Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 280 of 447 · 20 per page

• From Cleanness (2020)

  I sat up as he held it out, and when I didn’t take it he said I want you to beat me, his voice neutral, matter-of-fact, I want you to whip me with it. I swung my legs off the bed but didn’t get up, I hesitated before finally taking the belt from him and standing. This hadn’t been part of the scene we had planned, he hadn’t said he wanted it, I wasn’t sure it was a scene I liked. He knelt on the bed again, on his hands and knees, presenting his ass. I stepped to the foot of the bed, letting the belt unroll from my hand, then taking the tip again to fold it, I would strike him with half its length. I had never whipped anyone before but that was how my father had done it, taking the strap to us, as he said, that was how he punished us. I took the folded belt in both hands and brought my hands together, making the halves bend out like wings, and then snapped it quickly twice, the noise loud in the small room, making me flinch. That too was what my father had always done, frightening us to double our punishment, I guess, to make us fear the belt before we felt it. At the sound of it he shifted his position, he lowered his torso, dropping to his elbows and resting his head on his clasped hands. I delayed a little more, I rubbed his ass with my free hand, gripping the flesh. Then I struck him, not gently but I knew he could feel my reluctance, and after a second and a third time he said Harder, his voice muffled against his hands, and then again, harder, and I obeyed, striking him each time with greater force, warming into it. But still he said Harder after each stroke, almost like a taunt, and I didn’t know whether it was in response to his voice or to my movement that I became cruel again, became all acquiescence, I would punish him if it was punishment he wanted.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  Skip hesitated for a moment, then stripped all his clothes off, jumping into the pool and joining the rest of the people. I didn’t know what all of this had to do with the invasion of Cambodia or the students slain at Kent State, but it was total freedom. As I sat there in my wheelchair at the edge of the Reflecting Pool with everyone running naked all around me and the clapping and the drums resounding in my ears, I wanted to join them. I wanted to take off my clothes like Skip and the rest of them and wade into the pool and rub my body with all those others. Everything seemed to be hitting me all at once. One part of me was upset that people were swimming naked in the national monument and the other part of me completely understood that now it was their pool, and what good is a pool if you can’t swim in it. I remember how the police came later that day, very suddenly, when we were watching the sun go down—a blue legion of police in cars and on motorcycles and others with angry faces on big horses. A tall cop walked into the crowd near the Reflecting Pool and read something into a bullhorn no one could make out. The drums stopped and a few of the naked people began to put their clothes back on. It was almost evening and with most of the invading army’s forces heading back along the Jersey Turnpike, the blue legion had decided to attack. And they did—wading their horses into the pool, flailing their clubs, smashing skulls. People were running everywhere as gas canisters began to pop. I couldn’t understand why this was happening, why the police would attack the people, running them into the grass with their horses and beating them with their clubs. Two or three horses charged into the crowd at full gallop, driving the invading army into retreat toward the Lincoln Memorial. A girl was crying and screaming, trying to help her bleeding friend. She was yelling something about the pigs and kept stepping backward away from the horses and the flying clubs. For the first time that day I felt anger surge up inside me. I was no longer an observer, sitting in my car at the edge of a demonstration. I was right in the middle of it and it was ugly. Skip started pushing the chair as fast as he could up the path toward the Lincoln Memorial. I kept turning, looking back. I wanted to shout back at the charging police, tell them I was a veteran. When we got to the memorial, I remember looking at Lincoln’s face and reading the words carved on the walls in back of him. I felt certain that if he were alive he would be there with us. I told Skip that I was never going to be the same.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  “I wanted to get all the way to the front, but this place is great.” We lined ourselves up together, wheelchair to wheelchair, facing the platform where Nixon would speak. They had brought in a couple of Stop the War signs, and I grabbed one and held it above my head. There was an announcement at the podium and then a tremendous roar. It was the vice president of the United States, Spiro T. Agnew. The delegates stood chanting and shaking their clasped hands over their heads, stamping their feet up and down until it seemed as though the whole convention hall was going to explode. “Four more years,” the crowd shouted. “Four more years, four more years.” Agnew stood rigid at attention, accepting the tumultuous applause. Finally he raised both of his palms, signaling them all to stop so he could give his speech. Every time he spoke a few words, he was interrupted by the wild crowd, wild and enthusiastic. “Agnew in ’seventy-six!” a fat woman yelled next to me. “Agnew in ’seventy-six!” I pulled myself up onto the siderail of my wheelchair and sat holding my sign as high as I could. I wanted everyone in the hall to be able to see it. A man came up suddenly from my blind side. Before I knew what hit me he had grabbed my sign and torn it into shreds in front of me. “You lousy commie sonofabitch!” he shouted. Now there was only one sign left and we decided to hold on to it until it was Nixon’s turn to speak. A few seconds before he was introduced, security agents began to move in all around us. We must have been an ugly sight to the National Republican Party as we sat there in perfect view of all the national networks that were perched above us. Suddenly a roar went up in the convention hall, louder than anything I had ever heard in my life. It started off as a rumble, then gained in intensity until it sounded like a tremendous thunderbolt. “Four more years, four more years,” the crowd roared over and over again. The fat woman next to me was jumping up and down and dancing in the aisle. It was the greatest ovation the president of the United States had ever received and he loved it. I held the sides of my wheelchair to keep my hands from shaking. After what seemed forever, the roar finally began to die down.