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 83 of 447 · 20 per page

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  “He gave her a questioning glance. On her face the expression of anguish and ennui changed, it seemed to me, when she looked at him, into an expression of anxiety for him. For a moment I stood in the doorway, holding the dagger hidden behind my back. Suddenly he smiled, and in a voice that was indifferent almost to the point of ridicule, he said: “‘We were having some music.’ “‘I did not expect—,’ she began at the same time, chiming in with the tone of the other. “But neither he nor she finished their remarks. The same rage that I had felt the previous week took possession of me. I felt the need of giving free course to my violence and ‘the joy of wrath.’ “No, they did not finish. That other thing was going to begin, of which he was afraid, and was going to annihilate what they wanted to say. I threw myself upon her, still hiding the dagger, that he might not prevent me from striking where I desired, in her bosom, under the breast. At that moment he saw . . . and, what I did not expect on his part, he quickly seized my hand, and cried: “‘Come to your senses! What are you doing? Help! Help!’ “I tore my hands from his grasp, and leaped upon him. I must have been very terrible, for he turned as white as a sheet, to his lips. His eyes scintillated singularly, and—again what I did not expect of him—he scrambled under the piano, toward the other room. I tried to follow him, but a very heavy weight fell upon my left arm. It was she. “I made an effort to clear myself. She clung more heavily than ever, refusing to let go. This unexpected obstacle, this burden, and this repugnant touch only irritated me the more. I perceived that I was completely mad, that I must be frightful, and I was glad of it. With a sudden impulse, and with all my strength, I dealt her, with my left elbow, a blow squarely in the face. “She uttered a cry and let go my arm. I wanted to follow the other, but I felt that it would be ridiculous to pursue in my stockings the lover of my wife, and I did not wish to be grotesque, I wished to be terrible. In spite of my extreme rage, I was all the time conscious of the impression that I was making upon others, and even this impression partially guided me.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  “If it were only that! Take all the poetry, the painting, the sculpture, beginning with Pouschkine’s ‘Little Feet,’ with ‘Venus and Phryne,’ and you will see that woman is only a means of enjoyment. That is what she is at Trouba,[*] at Gratchevka, and in a court ball-room. And think of this diabolical trick: if she were a thing without moral value, it might be said that woman is a fine morsel; but, in the first place, these knights assure us that they adore woman (they adore her and look upon her, however, as a means of enjoyment), then all assure us that they esteem woman. Some give up their seats to her, pick up her handkerchief; others recognize in her a right to fill all offices, participate in government, etc., but, in spite of all that, the essential point remains the same. She is, she remains, an object of sensual desire, and she knows it. It is slavery, for slavery is nothing else than the utilization of the labor of some for the enjoyment of others. That slavery may not exist people must refuse to enjoy the labor of others, and look upon it as a shameful act and as a sin. [*] A suburb of Moscow. “Actually, this is what happens. They abolish the external form, they suppress the formal sales of slaves, and then they imagine and assure others that slavery is abolished. They are unwilling to see that it still exists, since people, as before, like to profit by the labor of others, and think it good and just. This being given, there will always be found beings stronger or more cunning than others to profit thereby. The same thing happens in the emancipation of woman. At bottom feminine servitude consists entirely in her assimilation with a means of pleasure. They excite woman, they give her all sorts of rights equal to those of men, but they continue to look upon her as an object of sensual desire, and thus they bring her up from infancy and in public opinion. “She is always the humiliated and corrupt serf, and man remains always the debauched Master. Yes, to abolish slavery, public opinion must admit that it is shameful to exploit one’s neighbor, and, to make woman free, public opinion must admit that it is shameful to consider woman as an instrument of pleasure.