MIXED MESSAGES
“Supporting Donald Trump, who is arguably the embodiment of sin, requires resolution of a huge case of cognitive dissonance.” An insightful tweet from a neuroscientist. And so we mix religious concepts with brain theory. It works.
This idea maelstrom we’re enduring and some people are trying to evade was inevitable but becomes highly disturbing as everything changes. Consider the problem of John Weaver who was a founder of the Lincoln Project, that potent opponent of Trump et al, who is now vigorously rejected by those same people, the Lincoln Project people, because of a sex scandal. Nothing at this point is more confusing than sexual experience, unless it’s politics, but going outside conventional sexual bonds means political exclusion.
“The Lincoln Project has condemned John Weaver, a co-founder of the anti-Trump Republican group who is alleged to have made unsolicited sexual overtures to males as young as 14.
Weaver, 61, is a Republican consultant who worked with presidential candidates John McCain and John Kasich. His alleged online comments to young men were reported in mid-January by the American Conservative and Scott Stedman, an independent reporter who said he received messages from Weaver, data analyst Garrett Herrin and Axios.
Then, Weaver said: “The truth is that I’m gay. And that I have a wife and two kids who I love. My inability to reconcile those two truths has led to this agonizing place.”
The quote is from the Guardian, an English paper, because American media can’t be trusted. We can hardly trust ourselves to think straight or to be confident that we’re dealing with facts. The very categories of thought and experience that have guided us have become challenges. We’ve gone from a religious position that was absolutely certain to a therapeutic attitude that excuses almost anything short of murder — maybe even that. Suicide is no longer a major sin, but only a failure on the part of interventionists. Sexual success has replaced salvation as the goal of life. Political success displaces all patriotic loyalties and no one knows what these latter are anyway — is it voting? Is it who’s in office? Is it your grandpa’s allegiance?
Where are the boundaries? “Gay” was once forbidden and things like “buggery” were impossible to define. Now we accept bestiality if it’s consensual. (Huh?) We were told sex that could not lead to birth was illegitimate, therefore no fooling around with the same sex or with your own hand. We were told it could not persist since there would be no descendants, but it’s always there, even in other species.
We took physical birth descent as the only way to really judge entitlement, which led to some ingenious historic switches and “adoptions” among the people who tried to perpetuate themselves across generations, a set of tactics which was demolished by DNA evidence. Rapists who claimed it wasn’t them were caught even if they wore condoms because now we can collect their DNA from surfaces of the body and clothing.
Those who tried to guarantee genetic descent regarded women as livestock, like cattle producing sons, and so kept them locked up. Too late they discovered that oppressed and enslaved people will eventually rise up and destroy their owners. And they will know well where their vulnerability lies.
But anyway, what about the man with three hundred children because he was a sperm donor whose target wombs were petri dishes. Was it akin to rape? But it was wanted. The real penetrator was a turkey baster. (The penis is only a turkey baster — the testes has the stuff.)
What about the girl who is two people, two heads in one body, each married to a different man? Not even Siamese like Chang and Eng.
What is love anyway? Just the big O or craving it? Must it be in relation to only one person, assigned by God? What if it is only porn, commercial porn, not personal spying, produced for money but not arousing to those who make it, dependent on the imagination of the recipient — is that immoral? Or does it deflect people from managing a family or even intimacy? What is more pornographic than power? Why is God endorsed by a sex act, though it’s a bit hard to imagine?
Why is sex so entwined with violence and suffering, even death as in the crushing of small animals and the production of snuff films? If it is cheaper to buy a small boy from a devastated society than it is to buy a lion cub, and if you live in no nation, just on the sea in a yacht, why not?
In the 19th century there was also a great re-organizing of society around the industrial revolution, just as there was centuries earlier when the tall ships plied the seas and discovered that cultures were different in different places. Then they set about invading, raping, disorganizing, dehumanizing, and carrying off everything valuable. It took a while to get those sailors into reliable roles in factories, on time, educated in steps.
The industrial revolution needed resources, both for energy and for materials, just as Europe carried off the wealth of other places in order to support their wars and self-indulgences: gold, rubies and chocolate. Soon, cocaine and marijuana to escape from office/factories.
Such a cynical look over our shoulders at history both near and far. Much harder to envision a future, something like the one that replaces the pandemic that left only a third of the European Black Death, and the one that replaced the “Spanish flu” that eliminated one-tenth of the US. We don’t know what fraction will lose now and what difference it will make.
To bring this line of thought around to the beginning, what are we to think of John Weaver? The Lincoln Project, a work of virtue and idealism was in part devised by him, with explosive and acid opposition to something obviously destructive. The people who thought the highest of him now discover that he did something outside convention and they are astounded, offended, totally repelled. Not that it contradicted his blasting videos, but that it was against another part of their moral system. One wonders whether it would have made a difference if he had been phone-teasing girls. Is it okay to make print contact but no physical contact? Why is anyone surprised that he had a wife and kids when we’ve already seen so many examples? They aren’t the same thing, are they?
How much of the outrage is really about secrecy? When so many taboos withdrew — both about sex and money — that left people both released and in great danger. A fetish developed for what is supposed to be true and a near-psychotic opposition to what was false in any sense at all, from definition to culture-division.
You see where this is going? Too late. We’re already there.