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I told him if he wanted to wrestle me and beat me on the floor of the convention hall in front of all those cameras he could. By then a couple of newsmen, including Roger Mudd from CBS, had worked their way through the security barricades and begun to ask me questions. “Why are you here tonight?” Roger Mudd asked me. “But don’t start talking until I get the camera here,” he shouted. It was too good to be true. In a few seconds Roger Mudd and I would be going on live all over the country. I would be doing what I had come here for, showing the whole nation what the war was all about. The camera began to roll, and I began to explain why I and the others had come, that the war was wrong and it had to stop immediately. “I’m a Vietnam veteran,” I said. “I gave America my all and the leaders of this government threw me and the others away to rot in their V.A. hospitals. What’s happening in Vietnam is a crime against humanity, and I just want the American people to know that we have come all the way across this country, sleeping on the ground and in the rain, to let the American people see for themselves the men who fought their war and have come to oppose it. If you can’t believe the veteran who fought the war and was wounded in the war, who can you believe?” “Thank you,” said Roger Mudd, visibly moved by what I had said. “This is Roger Mudd,” he said, “down on the convention floor with Ron Kovic, a disabled veteran protesting President Nixon’s policy in Vietnam.” The security agents were frantically trying to stop other cameras from getting through and later I was to learn that Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler had almost flipped out when he heard Mudd had interviewed me and it had gone nationwide for almost two minutes. By this time a few other veterans had managed to get into the hall. One of them came to tell me that my old friend Bobby Muller and Bill Wieman, a double amputee, had gotten passes from Congressman McCloskey and had managed to get into the center aisle in direct line with the podium almost two hundred feet back. “Get me up there quick,” I said. He turned me around and wheeled me toward the back past the smiling security officers who must have thought I was leaving. What are you smiling at? I thought to myself. I’m just warming up. “There, up there,” the vet said, pointing to the front of the aisle where Bobby and Bill were sitting in their wheelchairs. “Where you been?” Wieman said to me, as I shook their hands. “I’ve been over there,” I said, pointing to the other aisle.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  As a matter of fact, he hated the Germans, this Nietzsche. He claimed he was a Pole or something like that. He had them dead right, too. He said they were stupid and swinish, and by God, he knew what he was talking about. Anyway, he showed them up. He said they were full of shit, to make it brief, and by God, wasn’t he right though? Did you see the way those bastards turned tail when they got a dose of their own medicine? “Listen, I know a guy who cleaned out a nestful of them in the Argonne region—he said they were so goddamned low he wouldn’t shit on them. He said he wouldn’t even waste a bullet on them—he just bashed their brains in with a club. I forget this guy’s name now, but anyway he told me he saw aplenty in the few months he was there. He said the best fun he got out of the whole fucking business was to pop off his own major. Not that he had any special grievance against him—he just didn’t like his mug. He didn’t like the way the guy gave orders. Most of the officers that were killed got it in the back, he said. Served them right, too, the pricks! He was just a lad from the North Side. I think he runs a poolroom now down near Wallabout Market. A quiet fellow, minds his own business. But if you start talking to him about the war he goes off the handle. He says he’d assassinate the President of the United States if they ever tried to start another war. Yeah, and he’d do it too, I’m telling you. . . . But shit, what was that I wanted to tell you about Plato? Oh yeah. . . .” When the others were gone he’d suddenly shift gears. “You don’t believe in talking like that, do you?,” he’d begin. I had to admit I didn’t. “You’re wrong,” he’d continue. “You’ve got to keep in with people, you don’t know when you may need one of these guys. You act on the assumption that you’re free, independent! You act as though you were superior to these people. Well, that’s where you make a big mistake. How do you know where you’ll be five years from now, or even six months from now? You might be blind, you might be run over by a truck, you might be put in the bughouse; you can’t tell what’s going to happen to you. Nobody can. You might be as helpless as a baby. . . .” “So what?” I would say. “Well, don’t you think it would be good to have a friend when you need one? You might be so goddamned helpless you’d be glad to have some one help you across the street. You think these guys are worthless; you think I’m wasting my time with them.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Wherever there were men fighting for food and rent there was this retreat going on, in the fog, in the night, for no earthly reason except that it was the strategic thing to do. It was eating the heart out of him. To fight was easy, but to fight for food and rent was like fighting an army of ghosts. All you could do was to retreat, and while you retreated you watched your own brothers getting popped off, one after the other, silently, mysteriously, in the fog, in the dark, and not a thing to do about it. He was so damned confused, so perplexed, so hopelessly muddled and beaten, that he put his head in his arms and wept on my desk. And while he’s sobbing like that suddenly the telephone rings and its the vice-president’s office—never the vice-president himself, but always his office —and they want this man Griswold fired immediately and I say Yes Sir! and I hang up. I don’t say anything to Griswold about it but I walk home with him and I have dinner with him and his wife and kids. And when I leave him I say to myself that if I have to fire that guy somebody’s going to pay for it—and anyway I want to know first where the order comes from and why. And hot and sullen I go right up to the vice-president’s