The Duke boys at that party, whether charged, convicted, or neither, and regardless of where they may or may not have deposited semen, are culpable at the very least for their intoxicated abuse and objectification of women. They behaved very badly, and the rape charges were a sidetrack. Whether a penis was inserted here or there is a distraction from the normalized antisocial and dangerous behavior engaged in by the players, who may very well not be guilty of any “crimes”. The public figures whose lies resulted in the ongoing killing in Iraq will likely never be convicted of any “crimes”. If criminal conviction was the sole and reliable measure of harmful behavior and culpability, no one would be accountable for the carnage in Iraq and guys who behave like these Dukies could have smart girlfriends who like them.

Antisocial behaviors on the street, with the wrong skin color, are a ticket to prison. Antisocial traits in a privileged social class and context, greased by academic degrees, social capital, and the right wardrobe, are a ticket to status and success. That’s the issue here.

Ms. Havrilesky: I am convinced that you are intentionally attempting to rip away the festive, sparkling, bedazzling enactments of this special season - the very rituals which maintain our most comforting and sanctified images of a Christian nation - as if it was all just shiny wrapping.

Thank you and Happy Holidays.

P.S. To all of my kin reading this:

Of course I expect you all right here with me tomorrow. Especially now that I’m getting on. The way I’ve been feeling, I don’t even know that I’ll be around this time next year, so . . . . . . . . . of course I would never want you to feel guilty if that happens. Your clan will be here, your own people, your blood, just like we always expect it, the way it should be. You understand.

Why is it that these delightful, fun-loving, unrepressed young women are not demanding apologies from us, from their culture, for our cowardly projection onto them of our own disallowed sexuality, our disallowed freedom, our fear of becoming real and true?

Am I missing something?

Somehow there seems something about an execution, any execution, that is even more damning and hopeless than whatever acts it pretends to enact “justice” for. It is killing as the end, sanctified result of what a society views in itself as moral deliberation, and it says that the best we are capable of, in response to what we profess to abhor, is to repeat it.

It may be worth noting (or acknowledging, as someone trained as a scientist) that as a way of knowing, the privileged status of science is neither based entirely on merit nor is itself not constructed. To some non-trivial extent science, like religion, protects itself with its own opaque language, rituals, and meanings which scrutiny, history and deconstruction have a tendency to regularly relegate to nonsense – not necessarily a condemnation, but a suggestion (as I believe Mr. Clement has been making) to recognize that in constructing what we decide is “real” and “knowable”, etc., we have created not just “God”, and “Creation”, but also e.g., “gravity”, “matter”, and the meanings of “knowledge” and “what exists” as well.

Look around for some “matter” sometime, and don’t be fooled by your experience of phenomena, which is entirely distinct from whatever “stuff” we believe is “matter”. Better yet, ask a physicist to show you some and to explain exactly what “matter” is. It is simply not there, although we have convinced ourselves it is based on our experiencing and organizing phenomena in ways that we like and that work well with other ideas (also created) like discreteness, stability, existence, self, not-self, causality, attraction between “objects”, etc. It all makes a very appealing story (construction) because it can be incredibly useful and sometimes even congruent, or ultimately beautiful.

But it doesn’t establish any reality for the stuff called “matter”. Does that mean that matter is supernatural? Does it mean that “natural” and “supernatural” are constructions not as useful as at first appeared? Heavens! Does it mean that we would do well to better own that reality and what is “known” are as much constructed by us as discovered?

As a number of writers have noted, it’s not so difficult to set up and demolish a straw man God, but that has little interest or use. What might be more interesting and adaptive would be to note, just as an example, that in the broad picture of evolution and life, forms which have allocated internal resources (i.e. parts of themselves, such as plant exudates) to providing sustenance to other forms, in lieu of a depredation-defense dynamic - often forming symbioses in the process (a mitochondrion incorporated here, a photosynthetic cell there) - seem to have in many cases achieved remarkable resilience and stability, almost seeming to evoke the spiritual concepts of selflessness, love or sacrifice. In our stuck, dichotomous wrangling we might alternately label such interesting integrative drives in nature as “chance”, “random selection”, “the Creator’s hand”, or “God”.

Or we might transcend these competing constructions altogether and create entirely new meanings which provide greater congruence and integration. Put another way, and as also noted by Mr. Clements, the fundamentalist creationists and those reacting diametrically to them both seem to be hamstrung by inherited, immature, and uninteresting constructions of “God”.

I like the open optimism of R. Anderson, In the Dollar…, and others who seem to trust science as one method or part of a process of creating meaning or truth but without inherent content, without preordained metaphysics or ontology. Unconstrained by inherited constructions, we may surprise ourselves with what can be created, in its beauty and in our abandoned grounds for disagreement.