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  To accommodate the many disturbing exceptions to sexual temperamental norms Freud made use of a sliding scale of gradation and variation of masculine and feminine, with Platonic ideals at either end, probably borrowed from Weininger. To this he added the theory of bisexuality. Bisexuality could be invoked, as Freud explained, when dealing with “ladies” who “whenever some comparison turned out to be unfavorable to their sex were able to utter a suspicion that we, the male analysts, had been unable to overcome certain deeply-rooted prejudices against what was feminine and this was being paid for in the partiality of our researches.” Freud then informs the reader how he responded: “Standing on the ground of bisexuality, we had no difficulty in avoiding impoliteness. We had only to say: ‘This does not apply to you. You’re the exception; on this point you are more masculine than feminine.’”96 Women who dispute logic are called men for their pains. And since the sexual-temperamental differentiation is, although supported by behavioral differences which constitute social norms, still thought by Freudians to be physiological in origin, to say that a female is not feminine is merely confusing. Nor does the theory of bisexuality provide much relief to the individual since femininity is forcefully prescribed and praised as the mature resolution of the child’s bisexual dilemma. On a number of occasions Freud allowed that masculine and feminine in their pure form are theoretical constructs of uncertain character.97 He further allows, as most social science has done since—to insidious effect—for overlap and graduated patterns. Yet the general effect of Freudian thought was, despite the theory of bisexuality, to equate, even to prescribe, what it defines as masculine with the biological male, feminine with the biological female. By 1933, when he came to write his definitive work on the subject, “Femininity” Freud had come to define the feminine as a “preference” for passive aims, or to put it in his own somewhat paradoxical phrase “the active pursuit of a passive function.”98 Freud had gradually rejected his earlier hypothesis that feminine temperament might be largely formed by the effect of learning processes and social pressure and, though still sometimes acknowledging in passing a social component, went further and further in identifying “feminine” attributes with “constitutional” “instinctive” or genetic tendencies.99

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  “All that day I did not speak to my wife. I could not. Her proximity excited such hatred that I feared myself. At the table she asked me, in presence of the children, when I was to start upon a journey. I was to go the following week to an assembly of the Zemstvo, in a neighboring locality. I named the date. She asked me if I would need anything for the journey. I did not answer. I sat silent at the table, and silently I retired to my study. In those last days she never entered my study, especially at that hour. Suddenly I heard her steps, her walk, and then a terribly base idea entered my head that, like the wife of Uri, she wished to conceal a fault already committed, and that it was for this reason that she came to see me at this unseasonable hour. ‘Is it possible,’ thought I, ‘that she is coming to see me?’ On hearing her step as it approached: ‘If it is to see me that she is coming, then I am right.’ “An inexpressible hatred invaded my soul. The steps drew nearer, and nearer, and nearer yet. Would she pass by and go on to the other room? No, the hinges creaked, and at the door her tall, graceful, languid figure appeared. In her face, in her eyes, a timidity, an insinuating expression, which she tried to hide, but which I saw, and of which I understood the meaning. I came near suffocating, such were my efforts to hold my breath, and, continuing to look at her, I took my cigarette, and lighted it. “‘What does this mean? One comes to talk with you, and you go to smoking.’ “And she sat down beside me on the sofa, resting against my shoulder. I recoiled, that I might not touch her. “‘I see that you are displeased with what I wish to play on Sunday,’ said she. “‘I am not at all displeased,’ said I. “‘Can I not see?’ “‘Well, I congratulate you on your clairvoyance. Only to you every baseness is agreeable, and I abhor it.’ “‘If you are going to swear like a trooper, I am going away.’ “‘Then go away. Only know that, if the honor of the family is nothing to you, to me it is dear. As for you, the devil take you!’ “‘What! What is the matter?’ “‘Go away, in the name of God.’ “But she did not go away. Was she pretending not to understand, or did she really not understand what I meant? But she was offended and became angry.