CHANGES IN THE NIGHT

Airplane in the Night

I go to my blog, “prairiemary.blogspot.com”, expecting it to look just as it did when I last closed it yesterday, but it’s entirely different.  I’m surprised, but then realize that it is a projection of a code structure devised by people far away and that if they want to change the instructions for the appearance or even the content, they can.  It is not paper.  They don’t have to steal it or burn it or shred it.  They just turn it off.  I have no control. 

When I remark on email at night that I can hear the C130 big planes in the air, practicing flight along the East Slope of the Rockies, I strongly suspect that it triggers a monitor somewhere and eventually someone will want to know why I’m noticing and relaying the information.  Am I a spy?

Before the recent presidential election, I would talk to people about Trump and point out cheesy behavior.  They would agree.  Then they would declare belligerently that they were going to vote for him.  I get the same reaction when I try to explain why I stay off Facebook:  it sells my personal info, it censors things it doesn’t want me to know, it rats me out to enemies, it protects lies and accommodates bad people if they’re rich, etc.  The person I’m talking to agrees with me and goes right on with Facebook.  They say,  “Everybody does it.”  These are smart people, but their reference group — the people they know and interact with daily — are not the same people as the ones I interact with, even in memory.

My reaction to the “neither of the above” situation of our election is not “OMG the end of the world”, but rather “what structures of our system are putting us into this kind of bind?”  Because this is not the first time.  It’s just happened at a global level.  It’s obvious that the forces at play are sometimes old, hangovers from the assumptions “we” brought with us from a warring Europe that had barely discovered a new concept called “nations” and then we tried to invent “democracy” — though we only intended it to be for old prosperous and well-connected white men, certainly not for slaves and women who would be irresponsible and swayed by promises.

But then, as things do, the forces of culture took over and everything unfolded in quite a different way.  Also, smallpox wiped out the indigenous American people in the same way that the Great Plague earlier wiped out the indigenous people of Eurasia.  Nature hates a vacuum.  And she balances repetition of the familiar against entirely new circumstances.  Nothing stays the same, which means small changes (mutations) in the “code” which means that evolution makes my blog look entirely different.  I have to learn where things are all over again.

I’m doing mix-and-match thinking here, because that’s one way to change perspective.  I get impatient with The Edge because they have a lot of old prosperous academic white men around, filtering.  But yesterday I found a talk that is at the heart of the problem.  (Edge #482: Glitches - A Conversation With Laurie Santos  https://www.edge.org/conversation/laurie_r_santos-glitches)  It’s video, print and sound.  The idea is to figure out what evolved in the brain/mind to go beyond primates and create humans.  They do this by setting up little “plays” in front of monkeys and then figuring out from their actions what they thought.  Most of it is about stealing food, which is what monkeys do.

As it turns out, monkeys know what you know.  They don’t know what you don’t know.  If something happens while you’re gone but the monkeys are watching, they can’t tell you don’t know it.  People are the same way — they can’t tell what the other guy doesn’t know.  (Santos uses the word “ignorance.”)

Another “glitch” turns out to be that people are so influenced by other people, esp. the ones they admire, that if another person tries to solve a problem and goes at it wrongly, the second person will try that wrong way also, though it prevents them from solving the problem and they have the information they need to understand that.  Strangely, a dog or monkey will see you try to solve one of their dog/monkey problems wrongly, shrug it off, and succeed on their own terms.  So it appears that we have evolved the ability to observe and absorb what other people do mistakenly, even if thinking for ourselves would solve the problem.  This appears to be organically true of the brain, not just a cultural development, though awareness might help us break it.

Long ago when I first learned about atoms, they talked about little balls revolving around each other, sort of like the solar system except very small.  Now the research is indicating that there are no balls but rather “shells of energy” that make atoms that are differentiated by the even smaller “shells of energy” that are protons and neutrons in the nucleus while the electrons whiz around the outside, joining to other atoms or leaving entirely or arriving from nowhere.  These atoms clump and fold in unique ways to create molecules which our bodies control and are controlled by.  We have developed an ability to control and create molecules in a lab — with mixed results.

Every chair, every wall, is made up of these entwined shells of energy which are not solid but mostly space.  Yet we sit in the chairs and trust walls not to collapse on us.  Our bodies  — our bodies!  We trust them to breathe and think, but they are only molecules, evolving, unconsciously moving in processes we can’t perceive with equipment.  Everything is process.  And we CAN perceive them with equipment: thought is organic and resides in cells using molecules.

We had not thought that brains were a process or that they mutated and evolved, but we’ve been aware that people are different from each other and don’t agree.  We are not schools of fish nor even dog packs. 

