It's the Only Thing

The child-rape scandal at Penn State continues to unfold, and I confess to some relief that for once, words that are often thrown around too freely, like "pedophile" or "rape" itself, are actually the right tools for the job. "Pedophile" has been been inflated to the point where it is used any time there's a notable age-difference between partners, even if the younger partner is thirty; but this time the victims are in fact prepubescent children, and they were forced, so "rape" is the correct word once again. Not that it matters, since a ten-year-old of either sex is not allowed to give consent to sexual penetration by a sixty-year-old male in any state of the Union; the overturning of sodomy laws in 2003 has no effect on that. It would be interesting to know how Joe Sandusky worked around little details like this in what passed for his mind. He can hardly have been unaware of the law, or the moral issues; or even, "This is a lot of fun, but what if someone walked in and caught me?" Someone did, after all, but all that happened to Sandusky was that he lost his keys to the shower room and had to take the boys home to diddle them.

The Penn State coverup echoes the Roman Catholic Church's coverup of sexual abuse by clergy. Despite the high moral values claimed by religion and elite sports, neither institution could work up much concern over the sexual use of children and youth by adults who had official charge over them. Given the official hysteria about pedophilia in anti-gay campaigns, it's fascinating that, confronted with cases of actual pedophilia, coaching and religious hierarchies don't in practice consider it a big deal. (This might be a useful point to bring up when antigay bigots start frothing about pedophilia: why are they so worked up about a possibility that isn't even theoretically on the table -- If we pass a gay-rights law, day-care centers will have to hire known child molesters! -- but not very excited about institutions in their midst that have employed and protected known child molesters? Indeed, they continue to revere them, and defend them vehemently. More attention should be focused on this, and less on indignant screaming about whether homosexuality is a choice.)

It's a reminder that the word "rape" has only recently been dragged, kicking and screaming, to a new and specific meaning of the imposition of sexual acts (a messy category itself) by force on an unwilling partner. In practice and in theory, "rape" has included consensual acts where the "victim" was not allowed by law or custom to give consent: a white woman to a black or lower class male, a physically mature individual to an even slightly older one -- and in practice and social attitudes, the victim has often been blamed even more than the perpetrator: once penetrated, a woman is polluted, so she must have or get a husband, which justifies and covers the pollution, or she'll be branded a whore. ("Sodomy" is another tricky term: it often carries connotation of force, because no male of any age is permitted to consent to being abased in this way, so any "sodomy" is forced by definition.) "Rape," like many other sexual offenses, really means that a nominally clean person has been polluted, and her or his consent is irrelevant, which is probably why there's so much confusion about the issue.

Another confused area, of course, is mob violence, which is what got me started on this post. Penn State students rioted the other night in support of Coach Joe Paterno, who for the better part of a decade covered up the sexual abuse of children in his facilities even after it was reported to him. (A smaller group of students also gathered around Paterno's house to support him, crying "We love you, Joe!") This even jolted Jon Stewart; but maybe football is just inherently less important than basketball. FoxSports reported:

At around 12:20am local time Thursday, the university issued an official police dispersal order via Facebook, warning students to vacate downtown State College immediately. It came after several violent scenes in which protesters flipped over a media van and destroyed other property.

Well, there you go! I now see how valuable social media like Facebook really are.

About 2,000 people gathered at Old Main and moved to an area called Beaver Canyon, a street ringed by student apartments that were used in past riots to pelt police, myFOXphilly.com reported.

But while several arrests were made, the disorder was controlled amid a strong presence from state police as the crowds returned to Old Main.

(Bold type is mine.)

To add to the entertainment, the Phelps clan, aka Westboro Baptist Church, is planning to picket Penn State, to the indignation of some groups there. "[T]he radical group has caused the Penn State Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Ally Student Alliance to team up with the Penn State Atheist/Agnostic Association in a counter-protest."

Alyssia Motah, co-president of the LGBTQA Student Alliance, says that WBC's presence will be a chance to be heard.

"The fact that they're going to be here is an opportunity for us to react and we intend to do that," Motah said.

