Rape and War and …Upcoming 'Protest Violence'
Press Action
Saturday, August 28, 2004
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/oxman08282004/
By Richard Oxman
"Rousseauism’s Christianized psychology has led to the tendency of liberals toward glumness or depression in the face of the political tensions, wars and atrocities that daily contradict their assumptions.” -Camille Paglia
For huge numbers of the earth’s population—especially those in control of The War Machines & Goverment Policies—sex is a perverse activity, the attraction to which/addiction to which is contingent upon profanation and violation. And, as per Camille Paglia, their practice of sex “will never conform to liberal theories of benevolence.” (1)
Just as all attempts to block terrorism will fail because the very nature of terrorism is – like wild water—to find the path of least resistance (in resisting), the kind of sexual behavior that is approved of is doomed to be undermined. It may be a daemonic law, but it is...a law...for many. Particularly The Corrupted Powerful. (2)
The joy of violation and destruction expressed by children over a (war) video game, or at a paintball session, has a counterpart in real wars’ No Man’s Land...and on the sexual battlefield that Father Karamazov said he chose to die in...bed.
The blood-lust of rape, brought to the surface so recently in the abominable reports out of prisons here and abroad, is missed entirely by those who have adopted the Run-of-the-Mill Middle Class White Woman’s POV. Ditto for Men in that category...and People of Color. It is the politically and morally correct concept that keeps us from seeing clearly the pure charge that so many in charge get with the erotics of unrighteousness.
Iago didn’t wear his heart on his sleeve. Our Iagos—with eyes on evil for the sake of evil—sew theirs into the linings of their crotches. Shakespeare’s uneducated groundlings – today—would howl in easy recognition of (what Stanislavski might be obliged to label) their dastardly spines. Yet our academics can’t really call a spurious spade a spade.
That is why the learned cannot do battle with them.
And that is why all of the talk and explanations, all the facts, figures and stats...don’t stack up for the devils. Cruelty and torture—the stock in trade of Sade, Baudelaire and Huysmans—are their gods.
The toys chthonian thugs collect, and the money they pile up, carry much less weight with them than the power they wield vis-à-vis this sexual component. Nature rewards them for their energy and aggression much along the lines that their sperm are fulfilled when they break through an ovum’s citadel, leaving less assertive, ineffectual buddies writhing in passive death throes, tomb-like in the womb.
This can lead to an argument for pornography, but that’s not my focus here.
Even though there are plenty of contradictions respecting this notion that “Nature gives males infusions of hormones for dominance...,” (3) we cannot get stuck in the muddle of thinking which says “rape is a crime of violence but not of sex.” For...for the Power Seekers/The Powers at least...sex is certainly power, and rape is NOT power masquerading as sex.
We know that social controls which serve as an impediment to rape are weakest during wartime, on the battlefield. And we have been reminded that we are engaged in a war that may never end...right here in our backyards.
Well, where does that leave us with our leaders? The most civilized who are capable of the most uncivilized, barbaric acts? What’s our proper orientation to them here at home? At the upcoming RNC?
It leaves protesters in the position of having to contemplate castrating them, that’s where it forces us.
There is no question that authorities must have—at a minimum—their metaphoric testicles removed.
And there is no shortage of resisters capable of taking part in such an operation.
The only question is whether or not the most radical elements among our forces will do more than simply turn our boyish Bush into a soprano or alto...belatedly.
Put another way, the question is whether or not they will see Kerry (and all the JFKs) as rapist-murderers.
Dark violence is inevitable now, even if they don’t. (4)
(1) See Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 24.
(2) For those of you who are bothered by my use of capitals, I beg you to review some Emily Dickenson, particularly apt here. Also note that statements I make with regard to sex and The Powers, Paglia generalizes for all humankind.
(3) See Paglia’s “Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art,” in Western Humanities Review, Vol. XLII, No. 1 (Spring, 1988).
(4) See my two recent articles respecting violence, “Indiscreet Street Googling: Arundhati Roy for President” and “The Violent Bear It Away: Flannery Will Get You Somewhere”; those who have read them already should, perhaps, re-read them, especially the latter.
Richard Oxman is a Feminist/Underground Activist living in chauvanistic Los Gatos, California; he can be reached at rmoxman@yahoo.com.