Perverts, and Rapists, and Liars, O My: The Power, Privilege, and Injustice of America’s Ubermensch

You walk into a locker room shower and see a grown man anally raping a young boy.  What do you do? Rush upon the evil pervert with every ounce of strength in your body and relieve the child of the most heinous assault possible; secure the child’s safety; and make a beeline to the police, right? Not if your Mike McQueary.  Nah, he walked away and, like, mentioned it to his superiors.  Who also did nothing, except maybe slap the pervert Jerry Sandusky’s hands and say, no more showering with boys, wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more. 

None of these men in positions of authority and power gave a damn about that child, whose body and soul were being violated.  Subsequently, none of these men gave a damn about the many other children this foul horror of a human being had raped, molested, and emotionally ripped asunder. 

What mattered to Joe Paterno and Company was their positions of power, privilege, influence, and money.  That’s all.  Penn State, from bottom to top — from Mike McQueary to university president Graham Spanier — didn’t give a half sh*t about the sanctity of the innocence of children, every person’s unquestionable moral obligation to protect all children at all times, and the obvious moral and legal responsibility to report violators of children to the police, immediately.

How deep in our society does the rape of little boys, and the ensuing administrative cover-up, go? The Catholic Church did it for decades, decades, at least.  The Church would still be covering up pervert priests if it hadn’t gotten caught.  Just like there never would have been a “Penn State Trustee’s Panel” to investigate the rape of children by its employees and the ensuing cover-ups if Penn State hadn’t gotten caught. 

Neither Penn State nor the Church are mindless monolithic institutions, much as they may seem to be.  They are composed of human beings, individuals, with individual minds, individual souls, individual mandates to do the right thing, especially for children in harm’s way, no matter what the cost to self.

Men at the top, rich, powerful, privileged, living above it all, including the Law — whether they be priests, university officials, sports stars, or Wall Street kingpins — must be watched, by us.  And when one of us sees one of them raping a child, we have to step up and stop it, through physical force, legal avenues, and whatever else it takes, without worrying about losing our jobs, or causing harm to the reputation of the pervert.  Mike McQueary ought to be ashamed of himself, he ought to be charged with abetting the rape of a child, and he ought to be damn well fired.  

There isn’t just one horror of a human being in this story; there is a whole Hell’s worth.

Little Girl Lost: Baby Lisa Irwin

This is a fascinating case.  Specifically because it’s not so cut and dried, is it? It’s not obvious the mother “did it,” nor is it clear the mother is innocent.  What is clear is that Debbie Bradley, baby Lisa Irwin’s mother, is a bit of a drinker, with a bit of a colored past.

It is hard to sympathize with Debbie Bradley, given her own admission of putting her baby down at 6:30 p.m. (who does that???) and then embarking on a Scott Fitzgerald–worthy boozing binge, only to wake up to her husband, home from a night shift, asking, where’s the baby, where’s the baby? But, then again, how hard is it to empathize with a woman whose baby girl is gone, if we believe that she, the mother, did not herself make the baby gone, in one horrible way or another?

I believed, for years, that Patricia Ramsey was responsible for the death of her child, JonBenet Ramsey.  I was utterly convinced of her guilt.  I had read every article in the the news, all the websites hawking the evidence, I had watched Patricia Ramsey on television, “analyzed,” (accurately, I arrogantly believed) her body language.

I don’t know exactly why, exactly, what it was that convinced me of the opposite, recently.  But something about the DNA evidence, sparse as it may be, just caused a sort of Joycean epiphany: I’m an arrogant, presumptuous person, and that poor woman was innocent: she lost her baby girl, for whom she lived, and we all accused and convicted her without a trial.  And now she is dead of ovarian cancer.

Granted, maybe the fact that she died, still young and beautiful, of ovarian cancer, that rotten sneak of a murderer, scratched at my heart and made me feel guilty for having had such thoughts about this woman, this mother.  But had I not kept up with the case, had I not learned to understand further evidence in the case strong enough to vindicate Patricia Ramsey, at least to my mind, I don’t think I would have felt soft or sad towards her just because she died of ovarian cancer, no matter how much I hate the evil illness and its attack upon two women I know, and love, and admire.  No matter how much I want to murder such a murderer.

No.  If I believed that Patricia Ramsey was in fact guilty, I would not have felt bad about her fate.  I’m harsh enough that I might have felt some kind of justice had been done.  Yes, I’m that harsh and vengeful.  I wish I weren’t.  But I am, and I might as well admit it.

But she wasn’t.  Patsy Ramsey was innocent of her baby girl’s death.  So was JonBenet’s father.  Neither parent hurt their baby.  Yes, they entered her in beauty pageants that many of us find creepy, but how many of us, secretly, even, tune in to Toddlers and Tiaras and think, omyGOD, she is SO cute???!!! Well, to many folks in America, these beauty pageants are perfectly a matter of course, perfectly feminine and natural.  Some of us might disagree with them, but what the hell, it’s all perspective, isn’t it? Isn’t it.