Everything has structure, relationships, interactions.  In France a school of thought emerged that was about the construction of experience: how we piece together our experience into our individual and cultural assumptions about life.  Soon there was an opposite school of thought based on DEconstruction, based on what happens if you throw out all those assumptions and look for the deepest level possible.  Derrida is a name that comes up.  This was the state of the idea world when I hit seminary, where the task is to find the theological structures of religion and — to be frank — if you were an honored old academic white man, to defend them.  

But the scientific evidence of the world was revealing that many of those two-millennial-old ideas were wrong.  There is no king in the sky.  There is ecology wrapped in a various blanket around the planet, and it calls for different ways of being.  But this knowledge has not evolved into a way of guiding human culture politically that responds to feedback the way a proper ecology ought to.  So much of it is invented and persists only if it is constantly tended.

If we don’t, we wake up and discover that our blog looks different or just isn’t there, and OMG we’ve elected a president who didn’t get the majority vote.  We fear that our beloved family will leave in the night and our house will fall down.  In some places that is happening now.  Predator drones controlled far away with the same code that supports my blog. 

THE FIVE-STEP BODY LOOP

Entering into a question about human beings through the theory and experience of acting is different from any other kind of analysis.  The basic premise is that the actor can “become” someone without any judgment, just trying to feel -- emotionally and bodily (which is to say through both viscera and muscles) -- what this person feels as indicated by posture, movement, seeming goals.  The actor looks for the character’s “spine” which is the central metaphor around which the personality of the character has developed.  Originally (unless it’s improvisation) that will have come from a playwright, with a little bit of leeway for the actor to interpret, but without a strong-spined central character the play will be weak.

In spite of it being guided by a script and dialogue, this is VERY different from liturgical worship with prescribed steps and an order of service with communal prayers.  For some people this kind of written predictability is reassuring and expands their consciousness of what is sacred.  The neurology of repetitious devotion can be powerful for some.  For others it just doesn’t do anything.  A prayer book or order of service gives safety and inclusion for a conventional person.  An indigenous congregation, particularly African, may want the freedom to express emotion in movement and gesture.

I’ve been impressed by realizing that the reason so many “religions” are called “pagan” and denigrated is that they aren’t considered institutions because they have no writing.  And in fact, it’s very hard to have an institution without writing to describe to the rules and hierarchies.  It’s like a nation without boundaries, flag, or headquarters, which is natural for preliterate tribes.  But to engage in holiness doesn’t require writing or an institution -- it only needs a person.  Not even two persons.  Prayers might be in words, either as a dialogue with God (whether or not he is real -- this is a play) or a soliloquy.

Theatre needs two kinds of persons: one kind to initiate as the primary and another in the audience to receive feeling through empathy.  They can trade off and, amazingly, one person can split into two and create this dialogue of experience internally, which can be productive in exploring and learning or can be crippling if the two start an internal war over contradictions.  The key to many Christian/“Western” systems is this confrontation sort of argument.  We use it in law, in debate, in politics, and in stories of combat between Jesus and the Devil or Jacob and the Angel.  All about who has control.

Confrontation is one way to be intimate without being absorbed.  To have an ongoing enemy is a way of knowing your place in the world.  Ferocious opposition demands recognition and attention.  If an overwhelming person breaks down one’s boundaries, one might need to put up barriers to protect one’s inner self.  Maybe more than one fenced and hidden sanctuary, well-disguised, maybe even to oneself.  These can make a person hard to reach on normal terms.

Performance is physical.  I’ve been exploring what I’ve been calling “five step theory” which started as the stimulus/response three steps of bringing the world into the self (something is felt, it is measured and sorted, then something is done) but reflection demanded the addition of human empathy and then awareness of participation in the cosmos.  (It seems that some people don’t have the last two -- or haven’t activated them -- which is too bad since they are sources of the feeling of the sacred.)  

I was surprised to discover the five steps are formally called the “bodily loop” and includes the information stored in muscles and viscera, possibly as habituation and possibly below consciousness, like learning to ride a bicycle or a skateboard, like the digestive system learning what and when to expect to eat so it can be prepared.  Like learning lines for a play, except that the play is real.  Like the body that learns to depend on an outside source of a vital molecule, so that it shuts down its own production of serotonin or dopamine.  This means not all thought is in the brain.

Most physical systems are reciprocal: that means they operate in tandem with the other parts of the system.  One could envision a teeter-totter or a tug o’ war, but maybe that’s where our insistence on binaries comes from.  Maybe spiritual feeling comes when that two-ness is combined into a unity, all systems in harmony.  It’s a nice idea -- maybe too nice.

One of the writers reminds us that brains are not engineered -- they are organic.  That means they are not precision calibrated or optimized to tight tolerances.  Rather there’s a lot of slippage, work-arounds, compensations, redundancies.  This is generally good since it means a bit of wiggle in the system, survival in the face of destruction.  For an acting company one night’s performance is not the same as the next night’s.  Which one is better depends on the judgment of individuals, which might differ.  It’s an art and art is often about discovery.  A new actor in a role may cause revelations in the rest of the cast.

