meant to be germ cells, much less the frozen raw materials: ova and sperm.  We're told that male fertility in some countries has sunk by 50% and also told that a pill that sustains erections by dilating blood vessels (Viagra) will also give you a very bad headache and -- if you have the wrong heart condition -- kill you dead.

The difference between male and female average ages of death diverge everywhere, a difference that appears most obvious in countries that don't value little girls enough to feed them.  Or finds young men in opposition to the tyrants, to be so dangerous that they must be slaughtered en masse as rebel soldiers before they are even adolescent.

Elite privilege, whether based on money, family, credentials, or wartime, has always traveled from high male to low female -- an entitlement to being the penetrator, often backed up by a stronger physique or helpful pals.  To even the level of force, women must resort to bear spray, sirens, knives and possibly handguns, but they don't usually think of that at an academic party.  A new technological defence is the small cell phone.  After the fact, DNA evidence can be powerful.

Mixing secrecy with sex is traditional, but it is not just the dark alley that offers secrecy.  To have info like names, car license numbers, addresses, phone numbers, property (wallets!) and friendship circles works,  When attacks reach the criminal level, they are valuable evidence.  Events should be written down or recorded, repeated to friends and authorities, and kept safe.  If secrecy is a power element, identification is the counter.

Alcohol and drugs play into this, dropping cultural moral inhibitions in both sexes, though it's a mistake to misjudge the level of not-caring on either side.  The element of death is also here, either because of unleashed emotion or because both substances can be lethal in the wrong amounts.  The worst unconsciousness is not drugs but social denial, often controlled by class, even the classes who are bequeathed entitlement.  It is not the sex itself that is immoral, but its use to oppress others.

Kavanaugh, to whatever degree he has any consciousness of anything but himself, can't have good judgment because he can't grasp the facts.  This is a deadly fault in a judge.  It's not that he doesn't know what women feel, it's that he doesn't know that they DO feel.  (I worry about his wife and daughters.)  Morality to him is whatever the boss wants.

He seems to think that the slang in his yearbook is inoffensive if it's about drinking.  He thinks that sexual meanings would be worse -- but a good argument could be made for the opposite, that self-destructive substance abuse might be worse than talking dirty.  (We don't know what he actually did, but our imaginations quickly supply mental images of him boofing, for example.)  Naming people means taking little care not to hurt others.  But this sniggering boasting, whatever it's about, is clearly meant to make him seem more powerful.  He doesn't understand that to others this sort of graffiti is childish.  At this point he is supposed to be ready for Yale.  Yet much of his frustration seems to be due to failure to understand basic cultural standards.  He really doesn't know where he falls short.

Now I'll turn to the sneering at Avenatti.  I get impatient with the use of "porn" as a signal of decadent character.  "Porn" is highly variable and one style is not equivalent to another.  Cosplay is not the same as fisting.  Getting turned on by imagining you've been swallowed by a whale is not the same as being actually whipped.  If you watch the movie called "Kink," you'll get an idea what I'm talking about.  (It's mainstream enough to watch on Netflix.)  I would suspect that some people watching this hearing got turned on by watching Kavanaugh bawl without a hankie.  Sex is very plastic and not always a matter of anatomy, but often about weakness.  Crying is weak, and a gift to cartoonists.

The rules for lawyers who are hired by people who perform burlesque shows are the same as rules for lawyers defending anyone else, even for murder or treason.  That's the whole point.  The lawyer doesn't at all need to be disreputable, although Avenatti is pretty sexy to some people and not everyone thinks sexwork is immoral.  On the other hand, porn has been an aspect of money as long as there has been money.  Also a familiar corruption of lawyers and much of the law.

Kavanaugh has been a flunky, a dependent, a version of a "coffee boy" who carries things around and keeps them organized.  He was first nominated by George Bush for the D.C. Circuit of the US Court of Appeals and stalled for three years over charges of partisanship.  That is, he could not make the case that he would be fair.  "Kavanaugh had the most or second-most conservative voting record on the D.C. Court, in every policy area, in the period 2003 to 2018."  That means he continued to keep his thumb on the scales.

Sex is an effective distractor and deceiver.  Kavanaugh's past sex life seems to me criminal but trivial.  It's his political life that discredits him far more.  In a thread on Twitter that I can't find now (is it removed?) the speculation was made that Kavanaugh or his patrons merely has strong material for blackmail.  The idea is that Justice Kennedy's son, the one Trump audibly complimented in the reception line at his inauguration, was Trump's "man" at Deutsche Bank, the main source of Trump's Russian "loans."  Kennedy was "owned" through his son, a Mafia strategy.

The description was detailed, believable, and a version of treason that ranks high on the list of many.  It includes efforts by leaders to dissuade Trump from his fixation on Kavanaugh.  I suspect the FBI and Mueller both know all about it.  Trump is "owned" by competing forces.  He doesn't consider sex a very important issue and in the context of this, it isn't.  This theory of collusion explains quite a lot.

Making sex of all kinds except those involving force or deception will take a weapon off the table for a lot of people.  But for politicians the real source of corruption is money and power.  Sex is only a route to children who can become surrogates.  An old man's sex is money and power.

LYNCH SYNDROME: THE CANCER METAPHOR

In the past I'd say, "It's hell gettin' old!" meaning mostly physical limitations like not being able to hike or lift things.  Now those limitations are being followed by signs of death, at least in the way the pharma people frame death since every symptom and the fear it stirs up is a sales opportunity.  I'm hoping that death will come out of nowhere and be instant.