Maybe, what we need to do now, in regard to that poor baby Lisa Irwin, is take a step back and consider perspective.  At this point, we don’t know what happened.  We just do not know.  You might feel like you know, and I would understand that, God knows, I would.  But feeling and knowing are two separate things.  The fact is, we do not know.

I’m not writing in favor of Debbie Bradley.  I don’t feel overly fond of her.  If I had a little baby girl, I wouldn’t touch a drop of the fun stuff, as much as I like it.  I just wouldn’t.  My baby would be my life.  My whole life (well, my husband, too, of course).  Full disclosure: I’ve chosen not to have children, but if I did have a little baby girl, she’d be lucky to spend any time in her crib and out of my arms.   And I would never, ever consume alcohol or any other substance when I was in charge of her, which would be always, even if my husband was present.  I just would not ever imagine that I was not 100% responsible, at all times, for my dear baby’s life.

But part of me cannot help but think, who am I to judge? Another part of me answers, what’s wrong with judgment, of COURSE you must judge, as long as you are honest.  Ok, fine.  Obviously, I am judging just by writing what I am now writing.  But I do believe that we should all, all of us, step back.  Feeling pressure or depression or anxiety or any other “feeling” that inspires a person to drink too much once, or repeatedly, does not make a murderer, or even a mother who could have saved her baby had she not been drinking.

I know how lenient that sounds.  But all I’m saying is: we do not know what happened.  Perhaps Baby Lisa Irwin was kidnapped, and this kidnapping was long planned, brilliantly planned.  Maybe it wasn’t –  maybe it was opportunistic.  Maybe the mother or father did do something horrible.  All possibilities are, well, possible, at this point.

I’m saying we should not rush to judgment.  There is nothing wrong with judgment; frankly, I believe being judgmental has a bad rap.  But being mindlessly judgmental is not just stupid and inaccurate; it is evil.  As evil as the kidnapping, or, Christ forbid, the murder, of an innocent baby girl.

With Lisa Irwin’s first birthday just days away, let’s think about that, let’s honor her life, or the memory of her life, with this thought: she deserves the truth, she deserves the search for truth, whether that takes days or years.  This baby, all babies, deserve truth, and they, and we, are worth the time truth sometimes takes.

Everyday Halloween: The Real Terror Lying Beneath a Terroristic Surface

Tomorrow, November 5, is Guy Fawkes Day, which, to those of us in America, means absolutely nothing.  Most of us wouldn’t even have the slightest idea who or what Guy Fawkes is if it weren’t for the Natalie Portman movie, V for Vendetta, the mask from which has become a symbol of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

To make a long story short, Guy Fawkes was a terrorist.  He was a member of a little pack of English Catholics who wanted to get Catholicism back on the throne, and in order to achieve this end, they thought blowing up Parliament and murdering King James I with a pile of gunpowder buried under Westminster would be a nifty idea.  Self-righteous ideologues always think their ideas are nifty, by the way, whether they are violent murderers or peaceful  protesters.  At least the peaceful protesters aren’t hurting anyone physically, but, then again, Lenin and Stalin didn’t start out hurting anyone physically either.  Trotsky never got much of a chance to hurt anyone, unfortunately for him.  He was too busy avoiding Stalin’s hatchet to plant any hatchets of his own.

Anyway, King James survived, and people (well, the Protestants) celebrated by lighting bonfires around London.  Unfortunately, the Observance of 5th November Act, passed in response to the attempted terrorist attack on Parliament and the King, only served to light additional fires of hatred against Catholics, “malignant and devilish papists,” showing that the response to terrorism can be just as terroristic as the terrorists themselves.  Like we didn’t already know that.  What’s kind of cool is that Guy Fawkes Day would have been a mid-summer festival of fire had not threats of a Plague outbreak caused Parliament to close on July 28, 1605, delaying the attempt to blow up the House of Lords until November 5.  Of course, the Gunpowder Plot might have succeeded and King James bitten the dust.

About that mask.  I like V for Vendetta.  It’s a good movie.  It’s exciting and creepy and disturbing in a variety of ways.  What I don’t like is an angry, self-righteous mob glorifying the concept of violent revolution and adopting a symbol of the Terrorist-as-Hero for their ill-conceived, incoherent protest against a country that is hardly evil or abusive.

The very fact that the Occupy Philadelphia participants have been permitted to set up a tent city on the premises of City Hall without any government interference whatsoever is proof of the freedom, tolerance, and respect that exists for the individual, divergent beliefs, and the Constitution.  That is as it should be: the federal, state, and city governments should respect the individual and the individual’s rights under our Constitution.  And the individual, or groups of individuals, have the constitutionally protected right to hold and express divergent viewpoints.

However, when individuals or groups of individuals begin adopting the mask of self-aggrandizing terroristic figures, other individuals need to take notice.  That V for Vendetta mask is not charming or amusing or a creative approach to raising awareness of individual rights, and I don’t think the Occupy protesters intend it to be.  That mask is terroristic.  The Occupy Philadelphia protesters may be peaceful now, and they may stay peaceful, but there is a terroristic lining to their tent city cloud around City Hall, and that is worth noticing as we all try to decide on the best way to move forward from financial crisis and its consequences.