Maldoror's attitude to God and man is one of utter and insolent defiance.-- Paul Knight, Introduction
One
of the most remarkable things about the documentary Alison is the power of the testimonials of those who witnessed the condition
of the victim and the near state of grace with which she survived her trauma.
The assigned prosecutor emoted with the starkest credulity imaginable that she
expected to be dealing with a corpse. Alison Botha’s friends, the judge, her
doctors, the constables handling the case, even her perpetrators, all were
rocketed by the impact of her barely survivable injuries. The lead constable
heading the investigation seemed to be the most affected by the savage
infliction of wounds. He was fairly direct about the fact that he would have
shot to kill du Toit and Kruger, and it would have been a valid execution when
examined against Faulkner’s adage, “the past
is never the past”. What is
extraordinary about this post-colonial misogynist virulence isn’t the physical
mutilation. Examples of these by and large cut across cultures. Foucault was
able to ferret out a French pathological killer for his social norm analytics
which at first glance, seems atypical in its historical time frame. India has
flash point gang rapes. North America makes serial pathology a cottage
industry. The extraordinary thing here is Alison’s resilience, however a viewer
wishes to contextualize it, this woman managed to stay sane, have children,
marry, become a public speaker. This is the anomaly, in a country which became
a harbinger for 20th century guerrilla warfare.
Alison barely alludes to religion,
except to counter-balance scientific empiricism with its subject’s miraculous
rebound, and doesn’t reference politics, except for Ms Botha’s opening allusion
to the Kingdom of South Africa,
toying with the abstraction of a fairytale, which would be upended at the
conclusion, but at the time of this unfortunate incident, an escalation of a
serial pattern, the government was in transition from the National Party’s
rigor, de Klerk
being the last apartheid president, to Nelson Mandela’s majority rule reconciliation
under the ANC, and such magnified social destabilization this crime represents
seems to follow on the heels of national uncertainty. The dowager, like many
shot out in the sixties, grew up with Africaan oppression being the uncontested
whipping boy, similar to the childhood majesty of the Gargantua's.
Gaira may have eaten people as if they were so many buffalo wings, but however
primitive the FX for its day, the stuntmen give their creatures a grandeur that
makes Gaira’s rescue from the torture of laser beams appropriate. The denouement,
too, differs from the Godzilla franchise, by popularizing and disseminating Eastern
ideas of the ying and yang attached to each other in a perpetual balance.
Though investigation into the possibility of du Toit’s parole has thus far
gotten no further than Giovanni Gerbi’s article, the notion of rehabilitation
for these men is liberalism on a runaway train far worse than the authoritarian
stricture it replaces. The responses of the citizenry stoops to the level of
the perpetrators twenty year old savagery, and Alison doesn’t have enough to
cope with without taking a side swipe from an American girlfriend, a woman
named Sabrina engaged into the stupendous folly of romantizing a rage slasher.
We can never believe we’ve seen it all, not that I did not cast my despair into
this, telling myself if Alison put her pieces back together, I can survive the
shortening life-span stresses of my wheelchair failure which hasn’t been
rectified, but nothing in my autobiographical shrinkage is so mind altering.