Maybe they should chip in for WBC's travel expenses, for giving them an "opportunity to react."

Compare this to the unprovoked police attacks on nonviolent protesters in New York, Boston, Oakland and elsewhere. If the Penn State rioters had been upset about something not related to college sports, I think we'd have seen pepper spray, tear gas, tazers, clubs, shields, and water cannons, and there'd have been a lot more than "several" arrests. None of these police sex toys have been mentioned in any report of the Penn State riots I've seen, and according to the FoxSports story, Penn State students have a history of 'pelting' police in past riots.

Amartya Sen wrote in The Argumentative Indian (Penguin/Allen Lane, 2005), page 237, emphasis mine:

This inequality [of physical violence] has been traced by some commentators to the physical asymmetry of women and men, with men having greater immediate power in the gross bodily sense. Undoubtedly, this asymmetry does have a substantial role in the prevalence and survival of this terrible state of affairs, made worse by periods of particular vulnerability for women, such as pregnancy and early post-natal phases. But in addition to the physical aspects of this inequality, attitudinal factors cannot but be major influences. The possibility of physical violence can actually be used (to settle a dispute or gain an advantage) only when the permissibility of such behaviour is accepted, explicitly or by implication.

I think this goes a long way toward explaining the differing police responses to the Occupy movement and to the Penn State rioters. It's considered natural, if slightly tacky, for sports fans to riot after a loss, or a victory, or the dismissal of a winning coach; so the police treat them gently, even in the face of much greater and more overt provocation. Even political disruptions are okay, as long as they come from the Right. Remember the "unruly" Tea Party mobs, organized from above by right-wing organizations and media, at town hall meetings with Congresspeople in 2009? (The linked story mentions no arrests, let alone broken heads, resulting from the police intervention.) The Right's response to criticism was that the Left had done the same in our day -- which was true enough, but the Left got much harsher treatment for it, and continues to do so. As Sen suggests, that's not accidental. It won't be easy to change, either, but we should all be aware of the attitudes involved.

It's the Only Thing

The child-rape scandal at Penn State continues to unfold, and I confess to some relief that for once, words that are often thrown around too freely, like "pedophile" or "rape" itself, are actually the right tools for the job. "Pedophile" has been been inflated to the point where it is used any time there's a notable age-difference between partners, even if the younger partner is thirty; but this time the victims are in fact prepubescent children, and they were forced, so "rape" is the correct word once again. Not that it matters, since a ten-year-old of either sex is not allowed to give consent to sexual penetration by a sixty-year-old male in any state of the Union; the overturning of sodomy laws in 2003 has no effect on that. It would be interesting to know how Joe Sandusky worked around little details like this in what passed for his mind. He can hardly have been unaware of the law, or the moral issues; or even, "This is a lot of fun, but what if someone walked in and caught me?" Someone did, after all, but all that happened to Sandusky was that he lost his keys to the shower room and had to take the boys home to diddle them.

The Penn State coverup echoes the Roman Catholic Church's coverup of sexual abuse by clergy. Despite the high moral values claimed by religion and elite sports, neither institution could work up much concern over the sexual use of children and youth by adults who had official charge over them. Given the official hysteria about pedophilia in anti-gay campaigns, it's fascinating that, confronted with cases of actual pedophilia, coaching and religious hierarchies don't in practice consider it a big deal. (This might be a useful point to bring up when antigay bigots start frothing about pedophilia: why are they so worked up about a possibility that isn't even theoretically on the table -- If we pass a gay-rights law, day-care centers will have to hire known child molesters! -- but not very excited about institutions in their midst that have employed and protected known child molesters? Indeed, they continue to revere them, and defend them vehemently. More attention should be focused on this, and less on indignant screaming about whether homosexuality is a choice.)