office in the morning and I ask to see the vice-president himself and did you give the order I ask—and why? And before he has a chance to deny it, or to explain his reason for it, I give him a little war stuff straight from the shoulder and where he don’t like it and can’t take it—and if you don’t like it, Mr. Will Twilldilliger, you can take the job, my job and his job and you can shove them up your ass—and like that I walk out on him. I go back to the slaughterhouse and I go about my work as usual. I expect, of course, that I’ll get the sack before the day’s over. But nothing of the kind. No, to my amazement I get a telephone call from the general manager saying to take it easy, to just calm down a bit, yes, just go easy, don’t do anything hasty, we’ll look into it, etc. I guess they’re still looking into it because Griswold went on working just as always—in fact, they even promoted him to a clerkship, which was a dirty deal, too, because as a clerk he earned less money than as a messenger, but it saved his pride and it also took a little more of the spunk out of him too, no doubt. But that’s what happens to a guy when he’s just a hero in his sleep.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Henry’s teenage sister Amy and adolescent brother Bernie became caught up in the emotional upheaval left by Henry. Day after day, they had to endure their parents’ obsession with Henry’s cult involvement. Eventually they got angry at Henry for putting the family through this ordeal. Time after time, Henry’s parents took turns confronting their son with new pieces of information they had found about The Way. They told him that the founder and leader of the group was a plagiarist, who drank and swore excessively. This information did not deter Henry. Throughout this time, the Marlowes remained silent with their friends and relatives about Henry’s cult involvement. Roger was a state politician and concerned about his career. Kitty felt that people would think she was a bad parent for her son to be so disturbed as to join a cult. Whenever friends or relatives asked about him, they merely said that Henry was fine, had taken a leave of absence from college, and had decided to work for a while. They were very afraid of what everyone would think if they told them the truth. With each passing year, Henry became more and more estranged from his family. They spoke very infrequently on the phone and wrote only sporadically. Eventually Henry felt there was no reason to stay in contact with his family anymore. As far as he was concerned, they were under Satan’s power. Lessons To Be Learned Here are two different families, the Johnsons and the Marlowes, whose responses to a cult problem were very different. The Johnsons were able to find out very quickly that something was wrong and received good advice. The Marlowes were slow to pick up the signs, and when they did realize that their son was in a cult, they didn’t seek out help. Roger Marlowe lost a potentially valuable strategic position by quickly and directly confronting his son and issuing what amounted to an ultimatum. Some people actually disown children who have fallen victim to destructive cults. Unfortunately, the mistakes the Marlowes made are common and happen in the majority of families. In the case of destructive cults, parents’ impulsive reactions frequently do more harm than good. There are several lessons to be learned here. First, any sudden, uncharacteristic change in a friend or a loved one should be investigated quickly and thoroughly. If the person is suddenly spending a good deal of time away, find out why. Ask a lot of questions—in a non-threatening, reassuring tone, of course. Avoid wishful thinking. Remember: when people join cults, they often become deceptive or evasive when questioned about changes in their lives.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  It sticks out like a knife and every few minutes my leg jumps in violent spasms, the bone cutting and stabbing back and forth. The big clumsy cast I have been encased in isn’t doing any good. It is not going to heal. Again and again I wonder why it has happened, why I am back in the same place I fought so hard to leave before. The doctor never seems to be around. When he does show up it is only for a minute to see if I am still alive. He walks in and out, mumbles a few words. Once he calls me by the wrong name. It frightens me. It is like being in a prison. But it is not a prison, it is a hospital. The tall skinny man who brings my breakfast calls me Seventeen. “Seventeen!” he screams, waking me out of a doped sleep. “Seventeen! It’s time to eat.” Up and down the halls the nurses move like programmed robots, pushing their metal carts, giving shots, handing out medication. There is one nurse who always tells me I am crazy. She gives me extra doses of a drug to make me drowsy. It is so easy to lose it all here. The whole place functions so smoothly, but somewhere along the way I am losing, and all the rest of the people whom I can’t see in the rooms around me are losing too. Even if I make it out of this place, I think, even if I heal the leg, I will lose. No one ever leaves this place without losing something. Early one morning the doctor comes into my room and tells me he’s been thinking it might be a good idea to cut my leg off. He tells me that to cut the leg off would be a very simple thing. He makes it sound so easy, like there would be nothing to it. It’s they who are all crazy in here, I think. They are all moving so quickly, all of them in such a fantastic hurry. This place is more like a factory to break people than to mend them and put them back together again. I don’t want them to cut my leg off. It is numb and dead but it still means something to me. It is still mine. It is a part of me and I am not going to give it away that easily. Why isn’t anyone helping me? I think over and over again. Why am I being forgotten in this place? Something is happening to me in Room 17. I lie and stare at the walls of the small green box they have put me in. The walls are almost as dirty as the floor and I cannot even see out of the window. I feel myself changing, the anger is building up in me. It has become a force I cannot control. I push the call button again and again.