on tyranny
content notes: pretty much everything, but especially CSA
predatory
“Surely she must have known something,” my best friend said to me, of child actor Melissa Gilbert and her husband Timothy Busfield. The kids were out of the house, so we could speak openly about dark shit.
She saw the look on my face, so she rephrased it as a question: “Surely she must have known?”
“No,” I said. “No way.”
Instead of defending Gilbert, however, I brought up a TikTok I’d seen the night before, recorded by a person who is creating a body of research about Dr James Dobson of Focus on the Family. Their research was very compelling: Dobson had been a member of an anti-pornography thinktank in the ‘90s, had been best friends with a priest who was eventually sent to a special home for priests who could not safely be reintegrated into society. I didn’t go into detail. The TikTok creator had not liked my reply on the post, wherein I’d stated I strongly doubted Dobson possessed the self-insight to be conscious of his own predatory behavior.
But he’d certainly enjoyed the power he held over other people’s children, which is indisputably creepy. Dobson had convinced other people to raise children with broken wills, children who were reluctant to question, to speak up against abuse. He’d used Bible verses about being “born into sin” to convince parents that all little children emerge into the world as hellbeasts who need the devil forced out of them.
“Children are born perfect!” I said then, livid. It’s just all the shit we pile onto children that makes them dysfunctional! My best friend and I agreed that they are perfect, or else concepts like an ‘age of accountability’ would not exist.
I said that Dobson had perpetuated—for want of an equally apt, less incendiary term—rape culture. He would not have recognized this because, to him, it was the ‘natural order of things,’ Bible-based, the very water in which he swam. He’d befriended predators, had upheld and enforced a system that protected predators. He’d molded a generation, in us, through our parents, of perfect targets for predation.
Melissa Gilbert, I ventured, as a child actor, had to appeal to authority on sets all her young life. So she’s just another perfect target.
“I wouldn’t wish Hollywood on my worst enemy,” my best friend sighed.
“Never tell someone you’ll love them ‘unconditionally,’ or that you don’t believe in divorce,” I continued, adding to the list of Dr Dobson’s crimes as a relationship expert. “Because there is a certain mind that will take this to its logical organic conclusion, which is, Okay! Die for me.” This sounded extreme and even absurd, so I backtracked: “If you introduce the idea of loving unconditionally to someone else, a certain type of mind will want to test this. They will test and test and escalate and escalate. If you ever break and leave, they’ll feel vindicated. But—”
“It takes you dying,” my best friend said, wide-eyed. “And only then can they say, Wow, I guess she really did love me.”
“You got it,” I said, nodding.
“Her career is ruined,” my best friend said flatly, of Melissa Gilbert.
“Maybe,” I said. “She bought those kids presents.”
It was, in a strange way, one of the most gruesome details People had published. As a TV director, Busfield had obtained access to the child actors’ families. His wife had purchased presents for them. One of the most damning details, I explained, was that the kids had been armed with on-set iPads so they could constantly communicate with their parents all day—until Busfield arrived. He’d had the iPads taken away.
“He isolated them,” my best friend realized.
We went silent as a third person entered the room. I started tidying. The third person left.
“I’ve had predator-dar all my life,” I said in a low voice. “Predator radar. I don’t know where this came from, which has always worried me.” But my first crush had been the actor James Woods, with his rubbery expressive face; I was equally fascinated by the actor Jeffrey Jones. Then, as a kid at a Southern Baptist church, I’d immediately recognized the same quality in one of the deacons. Something about him was piteous; he was too open with the youth group. It had been off-putting. So I’d refused to laugh at his jokes, had generally kept my distance from him even as I carefully observed him. Then there had been Timothy Busfield on Thirtysomething. I just knew. Later in life “I would check his Wikipedia,” I said, “to see if the other shoe had ever dropped yet.” I’d been worried for Melissa Gilbert, an actor about whom I know next to nothing.
“I suspect that Melissa Gilbert has predator radar, too, but that she doesn’t recognize that’s what it is,” I said. I sighed. I said something about noticing bad boundaries on sight, about immediately recognizing authority—power—that is ill-gotten and ill-used. You immediately sense that it is dangerous.