A play is about a progression, a process, a realization, a shift.  So is a person and so is a community.  But some holy performances are about confirming an attachment, a point of reference -- this is probably the origin of the fantasy of a god.  But also something as simple as crossing oneself with a bit of Holy Water.  Awareness of the seasonal sequence can also serve, as can a pilgrimage or a building.  A community that meets regularly is a way of reminding you of your identity and your role in the world.  If it has enough resilience to allow its members to grow and experiment, it will be more powerful.

In the preliterate world people rarely knew more than individuals in their family and community.  An outsider coming in or a trip out through unknown territory was exciting and risky.  If those Other people did things differently, esp. in their relationship to what is sacred, the information was literally exotic and maybe beguiling.  On the other hand, maybe they were a threat and one’s own community demanded their death.  Much depended on the ecology and what it required for survival.  But no one could write down memories, just preserve oral myth which could exaggerate or minimize.

In the best of circumstances, the outliers could expand the world and trigger reflection on meta-sacrality, like the Transcendentalists reflecting on the new information about Asian and East Indian religions that sea captains brought.  Those came to Boston and Concord as writing like Upanishads, very impressive to quasi-scholars who read while seated in Nature on a log.

By now our reach far exceeds our grasp, the images of the galaxies and even the brain connectome are sources of awe. Robert Turner reminds us that images of the brain are really a computer-processed version of something that only looks like a blob of fat, which it literally is, but the computer is only wires and bits of silicon.  How are we to find them holy when our kids play the old games of destruction and rivalry on them?

We go back to the images and strategies of the pre-literates in a vocabulary that’s nearly forgotten once we learn to read and write, but that toddlers can activate on a tablet.  The first question is how universal can it become -- we’re not there yet.  The next question is about the consequences.  No one knows.  Can we hold each other and the world sacred in the way pre-literates did?  Or will we fall back on war?  

The more we are as empathic as actors and as conscious of authentic performance, the more likely we are to survive.

TORTURE

When I was a little girl and testing my self-control it was not about marshmallows.  I walked to school in the rain every day, trudging along Sumner Avenue in my rubber boots which slapped the backs of my calves at every step hard enough to raise a nasty welt.  The cure would have been to wear long stockings, but I despised them because for a while I’d been forced to wear them with a kind of garter belt that went over my shoulders because I had no waist.  It was merely flesh-colored elastic but to me it was like those black leather harnesses that SM pictures show.  No one had thought of tights yet, so long stockings and garter belts were associated with Marlene Dietrich sexy outfits.  Mine were not sheer black silk but rather oat-meal colored and about that texture, worn with sturdy oxfords to prevent leg aches.  So my welts were as much suffering in the name of vanity as a test of endurance.

Addicted to the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tales that were full of torture and ordeals, feats of tenacity and virtue, I imagined that I was surviving in the frozen north or the midnight nettle-ridden church graveyard.  I was the little mermaid, the original one who had foot neuropathy like a modern AIDS patient, because she had traded in her fish tail for legs, which I didn’t quite understand was about what was between the legs.  

What I’m saying is that there is a close relationship between sex and pain that even a little primary school kid could feel.  The point of the connection is mastery of oneself, self “control” as they put it as though the brain were a dashboard -- which it is -- because at that point in life it’s hard to find anyone else who could be controlled by a little kid.  Maybe the dog.  But adults control little kids.  Some of them punish and now we know how many torture children.  Control, punish, torture, is a continuum about imposing one’s will on someone else.  They say, "I own your butt."  The self-defensive response is withholding, if only by not respecting those who don’t have enough self-control to figure out how to persuade a child.  

Solstice on the high prairie

These are dark thoughts for the Christmas season, but it’s very much a solstice (endarkenment) winter this year because of the disclosures about what we only suspected before: that the parts of our government who were supposed to be trustworthy enough to protect us turn out to be criminally insane.  What other explanation is there for what we’re reading now?  Sure, they were scared about 9/11, but this frenzy of imposed pain and humiliation was also about an additional element.

I’m often a little taken aback by the reaction when I mention “pedophilia,” undefined but generally imaged as a helpless little kid being sexually invaded by a monstrous adult.  Quite apart from the criminal event, men around here who still make their livings in physical ways, men who are hunters and cowboys, will blow up into a rage and swear that they will KILL anyone who did this to children.  And yet as a teacher, a minister, an investigator of cruelty complaints against animals, and a scholar, I KNOW that there are many children here who are to some degree molested, even murdered.  Secretly, without challenge.  I see that somehow the rage is meant to be a sign of protectiveness and moral indignation, but it sounds more like the same kind of vengeful emotion that caused an offender to use a child for his own ends -- mixed with memories of their own personal trauma.