Although
the dowager did not offer it rapt attention beyond the first twenty minutes, the
B grade revenge fantasy Steel
and Lace has a few interesting twists to its credit beyond the standard
autonomic predator motif. It offers a sympathetic backstory for Claire Wren as
the victim overwhelmed by the collusion of masculine privilege, and combines a
procedural pursuit against its marginal futurist construct, then ends on the
same tragic note as it opened, perhaps to convey that vigilantism leads us to
the same empty, mind-numbing place, even if Bruce Davison, with his more
subdued command of telegenic capture than Ed Begley Jr, who he resembles, had a
take which may have opened the door for his casting into his X-Men role. This is not to applaud the movie for its cartoonish aspects. Michael Cerveris and his cohorts, although it implied otherwise, do not deserve their horrific deaths at the hands of yet another play on black widow mating aspects due to a stigmatizing sexual violation. This is what the Colorado baker's refusal to service a a gay couple, and Wilkinson's request for Sanders to leave the Red Hen amount to, the application of stigma, and our tolerances to be put on the spot. I agree that Sarah Wilkinson had the right to refuse Sanders service, but her rationale for doing so is tenuous at best. Press Secretaries do not make White House policy, they explain or justify to the press corp, regardless of ideological stripes, and I was angry about the fiasco for this reason. The woman is a federal office holder, and yet the discomfort of bus boys and waiters is of a sudden preeminent because this particular president is trying to ease pressure on our southern border with a more exposed, authoritarian gesture. Freedom of mobility is important, and if the indigenous peoples conquered by colonialism want to destroy the best aspects of Western civilization, maybe now well past its zenith, they may be victorious against imperial sins out of moral guilt latticed into egalitarian fictions, but any number of people may still die needlessly, if developing world standards are a new found metric.
It takes our now embattled , but still robust meritocracy, as embodied in Georgetown's Randy Barnett, that we haven't quite revamped the legal dueling as a method to settle the argument between federalism and the masses. As Trump has ratcheted up his peevishness, I have toned down my excoriating expletives, mostly due to the extraordinary exertions of bowel maintenance, but I haven't retreated. If Maga and the left wants a blood feud, bring it on. My life is as gestapo hardened as Allison's real life will to survive against such savagery against her body. Proportionality may fail us even in the most heartfelt circumstances, but we always have new medians. The age of the savant has caught on.
In the Martin Beck adaptations, the actor who facilitates Haber's comic relief does it in a naturalistic way which seems to accurately depict Swedish eccentricity far better than other dramas in the same mold, always in his neck brace, a bit faggotty within the confines of the Hollywood sissy; in The Weak Link, one of the later movies in the series, he upgrades his interesting fashion statement to a lighter blue teflon type material, and voila, the pieces to the puzzle fall into place for Haber's dilatory concern, and Sweden's wolf pack rape problem, an issue seemingly integral to Scandinavian immigration issues, is mitigated by mystery novelists, the pair of whom should obviously be governing the European Union. Sometimes too much realism does have an undue impact; even though we know it's television, and see the interplay between Haber and Persbrandt as something familiar, even comforting, there are evenings when the immensely complicated mechanics of broadcast signals and film frames seem repellent, necessary to unplug, as urban life is strenuous enough, and though The Weak Link seems to be one of the later Beck's I missed, I'm sorry for the experience; it seems we all become discontent in our village, after so many years, by choice, or not, and if we cannot find some way to relieve the frustration of letting go, we become monsters. Not every person who lives under this corporate Presbyterian umbrella is mentally ill. Most of the residents are old, black, poor, an occasional veteran and sick whites physically on their way to hospice, but there is, as well, the mental health contingent, and I know of a few suicide attempts here at Riverside, and cannot tell you why public housing is like this in America. My desire to flee is so strong I may just obey, take the bus to my stepmother's, say a prayer I don't kill my father, and camp out on the fucking lawn while it's still summer, and just go. I could apply to writer's retreats, but they are exhaustively competitive, and primarily serve graduates who still have the energy and longevity, even the assumed placid temperament. If I voluntarily roll myself out of Riverside Presbyterian, I am probably too old to play roulette once more with another section 811 landlord, but it is the leaving, just walking the fuck away, that makes me stop hurting. It is just a fucking beige ten story slab, a leaning tower cheaply painted and cheaply maintenanced with bad plumbing, whether or not this is fair to do to an old man who institutionalized me for 16 years. I threw in a few months of my own, back in the day, for good measure, and forthwith swear off Swedish programming for the next six months, even though this particular episode had a studious lesson to teach about the domino effect, castigating aggression, Persbrandt's Gunvald was still Gunvald, plowing through with the force for coup de grace. If you need to become a writer, don't do it the way I did. I often wonder if I had to be one because being a quadriplegic would have been otherwise intolerable, but I never truly thought the damn thing out, and equated it early in youthful exuberance with the prophetic. I decided to make it my life, with nonchalant assurance things would fall into place, within my own obstinate bovine traces: think of other vocations of interest, and make a plan. My IQ may be very high, but in many ways, I'm also a fucking moron beneath my own contempt, and don't know how to repair the damage, with what I allowed Pennsylvania to inflict on me, just taking it. The novelist Jennifer Weiner set me thinking on this. She's produced, made her splash, certainly resonates with my sister, and held my interest about 30 seconds. I staked my life on my talent, and I'm all but a pretentious sociopath. Weiner makes fun of her social status and her sex life, and has enough recognition to play on video. No matter how much we stake, not finding a sustaining audience by the age of 40 is a pretty good gauge of how far to throw in the towel.