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  I studied Mother while she walked up the steps of the Breeze Inn in her black bathing suit. She wore an old white shirt of Daddy’s for a coverup. Like a lot of women with great legs, she had a way of tiptoeing along an invisible line, especially on stairs. It made her butt kind of prissy, and I remember that bothered me somehow, too. She was carrying a sketch pad the size of a small card table, like she was planning to draw the fishermen, but I knew with a cold certainty while I stood ankle-deep in that lukewarm water that she was climbing up there to get drunk. Maybe that pissed me off, because all of a sudden, I wheeled around to Lecia and whooshed as much of the Gulf at her as I could move with two cupped hands. She tried to cover her face so her bangs wouldn’t get wet, but she was pretty well soaked. She was giving me the finger for having done this when Daddy stepped out from behind the trunk of the car. But instead of just letting her hand relax, so he wouldn’t see her shooting the bird, she hid the whole hand behind her head, still frozen in the fuck-you position. She stood there like that for way longer than it might have taken her to relax her hand. I can still see Daddy coming down the beach toward us. He had his black swim trunks on, and black basketball Keds. He’d put on a red Lone Star baseball cap and was slipping into his blue work shirt while he came toward us. He had the easy glide of men who labor for an hourly wage, a walk that wastes no effort and refuses to rush. His barrel chest and legs were pale. There was a wide blood-colored scar up one shin where one of Lee Gleason’s quarter horses had thrown Daddy, then dragged him around the corral till six inches of white shinbone was visible on that leg. On the same leg, just above the knee, there was a knot of iron-blue shrapnel bulging under the skin left over from the war. Still, he didn’t limp one bit coming toward us. He had an amused squint on his face. Maybe he even knew that Lecia was hiding that fuck-you finger in back of her neck, and that tickled him. He stood on the packed sand and called to us. “Y’all come on out from there. I want you to look at something.” We followed him up the beach. We passed what looked like the whole roof off a good-sized shed. There were also stinking loads of dead fish, a whole school of mullet all facing one direction and blank-eyed, looking like they’d leapt up all at once and the wave that had carried them had just evaporated before they came down.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  If the IRS doesn’t recognize you, why should we?” As a part of the settlement, Miscavige revealed, the agency agreed to send notices to every country in the world, explaining what Scientology was. “It is very complete and very accurate,” Miscavige said of the government brochure. “How do I know? We wrote it!” Miscavige summed up the mood in the Sports Arena: “The future is ours.” A MONTH AFTER the church’s historic triumph over the IRS in 1993, Rathbun blew. He had come to see Miscavige in a different light during the two years they labored over the tax case. The last six months of the tax case had been particularly arduous. During that period, he slept only about four hours a night. The former athlete was a physical wreck. “ I’m only doing this for LRH,” he told himself, as he and Miscavige ate dinners together night after night in Washington and trudged back to the Four Seasons in Georgetown. “I’m not going to be this guy’s bitch for the rest of my life.” No doubt the stress affected Miscavige as well. On the night of his big victory speech in the Sports Arena, Miscavige showed up for a run-through, but the stage manager, Stefan Castle, was still fiddling with the cues for a complicated laser and pyrotechnic display. According to Castle, Miscavige stormed out into the arena and began to strangle him. Miscavige let him go before any real harm was done, but it was an alarming signal. Amy Scobee, head of the Celebrity Centre at the time, also noted that Miscavige’s personality began to shift immediately after the IRS decision, becoming more aggressive and hostile. At the party at the Celebrity Centre following his speech, Miscavige rudely shoved her aside as he entered. “ You just want to get rid of me,” she remembers him saying. As far as Rathbun was concerned, it didn’t help that Miscavige scarcely acknowledged him in the speech that night. Immediately after the event, reporters from the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times were calling Rathbun to ask about Miscavige’s salary, which had been disclosed in the IRS documents. Miscavige and his wife together were making more than $100,000 a year—not an extraordinary figure by the standards of world religious leaders, but quite a contrast to the $30 a week most of the Sea Org members were earning. Miscavige was outraged by the impertinence of the reporters, and Rathbun felt that he was taking it out on him. This was all coming at a time when he had been postponing a final visit to see his father, who was dying of cancer. The St. Petersburg Times published an editorial demanding that Congress investigate the tax-exemption decision. Rathbun was sent to Florida to turn around the Times editorial board, who were not at all persuaded by his arguments. Miscavige was furious that Rathbun failed to handle the situation.