Gemma Hoskins and Shane Waters interview me about my connection to the unsolved murder of Sister Cathy Cesnik featured in the Netflix documentary The Keepers 2019.
Listen to "S2 Ep45: Sister Cathy, A Survivor's Account – Unveiling MKUltra, Part 1" on Spreaker.
Listen to "S2 Ep46: Sister Cathy, A Survivor's Account – Unveiling MKUltra, Part 2" on Spreaker.
Seattle City Hall
Talk 2015
Survivorship Webinar 2010
Conference presentation 2010
Interview: Mad
Hatter's Review 2006
Read my writing on: Borne Press
Selected Posts from Social Media
My Grief is in My Dishes
July 13, 2024
My grief is in my dishes. My dishes pile up like my grief, unattended. I work through this or that incident or betrayal, but the dishes are undone. They stack up around the sink, then on the side table by the couch, then on my studio workbench. I cannot draw or paint while my grief piles up. Fifty minutes with my brilliant, beloved therapist is not enough time to do the dishes. There is no one whom I can call to help me. Eventually I break because I either poke a hole in that mountain of plates or I decide to cease to exist. Tears flow, my body shakes. There is not a single soul on this planet available to hold me. There never has been, but that is just the reality of life. It doesn't mean I'm not human. It doesn't mean I am not loved. I pretend to be held by stuffed animals, I pretend to be held by some god never invented by man. I assemble various reasons for remaining alive. If there is a reason left, in a few days, I will do the dishes. After that, the cycle will begin again.
Belasco!
April 23, 2024
Belasco! This is a movie reference, a thousand points if you get it right. The exclamation always stuck in my head. My middle aged brain misattributed the source to a beloved author, Shirley Jackson, the gap between "hell" and "hill", different author, different story, different screen adaption.
What was it about Belasco's legs? He was a sociopath, and (spoiler) he cut them off because he was too short to tower over and intimidate people, or he cut them off because his short stature was the source of his unfathomable suffering (unlikely, it usually takes far more than that). I adored the movie from the first time I saw it when I was, a young teen? I don't remember.
Legs lead to feet which lead to shoes, and don't get me started on shoes. I've told people I have an obsession for shoes because my feet were often tortured and now I like to wrap them in the prettiest claddings I can afford. No heels, never heels, that's just more torture. It's almost comically tragic how some women willingly torture their feet with high heels, as it is completely unnecessary to secure male attention. My feet are deformed, so proclaimed the podiatrist when I inquired about bunion surgery. He said, "What's the point? None of the bones are aligned properly." How did my feet get deformed?
Feet and legs keep me bound up in inactivity, somatic and physical pain. It's not just the generalized fear of being alive in a body and moving about, which is bad enough, it's localized to moving my feet and legs, but why? I've worked through so many torture sessions, electric shock to the toes, the ankles, the shins, mock severing of limbs, complete with perpetrators dressed in surgery garb wielding bone saw blades, electrical wires wrapped around cut lines, being shocked as saw motors whirred and fake blood was flung about. A shot of lidocaine numbed from the fake electrical incision line on down. All of it diabolical trickery. I still have parts of consciousness I can enter where I am completely unable to feel my lower limbs.
Why does it persist? I remembered a photo that my father, the part-time wedding (and CSAM) photographer, boast-shared at least once per year during my childhood. His friend, or a neighbor of ours when I was quite small, sometime between toddlerhood and six, was scheduled for surgery. My very young parents, still in their mid-twenties, threw the man a party. They got everybody drunk, then my father, together with a couple of conspirators, donned surgery garb and got a bunch of tools out of his workshop. They posed themselves around the man on the couch, wielding saws, pliers, and wrenches menacingly poised to do damage. It was a great laugh, a jest, that all in the party shared henceforth as a lark apropos to the scenario in which they all had great fun, including the victim. Or did he?
The photo is a relic of normative life. It is, or was, publicly accessible, and although arguably some sort of evidential artifact, it does not solve the puzzle of my continued dissociation with my legs and feet. I uncovered another piece today. Hopefully it's the last necessary uncovering.