“So you start trying to appeal to that authority,” I continued, “to keep yourself safe from it.”
“Ohhhh,” my best friend said.
I didn’t say it at the time, but later I’d describe the pity Melissa Gilbert surely felt for her spouse—and surely he for her, for her naivety and generous stupidity. A two-way pity marriage. (“You pity me? Ipityyoooouuu!” I’d mock-roar, sending my best friend into a fit of giggles.)
Now my best friend and I were sitting on the couch, getting ready to watch TV. I revisited a specific memory I have of being 18ish and sitting in the back row on a flight to Houston. I was returning to college, and I had the window seat. The man on the aisle was some sort of folksy businessman, with his T-Mobile flip-phone attached to his denim jeans in one of those nylon holsters.
“I was asleep,” I remembered, “and I woke up because his hand was on my thigh, creeping his hand in, like this.” I put my hand on the top of my own thigh, then on my inner thigh. “I kept my eyes closed and shifted away, and he pulled his hand back, but after a couple minutes he put his hand back on my thigh. And so I sat up and looked at him and said ‘What!’ and he stared at me, and then he picked up his cup of water and held it out toward me and said ‘Would you like some water?’
“But I remember, while my eyes were closed, I was panicking. I thought about ringing the overhead bell for a flight attendant, but I didn’t want to embarrass him. So I was embarrassed instead. He should have been embarrassed, but I held all that embarrassment, all that shame, for him.”
“It’s just how we were raised,” my best friend said. “It’s all of us.”
split personality
I was watching episode 1, “Indoctrination,” of the limited HBO Max documentary series The Cult Behind the Killer: the Andrea Yates Story, which examines the nondenominational sect of Christianity that played into Andrea Yates’s psychosis.
I had correctly recalled that Yates and her husband were quiverfull (in the sense of “let go and let God” re: family planning), and that they were from Texas, a state which—how do I put this—maybe drives women crazier than other states do.
But the episode introduces other followers of Pastor Michael Woroniecki, too, including a now middle-aged man named David de la Isla. David was persuaded by Woroniecki’s fire-and-brimstone message, and especially by his choice of camouflage pants. (“I’m into hard Christianity,” I said aloud to my iPad, delighted by David.) But he’d grown up as something of a “trad son”; now, as a young college student, David was surrounded by the trappings of materialism and machismo for the first time, and he began to feel ashamed about whatever his particular ambitions were. He explains (at 31:03),
By the time of my graduation, I was heavily adopting Michael’s teachings. And I was spending… hundreds of hours reading, digesting, absorbing Michael’s tapes and tracts. This is where I really started experiencing a spiritual schizophrenia. I felt exposed. On one hand, I’m happy, I’ve accomplished this achievement: I was the first person in my family to go to college and graduate from college. But on the other side, I’m feeling guilty. I knew Mike would be disappointed, and I was fearful, ‘cause I knew that he would think, “See, I was right, look at you. Called you out as a phony, and you are. And you know it.” On one hand, a happy, glad accomplishment: [but over here,] guilty, maybe siding with Satan! It’s a strange place to be in. You’re dealing with feelings, emotions, struggles, insecurities…!
In my mind, that’s my battle. It felt like there was two Davids. Put that on the camera. Put that on your show.
The documentary handles this description of cognitive dissonance and a subsequently bifurcated psyche—incited by a pastor who saw every internal struggle as literal war against demonic influences—with the intensity it deserves. From here, the docu-series immediately returns to the narrative thread it had previously dropped: the police finding Andrea Yates, catatonic.
David’s characterization of a bifurcated psyche struck me because I’ve been thinking about it a lot in terms of patriarchy and tyranny. (Moses Storm, a relative of Pastor Woroniecki’s, also mentions “scarcity mindset,” marveling that people are driven to desperate acts when they believe the end of the world is looming.)