It's a reminder that the word "rape" has only recently been dragged, kicking and screaming, to a new and specific meaning of the imposition of sexual acts (a messy category itself) by force on an unwilling partner. In practice and in theory, "rape" has included consensual acts where the "victim" was not allowed by law or custom to give consent: a white woman to a black or lower class male, a physically mature individual to an even slightly older one -- and in practice and social attitudes, the victim has often been blamed even more than the perpetrator: once penetrated, a woman is polluted, so she must have or get a husband, which justifies and covers the pollution, or she'll be branded a whore. ("Sodomy" is another tricky term: it often carries connotation of force, because no male of any age is permitted to consent to being abased in this way, so any "sodomy" is forced by definition.) "Rape," like many other sexual offenses, really means that a nominally clean person has been polluted, and her or his consent is irrelevant, which is probably why there's so much confusion about the issue.

Another confused area, of course, is mob violence, which is what got me started on this post. Penn State students rioted the other night in support of Coach Joe Paterno, who for the better part of a decade covered up the sexual abuse of children in his facilities even after it was reported to him. (A smaller group of students also gathered around Paterno's house to support him, crying "We love you, Joe!") This even jolted Jon Stewart; but maybe football is just inherently less important than basketball. FoxSports reported:

At around 12:20am local time Thursday, the university issued an official police dispersal order via Facebook, warning students to vacate downtown State College immediately. It came after several violent scenes in which protesters flipped over a media van and destroyed other property.

Well, there you go! I now see how valuable social media like Facebook really are.

About 2,000 people gathered at Old Main and moved to an area called Beaver Canyon, a street ringed by student apartments that were used in past riots to pelt police, myFOXphilly.com reported.

But while several arrests were made, the disorder was controlled amid a strong presence from state police as the crowds returned to Old Main.

(Bold type is mine.)

To add to the entertainment, the Phelps clan, aka Westboro Baptist Church, is planning to picket Penn State, to the indignation of some groups there. "[T]he radical group has caused the Penn State Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Ally Student Alliance to team up with the Penn State Atheist/Agnostic Association in a counter-protest."

Alyssia Motah, co-president of the LGBTQA Student Alliance, says that WBC's presence will be a chance to be heard.

"The fact that they're going to be here is an opportunity for us to react and we intend to do that," Motah said.

Maybe they should chip in for WBC's travel expenses, for giving them an "opportunity to react."

Compare this to the unprovoked police attacks on nonviolent protesters in New York, Boston, Oakland and elsewhere. If the Penn State rioters had been upset about something not related to college sports, I think we'd have seen pepper spray, tear gas, tazers, clubs, shields, and water cannons, and there'd have been a lot more than "several" arrests. None of these police sex toys have been mentioned in any report of the Penn State riots I've seen, and according to the FoxSports story, Penn State students have a history of 'pelting' police in past riots.

Amartya Sen wrote in The Argumentative Indian (Penguin/Allen Lane, 2005), page 237, emphasis mine:

This inequality [of physical violence] has been traced by some commentators to the physical asymmetry of women and men, with men having greater immediate power in the gross bodily sense. Undoubtedly, this asymmetry does have a substantial role in the prevalence and survival of this terrible state of affairs, made worse by periods of particular vulnerability for women, such as pregnancy and early post-natal phases. But in addition to the physical aspects of this inequality, attitudinal factors cannot but be major influences. The possibility of physical violence can actually be used (to settle a dispute or gain an advantage) only when the permissibility of such behaviour is accepted, explicitly or by implication.

I think this goes a long way toward explaining the differing police responses to the Occupy movement and to the Penn State rioters. It's considered natural, if slightly tacky, for sports fans to riot after a loss, or a victory, or the dismissal of a winning coach; so the police treat them gently, even in the face of much greater and more overt provocation. Even political disruptions are okay, as long as they come from the Right. Remember the "unruly" Tea Party mobs, organized from above by right-wing organizations and media, at town hall meetings with Congresspeople in 2009? (The linked story mentions no arrests, let alone broken heads, resulting from the police intervention.) The Right's response to criticism was that the Left had done the same in our day -- which was true enough, but the Left got much harsher treatment for it, and continues to do so. As Sen suggests, that's not accidental. It won't be easy to change, either, but we should all be aware of the attitudes involved.

