IMMOLATION 20XX
Genocide has always been with us. We humans. Probably every religious institution throughout its history has inflicted genocide on non-aligned groups. Wars might be regarded as indirect genocides, since civilians are often collateral victims, often in huge numbers.
THE SHOOTER PARENTS
Parents, such as those of Adam Lanza (Sandy Hook), Nicolas Cruz (Parkland), Ethan Crumbley (Oxford MI), Salvador Ramos (Uvalde), and Robert Crimo (Highland Park) all claim no awareness of their sons’ plans to commit a mass shooting.
How is this possible?
Were they all asleep at the wheel? Were they such negligent or even abusive or perhaps sadistically inclined parents that they bred and raised a mass killer? With the exception of James and Jennifer Crumbley, the other parent figures seemed almost above reproach, except for also assisting the purchase of assault weapons.
How could they not have known?
ON THE RAZOR’S EDGE
“In a democracy,” the Greek historian Herodatus wrote in the 5th century BC, “there is, first, that most splendid of virtues, equality before the law.”
The first democracy was created by decree in ancient Athens. It lasted almost two hundred years.
Our American democracy, also created by a group decree, is now almost 250 years old, and it is teetering on a razor’s edge. The January 6 Select Committee is revealing to us how close we came to losing our equality before the law. And many Americans, including a shocking number of monstrously hypocritical Republican elected officials, continue to support this move toward autocracy tainted with the smell of militant fascism.
Most of western democracies are reeling at the American plight, and are further energized to help preserve the democratic country of Ukraine under attack by a fascistic regime as brutal and poised toward greater domination as the Nazis it fought against in World War II.
summer erupting
As we face another summer the likely threat of more wildfires erupting in warm dry areas of the country bodes badly. Those who witnessed their homes virtually ingested by raging flames as well as those waiting fearfully to learn if the firs will attack them, and those of us who have seen fires blazing in homes and buildings—all experience a participant observer’s trauma. TV and social media transmit and often amplify the sensation of trauma even from a long electronic transmitter distance. Traumas are piling on us: the war in the Ukraine, the ever-increasing mass shootings, the pending losses of rights to abortion and possibly gay marriage, the proliferating conspiracy theories spinning around us, the reports of institutional sexual abuse, the unending pandemic, climactic terror, and on-and-on—we begin to long for a calm, peaceful, temperate period.
bring the shooters down
In 1999 a mass shooting occurred in a Columbine Colorado high school. Key features of that shooting have become emblematic and inspirational, much like the complex iconic symbols of the Nazis. Columbine became enshrined by these features: the killing instrument an AR-15; the target: children in a public school; a prior announcement of intent on social media; a militia-style clothing in black; age of shooter: 17-18; the shooting as a last stand with shooter’s death or suicide.
WHY VIRUSES?
Someone exhales and emits an invisible cloud of virus particles. A person standing by inhales those particles and two weeks later they are in the ICU, medically comatose, breathing with the aid of a ventilator, struggling to stay alive. What the hell!
What are viruses for and why do they keep using people to replicate, while also sickening and even killing the human host? And despite our super-scientific efforts to destroy them, they keep mutating to more resilient, resistant, and even deadly forms.
Enough is enough already.
WAR FOREVER
My entire early childhood was ghosted by World War II. I remember as a small boy going to Telenews with my mother in downtown Detroit, watching newsreels spin out short reels of planes dropping bombs, battleships firing guns into the air, soldiers massing for combat. Even shots of concentration camp victims and huge piles of naked skeletal bodies, the sight of which would make my mother grab me by the arm and rush us out of the theater. She said she was afraid she would see her own mother or father or sisters in one of those piles. We had learned from my uncle Milo, who had been in Auschwitz, that they had all been seized in Paris, pushed into cattle cars, sped by rail to Poland, then marched naked into fake shower chambers, and quickly gassed and cremated.
Bending gender
When I was an eleven-year-old boy I had a friend from school, a round-faced boy whose shirts billowed out at his middle and whose fingers were always a bit sticky. Cal was his name, short for Calvin. Our friendship solely focused on our near addiction to horror comic books— Vault of Horror, Weird World, Haunted Horror, Beyond, Eerie, Tomb of Terror. He somehow was able to cobble together a growing assortment of such titles and we would pore over each issue after school, our sessions always called to an end by his mother advertising the preparation for dinner.
Much later I realized that these afternoon sessions with Cal also featured a Billy Elliot moment
Crimes against humanity
Cruelty between people—extreme atrocities, torture, genocide—is part of the spectrum of human behavior that must be as old as our species. In just the last hundred years we have witnessed up close and from afar the holocaust, the Korean war, the Vietnam war, the Balkan wars, the Iraq war, the Afghanistan wars, the Syrian war, the ISIS incursions, and now Ukraine. I would also include terrorist attacks, sex trafficking, the violent and sexual abuse of children, the seemingly endless mass shootings, racist inspired murders and on and on.
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.
PANZIL Unleashed
In 1997 I was struggling with an illness in my family while agonizing over a book I had been writing about severe cases of schizophrenia. My friend, David Gordon, seeing me distressed, suggested I take a break and write a children's book. David was an artist and longed to illustrate one. So we teamed up and produced this book about a young dragon,
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.