In Part II, we covered more than a bit of the legal niceties of the interactions between the law-enforcement and legal/courts communities, and AA. We also pointed out an easily-believable mechanism detailing a sort of life-cycle whereby older addicts/alcoholics in recovery (or not) could "acquire" fresh new victims, or at least could attach themselves to the lives of impressionable young people with severe problems with drugs and/or alcohol.
I never could tell the difference between love and espionage, and I still cannot. In fact, I frequently can't tell the difference between mere widespread community rumormongering and intentional and orchestrated campaigns of defamation. Heck, it took me years to figure out that there's a certain inherent logic in this sort of thing, for example a reasonable intention to increase the average property value of homes in a neighborhood can turn convolutedly foul and ugly twisted once "good intentions" collide with exigencies and realities, and start to pave the road to Hell, at least for some of those involved.
Here's an update on that story from January: it seems that squatters are getting aggressive about leaving their foreclosed homes. Who could have expected such a thing? Aren't people supposed to just accept the inevitable and march cheerfully into Homelessness, and start living in camps in the woods or maybe even in Mole-Man Bunkers cleverly built out of scavenged construction scraps and piles of hardened mud? But I digress.
Love, and espionage: both, to me, are mysteries. One of these mysteries is potentially something that may become a bit more clear once things are brought out into the light of day, but as regards me being able to sort out the difference between espionage and love as practiced by human beings, I've decided that while sex is out of the question for obvious reasons, I don't have to worry about my dog or cat sending scurrilous e-mails defaming me to my employer, forged to look like they come from a ex-wife or former girlfriend. So, if I want a friend in Washington -- someone I can trust -- I'll stick to household pets. A well-fed dog snoozing on my feet, or a cat purring in my lap, no espionage there. That kind of love I can understand and reciprocate.
I just can't understand the sort of "love" that has sketchy old men prying around in the courthouse looking for likely young ladies with severe self-concept issues and criminal histories of addiction and substance abuse, to "sponsor" young ladies into a court-ordered cult membership where they'll be more or less brainwashed into pimping out more-recent newcomers into sexing the sketchy old men that got them in that unenviable position.
I guess I'm what you could call an old man, though I try to be not so sketchy as to go prowling around in court records looking for mu-ha-ha-ha-ha-hah unsuspecting victims prime for induction into my evil cult of depraved sexual exploitation masquerading as court-ordered therapy. I might be just generally too weird for words, and I do have to admit that I have in fact entertained, with much cheer, the unlikely fantasy of attractive young ladies -- of more-or-less college age -- somehow finding their way into a romance with yours truly. What older unmarried heterosexual man hasn't had such ideas? I mean, look at the popularity of Sean Connery films where he inevitably winds up in bed with a lovely Russian... ooops. Once again, Love and Espionage. Never could understand the difference... should I blame Hollywood?
Hollywood certainly hasn't been shy about pumping out the blockbusters where the femmes-fatales teach their victims that sex equals death, at least when you can't tell the difference between a real devotion or the snares of the black widow. These are very old stories; contrast and compare the Scripture verses in Psalms 7 and 8. You'd think that people would have learned something by now.
The following is fiction, and let the reader be warned. Sometimes there's nothing more true than fiction, because the names and places of True Crime stories are always different in the court records... but however much you change the particulars, the story remains the same.
In prison for dealing dope, the prisoner discovers that it's possible to get closer to parole by participating in Alcoholics Anonymous/Narcotics Anonymous. While participating in AA/NA in prison, he hears a lot of stories and tells a lot of stories, too. He makes friends. And not being much of an addict while in prison, the fascinating thing about getting with the program is the really pretty deep grasp of psychology, no less than of addiction, that is possessed by many of the group participants.
On leaving prison, the man continues to attend AA/NA and discovers with great pleasure that AA/NA is co-ed and further discovers that it is not uncommon for people struggling away from addiction to drugs/alcohol to develop a new addiction... to sex.
It may be that participation in the program does keep people off of dope or booze, but personality changes are a longer time coming.