Belasco! I've known for nearly a year now that my father not only sexually entangled and destroyed me, but he had yet another side, completely sociopathic, that delighted in the infliction of exquisite pain. This is not pain meted out through random or sloppy injury, but highly engineered to produce a precise elixir of fear and anguish while leaving as little physical trace as possible. That was the secondary purpose of my father's workshop.
I've already worked through the knife sharpening episode where my fingernail tops were sliced, but not cut all the way through to the quick. I'd already worked with memory flashes of pliers pulling on toenails. What was new today was the car battery, hooked to a wire wrapped around the top of my right shin, the red and green wires, the alligator clips, the cut line, the searing pain at the junction. I traced that pain back to the conspiratorial betrayal as I followed him into the basement, "C'mon, we have some work to do." It seeded the part of myself that learned how to be in league with the perpetrators, to be in vocal cahoots, to be smart onside, to eventually save my own life by suggesting they do x instead of y in a lab session.
How deep was my father in the lab work in the mid 1960's? Did he model himself on early rumor, or on his bosses' protocols, or did they model their techniques on his sociopathic inventions? I don't know, and there is no one on this planet with the resources or courage to find out. It may be historical, but given the recent global success of fear-based behavioral manipulation campaigns, a little looking into might be worth the investment.
Antenna Girl
March 27, 2020
I both write and draw in my journals. My drawings are sometimes uncanny, or should I say canny? They often tell me things long before I'm ready to know about them. Many times over the years, I've had the impulse to draw a little child figure with antennas, sort of like the character from My Favorite Martian. This is an impulse I've fought. Even in my journals I can be self conscious, to a point. I think, if people see this they will have yet another reason to call me crazy, don't do it! Now I wish I had let those antennas fly! It's not I who was crazy.
Scene: I'm in a lab, very early on, the late 1960's, more than likely Detroit. They're working on trigger cues, building up the process of giving me an instruction and having me respond correctly, robotically. I'm in a tiny room, chair rail to ceiling windows on 3 sides. I'm sitting on a bench, and opposite me, there's a television with antennas. They all had them then, back when the only broadcast method was over the air. I'm with the balding, slightly portly doctor with a foreign accent.
They used the tv antennas as a metaphor, and reinforced the idea by placing a headband on my head, with two points of pain contacts. They were training me to “listen” for instructions in day to day life, “listen” for words spoken, for messages written in places, for messages from the television. This does sound crazy, right? Not really, not if the trigger cues they chose were delivered in person by a stranger, or words that already existed in popular culture, perhaps a catchphrase on a kids tv show (hello, Captain Kangaroo), or some landmark like a well known billboard. Not crazy at all as those were indeed the types of trigger cues they chose.
It was the job of the part with antennas to “listen”, sitting right behind my right ear. She had antennas in order to “pick up the signal” in whatever form it came. They showed me a graphic of a wave between the antennas, which I was to pretend was happening on my head also, and repeatedly instructed that I make sure to “pick up the signal”. They shocked me when I didn't. The words of another perp doctor, from an earlier lab visit, echo in my head, “She likes television, use that.” What better way to keep a trafficked child under control than to condition her, like pavlov's dogs, to ”remember to forget” every Saturday when her favorite tv character says Howdy-do!
Having antennas wasn't my idea, it was theirs. So yeah, I have a wee part of myself who's always believed she has antennas. It has nothing to do with my sanity, and everything to do with their sadism. What a relief! My therapist, who sometimes joins me in responding with a bit of gallows humor, congratulated me for being among the first transhumanists.
One thing is for sure, the US public has well attuned antennas, they are dutifully carrying out the orders of the controlling class, happy to be given the scrap of a one time $1200 payment, whilst the treasury is looted for the super rich, no questions asked.
Corona Night Time Walk
March 21, 2020
I walked through Pioneer Square tonight. Everything was shut. I saw about 20 people, a few homeless, a few drug dealers. I saw lots of rats. I hope the city is considering what will happen with the rat population while humans aren't present to keep them underground. The bright side, I suppose, is there's far less of a chance there'll be a shooting outside a nightclub tonight.