England's Green and Pleasant Land

I drove down to Kentucky this weekend for a relative's birthday, so I heard a lot more corporate-media news on the radio than I usually do. There were several references to the London riots, of course, and I was struck (though not surprised) by the spin that the newscasters usually took: the rioters were just a bunch of bored kids who'd had too long a summer. Not a word about the ongoing police violence that killed 333 people between 1998 and 2010 without a single police officer being convicted, or about the peaceful protests about this and other issues that were ignored. Richard Seymour linked to a photo of the gun that killed Mark Duggan, and as he said, "That gun is a beast. It's designed to decimate flesh. Police use these weapons on citizens. The idea that they haven't got enough weapons or powers is fueled by a juvenile revenge fantasy, not reality."



RWA1, of course, rose to the occasion with rants about the decline of the social contract and a link to this Wall Street Journal op-ed piece by Theodore Dalrymple:

The youth of Britain have long placed a de facto curfew on the old, who in most places would no more think of venturing forth after dark than would peasants in Bram Stoker's Transylvania. Indeed, well before the riots last week, respectable persons would not venture into the centers of most British cities or towns on Friday and Saturday nights, for fear—and in the certainty—of encountering drunken and aggressive youngsters.

And so on. This is disturbing, all right, and indicates serious problems with English society. But I can't help wondering how to square Dalrymple's account with the facts of 333 people killed in police custody. (One hundred of that number were killed between April 2004 and March 2005. Which, I suppose, is the tip of the iceberg, with more people beaten or otherwise injured by the police but who didn't die. And then there are the times when the police are the rioters.) Dalrymple doesn't even mention Mark Duggan; nor does he mention that the police initially lied about the circumstances, claiming falsely that Duggan shot first (the bullet they produced as evidence turned out to be a police bullet). There can be numerous explanations for this situation -- maybe the police prefer to dodge the mobs of hooligans and only assault isolated individuals they can safely gang up on. But anyone who wants to explain or understand what has happened in England in the past weeks is going to have to take the whole picture into account, instead of playing the old geezer chasing the kids off his lawn. The social contract (for which the Right has no use anyway) in England was already shredded, by the Tories and New Labour, long before this summer's riots. Quoth Dalrymple:

The reason for this is clear: The young unemployed Britons not only have the wrong attitude to work, for example regarding fixed hours as a form of oppression, but they are also dramatically badly educated. Within six months of arrival in the country, the average young Pole speaks better, more cultivated English than they do.

The rest of the piece is more of the same. Maybe English education has always been terrible; obviously Dalrymple sees education as a process of domestication for youth, preparing them for "fixed hours" and other regimentation. That is certainly how conservatives in the US see it. But again, not a word about police violence or other forms of repression that have always been part of English life.



I also wonder how long English youth have been terrorizing the English old. Dalrymple claims it's "long," which might mean "since last week," or "since the Norman invasion," or any number of points between. Alexander Cockburn commented on this kind of nostalgia at Counterpunch over the weekend, quoting first from the writer Gavin Mortimer:

In October 1940 Winston Churchill ordered the arrest and conviction of six London firemen caught looting from a burned-out shop to be hushed up by Herbert Morrison, his Home Secretary. The Prime Minister feared that if the story was made public it would further dishearten Londoners struggling to cope with the daily bombardments…



The looting was often carried out by gangs of children organized by a Fagin figure; he would send them into bombed-out houses the morning after a raid with orders to target coins from gas meters and display cases containing First World War medals. In April 1941 Lambeth juvenile court dealt with 42 children in one day, from teenage girls caught stripping clothes from dead bodies to a seven-year-old boy who had stolen five shillings from the gas meter of a damaged house. In total, juvenile crime accounted for 48 per cent of all arrests in the nine months between September 1940 and May 1941 and there were 4,584 cases of looting.

So much for the romance of the Blitz. Cockburn goes on to point out that

The riots in London last week started in Tottenham in an area with the highest unemployment in London, in response to the police shooting a young black man, in a country where black people are 26 times more likely to stopped and searched by the cops than whites. Stop-and-searches are allowed under Section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, introduced to deal with football hooligans. It allows police to search anyone in a designated area without specific grounds for suspicion. Use of Section 60 has risen more than 300 per cent between 2005 and last year. In 1997/98 there were 7,970 stop-and-searches, increasing to 53,250 in 2007/08 and 149,955 in 2008/09. Between 2005/06 and 2008/09 the number of Section 60 searches of black people rose by more than 650 per cent.

