Updated June 13, re-tagged)
Yesterday, we covered some history and geography that paints a sort of bulls-eye on the general vicinity of MD-28 and Rock Creek. Prior to that, we discredited the "lone gunman theory" -- so to speak -- with a series on the Midtown Alcoholics Anonymous Sex Cult in which we pulled out a lot of Washington Post articles as well as a lot of victim and innocent-bystander testimony.
We also covered the difference between Due Diligence and paranoia.
Would it be paranoia for anyone to think that all addiction-recovery "lay programs" are Cults? It certainly would be. But if you were to do some "due diligence" on the Midtown Group of Alcoholics Anonymous ("AA"), you would find not paranoia, but justified fear, suspicion, and -- for people with an even moral keel and scruples -- loathing.
Astute observers may have noticed a clear and recurrent thread in my bloggings. In general, I am a big fan of law and order, but I am much more concerned with order than with the law, in most cases. I am a pragmatist and I am also pagan. I like to point out that "if it harms none, then do as you will" implies "you must study consequences to know what may cause harm". That "first law of neo-paganism" is not a license for licentiousness; it's a command to think things through to their ultimate outcomes, and to weigh the outcomes of your actions against the impetus of your desires and intentions. If the outcome is harmless, that doesn't mean that your desires or intentions were inherently good; it only means that the action is permitted under the first law. And even if your intentions are good -- or seem to others to be good -- the road to hell is paved with those good intentions. That is why we well-schooled pagans look not to intentions, but to results.
Human law was made, as a general rule, in an effort to solve some problem. Even tradition is merely time-honored solutions to prevent or deal with problems. The nice thing about law is that, unlike tradition, law usually tells directly what problem it is trying to solve, or at least the law itself bears reference to the debates that usually surround the adoption and promulgation of law. In those debates, the causes and the effects of a law, should it be enacted, are considered at length. And if it will harm none, then make whatever law you will. In general, law seeks to avoid harm -- even if the only way it can preserve the greater good of all society is by punishing the smaller number of transgressors -- and tradition does the same. And in the absence of harm, one may presume there will be health, and wealth, and above all, order.
For much of my life, anyone who has come to know the way that I think -- and to understand in which things in which I take deep interest -- has tended to exclaim "you would be a good cop".
Well, I might make a good detective. I like to solve problems, and in general, when not pressed for time, I do solve problems. But solving problems, or sleuthing cases, is not what being a cop is about. The job of a cop is to enforce the law, and there's no question that due to the fallible nature of mankind, and the errant ways of many, society would fall apart without the firm blue line that stands between the decent and the criminal. Yet due to my belief that even good intentions that produce harmful consequences are morally insupportable, I might indeed do a bit of sleuthing, but I won't be wearing a badge.
I can imagine how I'd feel if I -- with good intentions -- arrested some out-of-control minor falling into severe addiction and remanded her to the system, only to find out that I was the initial and formative actor that put her in the clutches of a system so tainted that within months of the arrest, she had been inducted into a brainwashing Court-Ordered Sex Gang.
How do you feel about that, officer?
I couldn't live with it, personally... and that's why I'm not a cop.
If I checked the outcomes of all of my cases, and discovered that any significant percentage -- much less above 70 percent -- of minor females I'd arrested for narcotics violations or underage drinking, wound up living sequestered lives in a cult where they generally wound up as concubines to fat old bald guys with beards, all preaching righteous indignation and psychobabble pontifications while trying to get some minors' pants off, I'd probably start drinking so much that I myself would need AA.
Maybe even Midtown.
Gee, I wonder if that has ever happened?
And no, I am not suggesting that police officers who encounter minor females in a state of deep intoxication should maybe let them just stagger off.
It's just that if you're about to arrest them and put them into a system, when it comes to what the system has a habit of doing to them, maybe it's time for some fucking "due diligence". And outcome tracking.
Unless, of course, you actually like things the way they are.
Many years ago I wrote a novel. Mostly that was trying to bridge together some short-stories, and I was trying to break into the horror-fiction market. In the 1980s, one fourth of all works printed in English had been written by Stephen King. He literally outsold the Bible. That's market share. I wanted even a small part of it.
In the early days of the public getting access to the InterNet, Interlude I became for a time the most-downloaded work of literary fiction on the World-Wide Web.
Hey, people always told me "write what you know", and so I did. Yet people somehow seem to miss the fact that although the protagonist, an anti-hero, is yet-another attractive young vampyress, the story isn't about vampires. She's just an allegory on addiction.
The real story is about gangs, and Cults, and how you frequently can't distinguish between the two.
[ ... ]
The thing that was making Lace crazier than any other factor was that she was accepted here among the people of the Cult. She had a social circle within which to move, and she had her social obligations, and responsibilities, and she had a day-to-day life among people she could really get to know in a more than transient sense... and the society she in which she was accepted was a society of vicious killers and criminals.
[ ... ]
Well, Midtown AA isn't all that bad, now, is it?
Do you know that for sure? Enough to let a court send your teenage daughter there?
More to come?
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