As a human experimentation survivor, I'm finding these circumstances incredibly difficult to manage, and re-traumatizing on several levels. Forgive me if I don't trust in power structures contrived over decades, through the slow building of systems of control, and the slow chipping away of rights, so incremental, only academics in tiny shuttered corner offices and a few dozen paranoid researchers have kept detailed records. Forgive me if I don't believe that what will come out of this crisis is anything good, as long as people such as those who owned me as a child are managing this crisis. These are people who've indulged, without limitation, all the sociopathic capacities possible in the human animal—greed to the max; unfeeling, wholesale, devious, imperialistic destruction; power over others to an absolute degree—all while deriving great pleasure in it, whether that power is exercised in a lab on a single subject, or through the media, or through armies and bombs.
If these same people are directing things, and there's good reason to believe they are, then there's not a lot of hope for us to retain what ever civil liberties and rights we now possess. Our lives will never be the same. I hope it isn't true. I wanted to stop these fuckers, it's why I kept myself alive, but now, today, everyone is a lab rat. I don't know if I can live with that grief, …but I'll try.
Father's Day
June 16, 2019
My father. He was, by many measures a sociopath, but he was also capable of being funny, and of mimicking the actions of loving behavior, and here's the key, even when he didn't want something in return. So he wasn't purely a sociopath, although he engaged in countless sociopathic behaviors and crimes, including trafficking, child torture, and incest. He puffed and blustered and powered over but he was incredibly weak (it's arguable that sociopathy is at base an expression of weakness, but that's a whole other post). I witnessed his weakness, my put upon mother, dehumanized in every conceivable way by the culture at the time, as well as an endless series of direct, personal traumas, could, in the heat of an argument, quite overwhelm and control him. Who really held sway? It would be like following countless moves in a master chess game to figure it out, but ultimately, he did. His kind rules the world, and she couldn't step outside the boundaries of the game they constructed, she could only maneuver inside.
I'm still working my way through the writing of Lynn Brunet. I've not yet got through, my own head work taking precedence over reading, but I'm struck by her gentle and forgiving portrayal of her father, as someone caught up in a system, not solely a perpetrator, cast in the black and white roles we tend to overlay on abuse scenarios.
I can't cast my own father, or my mother, solely in the black, evil role of sociopath, because I recognize that they were caught up in a system. You'd have to trace the chess moves far wider, in plays going back several familial generations, and the pressures of our culture, our economic system, and our government. Yes, they had choices, but there were boundaries around all of them, societal and individual, and psychological, boundaries of ignorance, of denial, of coercion and tradition. We are a human family organism and our pathos is not limited or isolated to the germ level, it grows within the willing nurturance of other humans.
This is why it's so striking to see, every day now, all the epithets thrown down without a second thought, “You're a nazi!” “You're a bigot!”. It's an old new game to play to make us feel better, to outsource our anxiety, to put a damper on our sense of powerlessness, to make someone else pay. It is a budding cultural system, destructive, infantile, hastening the collapse of society, obscuring and abetting real sociopathic behavior. My father, if he were still alive today, would see his chessboard expanded, and not for his better impulses. For this and other reasons, I am glad he is dead. He was a wrecked and ruined human, and society utterly failed to erect boundaries around his behavior. It not only failed, it encouraged him, it paid him. I mourn for the father he could have have been, not just for myself, but for him too, in the ultimate sense of being a potential human.
May Flowers
May 17, 2019
Ouch. That is all. Well no, not really. Diving down deep into the layers where I had to give up, where I had no choice, where I had to adopt every perverted, sociopathic idea and impulse that they commanded I do else I'd be tortured. There are no words for this except heartbreak. It is literally (I hate that word because of the current vernacular usage, regardless) a cleaving in two of the heart, soul, psyche. Where are the words! They don't exist. I can't cry long enough. I can't rage long enough. I don't know what to do with myself. I'm one of those gif images digitally shaking in impotent electrical vibration in perpetuity. There is no container for this grief, it reaches beyond this linear, cell based life. I just wanna punch God in the face. Anyway, that was therapy for today. Here are some flowers...