That is, it’s a raw emotional rage that has a strong element of fear underneath it, the kind of storm that can be released in battle or by meth and alcohol.  It is an infected wound that probably has its origin in the abuse of the raging avenger, inflamed to the point of inviting his own disintegration.  

Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya was killed by torture in WWII.

As a child I was sneaking access to accounts of torture involved in WWII, both the war and the resistance which included women and children.  Catholic kids were absorbed in the trials of the saints and martyrs.  There is a body of literature that revolves around the indigenous peoples of the Americas -- some of it (Protestants) seeing them as no better than the wolves and some of it (Catholics) seeing them as something like slaves with souls -- both sides curiously watching and feeding off of torture both physical and mental, trying to impress the Other with their power and righteousness.  

I'm not sure how much today's youngsters know this is real, not a video game.  Watching “The Borgias” the storyline is certainly familiar and I long for a character who would point out what a human being can rise to, how to oppose evil without becoming evil.  The closest is that the former concubines and abused wives decide to raid the cardinals' purses in order to feed poor children.  This makes the three women still controllers, but with bribery and blackmail instead of violence.  They all want control, even the children who go door-to-door on behalf of Savonarola.

We love it.  Our media are crowded with graphic accounts of criminal networks, alien confrontations, and devastated dystopias.  Like Putin we seem to long for confrontation, hopefully violent and desperate, in order to prove we matter -- bare-chested and bear-mounted -- we can dominate everything else.  It's a kind of projection of ourselves on the underside of billowing smoke clouds by the red light of uncontrolled fire. 

In times like these -- and actually on the surface the times aren’t so bad, it’s just that we keep realizing how bad they have been SECRETLY, how out of control our protectors were -- we need better things to think about.   http://www.gocomics.com/francis/2014/11/27   So after I’ve watched another sumptuous, sexy and bloody episode of “The Borgias” I turn to a quiet little comic strip that plays off the chosen name of the current Pope.  I’m not even very religious in conventional terms, much less Catholic, but this little commentary cheers me, drawing as it does on the historical Saint and including “Brother Leo” who is a version of “Brother Juniper” who is a version of the innocent fool who acts wisely -- a fairly universal human type.  The Great Falls Tribune loves to intersperse stories about the Special Olympics among its usual fare of murder and robbery.  Then there's "Forrest Gump."  But do we have to be stupid to be good?

Patrick Marrin

Who draws this comic strip?  “Patrick Marrin succeeded Bill Freburger as editor of Celebration in 1998. He holds master’s degrees in theology, philosophy and journalism and has worked in religious education, liturgical and preaching ministry and as book editor, graphics editor and political cartoonist for a daily newspaper. Before being tapped as editor for Celebration, he was chair of the Mass Communications department and an associate professor at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kan. He traces his interest in liturgy to his early formation as a student at St. John’s Prep in Collegeville, Minn., and to the influence of the Benedictine monks there. He was a member of the Dominican Order for 18 years, including 11 years of ordained ministry. He lives with his family in Kansas City, Mo.”

The Marcel Breuer sanctuary in Collegeville, MN

This monastery focuses on liturgy, which is one of my interests, so on the way to seminary in 1978 I stopped off long enough to attend morning mass in their rather fabulous modernist sanctuary.  It is a community with the same human problems as the rest of the world, including the abuse of schoolchildren and controversy over homosexuality, but they are essentially humanist -- that is, valuing of all human works, not just those defined by institutional religions -- and that comes out in Marrin’s comic strip.  In fact, it is that dimension of Western Culture that the modern Savonarolas see as undeserving, mundane, a frill.  In fact, this is a community rooted in the land.  They make terrific bread.  (Symbol alert.)

Torture is an attempt to control.  For some it becomes a visceral, emotional, pleasure to actually hurt others.  For those at the next level, who only authorize, but secretly, it is also self-aggrandizement.  For those who suspect it’s happening but only if they are forced to face reality, it is a failure of courage and leadership that undercuts the whole idea of democracy.  For those who secretly relish the close accounts of torture, it is as much a dehumanizing and addictive drug as meth. 

Early on an August morning I arrived at the St. John’s abbey just as the sun began to break through the fog.  One drives down a long straight road to the amazing Marcel Breuer bell banner in front of the sanctuary.  I could see it a long ways ahead -- it was golden in the sunlight.  Then the bells rang out.  "Be still and know that I am God."  Not you, Cheney.  You don't make the morning that comes to comfort us.

THE MOMMIE HEGEMONY

“In the practice of hegemony, imperial dominance is established by means of cultural imperialism.  The imposition of the hegemon's way of life — an imperial template and bureaucracies (social, economic, educational, governing) — transforms the concrete imperialism of direct military domination into the abstract power of the status quo, indirect imperial domination.”