What Lisa Glatt actually wants to say is the Bill Cosby we thought we knew actually exists, that this Bill Cosby we loved was decent and charming with her mother's memory, but Salon is such a bleeding heart progressive vehicle, that Glatt has to diminish an event that is important to her mother's memory. Now, as you know, I follow Joan Tarshis, and I respect her memory, her emotional pain at the suppression of self blame. I have a lot of that. My trust was abused in numerous instances, including my very brief attempted date rape, but this doesn't mean, within those violations of interpersonal dignity, that Cosby isn't good, in certain respects, and contributors like Glatt should not fear this, nor is everything about being an icon a gross distortion. I do not get the joke about Wilt's shyness. I would not have been able to join in the humor of what was being underscored, but still. Americans still have a great deal of difficulty, unlike the French, with handling the more salient aspects of human need. I have not yet been forcibly penetrated, and George Will, the embattled columnist, would say the number of hits I've taken veers on triviality, and taken out of context, he is probably right: Rick trying to force his penis through my robe and clenched legs was sordid but not truly traumatic. Beaky trying to rape me in the middle of my crush on Tassoni was as deflationary as Joan's account of her struggle with the celebrity she obviously looked up to, and I got lucky. I could not stop Beaky, his hands were up my blouse after I got home from that party before I could sneeze, and he made me jerk, but he was too stoned to make me eat that bullet. Adding up my totals is another matter. Perhaps I over-reacted to former supervisor Linda's graphic statement of her sexual pleasure: I was, after all, soliciting her advice because I am plagued by dryness, however I stated it, and I showed her a Tassoni love poem (all dried up) but her need to be domineering and over the top was unexpected, and shocked me, even if I opened the door; it is too much. Destroying what we need to admire about Cosby's fictional restraint, responsibility of manner, destroying what reticence would, supposedly, increase in value, so yes, I mourn the luxury of ignorance for our greater good.
Justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others.-- John Rawls, 1971 Brandon Phillips served time for his aggravated assault. Two years. Did his time, his grandmother's bones long in the ground, and the damages from the inner city and Diamond Park, well, fifteen minutes away from a lifetime of inviolate branding, compiled by the incompetence of pluralism and cruelty of the peevish elderly, is merely fifteen minutes away. The beneficiaries in all this? The property owners, who escaped liability because I was passive, and thought the managerial minority staff were looking out for my interests. The difference between Camille Cosby and Hillary Clinton is a matter of degree. Former Flotus stood by husband because she derived her power from a philandering husband who became the president. The Bill from Arkansas loved women, besides, though things sometimes go awry, his naked penis hanging in front of Jones an embarrassment, but legally not systemic harassment (I have done a lot of research on this). Herein lies the reason I will not vote for Mrs. Clinton. She enabled Bill's behavior in a trade off to climb the political rungs, in contrast to Napolitano, who, beyond the occasional sympathy profile, glitters with no such star dust. The Bill from Philadelphia apparently doesn't feel our pain, and is allegedly just another black predator. Whatever side of the fence we choose, lives have been forever altered. Darren Wilson killed a future NFL scandal in Michael Brown, flabbier, if larger, than the Brandon who forever altered me. Brandon was wiry, strong, compact. Darker than Brown, and sorry but this is what he looked like, thick lips inflamed like a vagina with herpes, eyes red with hard driving inflammation, I no longer fantasize about blowing his fucking skull off; his attack was impersonal, stupid. Didn't even steal the five dollars from my consultancy fees lying on the table. If Brandon's time served is nothing against my fear of more suffering to come, contemplate what Wilson faces beyond more potential litigation: revenge threats, loss of his career. Cosby's legacy is tarnished, perhaps irretrievable, but he will be dead soon. It is the reverberations left behind. These will reach up and ensnare the future.