Nature of Nature
March 29, 2019
Today I'm angry at flowers. I don't why yet, but I will soon. Once a week I trudge to the doc for another round of revisiting the past, diving deep into the lab rooms. Oh dear, how many incidents have I worked on by now? It must be getting close to a hundred, I haven't kept an exact count. There was a scene I worked on, a few years ago, where they put me in a small room with two way windows. They wired up my head and interrogated me. They asked me if I ever saw angels. They were trying to get at any thoughts or feelings that underlie a belief in god, a belief in something transcendent, beyond myself.
They found it. I think they already knew the wave lengths from working on others? Then they tortured me. They tortured me any time I activated that sense of connection to something bigger. I'll never forget walking outside, right after I processed that memory. All of a sudden, everything bloomed. Color, air, flowers, grass, trees, all came alive as if they were speaking to me, not just alive, but alive with wonder beyond words, power beyond words, connection beyond words. I was so humbled, and filled with joy. Tears of grief turned to tears of joy. Since then, there's nothing that paints a broader smile on my face than being in connection with that part of myself.
But today, for some reason, I'm angry at flowers, and oh, they're everywhere right now. I think a big, central, grief is on the threshold, another break so deep it reaches down (or up?) to the transcendent. Regardless, on the way home, I bought a couple of bouquets. It's been a long time since I could afford such a luxury, and then when I could, it took me awhile to give myself permission. What if one day I need that money for food? These last few months, my face all puffy and lined from tears, I stop to do some shopping, and I buy myself some flowers. They're my little witnesses. Even though some part of me is mad at them today, I love them, all of them, everywhere.
World Now
March 21, 2019
The world today is so bizarre. All around are signs of collapse, inevitable at the peaks (I hope) of US empire and late stage capitalism—that most efficient destroyer of human communal bonds. We've each been atomized into single units, sold on the fiction that the meaning of life lies in what we are able to buy, rather than relationships, or rather than organizing around something higher, a concept now impossible and/or verboten to even consider, not in any sense that would touch enough lost people. What can be “higher” when science can figure it out? We've evolved ourselves into self destruction.
Our natural human organizing structures have been laid to waste, right along with our individual psyches. Hungry to fill the void, we reach for the offered surrogate, the online world, and social media, and fall head on into its traps. The bait is some sense of connection, meaning, and purpose. It wouldn't work at all without sufficient payoff, but we don't control it. It tracks us, and manipulates us, uses us to fulfill the whims of those who are better at playing the cynical and empty games of chasing money, power, and control.
Our feet are hovering above the ground, there is no sweet, dirty earth under our social systems. The forces guiding our political systems are the emptiness of greed and the violence of geopolitical power mongering. We live at the whim of power networks we have no control over whatsoever. This is a scenario that can drive people mad, drive them to believe all manner of irrational or fantastical ideas, but these reactions also play into the hands of those who are adept at manipulation, and lead to a horrible, self-reinforcing downward spiral. I see no way out of this except chaos and catastrophe. I don't fear for myself at all, I fear for the young, and I deeply regret the suffering to come.
Chest Pain
January 19, 2019
For 50 years, I've had an intermittent pain in my chest. It feels like the ribs on the right side are being torn from my sternum. At the same time, it feels like muscles that I can't control, close to the bone, are tensing, not only in my chest but in my back, drawing my arms as close as possible and my shoulders up under my neck.
The pain got really intense this week, with tingling and numbness. I worried about my heart, and my lungs, which is reasonable, considering how poorly I treat my body. But then I followed the pain.
I was in a room on a gurney, my hands and feet strapped down. I am having convulsions. There is a metal arm with black foam padding underneath, it is some kind of restraint holding down my chest? I don't know. When I convulse, the metal digs into me, on the right side of the sternum.
I am in the room, a part of a doctors office, where my mother took me regularly, to see the doctor who gave me orders, the same man she let into the house on quiet afternoons, who ripped me in two in my bed. He is wearing a white coat now, and he is shocking me. My mother is outside in the waiting room. Sometimes I can hear her voice. The pain in my chest is not just from the metal, it's from a broken heart, because my mother, my mother… chooses this.