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  On a green hill in the background, I drew grave mounds in brown and topped them off with white crosses, each penciled with “R.I.P.” That truth—that death came in a big blind swipe—was gradually taking form in my head, picking up force and gaining motion like its own kind of storm. It was drawing me away from the other kids in a way I didn’t even notice. They still saw the world as some playground smiled over by God. I couldn’t, and their innocence rankled me to the point of fury. When Baptist girls standing next to me on the choir risers got all misty-eyed singing about the purple mountains’ majesty, I would often elbow or jostle them out of nothing but spite. If they turned my way in outrage, I’d make a wide-eyed apology. I couldn’t help myself. Sundays, when Carol Sharp came home from Bible school—her black hair pinched and shining in twin plastic barrettes, her petticoat sticking her pink skirt out sideways—and announced, while I was digging for worms in the flower box, how God had made me from dirt, I said I wasn’t dirt, and I wasn’t God’s Barbie doll either. And why would God set Death loose among us like some wind-up robot destroyer if he loved us so much. Carol was ready for this. “There are some mysteries in life the Lord doesn’t want us to understand,” which serene declaration caused me to turn our garden hose on her full force. Something in me had died when Grandma had, and while I didn’t miss her one iota, I keenly felt the loss of my own trust in the world’s order. Leechfield itself would make you think that way—the landscape, I mean. You needed to watch out for the natural world down there, to defend yourself against it. One fall morning I was crossing a meadow to a sugarcane field with a friend’s family when the bird dogs that had been running alongside the men with rifles turned and went into a hard point right at one little girl’s feet. Somebody’s daddy told us all to freeze still, which we did. He took aim with his Winchester where this four-year-old was standing in her red Keds, scared enough to wet her pants. When he fired, a rattlesnake flew thirty feet up in the still air. It landed with a plop in the weeds, where the dogs fell on it. You might well start toting a rifle or shotgun around after that, for reasons that had nothing to do with other human beings. It’s nature itself, revered in other climates, that’s Leechfield’s best advertisement for firearms. The woods held every species of poisonous snake, spider, and rabid biting creature available in that latitude. Even at the beach, there were signs warning you to stay out of the eelgrass because of the alligators. The Gulf itself was warm as dishwater and brown. There were stingrays and sea snakes under its surface.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  In the mean time, if I may judge from my own experience, none are better paid, or better treated, during their reign, than the mistress of those who, enervate by nature, debaucheries, or age, have the least employment for the sex: sensible that a woman must be satisfied some way, they ply her with a thousand little tender attentions, presents, caresses, confidences, and exhaust their inventions in means and devices to make up for the capital deficiency; and even towards lessening that, what arts, what modes, what refinements of pleasure have they not recourse to, to raise their languid powers, and press nature into the service of their sensuality? But here is their misfortune, that when by a course of teasing, worrying, handling, wanton postures, lascivious motions, they have at length accomplished a flashy enervate enjoyment, they at the same time light up a flame in the object of their passion, that, not having the means themselves to quench, drives her for relief into the next person’s arms, who can finish their work; and thus they become bawds to some favourite, tried and approved of, for a more vigorous and satisfactory execution; for with women, of our turn especially, however well our hearts may be disposed, there is a controlling part, or queen-seat in us, that governs itself by its own maxims of state, amongst which not one is stronger, in practice with it, than, in the matter of is dues, never to accept the will for the deed. Mr. Norbert, who was much in this ungracious case, though he professed to like me extremely, could but seldom consummate the main-joy itself with me, without such a length and variety of preparations, as were at once wearisome and inflammatory. Sometimes he would strip me stark naked on a carpet, by a good fire, when he would contemplate me almost by the hour, disposing me in all the figures and attitudes of body that it was susceptible of being viewed in; kissing me in every part, the most secret and critical one so far from excepted that it received most of that branch of homage. Then his touches were so exquisitely wanton, so luxuriously diffused and penetrative at times, that he had made me perfectly rage with titillating fires, when, after all, and much ado, he had gained a short-lived erection, he would perhaps melt it away in a washy sweat, or a premature abortive effusion, that provokingly mocked my eager desires: or, if carried home, how faultered and unnervous the execution! how insufficient the sprinkle of a few heat-drops to extinguish all the flames he had kindled!

