I don’t speak of you being atheist
and so I hope
you don’t mind me speaking of God.
Hello Reader,
Peeling the onion again?
Of course you and I as North Americans are optimistic, idealistic even. If not you and I specifically, then our country as a whole. For example, as the decade turns, and as we are hearing so much about the dangers of not managing our consumption of social media and fake news, the experts are writing that no one had predicted this outcome.
Remember how it was? People used to talk of how a connected world would mean more liberty. “Knowledge wants to be free” people said, thinking that with “a voice for everyone” the web would mean “power to the people.” Such idealism. And now we have, as an open secret, state-sponsored Russian troll farms.
A recent CBC radio documentary, about the anniversary of the creation of the Internet, had a computer scientist saying he sorely wished he had thought to include a way for people to be identified on the web. For one thing, it would have stopped illegal death threats from trolls. But of course in those early days the excited scientists were too good natured and optimistic about people.
If not for idealism, we might have considered that trolls were already scrawling anonymously on walls, already making horrible anonymous telephone calls; we might have anticipated folks believing in fake news and twisting social media, if only we had considered that gossip was already being twisted and maliciously faked in small towns and city neighborhoods across America; if we had remembered communist propaganda then we might have anticipated the Russians would adapt to a digital world.
But then again, who knows? If we hadn’t been so warm and sunny about our neighbors and our country then maybe we wouldn’t have had, then and now, the sort of naive and functional democracy we enjoy. Yes, we have a world-wide reputation for being naive, but I wouldn’t want “the truth,” not if it meant my neighbors being as sour and cynical as those dispirited Russians.
I was once as foolish as a scientist. I would e-mail my brother using words about the actions and plans of relatives, using words like “maybe” and “perhaps.” I stopped. I had to tell him that from now on I would not write anything to him except for facts I was crystal clear about: No slim math probabilities, no “likely.” My brother was not a scientist, he was only human, just a small town guy with his gossip-beliefs morphing from “possibility” to rock-hard certainty. ’Twas ever the nature of gossip. And social media.
Remember the invention of video tapes and players? (My roommates made a long sex tape) Everyone knew “most” tapes were made for television shows and features, but I am sure I was not the only one surprised to read the actual percentage number of tapes regarding sex. I won’t say the percentage here, but I will just say that when I first came across the number, for a long second I thought, “it does not compute.”
And remember the invention of home TV taping, “TiVo?” (teev-oh) Had we looked at some people’s bookshelves, we could have easily predicted that many people would tape far more shows that they would get around to watching. But as I recall, the huge stacks of unwatched tapes were a surprise, something to be reported in newspapers.
Suppose I had bought a TiVo machine, without anticipation of future un-viewed stacks—would this “without” be from my innocence, or from denial? (“defence mechanism”) I believe “denial” is just as God-given as “idealism.” These words go on two sides of the same shiny yellow coin.
Speaking of metaphors, there aren’t two sides to an onion—there are a series of layers. And as the Earth turns, if you care enough to “do the work” then you can, circling the onion, periodically peel down another layer to see more Truth, a new reality. Very few of us, in this life, could peel down as fast and deep as a Shakespeare or a Freud. Those two I will honor without expecting me and my relations to be so wise. Nor my friends.
My favorite normal friend is Jane. Unlike everybody I knew in my self-help days, she never learned the onion metaphor. Jane was the first person I told that I lived through the final scene of Bladerunner. When we saw the TV episode Ann where Buffy rushes to the big city and uses her middle name, I told her how and why runaways use code names…
(I dislike false names used by rich comfortable people online)
…and then it took months before I could spit out that I had left home earlier than Buffy did. Recently Jane was interested to hear the new-to-her onion metaphor: when I told her of glumly going down to another layer.
She said simply, “But I thought you were all done.”
“So did I. It’s humbling.”
It was humbling the first time, back in my mid-twenties when I first learned to know and see; it was so jarring and exciting to revise reality. For years afterwards I was like an alcoholic fearing relapse, ever wondering in the back of my mind, “Is there something else don’t I know?” And of course there was, that’s how the onion works. At long last I thought I was done; I thought I understood enough of my past to disregard it, and just carry on. But of course God gives us denial for a reason, for until we are ready… Maybe God gives us minimizing as a “placeholder” until one day we are ready to look.
If my denial came from a desperately needed optimism, and golden idealism, then let me be gentle to myself. And gentle towards the American Jewish girl in Summer of My German Soldier who had denial like me. Just like her on the last page, I too struggled to try to see my parents as “seconds.” (damaged goods on sale)
Because I said I liked my self-help meetings, a friend came to one. Only one. Sitting beside me, she kept her head down on the table and cried for the entire meeting. Afterwards she told me that she was struggling with feeling disloyal to her dad.