I've been crying for weeks. But I feel better. In fact, I've never felt this way before in my life. I've never before felt this lack of pain, like I own my own chest, I can fill it, and sit upright, and move it about. I still have the sad pain, and shadows of intense fear, but the physical tensing is gone. After 50 years, it's just gone.
Future Past
October 28, 2018
The days when the changing times demand I wake up and realize that every reason I'd kept my body alive all these years, throughout a lifetime of torture and slavery, are moot. The sociopathic elite are killing the planet, so it doesn't really matter at all anymore to warn people that there is a form of slavery they don't yet understand. I look up and wonder, why am I putting myself through hell if it's all for nought anyway? I'm beyond cynical, so the first question that entered my mind was, is our internal life force some kind of torture device? That fucker is feirce, I've seen it fight tooth and nail in people three quarters dead already. I'm not going to challenge it, no matter the hopelessness ratcheting up every 24 hours. This is my ego talking, but I get an image of myself screaming, “They did this and this and this!” right before being burnt up in the sun, with the rest of the life on the planet. So be it I suppose. Interesting, humans, when deprived of a stable and not wholly abusive power structure, resort to magical thinking, like I did, when I was a child. I can be insightful about human behavior (it was a matter of survival), but that one, ironically, I never saw it coming.
Hands
October 5, 2018
There is no worse torture than to be forced to mimic the acts of one's own perpetrators. In socio-political parlance, and base human understanding, there are no grays, there is only black and white, you are a perpetrator or a victim. That's why it's so hard to break out of a cult, or out of organized crime, or out of the military. Americans are lost in the gray, the gray of being an empire, a world-wide perpetrator, while the vast majority at home suffers. We have the blood of millions of people on our hands. It's too much, so we busy ourselves with traversing minute social inequities, deflecting blame, burying our heads in the sand, missing the big picture. These days I can't look at my hands, can you?
How Did it Happen?
July 23, 2018
It's becoming more and more clear how societies fall into authoritarianism. It appears to be extraordinarily easy to take a society that once prided itself on its embrasure of free speech and civil liberties and force its acquiescence, with seemingly little resistence. I am so grateful to see tiny glimpses of sanity in my newsfeeds, although they are being winnowed down each day. During this last spasm of side choosing, under the heaviest of burdens, a veritable mass media ejaculate of false claims and jingoism, people I know to be smart and caring have succumbed to the call to fall in line or be left out in the cold. And that is the signifying power of propaganda. To be left out in the cold, in terms of our tribal evolutionary history, is to die, alone. The vast majority will capitulate to avoid it, most without any conscious awareness. That is how the propagandists win. All they need do is project the perception that “everybody agrees”, or “everybody knows”, and repeat the grand lie over and over. So many people have fallen, and traded their moral stances for empty headed parroting. It's like witnessing a little death everyday, but at the same time, it answers all the “how did they let it happen” questions of the past. I'd really rather not know, I so wish humans weren't so damn malleable and predictable, but if we weren't, we wouldn't have made it to here. Unfortunately, here may be our last stand.
Coincidence Theory
March 1, 2018
A funny thing happened on the way to “satanic panic”. Have you noticed the proliferation of articles excavating this subject in the wake of #MeToo? A number of mostly liberal media outlets are suddenly producing articles on the topic. They have to get in front it, just in case any survivor of a trafficking ring, elite or not, decides to join in the campaign and out somebody really important. By important I mean, someone who profits directly from human trafficking or uses sexual blackmail for political leverage. Weinstein was already on his way out, so in a sense #MeToo was somewhat manufactured to begin with, but I digress.
The current public consensus is that this country underwent a strange phenomenon in the 1980's and 1990's, wherein police, and social services personnel concocted sexual abuse allegations, and worse, in multiple cases where no such crimes ever took place. This consensus is built upon years of media productions, including PBS Frontline specials, and Pulitzer Price winning articles. These media items feature the claims of “experts” who, it is perceived, examined the cases contemporaneously, and historically. It should come as no surprise however that sometimes public consensus is entirely wrong. The problem is that there are relatively few people willing to wade into the morass of child trafficking. There are relatively few people willing to stand up for trafficked children unless they have a direct, personal investment in the issue. Therapists and social workers are bound by rules of professional conduct that make it nearly impossible to cross lines into activism.