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  frighten and intimidate the American people into supporting their agenda. The Bush administration seems to have learned some very different lessons than we did from Vietnam. Where we learned of the deep immorality and obscenity of that war, they learned to be even more brutal, more violent and ruthless, i.e., “shock and awe.” Sadly, the war on terror has become a war of terror. Where we learned to be more open and honest, to be more truthful, to expose, to express, to shatter the myths of the past, they seem to have learned the exact opposite—to hide, to censor, to fabricate, to mislead and deceive—to perpetuate those myths. Instead of being intimidated or frightened, many of us became more outraged and more determined than ever to stop these ignorant, arrogant men and women who never saw the things we saw, never had to grieve over the loss of their bodies or the bodies of their sons and daughters, never had to watch as so many friends and fellow veterans were destroyed by alcoholism and drugs, homelessness, imprisonment, neglect and rejection, torture, abandonment and betrayal, in the painful aftermath of the war. These leaders have never experienced the tears, the dread and rage, the feeling that there is no God, no country, nothing but the wound, the horrifying memories, the shock, the guilt, the shame, the terrible injustice that took the lives of more than 58,000 Americans and over two million Vietnamese. We had to act. We had to speak. * * * I am no longer the twenty-eight-year-old man, six years returned from the war in Vietnam, who sat behind that typewriter in Santa Monica in the fall of 1974. I am nearly sixty now. My hair and beard are almost completely white. The nightmares and anxiety attacks have all but disappeared, but I still do not sleep well at night. I toss and turn in increasing physical pain. But I remain very positive and optimistic. I am still determined to rise above all of this. I know my pain and the horrors of my past will always be with me, but perhaps not with the same force and fury of those early years after the war. I have learned to forgive my enemies and forgive myself. It has been very difficult to heal from the war while living in America, and I have often dreamed of moving to neutral ground, another country. Yet I have somehow made a certain peace, even in a nation that so often still seems to believe in war and the use of violence as a solution to its problems. There has been a reckoning, a renewal. The scar will always be there, a living reminder of that war, but it has also

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  Bronx VA in New York where I had been after I first came home from the war. The wards were overcrowded and terribly understaffed. The aides would sit in their little room at the end of the hall drinking coffee and cackling away as men on the wards cried out for help that never came. All the windows were tightly shut. The air was rancid, and I would push my call button again and again but no one would come to help. The anger and frustration would build up inside me and I remember several times screaming into my pillow as I lay on my gurney until I was exhausted. I felt so helpless, so lost. During the entire time, in that depressing place, Carol never called or came down to visit me once. I felt abandoned, betrayed, and soon stopped shaving and began to let my hair grow long. I remember looking in the mirror one morning thinking how much I resembled Jesus Christ hanging from the cross. I thought back again to the Bronx VA when I had been stuck in that chest cast for nearly six months after breaking my femur, and how as I had lain on a gurney on my stomach I would paint pictures of the crucifixion with myself as Christ, and how they’d sent the psychiatrist down from the psych ward because they were concerned and I immediately stopped painting, afraid they would have me committed just like my Uncle Paul who had been beaten to death in a mental hospital years before. The weeks and months in the Long Beach VA hospital passed, and I slowly began to adjust to my surroundings. Each morning the aides would lift me out of bed and place me on a gurney, stuffing a pillow under my chest to keep my testicles from squishing and my hips from getting red. They would do the same thing with my legs, placing another pillow under my kneecaps, making sure my bed bag was hooked up, then handing me my two wooden canes. Lying on the gurney on my stomach I’d push around the wards, then down to the cafeteria where I’d get something to eat. I would then go outside on the grass where I’d throw bits of crackers to the sparrows. This became a daily routine for me. In the weeks that followed I began to make new friends. Many, like myself, had been paralyzed in Vietnam, guys like Marty Stetson and Willy Jefferson, Woody and Nick, Danny Prince and Jake Jacobs, or Jafu as he liked to be called, who used to be a bodybuilder before he joined the marines. Jafu, I learned from Marty, was wounded in Operation Starlite on August 23, 1965, while participating in America’s first major offensive of the Vietnam War. He was shot in the chest, paralyzing him from his waist down. From what Marty told me, Jafu’s squad got caught in a horseshoe ambush, and though gravely wounded, Jafu continued to return fire with his M60 machine gun until

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Why this, that in her eagerness she had forgotten to take the usual precautions, and maybe now she was pregnant and then what? They wanted to know what I thought should be done and I said: “Nothing.” And then Valeska takes me aside and she asks me if I wouldn’t care to sleep with her cousin, to break her in, as it were, so that there wouldn’t be a repetition of that sort of thing. The whole thing was cockeyed and we were all laughing hysterically and then we began to drink—the only thing they had in the house was kümmel and it didn’t take much to put us under. And then it got more cockeyed because the two of them began to paw me and neither one would let the other do anything. The result was I undressed them both and put them to bed and they fell asleep in each other’s arms. And when I walked out, toward five A.M ., I discovered I didn’t have a cent in my pocket and I tried to bum a nickel from a taxi driver but nothing doing so finally I took off my fur-lined overcoat and I gave it to him—for a nickel. When I got home my wife was awake and sore as hell because I had stayed out so long. We had a hot discussion and finally I lost my temper and I clouted her and she fell on the floor and began to weep and sob and then the kid woke up and hearing the wife bawling she got frightened and began to scream at the top of her lungs. The girl upstairs came running down to see what was the matter. She was in her kimono and her hair was hanging down her back. In the excitement she got close to me and things happened without either of us intending anything to happen. We put the wife to bed with a wet towel around her forehead and while the girl upstairs was bending over her I stood behind her and lifting her kimono I got it into her and she stood there a long time talking a lot of foolish, soothing nonsense. Finally I climbed into bed with the wife and to my utter amazement she began to cuddle up to me and without saying a word we locked horns and we stayed that way until dawn. I should have been worn out, but instead I was wide-awake, and I lay there beside her planning to take the day off and look up the whore with the beautiful fur whom I was talking to earlier in the day. After that I began to think about another woman, the wife of one of my friends who always twitted me about my indifference.