The Anti-Palate Cleanser

Link from a Connolly...

And a link from Richard Dawkins: I Will Arrest Pope Benedict XVI

On being being prickly, Irish, worthy of abuse, and Team Constance

Last week, Sinéad Marie Bernadette O'Connor had a great column in the Washington Post. It was so great, so complete, and so pointed that I really didn't think I could blog about it at all. It felt like it would be superfluous or diminishing. I'm sure just about everyone who's reading this blog remembers 1992, when Sinéad O'Connor tore up a photo of JPII on Saturday Night Live while singing, a capella in her rich Irish mezzo, Bob Marley's War. "Fight the real enemy", she said as she shredded the photo. So much of her column stayed with me. I emailed the address she provided. I told her she was great and I was proud to be an O'Leary and Irish, along with her. 

Sinéad O'Connor, 1992, NBC (Saturday Night Live)

In her column, she asked, whether "Irish Catholics, because we daren't say 'we deserve better,' should be treated as though we deserve less" in response to the Teflon Pope's wholly inadequate apology for the decades long events that are still being revealed in Ireland. The events that despite the growing number of reports in places like Norway, the US (just google it, okay- there are way too many to choose from and I don't want anyone to feel singled or left out), Germany and even probably in India (nothing like knowing how to convert people, right?), the Teflon Pope seemed to suggest were just an Irish problem. Well, this week, a lot of people seemed to deserve so much better than what they got.

As one site, Get Religion, claims, the press just doesn't get religion... Of course, I suppose there have been all manner of defenses of the Catholic Church, which definitely in my mind, still isn't quite getting what it deserves. Defenses or should I say... offenses, when trying to defend the indefensible? For instance, the Bishop of Tenerife is really just outstanding in his claim that some of the adolescents were consenting and therefore it was okay for supposedly sworn to celibacy priests to have molested them. Though, in fairness, the Vatican went out of its way to distance itself from the Brazilian Cardinal Scherer, who spoke about exorcism rather than incarceration as the solution the other day. And they also tried to do the same (though it was a bit harder to do that with their own elected defender who spoke in an unprecedented fashion right before the Teflon Pope on Easter Sunday Mass), with Father Cantalamesso, who likened the persecution of Jews to the present "persecution" of the Church over the fact that they've sheltered pedophiles for decades if not centuries. (Of course, the Brazilian Catholic Church holds an especially cherished place in my thoughts because of their opposition to the abortion obtained by the 9 year old who had been raped and impregnated with twins by her stepfather. Did I mention they ex-communicated the mother, the child, and the doctors that saved the 9 year old child from delivering twins? They didn't, as I understand it, ex-communicate the stepfather. I have a lot of wonderful Brazilian friends but somehow I just don't have friendly feelings for the Catholic Church there, which has the largest number of Catholics of any country in the world. Yeah, it's an old story from last year, but still, talk about not getting what you deserve, for anyone involved.) 

Yesterday, as Maureen Dowd so 'adversarially' pointed out, "How can we maintain... faith when our leaders are unworthy of it?" How perfectly she captures not just the Church but even politics at this juncture, or even... public high schools in Mississippi and Massachusetts where there are further examples still of people not getting what they deserved. Sometimes I find Maureen a bit... edgy. I've always enjoyed her fire and ire, though sometimes I think she gets abrasive and deters some of the choir. And I think she knows that about herself. Because she got her brother Kevin, who's evidently really devout, to give her comments on the situation with the Catholic Church, Ireland, and the Teflon Pope. His comments, “In pedophilia, the church has unleashed upon itself a plague that threatens its very future, and yet it remains in a curious state of denial," are rather daunting when you consider that she describes him as truly one of the faithful. 

But I find what Maureen Dowd says to be true, across the board this week. "Our leaders are unworthy." Whether we're talking about Phoebe Prince (latest), whose face and fate just linger in my mind. She was the child who it seems didn't dare say she deserved better and whose school faculty, administration and fellow students didn't seem to think she deserved better either.

Phoebe Prince, CBS News

Or Constance McMillen, on whose behalf, along with so many other teens and adults who are persecuted for their sexual orientation, I just signed an ACLU petition to my legislators. (I'm sure those of you who have kept up know about how Constance was tricked into attending a decoy prom so that she definitely wouldn't attend the real prom arranged privately by other students and their parents from her school. They even made a Facebook page called "Quit Yer Crying Constance" and posted photos of themselves at the real prom, and some of the students were all bent out of shape when their public Facebook photos were picked up and maligned all over the blogosphere. Like so many others who are Team Constance, I fanned the mean page so that I could post to say I love Constance and I'm not afraid of a girl in a tuxedo.)

Constance McMillen

(AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis, File)

The bad press for the Catholic Church and the Teflon Pope just spins on and on. While South Hadley High and Itawamba Agricultural High School certainly aren't in the same league as an organization covering for pedophiles, I'm not left feeling appreciably better about whoever it is that's running things. It certainly doesn't seem like a higher power should be letting all these many, many things, both great and 'small', go so very wrong. 


