*Transcendental *Logic

When trying to rectify society’s many ills, how important is policing the use of sensitive words?

Concepts is one thing — I’m all in favor of dragging bad thinking out into the light and making everybody watch while you shoot it in the face.  But what about words, just words, not used as a part of any particular concept; for instance, when a sensitive word is used as slang to refer to something completely different from its normal usage?

Recently, on The Consumerist, an article about credit cards had in its first sentence the phrase, "So-and-so is getting raped with a 24% interest rate…"  …And many of the feministas went ballistic.

I’m caught in the middle on this one.  I care deeply about issues surrounding rape, but I think those issues are things like "dismally bad prosecutions", "negligence in reporting", "lack of victim support", "lack of education for both sexes on the topic", and "perpetuation of concepts that portray women as inherently submissive and men as forgivably aggressive". 

Much as I ponder it, I just can’t see "rape used as a slang term for egregious violation" being something that, if addressed, will make any positive impact at all in the frankly disgusting way much of our society views and deals with the obscene crime that is the real thing.  At best, it will make people recoil from the word itself , as we do with all societally-unapproved words — but what good has the national recoil from the N-word done for civil rights?  What impact on extramarital sex has been made by our societal repugnance of the f-word?  I tend to think that focusing on the word is diverting focus from the issue.

I don’t like being the person who tells anyone trying to speak up about an important topic to shut up and quit making those of us who are serious about it look bad, I really don’t.  My hometown is a racially-charged area, which is probably part of where I get both that tendency, and the phobia of giving in to it.  But I can’t help it:   I do think the women going on about how awful and inappropriate and insensitive it is to use the word "rape" in a way they don’t approve of sound whiny, over-emotional and generally ripe for a good Ignoring The Hell Out Of.  Plus, I have a good bit of knowledge about the language, and "rape" has been used as a hyperbolic term for violation for so long, and by so many people, that in some dictionaries that particular usage isn’t even listed as slang anymore.  I’m also a writer — to me, all usages of all words are permissible if they work, and a word itself can’t really be guilty of anything.  It’s the concepts that are dangerous, and I confess openly that I don’t see anything wrong with the concept that usury in the form of a 24% monthly interest rate is akin to a terrible, nonconsentual violation.  It’s not an exact comparison, but nor is it supposed to be…it’s called a metaphor, and darnit, people who overreact to metaphors (assuming the concept itself isn’t harmful) just strike me as dumb.  Now, if the sentence had been about how women shouldn’t manage their own finances, or how everything started going to shit when women started buying sex-toys, or about how so-and-so was so angered by this interest rate that he might just have to rape a customer-service rep, well, that’d be different!

Based on those arguments, I’m mad at these women for potentially making people who might otherwise listen more likely to roll their eyes the next time someone brings up rape.  I really think it cheapens the severity of the real issues to act like a traumatized kindergartner every time someone says a word that makes you cringe.  Not that I can’t understand why it’d make you cringe — to this day, I can’t watch even a mild rape-scene on TV or in a movie without feeling sick to my stomach — but learn to separate your emotional reaction from the issues that people who don’t know you need to be educated about, eh? 

Now.  Whenever I get angry like this about, say, complaints about what seem like minor or overblown aspects of racism, delivered by people of color, I default to "shut up you don’t know what you’re talking about" mode — as a person of little pigment myself, I feel I don’t really have the right or the background to say who should be speaking up and how.  But I am a rape survivor, as are many (close to most) women I know, and that makes me all the more anxious that the topic receive the treatment it deserves, and not get derailed by childish nitpicking. 

So, I honestly can’t tell if I’m right or wrong here. 

What do ya’ll think?

Exhibit One, your honors:

The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there. -Yasutani Roshi, Zen master (1885-1973)

…That’s a representational exhibit, mind you, since that saying or versions of it have been floating around literally for centuries now, and if you look you can find them everywhere from books to t-shirts to churches to the mouths of babes.

It’s a really common saying to run into…but how many of us have really heard it, for all that?

The “I’m in here, you’re out there” feeling is very, very fundamental to the usual human experience, I think.  I remember realizing it when I was about eight, and thinking, as I bet most people do, that what I’d found was a core truth.  Many years later, after much reading and pondering and yelling, I decided to agree with the Zen masters — the feeling of being separated from everyone else, everything else even, IS a delusion.  I won’t go into why, but the longer I work on the question, the more it seems like that has to be the answer.