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Vituperative attacks on same- sex love are strewn across the late antique homiletic literature. Notable is the direct infl uence of a Pauline conception, in which same- sex love per se is an encompassing category, inclusive of all forms of erotic contact be- tween males and females. At a rhythm that mimicked the deeper diff usion of Christian norms, the late antique state gradually turned its attention to the repression of same- sex encounters. Th e Th eodosian age (ca. A D 379– 450) was still marked by the predominance of old categories of masculinity as a regulatory platform, but there is a new, hostile energy in the air that it is not unsafe to attribute to religious fervor. Th e assimilation of Christian ideol- ogy and sexual policing culminates in the reign of Justinian (AD 527– 565), whose Institutes for the fi rst time classifi ed sex between males as a crime without distinguishing between active and passive partners. Justinian also passed a law against pederasty and enforced it ex post facto in spectacular fashion. Most remarkably, if Procopius is to be believed, men could be ac- cused of sexual crime even by slaves, signaling a total breakdown of the ancient sexual order.  Th e ecclesiastical campaign against same- sex love was vicious but highly sporadic. By contrast, the struggle against fornication, porneia, was a full- fl edged war, which saw the church muster its forces in deliberate array against an ancient style of sexual life. Th e preaching was endless, the peni- tential enforcement real. But the sex industry was too entrenched for the Christian state even to compass its repression. Instead, the Christian em- perors focused on an aspect of the sex trade whose moral and material sig- nifi cance should not be underestimated: they banned forced prostitution. Th e brutal exposure of vulnerable women rested on a public indiff erence so vast that it lay invisibly at the very foundations of the ancient sexual order. As Christianity progressively absorbed society, and could ever less comfortably  FROM SHAME TO SIN present itself as a dissent movement apart from the world, it was forced to reckon with the silences in its own sexual program. Because prostitution was at the center of an ancient sexual culture, an order of relationships be- tween state and society built on the concept of shame, the progressive real- ization of its injustice is a privileged index of Christianization. Th e aggres- sive campaign of Justinian against compulsion in the fl esh industry marks the end of a distinctly ancient sexual order, one whose distant origins lie at the very beginnings of the archaic Mediterranean city- state and fi nally crumble in the midst of his rule.  Chapter 4 follows the Christian revolution in sexual morality through the medium of imaginative literature.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Then there are the polyamorous, or poly, people. Polyamory is the practice of having multiple romantic, sexual, and/or intimate partners with all the partners’ full knowledge and consent, Kaupp explained. Those who practice polyamory believe they can love more than one person and be in more than one relationship simultaneously. They tend to go for deeper emotional connection with their partners than those in open and swinger relationships do, sometimes without privileging any one connection or partnership. The “hierarchy” may be that all the connections matter equally. Polyamory can be time-consuming and complex, both logistically and emotionally. Sometimes those who practice it have verbal or written contracts—drawn up by lawyers and therapists who specialize in such matters—to keep things clear and fair. And polyamory requires conversation, ground rules, and plenty of disclosing and “checking in.” As Kaupp put it, “People in poly configurations tend to process the crap out of everything!” Although there is no hard data, polyamorists and the experts who work with and study them seem to agree that poly relationships are most often driven by women. And poly peeps, as I came to think of them, are likely to emphasize that their relationships aren’t “just” sexual, that the emotional component is as, if not more, important than the physical one. (How disappointing, I thought, that in this sense even the poly movement recapitulates our culture’s insistence that women—who are at its forefront—are less sexual.) Polyamorous people may live in “throuples,” or triads, quads, or larger groups. For all their well-intentioned, earnest, and thoughtful talking things through, like Kaupp, they are basically bomb throwers, taking aim at something no less sacred than the US flag or the belief in God. In essence, while they are accepting of people who want to do things their own way, they want to blow up the heterosexual dyad and the dyad more generally, which even swingers and those in open relationships, not to mention everyone everywhere in the industrialized West, tend to prize, privilege, and believe in so fervently, albeit with local variation. Plenty of poly people concede the couple works for others. But as a compulsory reality, they say, it is dated as well as the source of much pain and discontent, because it is predicated on and promulgates limited, limiting old think: that women are the property of men; that we “evolved” to be pair-bonded; that refusing sexual exclusivity is sinful or simply bad for society, a gateway drug that leads to other forms of corruption that compromise the very foundation of our culture. (“The best thing for gender equality and relationships will be for all the old people to die,” one young woman joked at a panel on sexuality I later attended. She was only kind of kidding.)