I never really understood what hegemony meant, so I looked it up.  Now I recognize it.  The current USA version is “Mommieism.”  Daddies do the war, Mommies do the homestuff.  That means Mommies do the shopping and decide where the furniture goes.  It means mommies discipline the children and answer the door.  It means that a lot of women who have never really gotten past high school cliques and standards are in control of daily life.  And I do mean CONTROL.  But they have no chance to find out there is a world outside their bubble.  Too many escape only into immersive fiction that tells them how cherished they are in the end.  High school values, high school rules.  It works for the Hutterites who borrow Christian fiction from the local library by the boxful.  Literally.  Real boxes.

Institutions are built on the assumption of these current hegemonic cultural values: control, order, regimen.  But the cultural roles divide the territory into those who decide on the goals and standards (male) and those who make the population conform to them (female).  As soon as soldiers began to be compliance-monitors instead of warriors, women were admitted.  As soon as cops began to be rule-enforcers instead of dangerous emergency intervenors, women were admitted.  As soon as ministers began to be consolers and counselors instead of denominational leaders and daring theologians, women were admitted.

We hear a lot about the 1% and how they have most of the money.  There is another 1% that sets the goals for institutions and they have the power.  They're male, usually white.  Institutions reinforce the gender-role split.  Maybe they invented it.  Nurses are female, doctors are male, brain surgeons rule.

Lisa Edestein sans cleavage

There’s an exception: when females SEEM to be the leaders and making decisions they are usually subject to either larger umbrella management or covert shadow boards.  (Example:  "House, M.D." where the hospital administrator is an over-dressed female who "has no choice".)  I once took my pickiup to a "women's mechanic," owned by a woman and therefore claiming to be more trustworthy.  They screwed up, but when I went back to demand reparation, the woman disappeared and her husband came out instead.

When I was the student rep on the Meadville/Lombard trustee board, I thought they were actually in control and presented as my report a rather wacky cartoon summary of the problems that needed to be addressed.  It turned out my job actually had been to make everything look good, because people were on the board who were only there to supply money.  Being on the board was a big honor and they were expected to reciprocate.   I chatted a bit with a wealthy woman who wanted to explain all about flying saucers.   Alerted and thereafter paying close attention, I realized that there were three very powerful men from wealthy churches who went apart to a room where they could smoke and work on a bottle of single malt Scotch.  THEY decided our course of action, which was -- of course -- to maintain the status quo, though it meant losing money in the actual operation.  It would not interrupt the flow of donations and denominational subsidy.

The other students could not see this.  (I was forty, they were twenty.)  I think that a few years managing churches would open their eyes.  But I also predict that it would not take long for the male ministers to recognize the wisdom of going along with the church administrator, the choir leader, and the religious education director, leaving the minister to preach and sit behind the big desk.  (Such secondary church staff was usually female or maybe closeted gay.)  This was 1980 or so.  Soon the feminist movement would notice churches:  then both the choir director and the religious education director would demand to be called ministers, as well as whatever older, semi-retired, female, or otherwise willing person would take on visiting the sick and doing a little social action -- the low status stuff.  They knew there was no money in those roles, but there was honor, a title.  And control of those vulnerable people.

I used to have a classmate at M/L who would say,  “This seminary would be a great place if you could just get rid of the students.”  They DID figure that out. ("The thesis is in the mail.")  Universities are corporate institutions, governed by the goal of profit, and therefore delegating the low-reward practice of classroom teaching to women, immigrants, and beginners as adjunct faculty, for less pay.  Front-line interface with young people who might differ or argue interferes with an important person’s research, even their relationships with other important persons.  The media doesn’t understand how to cover students learning, but they “get” breakthroughs and prizes, which are -- plain and simple -- access to money.

So males, when they are children or just learning and therefore not much skilled, are controlled by adult women who do not admit their marching orders come from powerful men.  And the result, esp. for males, is often frustration, resistance, and a fulminating hatred of women as a category.  In reciprocity, women become monsters, as depicted by Glenn Close wearing expensive suits on "Damages."  Bunny-boilers.

But this is a white suburban version of male/female.  In the black ghetto, on the rez, in the hunter/gatherer tribes, women rule.  Or at least can dominate their realm.  They still live in a bubble, but daddy never comes home from work.  (This is changing.)
  

High school rules mean appearance is everything: decorate your locker.  Value the small, the sentimental, the sweet, the little, the scrubbed, the sparkly.  Scrapbook life.  If as an adult you somehow you get access to money, use it to travel in your portable bubble, either a big RV or the nice motel franchises or a resort liner or a packaged tour.  No risk, no foul.  And so the small churches in small towns become hegemonic one-celled congregations who hire women, older men, minorities -- maybe part-time or shared.  Safe people.  (Small town schools aren’t quite the same because the Chamber of Commerce will demand that the school teams be winners because it's good for business -- that means male coaches, as aggressive as can be tolerated. And a certain amount of sexual bad behavior is also often tolerated.)

