poliphilo | Sorry To Return To This, But...

High art vs. Low art.

The fans of Gary Glitter's music don't see that the fact he created entertaining pop songs puts him above the law. The Glitterati (to use a phrase I came across today) honestly think that because of the 'art' they create, they are not bound by the same morals or laws as the rest of us.

As someone on my LJ said, witness those actors and filmmakers who refer to us hoi palloi as 'civilians'.

I think that must be it. Polanski is an "artist" and Glitter just a popular entertainer.

We're talking elitism.

A former fraud detective in our town was sent to proson for having indecent films and images of girls as young as three and was in contact with someone offering children for sale.
He's served just six months and is walking the streets of town.
I wonder about our legal system

I can top that horror.

A man in my mother's town raped his stepdaughter continuously from the time she was three or four until the time she was fourteen. It came out when she was passing out blow jobs for $2 a piece in the back of the school bus. :(

He served two years in prison and is out. He's been stalking young girls coming home from school in the neighboring towns. The law says he's as free as you or me until he actually "does something."

By the time he does something, another young girl's life is ruined.

Oh,and on a truly ironic note--he ran for school board about six years ago. And some people voted for him.

wtf????

That's terrible.

I don't understand how such a serious crime can draw such a short sentence.

I trust the police are keeping a eye on him.

All sorts of people are walking the streets who represent a danger to the public, but you can't lock up every potential offender up for life. It's an insoluble problem.

Once upon a time the victim's family (mostly Dad and brothers) would take care of the problem. Of course when the Dad is the problem......

Vigilante justice- a problem to solve a problem.

I don't think our society has quite woken up yet to the fact that most abuse happens in the home. We're still putting most of our resources into a defence against "stranger-danger".

Put them down like you do a vicious dangerous animal, because that's what they are animals.

Gary Glitter's wife wasn't murdered by a religious cult that ripped the fetus out of her and killed that too. The sympathy card, I believe.

I personally think it's a bunch of crap, myself. Neither one of them deserves anything other than to be persecuted to the fullest extent.

AND, Garry Glitter's music is played almost every Saturday and Sunday here in the States, by marching bands at football games.

Yes, you read that right.

I meant, prosecuted. No really, I meant prosecuted.

Persecuted works for me, as well!

In a way I'm glad someone's playing those songs. The music's not to blame.

Should we boycott a work of art because the artist is/was a criminal? I don't think so. We'd deny ourselves a lot of good stuff if we did.

Actually, the thing about the fetus is an urban legend. He was left inside his mother's womb and when she was autopsied they found that he lived for about 30 minutes after her death.

However, yes, the sympathy card is being much played.

A lot of criminals have had bad things happen to them. Suffering doesn't always ennoble; often it brutalizes.

Exactly, and I don't think the sympathy card should be applied to anyone in that situation. People who have experienced tragedy, violence, and so forth can face it, deal with it, and choose how they respond. Also, I've met too many abuse victims who chose deliberately to become abusers for their own ends. My mother was violently abusive, and of her four children two have chosen to deal with their own issues and work consciously on not mimicking her patterns, and two have chosen to internalize her patterns and learn ways to behave abusively without looking overtly abusive so they can get away with things she did not.

Sorry, that was supposed to be "learn to choose how they respond". Bad edit.

I remember a woman who was abused by her mother saying on TV that she could have been an abuser too but chose not to be- and she didn't see why others couldn't make the same choice.

That's the mystery- why some go one way and some the other- why you rejected your mothers behaviour patterns and two of your siblings didn't. Is it about strength of character or what?

I've been thinking about this question, and have come to the conclusion that a lot of it is about how you respond to the world once your trust has been sufficiently violated. Do you decide that you don't want to fall to your abuser's level? Do you decide to strike out? Do you decide to manipulate and control other people? Do you decide to hurt yourself instead of lashing out? Do you decide that what happened to you doesn't justify paying forward the pain?

It's interesting that you see it as a matter of conscious choice.

I like that. We're not the puppets of the unconscious, but at any given moment can choose whether we do right or wrong.

Ironically, I've been thinking a lot about this very issue because my husband's blog is being trolled by a graduate student in sociology who is convinced that laboratory experiments prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that human beings are indeed the pawns of their deep minds and that we're incapable of consciously choosing to alter our responses.

At this point, my opinion (based on experience and observation) is that every human being is capable of making such conscious choices. However, not all people know, or understand, or believe in that capability, and not all of the people who know about it are sufficiently practiced in exercising it to have gotten consistent or perhaps any results yet. (Like any skill, it needs work and practice to develop fully.) Some people will keep working at it in spite of failures because they have a strong desire to do right even if it's hard and painful work. And some people refuse to acknowledge its existence while using it for ill because they don't want to do right; they enjoy doing wrong.

I certainly believe I make conscious moral choices, but I don't suppose there's any way I could prove it.

When it comes to human behavior, I don't trust laboratory-based proof. Experiment after experiment has shown that the only thing laboratory experiments prove is how people and animals behave under laboratory conditions. There was a big story recently about the fact that the guy who developed the alpha wolf theory has now completely rejected it because it reflects a behavior that wolves do not show in the wild --- only in the lab, when forced to form a pack with a bunch of strange wolves who aren't their family. (In the wild, packs are basically a breeding pair and their offspring, or are otherwise family-based.) So, you know, I wouldn't worry unduly about proof. Lived experience and the fruit of your efforts in your own and other people's lives is a much more important gauge.

It's simple. Gary Glitter is fat, ugly and working class; Roman Polanski isn't. Classism and lookism, if there is such a word. (It's the last big untouched "ism" but probably one of the most potent)

What about Chris Langham- the very fine comedy actor who did a little "research" into child pornography and is now a non-person?

Pete Townsend did some very similar "research"- and got away with it.

I don't know a lot about either of them, to be honest, so I couldn't say what distinguishes the two...

Sorry To Return To This, But...

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D'y wanna be in my gang?

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