Bill Cosby needs to be prosecuted. If progressives believe Darren Wilson evaded a fair verdict, and I don't, whatever the inconsistencies of his grand jury testimony, something needs to be done to alleviate the accusers of the comedian, as well, and this is where I disagree with most of the Post's opinion writers on the matter, statue of limitations be damned. Kathleen, having a deadline to meet, doesn't speculate on whether NBC protected Cosby as a brand name asset, and liability may be easier to sustain against a big network. This should be investigated. I cannot claim shock. Merely minimal awareness, but the details are making me sick, turning my stomach, and this is why we're all guilty, myself included, never paying the old man's innuendo any mind. But some of his accusers have their own culpability, just as I do. Tarshis is on the record as saying she blamed herself for many years, and this is easy to comprehend. I cannot blame myself for my mother's low life, sometimes dangerous strays, as I had no ability to get away from them, but I blamed myself for trusting my former supervisor Linda C Dezenski, as I admitted to Brian Sims aide, in tears. I *talked* to her, told her things, trusted her, and the humiliation this purchased me was and is too much to bear. Did it end her career at Liberty earlier than she would have liked? Maybe not directly, but nothing I have written about her, our interaction, is hearsay: the email threads, Liberty's assurances to me before doing me incalculable economic harm, can be traced, verified-- but I am culpable, and should have restrained myself. The trauma from that and subsequent instances, like losing unrestricted Paratransit access, the building renovations when I was absent reliable power chairs, the abuse, I am lucky to be alive. But I'd consider it a significant lack of judgment to go to a bungalow of any sort with a celebrity like Cosby, and drink with him, by myself-- this is not to imply that Joan was looking for sexual trouble due to the fact that she was 19 and star struck, but whether or not it was the last year of the flower power decade, she displayed a critical lapse in judgment, and in Hill's case, this lapse falls on her parents. Hill was a minor, and if her allegations have any merit, she should have had an escort. Their unwillingness, or inability, to file charges within the appropriate time frame is another factor, just as it is in my case. Statutory limitations should offer at least some latitude for the stability of the victim: I wasn't strong enough to win a settlement from Liberty Resources in the immediate aftermath of their breach, and can understand the power of that stigma. Robinson may be factually correct that serial rape has a time window, but serial revictimization is also a killer of women, crippling and impairing notwithstanding that some victims remain physically intact.