I guess in my rather tenuous belief system, if I have faith in anything it's that cruelty in any form is just plain wrong. 

Palate Cleanser...

Prickly Pear Cactus: Sharp spines erupt from the skin of a prickly pear cactus in the Galápagos Islands.

Photograph by Tim Laman, National Geographic Society

I'm thinking this palate cleanser is a perfect preparation for this evening's course of Teflon Pope, with a side of Maureen Dowd and Sinead O'Connor. Prickly is good...

Biding Time, and the wonders of Philip Pullman

Well, I have to admit that the whole business about Phoebe really has stuck with me long and hard this week. I keep thinking about the poor girl and the incredible and intentional cruelty she seemed to have endured, along with the even more incredible indifference of the adults in her school who witnessed some of it.

The week is getting away from me and, as I read article after article in the US and international press about the Teflon Rat, I mean Pope, and the defense of the Catholic Church, I am so offended and yet feel as if it would be wrong to set myself up as the ranting anti-Catholic blogger because the scope would just be too damn narrow.

A draining week thus far... So busy with issues for the new house and for work related things that I've had little time to write. Worried about the youngest going off to a school trip on Friday through Sunday and his perpetual tendency, and temptation, to crash off the gluten-free diet.

How I'm feeling:

The Martyr of Solway by John Everett Millais

The reality:

Things are pretty much on the upswing, even if I want to kill my windows and door people. Kinda sorta. And well... there's all this other drama going on but I must be discreet. Sigh.

Yes, I need to have some breathing room. But on the positive side, I received my gorgeous copy of Pullman's new book from the UK this afternoon. I'm just so excited. So I'll pop back later and rant some more about the Teflon Pope, the dangers of stepparents visiting Kyrgyzstan (is a Stan tour complete without going there? Hell yes, I hope) and how amazed I am that Pullman's YA fiction is still under the radar in the US. Nothing like books to spread reason, I mean sedition, where the church is concered.

PC #11

Dreaming, originally uploaded by acreativemint.

Dreaming by acreativemint

Resolving My Attention Deficit and the Cruelty of Children

After crawling back home from Seattle last night shortly before midnight, I'm faced this morning with the urgent need to write something to satisfy my craving to write. But where to start? The plethora of material is just daunting. There's the Teflon Pope's Easter Week Vatican backlash against the NY Times which is now making allusions to the Holocaust and persecution of Jews (and I am just so impressed with the Vatican on this one...), or the Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams (who liked one of my all time favorite fantasy series, His Dark Materials so how cool is he) dissing the Irish Catholic Church on lack of credibility or the Obama administration's offshore drilling proposals, or their take on wiretaps or the ultimate Mean Girl scenario in Massachusetts or a food post on seafood in Florida (supposedly local but not) or iPad frenzy.

I guess I'm going to have to go with Phoebe. Back in January, fifteen year old Phoebe Prince hanged herself following months of bullying. Nine youths have been charged as being involved in her death. 

I'm really having such a hard time with this story. My child is routinely bullied at school both for his short stature and his immature social skill set. Meanly bullied. He's the original short fuse child and has so many triggers, having been adopted at age 8 and having had enough bad stuff happen to him by then to last an entire lifetime and still have some left over. So really, the bullying thing, so very not okay with me. His school is middling supportive. Especially after I informed them about the tenth grade kid who was harassing him by grabbing his butt last year in the hallways and said if it happened again, I'd call the police and file a report alleging assault. Yeah, that one kind of got their attention. They knew I meant it. Must have been the menace in my voice. Oh wait. Must have been the fact that I'm involved in the child welfare court system. Yeah. That one.

And so I relate to the whole issue of bullying from the perspective of a parent. Schools are so prone to not finding ways to handle things deftly on this issue. And even when things go very and tragically wrong, they deny all culpability. You have to be really aggressive to get progress on bullying of your children and then you have to hope that the school itself doesn't bully your child. After all, I'm lucky in that my child is in a private school that costs a fortune. I can always use that angle, the one where I'm paying you to take care of, not allow wholesale abuse of, my child, to safeguard him after I've complained. But what options did Phoebe's parents have? They reported it twice to the school and if you believe the investigative report in the NY Times there is ample evidence that the school faculty, administration and even nurse knew this beautiful child was being abused. And for what? She slept with two boys? She spoke with a brogue? A boy who liked her was promised to a cool set girl and she trespassed by default because he asked her out? How cruel would a band of youths have to be to make a child hang herself? She was insulted openly in the classrooms and even in front of unmoved faculty. She was harassed in person, by phone and online. 