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  For that he got a box in the ears. That made him wag his tongue some more, whereupon he got such a wallop that his teeth flew down his throat and his jawbone was broken in three places. Still he didn’t know enough to hold his trap. Like the damned fool that he was he goes to the police station and registers a complaint. A week later, while he’s sitting on a bench snoozing, a gang of roughnecks break into the place and beat him to a pulp. His head was so battered that his brains looked like an omelette. For good measure they emptied the safe and turned it upside down. Dave died on the way to the hospital. They found five hundred dollars hidden away in the toe of his sock. . . . Then there was Clausen and his wife Lena. They came in together when he applied for the job. Lena had a baby in her arms and he had two little ones by the hand. They were sent to me by some relief agency. I put him on as a night messenger so that he’d have a fixed salary. In a few days I had a letter from him, a batty letter in which he asked me to excuse him for being absent as he had to report to his parole officer. Then another letter saying that his wife had refused to sleep with him because she didn’t want any more babies and would I please come to see them and try to persuade her to sleep with him. I went to his home—a cellar in the Italian quarter. It looked like a bughouse. Lena was pregnant again, about seven months under way, and on the verge of idiocy. She had taken to sleeping on the roof because it was too hot in the cellar, also because she didn’t want him to touch her any more. When I said it wouldn’t make any difference now she just looked at me and grinned. Clausen had been in the war and maybe the gas had made him a bit goofy—at any rate he was foaming at the mouth. He said he would brain her if she didn’t stay off that roof. He insinuated that she was sleeping up there in order to carry on with the coal man who lived in the attic. At this Lena smiled again with that mirthless batrachian grin. Clausen lost his temper and gave her a swift kick in the ass. She went out in a huff taking the brats with her. He told her to stay out for good. Then he opened a drawer and pulled out a big Colt. He was keeping it in case he needed it some time, he said. He showed me a few knives, too, and a sort of blackjack which he had made himself. Then he began to weep. He said his wife was making a fool of him.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Business executives in three-piece suits sitting in hotel ballrooms for company-sponsored “awareness” training, not permitted to stand up or leave, even to go to the bathroom. Housewives attending “psych-up rallies” so they can recruit friends and neighbors into a multi-level marketing organization. Hundreds of students gathering at an accredited university, being told they can levitate and fly through the air if only they meditate hard enough. High-school students practicing satanic rituals involving blood and urine, being directed by an older leader who claims he will help them develop their personal power. “Troubled” teens being sent off to boot camps by their deceived parents, unregulated by the government, some run by religious groups who seek to convert them.47 Hundreds of women and men of every description paying huge sums to learn cosmic truths from some channeled spirit. Tens of thousands of women dressed in long dresses, living in harem-type households run by men with long beards. Young girls and women (and men and boys, too) being sold for sex, making their traffickers rich. Young Muslims being trained to kill, rape and even blow themselves up in the name of Allah. These are some of the forms that mind control takes today. The Pervasiveness Of Cults Do you know anyone who has undergone or witnessed a radical personality change because of such a group? The odds are that you do. Someone you know—someone in your family, at work, or in your circle of friends—has likely been directly and profoundly affected by undue influence. In the past decades, the destructive cult phenomenon has mushroomed into a problem of tremendous social and political importance. It is estimated that there are now over three thousand destructive cults in the United States, directly affecting more than three million people.48 These organizations come in many different types and sizes. Some have hundreds of millions of dollars; others are relatively poor. Some, however, are clearly more dangerous than others. The largest and most destructive are not content to simply exercise their control over the lives of their members. They have an agenda to gain political power and use it to reshape American society—or even the world. Considering how well these cults have been largely able to shield themselves from public scrutiny, it might seem alarmist to regard them as a threat to individual liberty and society as a whole. Yet, some are influencing the political landscape through extensive lobbying efforts and electioneering for candidates.49 Some are attempting to influence United States foreign policy by lobbying covertly for foreign powers.50 The Moonies, for example, were a major supplier of money and guns to the Contra forces in Nicaragua.51 They also invested between $70 and $100 million in Uruguay,52 in a failed attempt to turn that country into the cult’s first theocratic state—a springboard from which to pursue its declared goal: “to conquer and subjugate the world.”53