Again, it's hard to square this with Dalyrmple's account of drunken, aggressive youth controlling the streets. The kindest thing I can say is that it must be oversimple. But maybe it's only white youth who are the problem?



The best commentary I've seen on the riots has been at Lenin's Tomb. He does his own satire of certain mainstream reactions:

I remember a time when a copper could clip a young fellow round the ear and send him on his way. I remember a time when the most violent thing in the charts was the Foxtrot, when nuns rode to morning service on bicycles, while mist rose from the countryside. And I remember when rioters had some respect, and some principles. Not like today's mob. ... The decent working class values of old - hard graft, family, community, and a good kick up the arse - have been replaced by the values of the Carphone Warehouse. 'Greed is good' is the slogan upon which these feral yobs have been raised. They are Thatcherites. That is why they should have their benefits taken away, and they should be reported to the police, conscripted, and deported. It never did me any harm... (Contd, p. 94, and ad infinitum).

His post on "The competing common senses of the riots" is worth a read, as is his comment on a Tory historian's attempt to clear space on the frontiers of old-fashioned English racism, and on reports of racist vigilantism in Enfield. (Brit racism in high places is nothing new, of course.)



I had some entertaining exchanges on Facebook under some linked articles about the riots, with people who accused anyone who disagreed with them of supporting riots and looting. I kept hammering back: I don't support rioting, but I don't support state violence either. They clearly are just fine with repressive reaction, I suppose because they don't imagine that the boot might ever come down on their necks. But that's not really the issue, is it? Part of ethics (it seems to me) is that you condemn wrongness even when it doesn't directly affect you. Too many people are just fine with police violence, even random execution-style slayings like the one that killed Mark Duggan.

England's Green and Pleasant Land

I drove down to Kentucky this weekend for a relative's birthday, so I heard a lot more corporate-media news on the radio than I usually do. There were several references to the London riots, of course, and I was struck (though not surprised) by the spin that the newscasters usually took: the rioters were just a bunch of bored kids who'd had too long a summer. Not a word about the ongoing police violence that killed 333 people between 1998 and 2010 without a single police officer being convicted, or about the peaceful protests about this and other issues that were ignored. Richard Seymour linked to a photo of the gun that killed Mark Duggan, and as he said, "That gun is a beast. It's designed to decimate flesh. Police use these weapons on citizens. The idea that they haven't got enough weapons or powers is fueled by a juvenile revenge fantasy, not reality."



RWA1, of course, rose to the occasion with rants about the decline of the social contract and a link to this Wall Street Journal op-ed piece by Theodore Dalrymple:

The youth of Britain have long placed a de facto curfew on the old, who in most places would no more think of venturing forth after dark than would peasants in Bram Stoker's Transylvania. Indeed, well before the riots last week, respectable persons would not venture into the centers of most British cities or towns on Friday and Saturday nights, for fear—and in the certainty—of encountering drunken and aggressive youngsters.

And so on. This is disturbing, all right, and indicates serious problems with English society. But I can't help wondering how to square Dalrymple's account with the facts of 333 people killed in police custody. (One hundred of that number were killed between April 2004 and March 2005. Which, I suppose, is the tip of the iceberg, with more people beaten or otherwise injured by the police but who didn't die. And then there are the times when the police are the rioters.) Dalrymple doesn't even mention Mark Duggan; nor does he mention that the police initially lied about the circumstances, claiming falsely that Duggan shot first (the bullet they produced as evidence turned out to be a police bullet). There can be numerous explanations for this situation -- maybe the police prefer to dodge the mobs of hooligans and only assault isolated individuals they can safely gang up on. But anyone who wants to explain or understand what has happened in England in the past weeks is going to have to take the whole picture into account, instead of playing the old geezer chasing the kids off his lawn. The social contract (for which the Right has no use anyway) in England was already shredded, by the Tories and New Labour, long before this summer's riots. Quoth Dalrymple:

The reason for this is clear: The young unemployed Britons not only have the wrong attitude to work, for example regarding fixed hours as a form of oppression, but they are also dramatically badly educated. Within six months of arrival in the country, the average young Pole speaks better, more cultivated English than they do.