It isn’t only in obvious extremist sects that this bifurcation and disintegration occur. I think a lot about the “dickwolves” controversy: it was the first time I ever felt as if I were being directly confronted to choose between my identity as a quote-unquote gamer, versus my identity as a woman. I was admittedly less attached to the latter identity—growing up Southern Baptist demands you make similar choices about yourself, and anyway, I knew I was a gamer long before I knew I was a girl—but GamerGate kind of drove home “they will only ever see you as a woman, a harpy, never a ‘real’ ‘gamer’,” and that does have the power to drive you a little insane. It incites the same sort of internal spiritual battle that a teenaged Southern Baptist in the ‘90s experiences the first time they, I don’t know, sneak Magic: The Gathering cards or whatever.
I took a (long, even indefinite) break from the Andrea Yates documentary, opened Netflix to see if there were another episode of Stranger Things (ha ha), and ended up starting the documentary on Jodi Hildebrandt, the Mormon counselor who convinced parents to turn that ‘inner’ spiritual battle outward, externalizing it onto their kids. (Spoilers: Hildebrandt advocates for child abuse, under the auspices of “exorcism.” She’d fashioned herself, effectively, as the Dr Dobson of the Church of Latter-Day Saints.)
As a young woman, Hildebrandt had persuaded LDS elders to let her go on a “mission,” which is apparently atypical for female congregants to be allowed to do. This pinged with me. I’ve been thinking a lot about having gone on an evangelical mission trip in my teens: the woman who’d led us on that mission had been the 1990s equivalent of gender-nonconforming, despite being Nazarene. This feels crucial. Maybe you’re ‘allowed’ to be nonconformist, as long as you’ll also be a cop, enforcing the ‘rules’ for everyone else. This is where the promise of “not like the other girls” potentially turns women into prison guards. (I think about Alison Mack a lot, although I’ve only mentioned her here once—in the context of slavery.)
According to Kevin Franke, Jodi Hildebrandt had confided that she was being “tormented and haunted by shadow figures every night.” The documentary suggests that this was a mental health crisis; what it really is, is sleep paralysis. Neurologists have known the truth for years: the call is coming from inside the house. People quite literally perceive themselves as a second person in the room.
This is to say, one perceives their own psyche as a literal intruder. The ‘spiritual battle,’ as preached by Dr Dobson, Pastor Woroniecki, and Jodi Hildebrandt, is autoimmune.
Tyranny might be said to be a type of sleep paralysis, relying on the misperception of the shadow self as a discrete hostile presence in the room. Actually, we already know this. Authoritarian regimes project their own collective shadow onto vulnerable populations and then declare war on them.
co-op
Yesterday, standing in the kitchen, I mentioned—and I’ve also mentioned it here, on this blog—that I was messed up, in a profound and lasting way, by William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. I’d read it as a teen, and I was still perpetually disturbed by it. Now I was standing there lamenting that, in times of crisis, if you alone are trying to enforce any sort of order, someone will come along and smash your eyeglasses and then put your head on a pike. People intensely dislike a self-styled leader who is right and also lacking in charisma.
“I have an article for you,” my best friend said to me. “Let me find it.”
“Wait,” I said suddenly, “I’ve been reading Lord of the Flies wrong. It’s about one man, and all the competing warring schoolboy voices inside him. There, I’m fixed.”
“Huh,” my best friend’s dad said, shaking his head.
“It’s The Guardian,” my best friend said. “I don’t know if it has a paywall.”
“They very much do not ever have a paywall,” I told her.
“Sent!” my best friend said, setting her phone down and looking at me. I left the room to retrieve my phone and read the article.
I returned to the kitchen for a sandwich. “Thanks for curing my nihilism,” I said to her at the counter.
The article is actually an excerpt from a book by Rutger Bregman: equally disturbed by William Golding’s novel, he’d searched for a real-life example to use as comparison. He found one—the amazing true story of how six Catholic schoolboys survived stranded on a desert island for 15 months—and he investigated how they’d accomplished this feat. It started with simply agreeing to “not quarrel.”
“It’s time we told a different kind of story,” Bregman writes.