On the other hand, child trafficking is a multi-billion dollar enterprise, and there are far more people not only willing, but wholly invested in making certain their profits, and lives, are not disrupted by meddling officials, social workers, or therapists. Such is the case with the so-called “satanic panic”. As someone who lived through the original, let me tell you, no, let me challenge you, to revisit all of the major cases of the era. Read the court transcripts. You will find that in nearly every instance, there was irrefutable medical, and corroboratory evidence of child rape. Who was it who really panicked, was it parents and the authorities, or was it powerfully connected child traffickers with far too much at stake? For me, a survivor of elite child trafficking, the answer is obvious. So, why should you care? Because kids like me were used to entrap and blackmail your public officials. We are one of the central reasons why, no matter how you vote, major policies rarely change. So next time you see an article about “satanic panic”, consider that you are getting played, just like your congress critter in his hotel room, and give a good, long side eye to the publication you're reading.
Work
January 15,2018
The photo is from Detroit Community News, May, 1969. I wish I could have asked Miss Universe for asylum, or whispered for help, but then who knows what she was going through herself. It was different time for women altogether. I've seen so many changes over the course of my life, and there is still so much work to do!
Post Script: I wonder if this photo helped increase my family's income from trafficking me.
The Time of Year
November 23, 2017
Year after year I cross my fingers it will be better. I've worked so hard processing the traumas, and my day to day issues are improving all the time. However today, and Christmas day, no matter how I feel the night before or even as I wake in the morning, an avalanche of fear hits me as soon as I get out of bed. I try to function, I try to do all the things that need doing, shopping, cooking, but it feels so overwhelming and impossible. All I really want is to hide in a dark corner, make myself invisible until the sun comes up tomorrow.
Hollywood Conscious Collective
October 30, 2017
A theme runs through a number of vehicles like Stranger Things. Yes, horrible things were done, (to kids even), but look, the lab rat humans now have super cool special abilities! It helps everybody feel better about what happened or may be happening now, in dark labs, funded with their own tax money. Okay so, WHERE ARE MY GODDAMN SUPER POWERS? I didn't get any. Don't you want your money back? Hmmm, now that I think about it, the danger of these special abilities poses a very real threat, if they are used in the wrong way. Perhaps it's the specter of the unmarked wounded in waiting that elicits an unconscious plea, please don't hurt us when you take your revenge! Everyone knows but nobody knows, the victims and the public dissociate in proscribed and predictable ways. I'd gladly trade all of these fictional fear spasms for one decent documentary.
#MeToo
October 18, 2017
Here's a forgotten anecdote that resurfaced this past week, offered perhaps as comedic relief, the creepiness was more pathetic than threatening. I was 17 and I needed a part time job for spending money. I found an antique shop, crammed to the ceiling with tiny and large items, that needed someone to help with the never ending dusting. On my very first (and last) day, I felt the eyes of the owner, a portly and unkempt middle aged man, on my back as I worked. He occasionally asked me questions about myself. I told him I played an instrument in the high school band. Later, he followed me into the back room. He came closer and closer, eying me up and down. He said he lived nearby, and asked me to come home with him, to listen to music. I froze. He leaned in, breathing heavily, and said, “I'd like to run my tongue around your body to The Flight of the Bumble Bee.”
#MeToo 2
October 14, 2017
It happens even at the corner pub, among men I've known for years, and I at my age, overweight, and menopausal. A hand suddenly on my leg, another hand suddenly on my bottom. My instinct is to freeze. I hate it. All my years of learning to say no, my intellect well trained, but my body overrides it. I interrogate myself, is there a sign on my back, is there something in my movements, that says I am public property? In most other ways, these same men, speak to me with respect and affection, except the defenses, the posturing that erupts at times in sexist quips and asides. Alternately, I hear weakness and feel compassion, or I hear insult and I shout, I win an empty verbal battle. I can't decide if I'd rather it be so blatant, or if the other style is preferable, the men who know the rules, who don't say out loud what is moving behind their eyes, who would never touch without invitation. I see the calculation, is she worth my time? I see it in small and overt deferences, in attention span, in holding the floor.