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  Did you fight in the war?” One of the guards looked away. “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” I said. “I bet none of you fought in the war and you guys are trying to throw me out of the convention. I’ve got just as much right to be up front here as any of these delegates. I fought for that right and I was born on the Fourth of July.” I was really shouting now and another officer came over. I think he might have been in charge of the hall. He told me I could stay where I was if I was quiet and didn’t move up any farther. I agreed with the compromise. I locked my brakes and looked for other veterans in the tremendous crowd. As far as I could tell, I was the only one who had made it in. People had begun to sit down all around me. They all had Four More Years buttons and I was surprised to see how many of them were young. I began speaking to them, telling them about the Last Patrol and why veterans from all over the United States had taken the time and effort to travel thousands of miles to the Republican National Convention. “I’m a disabled veteran!” I shouted. “I served two tours of duty in Vietnam and while on my second tour of duty up in the DMZ I was wounded and paralyzed from the chest down.” I told them I would be that way for the rest of my life. Then I began to talk about the hospitals and how they treated the returning veterans like animals, how I, many nights in the Bronx, had lain in my own shit for hours waiting for an aide. “And they never come,” I said. “They never come because that man that’s going to accept the nomination tonight has been lying to all of us and spending the money on war that should be spent on healing and helping the wounded. That’s the biggest lie and hypocrisy of all—that we had to go over there and fight and get crippled and come home to a government and leaders who could care less about the same boys they sent over.” I kept shouting and speaking, looking for some kind of reaction from the crowd. No one seemed to want to even look at me. “Is it too real for you to look at? Is this wheelchair too much for you to take? The man who will accept the nomination tonight is a liar!” I shouted again and again, until finally one of the security men came back and told me to be quiet or they would have to take me to the back of the hall. I told him that if they tried to move me or touch my chair there would be a fight and hell to pay right there in front of Walter Cronkite and the national television networks.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  hands beneath Leucippe’s chin and lifts her face upward for a kiss, she resists and reproaches him, “You are not acting as a free man, nor as a wellborn one.” While his hopes were still high, Th ersander remained “wholly  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N enthralled” by Leucippe, but the disappointment of rebuff lets loose his fury. He resorts to physical and psychological violence, striking Leucippe across the face and calling her a “miserable slaveling.” “You should be grateful that I speak to you, and count your lucky stars that you seem worthy of my kisses. . . . I know that you’re just a little whore, and the man you love is an adulterer. Since you don’t want to accept me as your lover, you will experience me as your master.” In the slave society of the Roman Empire, where the routine sexual exploitation of slaves was an integral part of the sexual economy, the narration of such pedestrian violence was highly unusual, and surely jarring. But the author builds up the uncomfortable potential of the scene, only to let it dissipate in arch melodrama. We are never really in suspense about Leucippe’s fate, and— what makes the scene so revealing— neither is she. At the tension grows, Leucippe tells Th ersander to “bring the lash, bring the rack, bring the fi re, bring the sword. . . . For though I be naked, for though I be alone, for though I be a woman, my one shield is my freedom [ eleutheria], and not blows, nor blade, nor blaze shall prevail against it!” Leucippe is protected by her freedom, her eleutheria, at the very moment when her control over her body seemed most elusive. Her rhetoric speaks on two levels. Most directly, Leucippe means that she will be saved from her imminent distress because she is, in reality, free. She is the knowing heroine, confi dent her objective status will somehow ensure that she is not the victim in this tale. Eleutheria was a powerful word, conjuring not only free status but sexual respectability; for the Greeks and Romans, the two were inseparably fused. Th e eleuthera was the sexu- ally honest woman, a virgin until marriage, chaste within marriage. Th e opposite of the eleuthera was the prostitute, and Leucippe is consoled in the midst of apparently insuperable danger by the truth of her nature and by the rules of romance, which, she seems to know, will not allow her to be violated. Her faith depends on her knowledge that the narrative logic of the Greek romance will ultimately obey the expectations of the social order. At the same time, Leucippe’s grand speech positions this novel within a matrix of cultural refl ection on the perennial problem of free will and fate.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  I often meet people in the West who insist that the Holocaust was the worst atrocity in human history, without question. Yes, it was horrific. But I often wonder, with African atrocities like in the Congo, how horrific were they? The thing Africans don’t have that Jewish people do have is documentation. The Nazis kept meticulous records, took pictures, made films. And that’s really what it comes down to. Holocaust victims count because Hitler counted them. Six million people killed. We can all look at that number and rightly be horrified. But when you read through the history of atrocities against Africans, there are no numbers, only guesses. It’s harder to be horrified by a guess. When Portugal and Belgium were plundering Angola and the Congo, they weren’t counting the black people they slaughtered. How many black people died harvesting rubber in the Congo? In the gold and diamond mines of the Transvaal? So in Europe and America, yes, Hitler is the Greatest Madman in History. In Africa he’s just another strongman from the history books. In all my time hanging out with Hitler, I never once asked myself, “Why is his name Hitler?” His name was Hitler because his mom named him Hitler. — Once Bongani and I added the dancers to our DJ sets, we blew up. We called our group the Black and White Boys. The dancers were called the Springbok Boys. We started getting booked everywhere. Successful black families were moving to the suburbs, but their kids still wanted to have block parties and stay connected to the culture of the townships, so they’d book us to play their parties. Word of mouth traveled. Pretty soon we were getting booked more and more in the suburbs, meeting white people, playing for white people. One kid we knew from the township, his mother was involved in creating cultural programs for schools. In America they’d be called “diversity programs.” They were springing up all over South Africa because we were supposed to be learning about and embracing one another in this post-apartheid era. This kid’s mom asked us if we wanted to play at a cultural day at some school in Linksfield, the wealthy suburb south of Sandringham where my pal Teddy had lived. There was going to be all sorts of different dancing and music, and everyone was going to come together and hang out and be cultural. She offered to pay, so we said sure. She sent us the information with the time and place and the name of the school: the King David School. A Jewish school.