This rant is grotesque.  It has just enough explanatory truth in it to be worth thinking about.  Put on your list of considerations things like mass shootings by young men, domestic violence by older men, the eviction of male children from families, oppressive cops, and the hiring of seminary presidents.  (But don't forget that the president of Harvard was run out by angry feminists.)  Why are terrorists usually male and why would they capture a couple of hundred little girls?  The problem is not that they are female, the problem is not even that they are powerless.  They are the most vulnerable so the most easily managed, and so valueless that they were not protected.  Now they are big sentimental favs in the USA. The problem is that so far we have not discovered a political arrangement that can withstand the plain old mammal pattern of male dominance.  Call it sociobiology but only if you must.  Just pay attention.

Diagnosis is SO complex.

Even though the female lions are the main hunters, it is the males who eat the most.  Whether we’re talking democracy, communism, socialism, anarchism, or any other system, the males manage to get control at the top and push the dirty work off onto women, children, stigmatized, uneducated, meek people.

Julia Lesage

A more orderly and formal discussion of this topic is at http://pages.uoregon.edu/jlesage/Juliafolder/HEGEMONIC.HTML   The title of the paper is “The Hegemonic Female Fantasy.”   A quote:  “The term originally derives from the Greek and was used to describe Athens’ prestige and influence over the other Greek city states. The concept of hegemony is most useful if seen as operating on two interrelated and mutually reinforcing levels: the institutional and the psychological. The dominant class has the power to write history and impose norms because it controls and directs economic, state, cultural, scientific, religious, educational, etc., institutions. In this sense, the health care system or the educational system not only deliver material services but are also ideological systems. In the cultural sphere, some institutions are tied directly to the state (e.g., public education) and some indirectly through grants (e.g., private universities). Even the independent arts depend on institutions for funding and exhibition and shape their products accordingly. Furthermore, certain major institutions comprise generally agreed upon systems for conducting personal affairs, and these shape women's lives directly, namely the institutions of marriage, the family, and heterosexuality.”

The essay quoted above is by Julia Lesage, an emeritus professor at the U of Oregon.  She comes from the context of film study, which is often more illuminating than, say, sociology or psych.  Less conforming than politics. 

It’s an open question whether the middle class values of marriage, family and heterosexuality are now disintegrating because women have awakened, or because economics will simply not support the current hegemony, which arises from the descending middle class.  (Theoretically invested in the values of Queen Victoria, even as they act like Gordon Gecko.)  The lesson of history is that most systems in the end are toppled by greed.  Not greed for money, but greed for power, which the Greeks would agree makes people of any gender blind.  Soon the golden eggs are not coming fast enough and someone wants to press the geese.

"HELP" THAT IS MERELY CONTROL

My eyes get far too much use because I’m such a print-freak.  When I was in Saskatoon, I began to see strange patterns, esp. grids, when my eyes were closed.  One of the reasons I was living there was for the universal health care, so off I went to the eye doc.  But one of the reasons the system works there is that access is filtered.  I was shunted to a bored little man, very interested in his cuticles, who gave me a stiff lecture on how I -- an American carpet bagger -- was depriving worthy people of the land, little old work-worn peasants, blinded by ultraviolet rays while toiling on the prairie. How dare I crowd them out with my trivia?  Then he mocked my symptoms, asking whether my “grids” were pink and whether I also saw elephants.  Back in the States, I was diagnosed with ocular migraine (malfunction of vascular supply) and given laser surgery to fuse the holes left in my retinas.  Painless.  Took minutes.  Extremely expensive, requiring high-tech machine and training.  Lucky.  VERY lucky.

Fast forward a couple of decades.  I go to the American eye doc thinking I’m having a routine checkup and he urgently refers me to a regular doc because of eye damage from diabetes.  Since I’m female, he refers me to a female doc.  She does a blood glucose assay, sits me down and fills me with terror.  Unless I do EXACTLY what she says for the rest of my life, I will soon be entirely blind and have my feet cut off.  My blood glucose score is 325.  (Normal is 100.)  I can barely drive home.  (Docs here are 130 miles away.)  Her prescription meds take my bg score down to 60, which is close to losing consciousness.  The little meter starts beeping and says (in print):  “Call your doctor !!!” I call her -- she’s angry.  I must be doing something wrong.

But I am super-responsible.  By my next visit, I’ve radically altered my diet, my bg score is 135  (cell damage is thought to start at about 180 and must persist over time to make you blind and foot-less), I’ve lost weight, and I’m proud.  The doc sets about demolishing me.  She tells me I have fudged my scores.  Clipboard in hand, she goes down a list:  what do I eat?  when do I eat? how much do I walk?  etc.  Every answer is inadequate.  As she talks, I grow older and wiser.  I stand, leave, never return.