If you have read the fiction and nonfiction of Pat Conroy, who’s books have been made into movies including Prince of Tides and The Great Santini, then you may have read that while he hated his father, he idealized his mother. My own mother I called nasty names, minimized… and idealized. And was in denial about. Call me stubborn, because I crazily kept thinking I had to clean up my own side of the street first, that “you can only change yourself,” that I needed to be a hero and do it their way, pay my dues, and that I needed to protect my mother from knowledge. I should have remembered the enslaved android Ruk on Star Trek. (The one underground with the duplicate Kirk) Ruk found a way to rebel, to break his programming, by finding an equation: “You can’t protect what is trying to destroy you!” I did, and also I didn’t, down the years and the layers.
As it happened, back when I was overseas I had a roommate who said he would step on every crack to break his mother’s back. This was back when I optimistically bought a sculpture souvenir for my mother, to give to her when I was less angry… but then I never did.
Today, no wonder my own gossip never morphs, no wonder people can rely on me for “even handed reports.” Down the years I must have been reacting against family falsehoods and exaggerations. And, to use a term only recently being tossed around, (although the eponymous movie goes back to 1944) I was always against “gaslighting.”
With sadness, I’m sure it’s significant that I never told my counsellor or self-help group about a certain big gaslight. Too much stupid pride, shame and anger—My bad, mea culpa, how humbling. Now I attend the Alexandra Writing Centre Society where many of my peers are enthused about writing memoirs, but that is something I can never do.
My recent onion layer was from reading the book Education by Tara Westover. I e-mailed a lady my age from Free Fall to recommend it. Turns out a mutual friend had recommended it too, but the local library had only two copies, so she was number 500 on the waiting list, so she bought her own. Such a small world. Now my library has lots of copies on display.
The cover shows an isolated old wooden school desk in a prairie field. Tara is supposed to be homeschooled, but she never is. So Tara struggles on her own to get accepted to Brigham Young University. There she keeps her lack of homeschooling a secret, and there her teacher despises her for not knowing the word “holocaust.”
As I’m sure Tara would agree: Even while feeling background radiation clicks of “shame,” the truth of gaslighting and brainwashing is that you don’t know you are being abused, anymore than all the right-thinking women in a faith colony will know they are being abused when told that they are “supposed to” be “sweet” rather than ask any questions of authority. Meanwhile, normal people in society won’t know about denial; they “don’t get it;” they just cannot grasp that honest God-fearing people like Tara can honestly not know they are in fact being violently abused. —Not even if you salvage their bloody T-shirt from the garbage, as Pat Conroy did— The “education” in the title is not “attending university;” it’s learning to see through eyes figuratively swelled shut by emotional blows.
My family, just like Tara’s, insisted the entire rest of the world was wrong. My mother would say I couldn’t believe any from-outside-the-family respect or valuing or nice awards or compliments, none whatsoever. “Not until— Because—” Never mind. My family was wrong and I was wrong to believe a dear liar. And now I am peeling another layer, facing my false ideals, and looking back gently on stubbornly wasted years. I had thought I was done.
Sean Crawford
at minus 31 degrees centigrade,
East of Balzac,
January
2020
Footnotes:
~Holocaust: From “whole burning.” Nobody I know ever says the word. I only know it because I have often read it. During my schooldays the (pre-war) word had not yet been popularized, probably not until 1963 and the book Night.
~Denial: How long does it take for it to go away? In a CBC radio documentary, interviewing three victims of sibling abuse, it took all three until their thirties to “see,” with one saying that once she had the word “abuse” her life started to make sense. I never thought to apply the word to myself until someone else did, when I was 36. That’s when a lady friend, age 26, sharing in the bar told me she was intimidated because I could see into her mind so well “due to your abuse issues.” (here’s the CBC link, you will need to scroll down)
At that time? I still thought being functional in life came from accumulating enough experiences to get functional ‘life skills.’ And perhaps (I forget) I blamed myself for not gathering more experiences faster. For me, this was a useful form of denial, because then at least I would do the sort of things business recruiters look for in resumes. I mean, I “got a life.” Maybe the recruiters are right to believe in “character training” but I was wrong to think it would work for me, because abuse that strikes to the bone does not get transcended that easily.
~A very sad song: Pat Benatar, at a live performance, explains why every one of her shows down the years have always included Hell is For Children.
~A jolly song: Speaking of Internet history, here’s a parody I have linked to before.
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