Over the weekend I had a phone call from my ex-step-granddaughter, a bright and quite beautiful woman I think of as a teenager.  She is 65.  Her daughter, whom I think of as an elementary school girl, has just gotten married, so I expect soon I'll be an ex-step-great-grandmother.  And yet the ex-step-daughter that is the key to this cascade of relationships is only a year older than me.  Even so do the surprises between heredity and culture (or subculture) weave in and out of each other.

The wild card in a wide complex that comes of divorce and remarriage, tragedy and hope, is a particular "cancer" or tumour growth, that is hereditary because it is a DNA code glitch: a missing piece of the genome that codes for a particular protein that normally repairs mismatches in the paired chromosomes.  One of the preventions of discovery of this problem has been failure to understand that the reason we don't ALL die of cancer is that there are built in constant repairs going on -- normally.  That is, we all have cancers, but most of us have bodies that kill them.

Techies know that much of their work is not writing new code architecture, but rather repairing drifted or mutated code deterioration to keep the old program working effectively.  This is why re-installing works.  When unused code, which is likely to be uncorrupted, replaces what has through use become slightly frazzled (which can happen quickly) then the program works again.

This is also true of culture, esp. when something entirely new -- like a really effective contraceptive or a change in the nature of family -- this causes code gaps, overlaps, and mutations.  But we don't have as many repair strategies as we need.  The Supreme Court was a cultural code repair system, but it has itself lost the code for truth and honesty.  How do we repair the cancer of corruption that has penetrated even our highest court?

Here's a formal definition of this cancer:  "Hereditary nonpolyposis colorectal cancer (HNPCC) or Lynch syndrome is an autosomal dominant genetic condition that has a high risk of colon cancer as well as other cancers including endometrial cancer (second most common), ovary, stomach, small intestine, hepatobiliary tract, upper urinary tract, brain, and skin."

It's like trying to look up tabooed words in an old-fashioned dictionary.  One definition leads to another.  You need to know the bits added together to make a word:  poly means many, non means not, auto means self, soma means body, endometrial means all arising from the epithelium which are the cells that provide linings and coverings. like skin.

"Familial adenomatous polyposis (FAP) is an autosomal dominant inherited condition in which numerous adenomatous polyps form mainly in the epithelium of the large intestine. While these polyps start out benign, malignant transformation into colon cancer occurs when they are left untreated."

Adenomatous means looks like a tumor.  Polyps are the little blobs that the doc looks for with tiny cameras on the end of fibers.  There is often a little scissors with the camera, so the polyp can be cut out.

Margaret, the first victim we knew about, was afflicted before we knew about Lynch Syndrome.  It is so various and so secretly arising from inside what was inherited in the egg of code, that only high tech tests can recognize what is going on.  There are two approaches to saving lives.  Both are dependent on constant surveillance and testing.  One person's life -- a particularly cherished member of the family -- has already been saved for now through colon surgery.  There is currently no medicine or gene therapy.

The second recognition is reflection on and testing of family members.  These are genetic family members, not included through bonding.  In the search for causes of Margaret's death -- which was in the Sixties -- her mother blamed everything from the crusty old doc who smoked a cigar while he operated on Margaret for appendicitis as a child and actually dropped cigar ash into her abdomen (!) to birth control pills, which prevented Margaret's daughter from the necessity of repeat abortions because she was more afraid of cancer.  (It was not that she was promiscuous so much as she was alcoholic and therefore was inseminated while unconscious.  Several culprits boasted.)  If she did have Lynch Syndrome -- she died in an auto accident before anyone knew about the cancer -- then half of the abortions (according to the laws of chance) would have been doomed to early death by autosomal dominant genetic defect.

Now we realize that Margaret's mother and grandmother both died of this spontaneously arising internal cancer.  The granddaughter's task has been to sort through the dozens and dozens of the genetically vulnerable, going back as far as there are living people, and also to ask about the cause of those who had died.  Fifty-fifty.  People had moved, couldn't be contacted, resisted contact.  Colon cancer is the primary type because the intestines are lined with rapidly replicating cells, replaced often because the colon carries along many damaging substances.  Diet becomes important because then less replacement of lining cells is necessary.

The metaphor works at the cultural level as well.  Greed, lying, using force to overpower the weak are all broken cultural prompts that destroy the ability to maintain effectiveness.  The courts -- well, I sort of hate to call them a colon, but a younger person would say they can get really shitty.  One could even say that our over-incarceration rates are a constipation, a failure to process and evict.  Fractal, you see.  Small in the body, large across the country.

People who know they are carrying Lynch Syndrome and families who include these people have a special task which is keeping their emotional stability and support alive and working. The family emotional code, you might say.  Daily life anywhere is full of small insults and lapses that can activate old failures to repair.  Maybe some have had surgery, let's say intervention for addiction.  

The ex-step-grandchildren I know best, or at least knew in childhood, have already lived longer than used to be expected.  Some didn't inherit.  Lynch's can reduce longevity by half, so people die as they barely become old enough to vote.  We see in the other countries (mostly) civil disorder and revolution can kill young people when voting isn't even a possibility.  But at least in this instance we can spare ourselves the guilt, the blame and the suspicion of not-knowing: not knowing the cause, and not knowing what to do, added unfairly to working through grief.