When I hear of horrific things like like Tarshis being sodomized after downing a redeye, I feel compelled to reach out to the victim through shared experience, though I myself was never forcibly sodomized. Stuart Lone, my fabled heroin addicted stepfather, merely groped me, tortured my dead brother in front of my eyes. It was mother's man before him, another stone addict named Beaky, ugly as sin, who tried to rape me, and I let my ex Frank penetrate me anally, perhaps out of self-hatred, and I did not like the pressure on my bowel. Had problems days afterward. Well, I found the old woman, coping with her torment, much as I am letting it all hang out, coping with mine and losing, understanding Robinson's cautious commiseration and Ta-Nehisi Coates' struggle with his conscience. As an Italian woman with quadriplegia assaulted by a black relative of a public housing tenant and molested by a biracial inner city woman, I do not really have a say in this internecine argument about black identity spilling over into white cross over acclaim. Cosby did not have the greatest impact on me due to the popularity of Cliff Huxtable, rather, I had to endure countless instructional films of Bill Cosby doing exaggerated versions of Ralph Ellison's lone black man defiantly penetrating through the brick walls of white preconceptions, and it influenced my subconscious about the righteousness of being a straight arrow. Now I have to live with the imagery of his alleged forced penetrations, with these women alone with him like naked sheep, shorn of their woolly coats, in our sexually permissive society. I tweeted to Joan. You can read it. I cannot enter into how she lives with it, being forcibly fucked by such a talented man who had such an influence on our psyches. It isn't about whether or not we believe her, or want to defend an icon who may have to end his public career on such a note, it is more about what kind of society we want, where trauma is apparently the new normal, and nothing is innocent any longer. Coates' observation that we generate our moral values from people like Cosby may seem a deft perception, but in reality, personality cults cut across human cultures. It isn't simply an American meme. Napoleon is still a herald in France. Margaret Thatcher was part of a Reagan era triad, of some sort, and so on. Nomenclatures evoke their own language, and Ellison would probably be turning in his grave. I was naive enough to tape his picture and obituary on my door in the inner city the year he passed away in 1991, a man whose genius strove more than most to call identity politics the tragedy for which they were. Right now I can't forgive anyone. Black journalists, corporate media, women like me and Joan who eat it and don't fight back until it is far too late, certainly not a comedian who made me believe my moral center was a justified possibility.
"What if God was one of us?"-- Joan Osborne My first thought, as the allegations against Cosby gathered steam last month, was: Why did these women never prosecute and file formal charges? My fear, 14 years ago, wasn't about going after my supervisor so much as it was how those on Philadelphia's Human Relations Commission would regard my depressive episode that followed in its wake. Then I think of my stepfather, Stuart, plying me with Jack Daniels. I too never prosecuted my mother's lovers for sexual assault. I too, never contacted the police about Miss Eddie from Unlimited Staffing. It becomes increasing difficult to bear, with age, and yet no one wins here. People older than I too look on Cosby as a beloved figure. As a child, his projection of authority was a solidifying force, and perhaps date rape is more difficult to prove than a forensic examination of my email thread with Linda C Richman prior to her divorce: If I did go after Eddie legally, also, it is my word against hers, despite the prevalence of nursing aide abuse. To protest that nothing is sacred doesn't mean I think Cosby's fractured image should be glued back together. It is an outcry, our faith always foundering on the shoals. In Helen Gurley Brown mode, with a middle of the road sentiment about men, their virility, and hands on slap and tickle, I had hoped this was about a grandee engaging in overly forceful groping, but the use of drugs screams out rape crime, loud and clear. During my unexpected vacation, I had to re assess my physical ability to hold down traditional employment, and the axis is wobbly. As a lead in to what I've been turning round in my mind, Cold Case was never quite my cup of tea as a procedural, neither realistic nor fantastic enough to break its televisionish stodginess, but it had poignant sound tracks.