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  * * * There were ten of them walking toward the village, and he felt the rosary beads in his top pocket and knew that the little black Bible they had given them all on the planes coming in was in his other pocket too. The other men were getting off the ’tracs in the graveyard. He could see the heat still coming up from the big engines and the men looked real small in the distance, like little toy soldiers jumping off tanks. He looked to the left and they were all there, it was a perfect line. He had trained the scouts well and everything looked good. There was a big pagoda up ahead and a long trench full of Popular Forces. There wasn’t any firing going on and he asked the commander of the Viet unit to help him in the assault that was about to take place. The Viet officer said they were staying put and none of them was even going to think about attacking the village. He was angry as he moved the scouts over the top of the long trench line. They’re a bunch of fucking cowards, he thought. “Look at them!” he shouted to the scouts. “They’re sitting out the war in that trench like a bunch of babies.” “Let’s go!” he said. And now they began to move into a wide and open area. They were ten men armed to the teeth, walking in a sweeping line toward the village. It was beautiful, just like the movies. The firing first started in the graveyard. There were loud cracks, and then the whole thing sounded like someone had set off a whole string of fireworks. He could hear the mortars popping out, crashing like cymbals when they landed on top of the ’tracs. The whole graveyard was being raked by mortars and heavy machine-gun fire coming out of the village. * * * I remember we all sort of stopped and watched for a moment. Then all of a sudden the cracks were blasting all around our heads and everybody was running all over the place. We started firing back with full automatics. I emptied a whole clip into the pagoda and the village. I was yelling to the men. I kept telling them to hold their ground and keep firing, though no one knew what we were firing at. I looked to my left flank and all the men were gone. They had run away, all run away to the trees near the river, and I yelled and cursed at them to come back but nobody came. I kept emptying everything I had into the village, blasting holes through the pagoda and ripping bullets into the tree line. There was someone to my right lying on the ground still firing.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Educate law enforcement and intelligence agencies, so that they can more effectively combat human trafficking and terrorism.224 Pass lobbying laws and impose stiff penalties for those who subvert the Constitution and abrogate human rights. Consider carefully any “religious” organization that applies for tax-exempt status. Take action against those who currently have such status, such as Scientology.225 Tax-abiding citizens should not be forced to subsidize such organizations! Set up a special agency where people can report infractions and/or blow the whistle on questionable groups. Hire experienced investigators to investigate and collect evidence. Questionable groups should be asked to reform their policies and pay damages, or they will lose their IRS exemption. Groups that are found guilty should be stripped of their tax-exempt status and made to sell property and other assets to compensate victims. Media Please accept the responsibility to support investigative journalism aimed at protecting the public good! Do not hide the truth from the public because of the threat of lawsuits that might hurt the “bottom line.” Perhaps there should be some federal agency set up to fund attorneys who defend investigative journalists who have been sued or threatened. The government might consider funding an independent media resource designed for the public good. Fire reporters and editors who are on the payroll—or the ideological hook—of known totalistic cults, especially those which systematically engage in criminal behavior or have stated agendas of taking over the world and violating non-members’ civil and human rights. Your archives are filled with documentaries and shows that have exposed destructive cult groups. Open them to the public! Many of these shows—like 60 Minutes, Dateline, Nightline, 20/20 and shows like Donahue and others—should be online for the public good, either free or at a reasonable fee. Words matter and so do names. Using the term “ISIS” is not just misleading—it is an affront to Muslims. The destructive group is not a “State” nor does it represent the overwhelming majority of Muslims, most of whom do not wish to revert to 7th century shariah law. Switch to the term that many Muslims use: Daesh. As a start, use ISIS/Daesh or Daesh/ISIS. As people become familiar with Daesh, drop ISIS altogether. Be precise when labeling an Islamist group. Do not call the tiny Wahhabi sect, to which Al Qaeda and Daesh/ISIS members belong, “Sunnis.” This is like calling the Branch Davidians at Waco “Christians.” Most Muslims want nothing to do with terrorism. It is no part of their faith. Write more stories about undue influence, mind control, former members, whistleblowers, and anybody else who stands up to injustice. Hold them up as courageous heroes.