Who Let the Bogeyman into Neverland?
The bogeyman was Michael Jackson!The truth is surely now out. A very practiced pedophile MJ employed all the documented wiles of a pedophile using his enormous public image and adoration as a child-like angel of innocence and beneficence.But he knew how to groom his little boy victims and their families as well. He may have believed he loved these little boys but he surely induced them to trust, honor and deeply love him. He was persuasive but never forceful. His love came with the careful sexual seduction of the committed pedophile.All over his child-fantasy Neverland were hidden, guarded sites for secret sexual trysts, boy and man..
WHY DO MEN KILL THEMSELVES
Suicide spoke to me from across the room and on the phone. All men. And all were, at some critical point, suicidal. None ever made an attempt. Was the therapy, even in conjunction with medication, the preventative? Probably.
Most people who do commit suicide do it without warning, without seeking help or have given up on "help" (such as Anthony Bourdain).The pain of depression can become so unbearable, so caustic, so relentlessly oppressive that only suicide seems to offer relief. And once a suicide plan has been fixed, the suffering individual typically feels better, looks better and, to his or her intimates, acts as if improved. Because relief is on its way.
Who Enables Sexual Predators?
Who led the many teenage girls into Larry Nasser's closed-door office where he examined and treated them, unchaperoned, by inserting his ungloved finger into their vagina?
Predator-enablers cannot be viewed as accessories to Nasser's many hundred crimes. But they were abettors. How many coaches and athletes saw Jerry Sandusky flitting around prepubescent boys, many of whom he sodomized in the showers of Penn State Athletic buildings. Abettors also.What about the parents of the two prepubescent boys who were allowed to spend days and nights and weeks alone with Michael Jackson while he played penis and butt? Abettors also.
Sexual Abuse and Institutions
When the scandal about Catholic priests in Boston abusing children burst onto the front page all over America, an outrage against certain institutions began fomenting. Immersed in the world of the psyche, I have wondered about how institutions, unwittingly, provide opportunities for predators, and even indirectly promote predation within their own ranks. I also wonder about the predator. Do they enter institutions with the aim of using them to provide access to victims? Or is there a mysterious systemic complicity that induces or releases predatory behavior within the stated mission of the institution, whether religious worship, education, sports training, artistic enterprise, or summer camp?
Covid and Dragons
Fear has many eyes ....and, for every saying about fear there is its opposite. For example: "fear arises from ignorance." But we know that from the cavalcade of anti-vaxers, armed with disinformative conspiracy theories, they have no fear. Belief in the nonexistence of Covid-19, or belief that it is no more dangerous than the common cold, creates a complacency, a fearlessness, in the face of severe illness and death. They all deserve to ride on the old Alfred E. Newman slogan, "What, me worry?"In older times plagues called forth dragons. The idea that a dragon comandeered a most valuable treasure or imprisoned a most beautiful princess or guarded a most sacred object offered an object lesson on human wish fulfillment. That a person, armed with little more than righteous confidence, could triumph over such an implacable and powerful monster gave hope that mere wishing could vanquish the unvanquishable.
Dragon Devolving
From earliest childhood I have pondered the origin of the idea of the dragon—this outsized, monstrous creature with a body composed of amalgamated features of the most terrifying animals: serpents, lions, eagles, raptors...Dinosaurs might have served as the model for these gigantic monsters construed as dragons.
Inescapable Terror
I remember a sandwich board man marching along Woodward Avenue in Detroit, his sign reading: THE END IS NEAR!" Well, now it seems like the end time might be approaching. We are nearing the point of polluting the atmosphere and all ecosystems that for many, if not all, life could end; we are on a perfervid course toward animal extinctions that could end with our own; we are struggling with a global pandemic that seems unabating; terrorism and wars persist and fuel possibly greater wars and even atomic warfare; and there is the possibility of a Trump re-election.Our great psychological defense, no doubt sparked somewhere in our brains, is denial, the persistent refusal to face facts, to accept a non-disputable reality. Denial is usually the first reaction to news of impending disaster, including one's own demise.