So here are two cases, one of a helper who does not intend to help, and the other of a helper who wants total control -- emotional control enforced with fear.  Both of them are evil, but both of them are good examples of how entwined “help” is with “control.”  Both of them are forms of domination.  

Now let’s flip this over.  I have a friend who defies every attempt to help her.  Though she constantly appeals for advice and assistance, every suggestion or intervention embroils us in a kind of sword fight -- thrust and parry, parry and thrust.  (Berne calls this, “Why Don’t You, Yes But.”  Friends, docs, exercise consultants, relatives -- all are cut off at the knees while the victor stands over them crowing,  “You see?  You can NOT help me!  I win!!”  Domination.  Control.  One can only walk off, ignoring the writhing anguish crying out behind one.  It’s real enough, but it’s a tool.  To cure it would be to remove a defense, possibly even the structure of a personality.

My short list of where things go wrong when it comes to “help” (or pleas for help) that are really “control” include, first,  motivation (who is defining the situation as requiring help or being susceptible to help -- is this for the benefit of the helper or the helpee?)  Second, the nature and source of rewards when help is successful -- or not.  Third, the methods of helping:  how authoritarian, how “scientific,” how intimate?  Fourth, the unintended consequences of helping people in the aggregate, since society is such a responsive complex ecology that changing a small meme somewhere (e.g. “addiction is not a crime but a physiological response to toxic substances”) can throw huge organizations and budgets into disarray.

In the individual personality, the pattern of needed help (infant dependency) versus provided control (parental intervention) is formed early on.  Resources, genomic potential, and the larger society all come into play.  It gives me the shudders.  I vividly remember at the age of maybe six or seven -- probably because of attending school -- I was facing an uphill struggle to remain myself as I knew myself to be.  You’re smiling, but to me it was dissociation, being forced out of my identity by adults telling me,  “Oh, you’ll change when you grow up.”  Meaning:  you’ll be the way we want you to be.

So when I sit down with some big scary hairy smelly alcoholic back-country brute, what I see is that same fear in his eyes.  Quickly replaced as he looks back at me by calculations about how easy it will be to game the system this time.  If it looks like the game won’t pay off they dissociate.  (Ever play Indian stick game?  Well, DON’T unless you grew up with it.)  That is, they look at the far horizon and suddenly don’t speak English anymore.  If there’s nothing on offer, why should they give up the small advantages they already have, like the welcome buzz of being drunk and the easy company of street people?  In my experience, which is more about highly educated professionals, the latter are worse.  More complex, more resourceful.  Exhausting.  VERY controlling.

In the end professional helpers can hardly help but perform triage, helping those who will accept it, helping those for whom the price is right, and waving on the impossible energy-suckers who will fight “help” all the way.  The trouble is that in some cases those intractables are vectors who can re-seed trouble (TB, HIV, violence, IV drugs) among the innocent throughout the culture.

So the helpers, not getting any rewards from their clients, turn to satisfying themselves with the feeling of being helpful, cheerful, exceptional people, rushing around improving everyone.  My mother thought this was the definition of ministry and was much disgusted by my constant fishing in the Abyss.  She saw it as no different from being a common misery-voyeur, entertained by maimed beggars in India instead of getting the dishes washed.  She herself usually went at problems as though she were killing rats.

Since that was our family pattern (which usually sent my dad running for cover out of the house) it feels to me far more trustworthy than cheery, kind, embracing “help.”  Alarm bells go off in my head:  “It’s a trap!  It’s a trap!”  Cool analysis, design of some strategy for change -- those to me are help that might work.  My mother’s gynecologist, who took her through three children and a major mastectomy, was strict, brisk, and VERY skillful.  The first two qualities are not enough.  The SKILL counts.

So now you know why I’m a print-freak.  It’s cool, it’s remote, it’s relatively safe, and not only do I not have to help anyone, but also I can play identity games that will always keep me moving, just out of reach.  But you remember that thing about “unanticipated consequences?”  I had not realized how intensely one can get attached to others via print.  No help for it.  Very little control.

THE DEVOURING DREAM

I said to someone, this Holmes guy may have some kind of organic defect, even a brain tumor.  The person said, “Or maybe just crazy.”  But isn’t a malfunctioning brain the same as crazy?  Where’s the line between some kind of fixation or misapprehension or failure to process consequences -- bad attitude -- as opposed to the malfunction of one of the little brain sorting centers or molecular feedback loops, an equipment problem?  One affects the other, one creates the other.   And our social iives, our cultures, shape both of them in terms of experience, compensation, nutrition, even trauma.  Where is the line between excusable madness and inexcusable narcissistic fantasy?  