The rest of the piece is more of the same. Maybe English education has always been terrible; obviously Dalrymple sees education as a process of domestication for youth, preparing them for "fixed hours" and other regimentation. That is certainly how conservatives in the US see it. But again, not a word about police violence or other forms of repression that have always been part of English life.



I also wonder how long English youth have been terrorizing the English old. Dalrymple claims it's "long," which might mean "since last week," or "since the Norman invasion," or any number of points between. Alexander Cockburn commented on this kind of nostalgia at Counterpunch over the weekend, quoting first from the writer Gavin Mortimer:

In October 1940 Winston Churchill ordered the arrest and conviction of six London firemen caught looting from a burned-out shop to be hushed up by Herbert Morrison, his Home Secretary. The Prime Minister feared that if the story was made public it would further dishearten Londoners struggling to cope with the daily bombardments…



The looting was often carried out by gangs of children organized by a Fagin figure; he would send them into bombed-out houses the morning after a raid with orders to target coins from gas meters and display cases containing First World War medals. In April 1941 Lambeth juvenile court dealt with 42 children in one day, from teenage girls caught stripping clothes from dead bodies to a seven-year-old boy who had stolen five shillings from the gas meter of a damaged house. In total, juvenile crime accounted for 48 per cent of all arrests in the nine months between September 1940 and May 1941 and there were 4,584 cases of looting.

So much for the romance of the Blitz. Cockburn goes on to point out that

The riots in London last week started in Tottenham in an area with the highest unemployment in London, in response to the police shooting a young black man, in a country where black people are 26 times more likely to stopped and searched by the cops than whites. Stop-and-searches are allowed under Section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, introduced to deal with football hooligans. It allows police to search anyone in a designated area without specific grounds for suspicion. Use of Section 60 has risen more than 300 per cent between 2005 and last year. In 1997/98 there were 7,970 stop-and-searches, increasing to 53,250 in 2007/08 and 149,955 in 2008/09. Between 2005/06 and 2008/09 the number of Section 60 searches of black people rose by more than 650 per cent.

Again, it's hard to square this with Dalyrmple's account of drunken, aggressive youth controlling the streets. The kindest thing I can say is that it must be oversimple. But maybe it's only white youth who are the problem?



The best commentary I've seen on the riots has been at Lenin's Tomb. He does his own satire of certain mainstream reactions:

I remember a time when a copper could clip a young fellow round the ear and send him on his way. I remember a time when the most violent thing in the charts was the Foxtrot, when nuns rode to morning service on bicycles, while mist rose from the countryside. And I remember when rioters had some respect, and some principles. Not like today's mob. ... The decent working class values of old - hard graft, family, community, and a good kick up the arse - have been replaced by the values of the Carphone Warehouse. 'Greed is good' is the slogan upon which these feral yobs have been raised. They are Thatcherites. That is why they should have their benefits taken away, and they should be reported to the police, conscripted, and deported. It never did me any harm... (Contd, p. 94, and ad infinitum).

His post on "The competing common senses of the riots" is worth a read, as is his comment on a Tory historian's attempt to clear space on the frontiers of old-fashioned English racism, and on reports of racist vigilantism in Enfield. (Brit racism in high places is nothing new, of course.)



I had some entertaining exchanges on Facebook under some linked articles about the riots, with people who accused anyone who disagreed with them of supporting riots and looting. I kept hammering back: I don't support rioting, but I don't support state violence either. They clearly are just fine with repressive reaction, I suppose because they don't imagine that the boot might ever come down on their necks. But that's not really the issue, is it? Part of ethics (it seems to me) is that you condemn wrongness even when it doesn't directly affect you. Too many people are just fine with police violence, even random execution-style slayings like the one that killed Mark Duggan.