One of the more terrible things about addiction is the lengths to which addicts will go to get more of what they need. Both addicts and their provisioners come to realize this, and the psychology of manipulation and turnabout become deeply ingrained. There is a clear and general course of progression of the disorder:
[ ... ]
Addiction protects and augments itself by means of a bodyguard of lies, distortions and evasions that taken together amount to a full scale assault upon consensual reality. Because addiction involves irrational and unhealthy thinking and behavior, its presence results in cognitive dissonance both within the addict himself and in the intersubjective realm of ongoing personal relationships.
In order for the addiction to continue it requires an increasingly idiosyncratic private reality subject to the needs of the addictive process and indifferent or even actively hostile to the healthy needs of the addict and those around him. This encroachment of the fundamentally autistic, even insane private reality of the addict upon the reality of his family and close associates inevitably causes friction and churn as natural corrective feedback mechanisms come into usually futile play in an effort to restore the addict's increasingly deviant reality towards normal. Questions, discussions, presentations of facts, confrontations, pleas, threats, ultimatums and arguments are characteristic of this process, which in more fortunate and less severe cases of addiction may sometimes actually succeed in its aim of arresting the addiction. But in the more serious or advanced cases all such human counter-attacks upon the addiction, even, indeed especially when they come from those closest and dearest to the addict, fall upon deaf ears and a hardened heart. The addict's obsession-driven, monomaniacal private reality prevents him from being able to hear and assimilate anything that would if acknowledged pose a threat to the continuance of his addiction.
At this stage of addiction the addict is in fact functionally insane... (Garrett, Floyd P, MD, "Addiction, Lies and Relationships")
So what we are dealing with now is someone whose addiction has shifted from drugs/alcohol to sex. As sex generally is considerably less mind-altering than continued long-term drug/alcohol abuse, the course of progression of the addiction is a bit more clear-headed and less chemically-altered in its "lies, distortions and evasions".
Yet it hasn't ever been necessary for people to be drunk or on drugs to become either evil, or insane, or both.
In the same way that an addict can tell themselves "I'll quit being a junkie tomorrow", our "protagonist" can tell himself "I'll stop being an evasive and distorting liar tomorrow". They may have shed their addiction... but not their addictive psychology. Yet even though they may fail to be able to understand this about themselves, they may very well be able to help other people combat their own addictions.
The crucial juncture comes while researching his own records as part of a job application. Our "protagonist" discovers that while his own AA/NA group doesn't keep records with full identity (no last names is a tradition in AA/NA), the courthouse does have a pretty comprehensive file of people court-ordered into AA/NA meetings as an alternative to incarceration. There are, nearby, comparable files of people who have been recommended to be offered this alternative, should they plead guilty.
Our "protagonist" makes a quick list of all upcoming court dates where the defendant is young and female, and at the next AA/NA meeting, starts working his way into a position of being a liason between the courts and the organization.
He can't help himself from doing this any more than a junkie could be asked to stand watch over a kilogram of heroin and a case of hypodermics. It's the addiction -- only it's not to heroin but to sex -- and it's the psychology... where secretiveness and deception even of one's own self alter the worldview to enable continuing the behavior, which will in almost all cases inevitably triumph.
Surprisingly to our "protagonist", this plan works. It continues to work, and it works better with practice. Before long, he doesn't even need to sneak around in the courthouse looking for likely targets, the courts mail the cases to him. All that concerns the court system is that they don't see these defendants again, or at least that they not see the defendants again in any way that seems to have anything to do with drugs or alcohol.
The plan doesn't just work, it continues to work, and not just for our "protagonist". His fellow addicts-in-recovery (or not so much in recovery) are a pretty shrewd bunch, and they see what's going on, and as it tends to provide them with a steady stream of young ladies to cozy up to, they do whatever they can to help.
Where all of this stops being merely cheesy exploitation and venal manipulation is here: most of the female now in this group may have come into it fairly young and tender fresh from their first real clash with the justice system. Most of the males are significantly older, at least the formative and leadership ranks, and they have come into this group mostly right out of prison, or as an alternative to incarceration for fairly heavy infractions. Quite likely the worst crimes the young ladies have done amount to shoplifting booze or getting busted in school with drugs from the parent's liquor cabinets. Quite possibly the worst things that these older men have done are things that have escaped the notice of the courts, or they'd not be in AA/NA, they'd be serving 20-to-life.
And if you want to see just how mean an addict can get, get between them and what they need.
More to come?
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