Ty Burr, writing in the Boston Globe, was impressed by the extreme comments about the new Batman movie before anyone had even seen it except for the critics, a few of whom disliked it.

“There is something truly awful going on here: an entitled fanboy mentality, enabled by the anonymity of screen names, that moves and thinks as a mob and that reacts to any deviation from unanimous praise with the fury of a spoiled child. Of course there were plenty of level-headed responses on the Rotten Tomatoes boards and elsewhere; of course not all fanboys (and girls) are immature dolts. But enough of them are there to dominate the discourse, and their assumptions are frightening to contemplate: If someone does not like this movie, he or she deserves to die.”   Isn’t this thinking as Holmes must have?  Burr generalizes on the genre.

More pressingly, it needs to be asked, why does fantasy in general and this fantasy in particular mean so much to so many people? Why does a negative review for a movie strike some as an attack on their own identity? When the second film in Nolan’s “Batman” trilogy, “The Dark Knight,” came out in 2008, it was remarkable to see so many members of a generation that had no cultural focal point discovering theirs in this, . . . a young man I met . . . likened the impact of “Dark Knight” to the Kennedy assassination and the Challenger disaster as events that unified young people and gave them their defining moment.

. . . I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that [Holmes] was responding, in his psychosis, to the tortured fantasy of power that this movie — and so much of the popular culture aimed at young men in particular — trades in. That fantasy is now everywhere..

. . . you’re still figuring out who you are and a beautiful, conflicted superhero (or supervillain) mirrors your self-image. Our entertainment culture’s dreams of power are a drug that keeps us rapt in a cloud of promises: that we can win and that winning is everything; that we’ll be seen and heard for who we are  . . . when we’re sold a fantasy that is so well made, that seems to tap so deeply into our very real sense of imminent catastrophe, and that seems so self-aware about the fantasy itself, certain people respond to it as if it’s the Truth. 

(Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.)

There is a precursor movie with many of these same qualities.  It’s called “The Crow” and uses the same ruined urban nighttime scenery.  I had a high school student who loved that movie -- he’s in a federal penitentiarry now.  The same dynamic goes back to Conan and back before that all the way to -- well, I suppose to pre-literacy.  Someone exceptional must save us.  (Elect Obama.)  If he’s not capable of making everything better right away, reversing the Great American Decline, kill him.  Well, at least vilify him.

IMHO the gun issue is a total distraction.  Guns magnify violence, people who can afford a lot of guns and a lot of ammo magnify it even more.  Some will say that if there had been someone in that theatre “packing heat” when Holmes began to shoot, he could have been prevented from killing so many.  Really?  He’s in the dark theatre, he’s lobbed two tear gas grenades so that people can hardly breathe, much less see.  Besides his gas mask, he’s wearing all SWAT bulletproof gear, so it was hard to distinguish him from actual SWAT team members.  Everyone is screaming, milling around, falling.  I don’t care how good a sniper is, this was an impossible situation, carefully thought out to be that way.

When I talk to people around here about the right to bear arms (this is a rural place where bears come into the yards), they do not talk about personal situations of danger.  They talk about danger from governmental oppression.  They speak of Russia.   Indians (if they feel very very safe) speak of the massacres not so long ago.  Yet they all hurry to be on the side of law enforcement and join the military at a higher rate of enlistment.  

Control is the hidden issue and guns are the illusionary source of control, both of one’s own safety and of the country’s preservation.  This is the talk from Cheney and the corporate funders of private “security” armies.  One cannot trust elected officials to prevent the obvious decline of the nation, so bunker-up and make sure you’ve got enough ammo to make it through the coming dystopia. But what use are these things against an armed Predator drone?  You could escalate all the way up to tanks and still not be in control.  You wouldn’t even know where your attackers were from or where they were when they triggered the drone.  

Many feel the only response is terrorism, either individuals or semi-organized groups intent on control, which they interpret as defense of themselves and their way of life.  In the process they destroy both, their goal turned back on them.

What terrorists and citizens both seem to want is a return to better times, maybe even childhood, when things were run by their parents -- if they were reliable which many are not.  There is a sense of entitlement to the way it is SUPPOSED to be, and a struggle to make it happen.  

In the case of James Holmes, he seems to have felt something was wrong in his own head and to have tried to find out what that was all by himself.  This is another strong marker among youngsters I’ve known -- never never trust adults or authorities to help you.  They will only punish, misunderstand, and confine you -- all the time saying it’s for your own good, even though it’s not.  Because adults don’t listen, they don’t get it, they aren’t grownups at all -- just pretending.  You’ve got to take it into your own hands.

Recently I saw the Tim Burton version of Batman.  I keep thinking about how much the phony city officials who stepped up to the microphone looked and sounded like Mitt Romney.