I remember conversations from years ago, with my ex, with friends, about the male gaze, discussing the limited choices, the limits of embracing or transgressing the power of attractivenesses. I remember explaining that getting fat every 5 years or so gave me a respite from the eyes, the hands, and the yelling. I remember the silence in response, and later at home, my ex saying something along the lines of the grave would be the only escape. I think, why can't men just be people, why can't we be people together? Is this how our sexed damage comes together to dance? Are they all just damaged or is this the way men really are, that protrusion on their bodies a permanent barrier or the only way in to their hearts? I'm nearly 55 and I still don't know the answer to that question.
Contemporary Discourse
August 9, 2017
Why have I stopped commenting on politics? It's become a useless exercise due to, I theorize, the following scenarios, though more than likely, a combination of all three. One, in a state of untenable fear in response to perceived approaching cataclysmic collapse (US empire, ecological, economic), people have donned their absolute worst behaviors. Two, the culture is undergoing a cyclical paroxysm wherein change is taking place too quickly to support rational, civil behavior. Three, sophisticated social engineering by powerful forces over decades is reaching its reality severing, Orwellian zenith. Whatever the case, it all sucks, as there is no way to say one thing without having to say a thousand other things, to bring light to one issue without elaborating on its history and context, while all of it is for naught as practically no one cares for fact or rationality because fear is driving every tiny interaction, ruling every relationship, prioritizing calculations for individual survival, bending reality into a million fictions. Reasoned, ideological critique is met with personal attack, social censure or worse, no matter where on the political spectrum. These are crazy times indeed.
Ritual
May 3, 2017
I've been crying through the Handmaid's Tale. So much of it is so right. I needed the commentary in reaction to it to connect the centrality of ritual to group transgressive behavior, I never looked at it from the other side. I always find myself insisting that custom and belief are not the core motivations of sociopathy, they are only frameworks, facilitators. I have to argue from that position because so many people can't handle hearing about atrocity without blaming some external force, some belief, some system, they cannot center the acts in a human, like themselves. I never considered further what my own eyes and body witnessed, that sociopaths need ritual to act out otherwise forbidden urges, to both codify and make precious every moment of ecstasy they take in inflicting pain. How do we know this about ourselves, at least our artists and writers do, and not know it at the same time? I've been crying through it also because I know I, and many others, have already lived through our dystopian future.
Pussy Hats
January 20, 2017
I marched against the WTO in 1999, and the Iraq war in 2003, but my pussy and clit hats are staying home with me tomorrow. If there were a march against elite trafficking (among all political persuasions) and US human experimentation, I'd be there. If there were a march against the Deep State, I'd be there. If there were a march against (domestic!) election rigging, I'd be there. If there were a march against US imperialism, neoliberalism, 8 years of war under Obama, I'd be there. Yet none of these issues seem to have mattered much to the vast majority of people who are gathering tomorrow. It doesn't sit right with me to be crying foul when the crimes of the US state have been ongoing all this time, with the people who were paid with tax money to torture me still free and operating, to suddenly take to the streets in outrage.
There is also a growing authoritarianism among liberals that in some cases is matching the blind rage and violence of the extreme right. I've watched a steady stream of scapegoating vitriol, driven by fear and sculpted by mainstream propaganda, directed towards people like me. I've received private messages asking me to take down articles I've shared, accusing me of supporting the US's perceived enemies. I fear that if I raised my voice in the crowd about the truth of my own experience and my views about our country, I could not be certain of my safety.
My war is not with struggling citizens who, in misguided rebellion, voted for Trump. I do not accept that the majority of them were driven by hatred. My war is not with one figurehead, however sociopathic. Sociopaths wear many faces, sometimes they wear calm, clever, caring masks. Sometimes they carry the banner of feminism. I understand the fear of being governed by a sociopath. I grew up with them, at home, and in the labs. It is terrifying, but fear renders you ripe for manipulation and vulnerable to all number of behavioral and strategic blunders. If there were a march against succumbing to fear, I'd be there.