But this is not a realization that I have real-ized (”made real”), so much as decided to agree with because, on balance, it makes more sense to me than the way I actually feel.  It’s a tough thing, to decide to believe that you’re delusional about something; it feels like stepping onto a dangerous plank, where you violate the evidence of your senses in favor of what works in the abstract, or in your guts.

Still, years later and I haven’t been talked out of my position yet — and it’s not that people haven’t tried!  I think I’ve come closer to actually real-izing the truth of the fundamental oneness of life (Life, actually, since if there’s only one of it, it’s a proper noun, yes?) — I’ve caught glimpses of it, with my senses as well as my mind, and it’s seemed more and more solid, and more right, the more I contemplate it.  But it seems to be one of those things that many people will just have to believe in first, and work to understand later.

That’s not usually an M.O. I’m okay with.  I mean, in this case the belief itself seems to be harmless (it only seems to inspire compassion, tolerance, etc.), or even helpful, so there isn’t much to object to; but in general, I don’t like pre-validated beliefs at all, at all. 

*sigh*

Some days it seems like the Universe is deliberately tailoring the challenges you get so they require the very hardest things you could be asked to do, doesn’t it??

Okay, check it out — I think I have a sixth sense. (Or a seventh, depending on your view on such things.)

It’s in my nose.

I’ve had it my whole life, to some degree, but it’s only lately that I’ve really been noticing it. I still can’t figure out what it does, exactly. But I know it’s there:

* It’s physically located in two spots on either side of the bridge of my nose, slightly tip-wards of where my glasses sit.
* Sometimes those spots get sensitive, for reasons I can’t determine yet. It’s not painful, but it can be uncomfortable.
* When it gets sensitive, rubbing the spot helps temporarily.
* But touching this spot has always had an odd effect, which is also possibly the most striking form of synaesthesia I experience. There’s a smell that comes to me when I touch the nose-spots that I never smell any other time. I remember noticing it in puberty first, and thinking then that it was a weird result of something on my fingers reacting with oils on my face or something. My boy was the first to suggest that the smell (which I now know isn’t on my fingers) was a synaesthesic response to stimulus.
* I’ve gotten to calling the spots my “shark pits”, since sharks have a sense in a similar place that we find fairly mysterious.
* I’ve also noticed the shark pits reacting to something, though like I said, I can’t pin down what. If I’m walking or otherwise moving already, it’ll make me turn my head involuntarily; if I’m still, it feels like someone’s pulling on my face without touching my skin. (As I told my love, “It’s like someone’s grabbed my aura.”)

So. Obvious conclusions regarding my freakhood aside, what’s anybody think? Do I have a sixth physical sense? What might it be reacting to, and importantly, how would I test it to see? And is it just too, too horrible to keep calling it “shark pits”?

War.

Politics.

Systemic Misleading and Betrayal of Public Trust.

Casualties — your friends and mine. People’s children.

The most important heroes war breeds aren’t on the battlefield, if you ask me — they’re in the other skirmish, the Information War that happens in the shadow of every “deployment”, hiding in the foxhole of sanitized language and sniping any rogue reporters that come into view.

In this war, media conglomeration and the epic economic influence of the corporations who now depend upon continuous conflict to keep their wallets fat have functioned as a nearly-unbreakable shield for the fighters on the government’s side of the infobattle, the Truth War, the fight that’ll determine the content of both the past — how history is written — and the future.

In the last great illegal, unjustifiable war, the last moneychild of the “military-industrial complex” so feared by Wilson and Jefferson particularly, there were many heroes in the infobattle. Infiltrators and spies, rebels and freedom fighters. Like Daniel Ellsberg. Because of him and his very real sacrifices, people knew that the government had lied when we went to war, knew it in spite of the stranglehold Nixon kept on such information, and that knowledge changed the American view of our government forever. (Perhaps not enough, but that’s a separate argument.)

Who, do you think, are the heroes this time?

I will say this (though my instinct is to duck as I type it): The heroes are not the soldiers, as a whole. There are soldiers beloved of me too — living and not — and the job they do is dangerous and brave. But danger and bravery aren’t what make heroes.

