We are all victims.

One of the services, I guess you could call it, of my blog supporter (called, oddly enough, “Blogger”) is a “Next Blog” button up in the whaddayacallit bar, which, when clicked, gives you a random selection of other blogs. The great majority of these are, if I may say so, dull dull boring dull—a remarkable number of women writing sensitive New Age poetry or just witless blathering about life or relationships or nature-worship, or talking about their kids (a few blogs consisting of nothing but pictures of their kids), lots of travelogues with lots of pictures, one woman going into great detail about her weight-loss diet—plus blogs in Spanish, Danish, Dutch, Bulgarian, Turkish, Chinese, God knows what. It’s a remarkable, even if very tiny, window into what the Blogosphere has become. But every once in a while, maybe once every 20 or so, I hit pay dirt. The latest such is a guy in Virginia who calls himself Crankster and his site “Cranky Old Bastard”—the sort of names that would appeal to me, of course. He is mildly cranky, in a very articulate way which is refreshingly free from foul language (I obviously have nothing against colorful language, but it’s nice once in a while to read someone who can express himself without it), although not, at 35, what I would consider old. And one of his recent posts (3 Jan 07) pushed one of my buttons: “Gotta love the kiddies”.

He starts by citing a column in The Telegraph by British Conservative MP Boris Johnson in which he tells of being seated on a British Airlines plane next to two “bratty” kids (Crankster’s term, not Johnson’s), and just as he was resigning himself to a miserable flight in their proximity, a stewardess asked him to move. Imagining that he was being moved to a better seat out of respect for his office, he was told that it was instead because BA has “very strict rules” against men sitting next to unrelated children. The reason, of course, is that all men are assumed to be, at least potentially, child molesters and pedophiles. In the Telegraph article, Johnson goes on at some length about the totally ridiculous nature of such an assumption, bewailing the terrible effect it has on British society in general and British schools in particular; and of the dozens of comments on his article, the vast majority agree with him and warmly thank him for telling it like it is. A fair number of the commentators tell of knowing men whose lives and careers have been ruined by the fanatically zealous application of laws based on this assumption, often against men who haven’t the slightest inclination to pedophilia but have been falsely accused; and of incidents where someone has, out of human compassion, tried to help a child who has fallen and hurt him/herself, only to have the mother descend on him like a harpy, screaming that he’s molesting her kid.

Well, all that is about the implications of a British incident for British society, but it doesn’t take much stretching for Crankster to apply it to American society as well, in which very similar attitudes lead to very similar incidents. As he puts it: “The fact that society increasingly seems to view men as presumptive sexual predators, without any corroborating evidence, is terrifying.” He goes on to apply the same principle to women falsely accusing men of rape, illustrating it with a story from his own experience of a woman who accused a guy (a friend of his) of raping her simply because she didn’t want to admit it was consensual sex. In the same vein, one of the comments to Johnson’s article suggests that kids can use the same weapon vindictively against teachers who give them bad grades; all they have to do is accuse the teacher of looking at them funny or patting them on the shoulder and the teacher is gone, no questions asked. A situation in my own experience involved the rector of the church I was working at being accused of “sexual harassment” by two fruitloop-paranoid bitches because he told them an off-color joke—didn’t even touch them, just told them a naughty joke. The resulting witch hunt was so stressful that he had a heart attack that ruined his health, and his career along with it, since even if he was exonerated, he was too damaged to continue working.

Yes, all this is terrifying, as is also the widespread occurrence of it. What is perhaps most terrifying is that it points to a mentality of near-psychotic paranoia that has gripped the entire nation, so that no one can do the most innocent and innocuous thing without having to consider what raving crackpot will accuse him of some crime that never entered his mind. The accusation will always lead to a conviction because of the closely related and equally widespread social pathology that assumes, without trial or evidence, that if someone is accused of something, he is automatically guilty of it; I have even heard it said, in all seriousness, that such people must be guilty or they wouldn’t have been accused. And the strychnine-flavored icing on this shit-filled cake is that everybody is looking for the flimsiest half-assed excuse to accuse somebody of offending or hurting them because everybody is a victim: it’s the culture of victimization. In the course of the witch hunt against the rector mentioned above, some woman who claimed to be a counselor to victims came to speak to the congregation to help us “work through” the terrible damage done to us by the rector’s misbehavior—not a word about the damage done to the rector, since he was obviously guilty and deserved no consideration. In a presentation notable for its appalling asininity, she actually said, “Everyone here is or has at one time been a victim”; and when I and a few others had the temerity to challenge this bizarre assertion, she calmly replied that anyone who denied being a victim was “repressing” whatever experience had victimized them.

Connected to all this on several levels is the episode in my own life when I was bullied into attending a therapy group for alcoholics because I was accused of being one and was, according to the above logic, undeniably guilty. In the course of these sessions, one of the “therapists,” perhaps in an attempt to make us feel better about being alcoholics, made the insane claim (similar to the one above about victims) that everyone is an addictive personality. I was not kindly received when I pointed out that this essentially removed any rationalization for treating alcoholics as special if they were simply displaying the same behavioral trait that everyone else had, but I was polite enough not to mention further that this banal statement served the useful purpose of extending his client base to the entire population.

So we have here the following principles for relationships in today’s society:
1. Everyone is a victim of someone else; all one has to do is find someone they think is victimizing them and accuse them of it.
2. Anyone accused of any sort of misbehavior by anyone else, no matter how manifestly batty or lying, is automatically assumed to be guilty.
3. People who aren’t even accused of anything may be assumed to be potential, if not probable, offenders and therefore guilty of being a member of a suspect class.

Under rules like these, is it any surprise that our society is a hopeless shambles of emotionally crippled, scarred basket-cases trying to compete in accusing each other of thoroughly phony and specious pseudo-offenses, totally incapable of trusting anyone enough to enjoy any kind of sensible relationship, always on the lookout for some excuse to blame someone else for their own failures, always trying to screw the other guy before he screws them. . . A common idea among us social misfits (a quote for which I can’t find now) is that the people locked up in nut-houses are far more sane than the people outside who decided they were crazy. The entire society is an unwalled loony-bin, with no sane attendants.

One last observation: Note that the guy who started all this is a British Conservative MP. Maybe conservatives over there simply have more sense than ours here, but I think another factor is that what we are dealing with here is closely related to Political Correctness, which has been the demon curse of the Left for decades and the source of almost all the witlessly silly ideas and policies they’ve endorsed. Almost everything that is called Politically Correct is rationally moronic, and the sooner the Left disowns this blithering nonsense, the healthier and stronger they’ll be.