My protest is against those who pull the wool over the people's eyes, through kindly seeming figureheads and media manipulation, who keep us falsely divided and hateful towards each other, so our anger never reaches the real centers of power. If and when there is a great awakening, and the outrage is focused not on figureheads, or the symbols of our problems, but the the entirety of the system, nudge me, and I will join you in the streets.
How We Got Here
November 22, 2016
How did we get here? One answer to that question is the concentration of secret power under the auspices of National Security. It's November 22, 53 years after the first public coup. I was born in that year, and not long after, barely able to pronounce my l's and r's, in a makeshift lab in a pediatrician's office, was tested to see if I might fit the requirements for a special, American project.
The people who oversaw the project had private and public faces, policies, and beliefs, just as Hillary stated in her Goldman Sachs speech. In private, they believed in the inherent superiority of their class, and that those of lower birth, ability, and culture were expendable. They took a mechanistic view of the human animal, invested fully and lustfully in perfecting methods of complete behavioral control of individuals and the masses. I encountered former Nazi scientists in their labs, and watched them celebrate Hitler's birthday. Outside the labs, I saw them rape and torture children and captive adults, in both low and grand ceremonial settings. They created a sleeping army of subjects, to be awoken at will for political blackmail, and a plethora of other covert schemes, and projects. They carried out this work behind the theatrics of both liberal and conservative public policy, peppering our civilian government with their compromised servants, playing the long game, of perpetuating the ideology of the Reich.
Among the survivors I've met are the child of a Warren Commission member, and the child of a Warren Commission clerk. This is no accident, as the private fascist yearnings of those in the network are both the product and progenitor of hidden, extreme violence and sociopathy. Yet their own traumatized children are groomed for more important or public roles and duties. According to David Talbot in “The Devil's Chessboard”, Allen Dulles gave over his son to the treatment of the MKUltra doctors. Until the dissociation is broken, and victims can come forward without fear, the full history of American fascism will not be known.
"Like"?
October 16, 2013
I recently attended a dinner party that had me thinking about the younger generation's usage of the "like" qualifier. I only knew the host of the party and was seated at a table of complete strangers. They were all women in my general age range. We engaged in the usual sorts of conversations, the weather, recent news events, and eventually, world views that tangentially tied us together with the host. I always feel extremely uncomfortable interacting with people whom I don't know. Some level of discomfort in these scenarios is fairly universal, but I had been cooped up in my house alone for several days, working, making art, and dealing with the extraordinary circumstances of my life, so I felt even more an alien to the other women that night.
I noticed something that put me off, more than usual. When one of them would make a statement, regardless of the subject she was addressing, she would assert herself as if she were an expert, as if having read one news story, a book, or a blog, she could state without reservation that this or that plant only grows in this region, for example. The authoritativeness, the unqualified confidence disturbed me. It felt as if each women was delivering a speech, lesson, or debate point, and not engaging in casual conversation. There was no verbal or non-verbal acknowledgement that she might not be the only participant acquainted with her chosen topic or its sources. It was very uncomfortable, and it took me great deal of time to join in. When I did, I must have qualified my own statements, as the others felt the need to explain and expand my point for me if they happened to agree.
On the way home on the bus, I sat nearby to group of young teenagers. I overheard their conversation, and it was peppered as usual by the tiresomely overused "like" qualifier, the word inserted before nearly every thought or recollection. The contrast in style between these exchanges and the conversation I'd just engaged in could not have been more stark. I thought back to the many times I witnessed my parent's generation in casual interactions. I remembered that the women, as well as the men, mediated their assertions with introductory phrases such as "They say that", or "I read in the paper today". Does anyone else remember this was so? With the possible exception of incidents of mansplaining or other exchanges between perceived non-equals, no one postured as an expert, unless they were discussing their direct experience.
I wondered if the younger generation's inability to speak authoritatively on any subject, including their direct life experience, might be an over reaction to their parents having adopted a style of exchange that is wholly absent of any mediation and qualifiers. My generation, perhaps as a by-product of the ubiquity of information in the age of the Internet, seems to have forgotten the danger of certainty, or thrown it aside in service to dominance posturing. Perhaps the younger generation is unconsciously opposing this equally frustrating conversational bravado, especially considering we've so entirely fucked up the world for them.