Heroes, particularly, do not harm people solely because someone in power tells them to — it’s just not in the job description. When I say “heroes”, I mean people, like Daniel Ellsberg, who defy the all-powerful bad guys, taking on great personal risk and loss to do so, for the benefit of the people who would otherwise be powerless. That’s a hero, and that doesn’t mean a soldier can’t be a hero, but simply being a soldier doesn’t make you one, popular rhetoric aside.

But I’m casting around in my mind, and I don’t think I know about the heroes in this war, and that bothers me. There almost certainly are some, but are they so beleagured and outgunned that they’re doomed to obscurity?

Okay, so a funny thing happened the other day. My husband, who has what can truthfully be described as “funny hair” (I think it’s totally cool, myself), was driving down the road and got pulled over. The cop asked him to step out of the vehicle, at which point my lovely boy replied, “Are you asking to search my vehicle, sir?”

The cop sez, “Maybe.”

Wonderful funny-haired husband replies, “Because I have no problem stepping out of the vehicle, or allowing you to search me to ascertain your safety, but if you’re asking to search my vehicle, then I’m going to assert my fourth-amendment rights and ask you to obtain a warrant.”

Long pause.

Finally cop sez, “Just get the f*ck out of here.” And leaves.

Now, if there was a legitimate reason to pull my husband over, say, because he was speeding or had a busted taillight or something, wouldn’t the cop have stayed to write a ticket? More importantly, does it interest you that there are active-duty police officers out there who flee at the very mention of your fourth-amendment rights, all but waving a flag announcing that they were planning to violate them?

What if this were a cop in your hometown, or close to it? Would it interest you then?

I won’t hesitate to say that it interests ME. I’ve had my share of awful run-ins with cops flagrantly flaunting their power, obviously confident that they could do whatever they hell they wanted because they were never going to get caught and even if they did, it’s “your word against theirs.” Because necessarily, a cop is a better person than you…right?

Want to try a fun experiment? Tape-record or videotape your next encounter with a cop. Any encounter — simple traffic stops are fine. Or rather, try to. Because in every case I’ve ever seen or heard of, the cop will freak out and basically refuse to do anything while the tape/camera is rolling. Oh, um, don’t try this with a good recorder — I’ve seen them get broken and/or stolen more than once, trying this stunt.

Well, here’s an interesting idea: If you search Google for the terms “rate company”, you get about 13 million hits. If you searched for “rate cops”, you would have gotten a hit for RateMyCop.com — that is, until GoDaddy pulled the plug on them earlier this week, due to–just guess–strenuous protests from cops. (Note: They seem to have it back up by now…for how long remains to be seen.)

So, if nobody bats an eye at letting the public rate private corporations with which they deal financially, then why the big stink over letting them rate public servants in whose hands they frequently put their lives, and their freedoms?

The cops, of course, say it “puts their lives in danger”, which is a stock cop response for everything from requiring them to not engage in high-speed chases in quiet neighborhoods to asking them to please not run traffic lights unless they can prove they had to. In this case, the site uses names and sometimes badge numbers — information that any citizen is supposed to be able to have from a cop whenever they request it — but not pictures or personal information. It also doesn’t include undercover cops at all; only uniformed officers. So where’s the danger? A California police chief did speak up with a reason that sounds more likely — they’re worried about “unfair maligning”. To which the site’s owners say hey, cops are free to comment too.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. You can read an article about RateMyCop’s takedown here, or of course, visit the site itself.

…

HOLY COW UPDATE: The same cop pulled my husband over again today! And he was very obvious that he was only doing it to harass. But my boy and I had just discussed RateMyCop this morning, so what do you think he (my boy) did? He told the cop to hand over his name and badge number, “because I want to post about this on RateMyCop.com”.

The cop had almost certainly never heard of the site, but once again, he went pale and went away without incident. See what even the threat of accountability does?? (BIG thanks to my boy for unwittingly providing such an interesting case for discussing this topic, heh.) …Of course, whether we never hear from that cop again, or he becomes a serious problem, is still up in the air. It’s a county Sheriff boy, and they’re generally pretty awful because, as I understand it, part of the qualification to get that job is that you have to have been a *prison guard* — eek. Because guarding convicts is such wonderful real-world practice for protecting and serving the public…

Anyway, that’s enough babble from me for today. Back to my ginger tea and kleenex…