"What about my needs?"-- a raspy Patrick Stewart Rick Berman and Brent Spimer stay within the traditional confines of Trek didacticism with Nemesis, the NG film which seems rather lackluster. We have to teach the kiddies about insurgency, after all, so lets have the ever conspiratorial female in the guise of Senator Tarl'uara just wipe out the entire Romulan Senate for an overt sexual attraction to Shinzon, but upon rejection say oh sorry, I'll develop a conscience now and fight him to save the Federation. This is Trek, with all its sleights of hand, some to be forgiven in stronger scripts with better analogies. We get it. Picard/Shinzon. Data/B4. There but for the grace of god, and al-Baghdadi might now be slitting my throat with a scimitar for a less peevish feminine replacement-- but the gaps are nonetheless irritating. If I am a Romulan aborting an elaborate espionage, why not just give my humanoid clone boy a lethal injection? Why is the doppleganger bent on destroying earth? The Borg needs bodies and so the Borg conquer, but Shinzon is supposed to be representative of a rebellious Napoleon, one who wastes his dying breath seeking revenge on a benign republic (us) who had nothing to do with his creation or the hell of the environment to which he was consigned. How many of you pick apart these scripts for loose ends when not contemplating the use of a woofie to have your way with male or female victim of your choice? I had a one sided dialogue with Richard Morgan, yet another liberal homosexual bent on world dominion, about his sodomy driven rapist, which he has now fabulously published on the digital front page of The Washington Post. I am not envious of the byline, as such. If I ever get in Wapo I have to vanish from its community for a time, and the trope of disability and sexual abuse is too well known. No one cares about the battles I waged with a Jewish woman of my own condition either, except for sewing my posts together for a book about the chimera of activism. I wrote Morgan because his rape story is symptomatic of our narcissism, and what I'd convey to him further is this: he insisted in his column that he did not want to file charges against his rapist, but is he looking at the larger picture? I almost killed myself because I let a former supervisor toy with me for her own amusement. I did nothing about it to stand up for less cruel and chronically inept centers, except managing to get the woman demoted over the threat of a battle which, if it comes, is going to exhaust me for little more than welcoming the new mafia out of the old. We're cripples first, then people. So what if Richard, through his silence, aborting his responsibility to others, discovers later that his rape date does drive someone to suicide, humiliating them more than Morgan could stand with his count of 17 penetrations? He was courageous to put this out in public to counter George Will, but is he thinking of others, people who may not even be in the formerly encoded language of in the life? I am driving at a pattern here of what's wrong with the entire progressive worldview: me first, this emergence is more important than the collective civic good. I've never been drugged into sexual complicity by either sex; it isn't necessary, as I'm basically defenseless, but we don't get anywhere always ducking our heads.
I went to Beirut in June of 2010 because my father was dying.-- Claire Messud There is a scene toward the climax in Chinatown, brilliantly staged by Polanski. Mrs. Mulwray drives Jake to the sanitarium which Noah Cross utilizes for his cover up, and in the foreground we see a resident of the sanitarium sexually harass a nurse who looks like a horse's scrotum, and the nurse, care worn and world weary, bids the octogenarian to have a seat and finish his meal. It is nearly a Shakespearean moment. The Nicholson Dunaway Huston trifecta bisected by the lewd romper room antics, antics which offer cues about Roman fucking nubile adolescents in puberty, and yet, Polanski's entitlement with his alleged victim is a footnote, an inconvenience, even as he might have been my psychotic stepfather, in my poem "Broken China" I am crying out daddy daddy help me, wishing my father had killed my mother's second husband, fearful of the reverse but unsure. Stuart was brutal, but my father had a more calculated Roman menace. Should this woman be a footnote due to Polanski's genius? That woman in India, I have to close my mind to her trauma. Many of us would; many of us do. What that must have felt like, gang raped and then internal hemorrhaging, an iron rod to violate her. Violate is too nuanced for her agony. Her uterus was likely perforated. A footnote.
My father will never know how much hatred I feel that I failed him, that the IRS my mother and his son destroyed the life he deserved. He never talks to me but now that his third wife is dying, now he speaks. He made me almost wealthy in an invalid's barren and bleak institutional environment and this is my evil, created my evil, that human life is so expendable. The veterinarian whom Moyers filmed openly discussed euthanizing himself with horse tranquilizer during the brief time he could operate a power chair. In the last segment, he pleaded with his wife to let him go, recumbent, shrunken, clothed in a polo shirt. We do not realize the profound impact of the photographic medium, the saturation of prognosis, treatment, the mechanized technology with which we contain disease. The majority of my life was spent in a hospital, and then I force myself to watch it in a teleplay funded by Congress to educate the American public on the brutality of modern medicine.
