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Wednesday, November 02, 2005

Bear life

With characteristic pithiness, Atrios observes,

Between Horny Bear Scooter and Strip Search Sammy I’m really starting to wonder what the hell is up with your modern Republican party.

But that snippet seemed a little too pithy, so I followed the links to Amanda’s house, and she led me to Shakespeare’s Sister, where I read all kinds of things about Scooter Libby’s 1996 novel, The Apprentice, via this “Talk of the Town” item by Lauren Collins in the latest New Yorker.

All of which is prelude to saying that I was just a-skimmin’ the Internets one fall evening when I came across this passage, penned by Scooter Libby himself:

At age ten the madam put the child in a cage with a bear trained to couple with young girls so the girls would be frigid and not fall in love with their patrons. They fed her through the bars and aroused the bear with a stick when it seemed to lose interest.

And I thought, well, now, between Alito’s approval of a clearly unwarranted strip-search of a ten-year-old girl, and Scooter’s little fantasy of ten-year-old girls being raped by bears, yes, there really does seem to be something quite odd going on here.

Now, I know there is no indication whether, in Libby’s novel, the girls are strip-searched before they are raped by bears, and of course I know there’s no paper trail as to whether Alito would approve of such a search.  And I know, from reading the comments at Shakes’s Sis’s place, that there are some readers out there who’ll say, “get a grip already, you liberals!  Scooter Libby wasn’t proposing legislation that would require ten-year-old girls to be raped by bears!  He was merely fantasizing about ten-year-old girls being raped by bears!  Yeesh!  Whatta bunch of literal-minded types you liberals are!  No appreciation whatsoever for the right-wing literary avant-garde!”

But still, the evidence does seem to be piling up, like unto a heap of naked, abject bodies, that there’s something very rotten, very foul living in the heart of the darkness of the right-wing imagination.  James Dobson and his extraordinary lifelong fetish for beating small children with belts and spoons, even when the children are as young as eighteen months.  Rick Santorum and his fears about men having sex with dogs (for John Cornyn, it was box turtles).  Alberto Gonzales and David Addington (Scooter’s replacement!) and the whole prisoner-torture crew.  Rush Limbaugh and his hand-rubbing glee over the Abu Ghraib photographs, likening them to Madonna kissing Britney on MTV.  And, of course, the Abu Ghraib - Guatanamo phenomenon itself, with its PUC-fucking, its serial rapes of women and young boys, its lethal, days-long beatings of kids who just happened to drive by at the wrong time.

Folks, I know it’s a little hard to believe that the party in power is the party of torture, child-beating, and strip searches of innocent prepubescent girls.  You know, next to this stuff, a little abuse of parliamentary procedure here, a crooked Supreme Court decision there, and couple of well-coordinated smear campaigns against critics of the Iraq War look like plain vanilla evil. 

So I asked a couple of scientists and philosophers what they make of all this, and they said, “Michael, we don’t believe in ‘repression’ or the ‘unconscious’ or weirdo psychoanalytic things like that.  Remember, Freud’s work was never empirically verified; strictly speaking, it’s not a science at all.  You literary critics really should stop making up these extravagant ‘explanations’ of human behavior and listen to the neurobiologists.  After all, Alan Sokal proved that none of you know what you’re talking about.”

Well, since they were no help, I turned back to Shakespeare’s Sister, who writes,

What kind of mind comes up with this shit, dreams up scenarios where children are raped by animals to train them in prostitution? Oh, right. A conservative one. One that has toiled under a lifetime of repression, and spent its time dreaming up legislation designed to control the sexual freedom of women and gays. It isn’t enough that men like Scooter Libby must repress their own sexualities; they have to oppress anyone who doesn’t succumb to exhortations to do the same.

They like to say that the sexual liberation of women and gays has some alleged detrimental affect on society, but I don’t see it. What I do see is a collection of perverts whose own sickness pours out of them given the slightest opportunity, and whose fervent belief yet that they are the moral ones encourages them to create a whole other generation of screwed-up people, as they legislate the promotion of abstinence, repression, in sex ed classes.

To which I have to add, remember the good old days, when Newt Gingrich, accomplished womanizer and sick-wife-abandoner, was telling us that Democratic policies were to blame when Susan Smith left her two kids to drown in a car?

I think that the mother killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things.  The only way you get change is to vote Republican.

Well, that was in 1994.  Since then, y’all have voted Republican.  And my, how things have changed.

I’m beginning to think that Hunter S. Thompson checked out last year only partly out of political despair—and mostly because he had the entirely plausible feeling that not even he could plumb the depths of America’s right-wing imagination any longer.

Posted by Michael on 11/02 at 03:24 PM
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