Death and Taxes
When I was eleven years old I was taken to the hospital for an elective appendectomy. It was my introduction to the American healthcare system.Last week I filed my 2019 income tax forms, paying times what Trump paid in 2017, thus interacting yet again with our tax system.Between these two events many decades of living have intervened. Inevitably my involvement with these systems will terminate with death.
Children of the Pandemic
As a toddler during World War II, playing in our comfy living room in Detroit, I was unaware of the fear and anxiety that permeated the adult life around me. Not just the threat of war possibly arriving at our shore, but the knowledge that my parent's families in France were possibly subject to the horrors of the holocaust. And word of their fate, their actual status, was unavailing.
The Passover Lesson That Can Save us All
The central tenet of the Jewish holiday, Passover, is the celebration of God's deliverance of the Jewsfrom slavery. But that deliverance came because the Jews were warned to paint their doors with the blood of a sacrificial lamb so that God's wrath would spare the Jews of the slaughter of their first-born sons. That was the final plague Moses proclaimed against the Egyptians. The pharaoh's refusal to free the Jews when faced with this tenth, terrible plague forced God's hand.
Your Brain on Social Isolation
Social isolation is human despair. We evolved down from primates who were all blessed and sometimes cursed with group membership. Simply put: no (hu)man is an island.The strangest, and some ways most disturbing, example of social isolation I ever experienced was as a senior officer on a Coast Guard ship were I was sent for a very brief tour. It was during the Vietnam war and I was serving in the Public Health Service. A requirement of that service was to do a 3-week junket providing medical coverage for a small sector, in the North Atlantic —the Sea of Labrador—as part of America's commitment to NATO.
How to Write a Children's Book
Panzil. How did I think of that?
I can blame my late friend, David Gordon, who coaxed me into writing a children's book. He was a graphic designer and he let me use his back office and his dining room during a dark time in my life, a time when one of my children was suffering from a debilitating illness that was worsening.
Shut Up, I'm Reading
I remember the first time I held a crayon. The color (blue) and the iconic Crayola wrapper fixed themselves in my memory. But that memory was only retrieved, twenty-plus years later, when my two-year-old son fisted his first crayon.Crayons gave way, under first-grade teacher’s orders, to pencils and then, in third grade, a pen holder with its nib poised over an inkwell sunk in the corner of my school desk, the requisite yellow chamois somewhere at the mop-up ready.
Love That Has No Name
My child — the child within me — loves dinosaurs, dragons, and robots. Today, nowadays, robots are the winners. Jurassic Park dinosaurs are for adventures on a razor edge and the adventure ends there. Dragons are for renting out powers like flying, fire-breath, and gentle menacing but then you have to cage them and get back to the everyday.Robots, keen and smart and enigmatic, are for pairing up with these mentally immaculate beings, geniuses with talents to invent and deploy all kinds of wondrous things without showing ego or affect
Machines Like Us
Every era, every generation seems to have its horrors. But none of them, past or present, equate. We are in a particularly rough patch: right-wind attitudes are moving to the forefront and the planet seems to be readying for death by human hands.
Why Do We Call It Asperger's?
I first encountered Carl, my wife's cousin, in a high school biology class. He stood out because of his nearly white hair, eyes that were always staring past you, and a tendency to interrupt the class asking peculiar questions tangentially related to the topic being discussed—"why is a tadpole forced to become a frog?"
One in Ten?
While in Med school one of my friends, whom today one would call a "cis"—a totally straight guy, had a urological exam for prostatitis that involved prostatic massage. He bounced out of that clinic exclaiming, "Wow! Now I get why gay guys love anal sex."
When Can I Touch You?
While in high school I volunteered to read to the blind. The program assigned me to Robert, a pixie-ish young man who was a music student at the local college. Though he read braille fluently and books on tape were available, the texts he needed were only in print.It took me a while to adjust to his touching, his need to take my arm when going somewhere, his delight in touching objects to get their feel, to “see” them as he said.