The District Attorney in this case has taken a lot of heat in the Massachusetts press for some of the charges filed against the nine youths. Especially the statutory rape charges against the 17 and 18 year old boys who were involved with her and then joined to varying extents in the bullying by speaking badly of her. And then there are the seven girls who are charged. Some are charged as minors and some as adults. The felony charges include violation of civil rights with bodily injury, harassment, stalking and disturbing a school assembly. According to reports in the Times, District Attorney Elizabeth Scheibel was quoted as saying “The actions or inactions of some adults at the school were troublesome, but did not violate any laws." 

So what's a parent to do when their child is bullied this badly? Call the police? Hire an attorney or go to Legal Aid? I guess I'd have done all that. But that would be if my child reveals the extent of his or her suffering, which all too often youths are afraid to do. For instance, I found out about that butt-grabbing harassment only by chance, following up on a passing comment by my child and his wanting to take a different route to go retrieve something from his locker when I picked him up at school one afternoon. I asked why he was taking a much longer route and pressed and pressed until he told me why. It turned out that a teacher had witnessed my child getting this abuse and said nothing. In fact, another teacher had reported my son for striking his abuser in retaliation for his being grabbed by the much older and bigger boy! Kids in this age range have to rely on attentive adults, who look out for them. Like school staff who are there to see it happening. I really have to question what the faculty and administration thought was happening when they saw Phoebe Prince repeatedly in tears and having so much trouble coping day after miserable day. I mean yeah, we're all just human and maybe they didn't know it was so very, very bad. But someone should have thought to ask what was going on, what could be done to make it better. It's just astonishing to think that a 15 year old girl hung herself and then they noticed they had a problem. Talk about attention deficit...

So I'll get back to the Teflon Pope later. For the present, I'm just going to ruminate on what savages children can be. And how there's still something so dark in all of us that we can be so cruel as a species. And how utterly indifferent people can become to suffering. 

Palate Cleanser #10

Pink Hyacinths, originally uploaded by o_lesyk.

Much needed...

What a World, What a World Redux the Third

So I'm on vacation in the Pacific Northwest, dealing with aging parents and cold rain and coughing kids. But the real world is an even colder and sharper place. The real world has viral video games like RapeLay, a Japanese game (and I use that term quite generously) that actually first came out in 2006 in which the player/perpetrator gets to seek revenge on a woman by selecting victims in her family to rape repeatedly, by various means, also selected, and even to impregnate her and urge her to have an abortion. CNN had a splashy cover image on the their website about the game.

So I've really tried to put this game, and the CNN coverage of it, out of my head since I read about it two days ago but I just can't. First, there is the game itself, which is so obviously objectionable and which has been rendered "viral" because of the mass interest created in coverage of its heinousness. Part of that seems all too familiar to me as a parent. I used to explain repeatedly to my two older kids and even to my youngest why it was that various Grand Theft Auto video game offerings had no place in our home. (Particularly ironic with the youngest since he's adopted and his brother in law is a police sergeant). But where do I even begin with a game as heinous as RapeLay?  But there was this second thing that stuck in my mind. When I googled for a bit more information on the game, I saw it had been around for about four years. Where was the ire and outrage when the game was released four years ago? How could it be around for four whole years and just be getting all this outcry now I kept asking myself? And why would CNN be all over the issue now?

Taking compassion fatigue to a new level, repeated exposure to violence inures young people to it. It sets a new threshold for normalcy that is simply frightening to contemplate. We know this from all kinds of studies from  the dehumanized Lost Boys in Sudan to young men inculcated by the Taliban to young people ensnared by various terror organizations throughout the world into thinking that life is worthless unless it's their own or their leaders and their ticket to the afterlife is to become suicide bombers. And filling news websites with images and rhetoric that express alarm and horror in a sensationalized fashion may even be contributing to the problem, especially if we look at the DART analyses on the effect of visual imagery of trauma and the viewing audience. So what about the potential for exploiting the information in order to up your visitor clicks onto your site? Hmmmm. Would CNN be using biased and exploitative reporting here? Au contraire, mais non! How could they?

After not being able to get the report and the whole "game" out of my head, I dug around and found the Kotaku article, which was something of a gold mine at least in terms of further information and context. It seems that in 2009 the gaming industry itself, within Japan, put a stop to production and development of games involving such sexual malice. I should note that they didn't put a stop to the release of games already in the release pipeline although they did rename them.  And what can we say about a gaming culture that even developed rape games in the first place? But anyway, what the Kotaku article makes you wonder about is what CNN was up to with their report, especially the context of their report. What are we reading when we read the news these days and why do we have to do all kinds of research to make sure what we read is true? All I know is that paying attention to the news is getting to be an exhausting process. Between trying to prove to my mother that Glenn Beck is lying and distorting facts, statistics and reality, and researching even reports on supposedly neutral outlets like CNN, who even has the time for news? Being sure it really is news (rather than opinion or reality-based fiction) is becoming such a trial.

The strategy of exploiting and generating more and more outrageous sound bites is so harmful to our literate and caring society. It's great to see the world out there and know where our ire and moral outrage should be directed. 

If it hasn't been bled dry by a sensationalized and distorted press presenting information out of date and out of context.