• From Going Clear (2013)

  “ She was a sweet, innocent thing thrown into chaos,” one of her shipmates recalled. John Brousseau was married to Shelly’s older sister, Clarisse, and one day he proposed that the two couples go fishing. Miscavige had never been. They drove up to Lake Hemet, a glacial lake in the mountains above Gold Base. It was a beautiful spring day, the sun was glinting off the water, a mild breeze was blowing, the wildflowers were out, and birds were singing. Everyone was dressed in shorts or jeans. They had brought sandwiches and sodas for a picnic. Brousseau baited the poles with salmon eggs, and then showed the others how to cast. He said to just let the line sink to the bottom and then sit back and wait. Maybe a trout would take a bite. Brousseau recalls looking over at Miscavige five minutes later. He was visibly shaking, his veins were bulging. “ You got to be kidding me!” he said. “This is it? You just sit here and fucking wait?” Brousseau said that was the general idea. “I can’t stand it!” Brousseau remembers Miscavige saying. “I feel like jumping in and grabbing a fish with my fucking hands! Or cramming the hook down their fucking throats!” That was the end of the fishing trip. After Quentin’s suicide and Mary Sue’s prison sentence, the remainder of Hubbard’s family broke apart. His oldest daughter, Diana, had been Hubbard’s main supporter. She and her husband, Jonathan Horwich, lived at Flag Base in the Fort Harrison penthouse in Clearwater, with their daughter, Roanne. As her father became increasingly remote, Diana decided to try her luck as a singer and songwriter. She released a soft-jazz album titled LifeTimes in 1979, using notable Scientologist musicians, including Chick Corea and Stanley Clarke, as backup. The cover features her in a black dress, lips parted, arms crossed, her pale shoulders hunched, and her waist-length red hair stirring in the breeze. Although the album received little notice, Diana decided to leave her husband, and the Sea Org, and marry John Ryan, a public Scientologist who had produced her record. She moved to Los Angeles to dedicate herself to music. Horwich agreed to the divorce, but he refused to part with Roanne, who was two years old at the time. Hubbard strongly supported this decision, but Mary Sue was opposed. She wanted her granddaughter to be nearby, and she began agitating for Diana to gain custody. Several missions were sent to bargain with Diana, but she was unmoved. Finally, Jesse Prince got the assignment. “ It was a do or die mission,” he recalled. If he didn’t succeed in gaining clear custody of Roanne for Horwich, he would be sent back to the RPF. For whatever reason, Diana signed the release he put in front of her. Hubbard was thrilled. He rewarded Prince with a leather coat, a gold chain, some cash, and an M14 assault rifle. Suzette, Diana’s younger sister, was increasingly disaffected.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  And he can’t hardly breathe.” I slid out of the covers and pulled on a hooded sweatshirt. Her hair was silky white, a glow in the dark room. “Won’t let you?” I said. The concept of permission as applied to Mother was foreign. She answered with a tired sigh. I took the sloshing vaporizer, which was the old hot-steam type she’d used for our croup as kids. Daddy was sitting on the edge of that oceanic bed in his boxer shorts barking out a dry cough. His head hung down between his broad shoulders like a wounded bull’s. On his right thigh was a plum-colored bump where he’d caught some shrapnel during the war. “Daddy?” I said, and he roared up for me to get the fuck out, which assault seemed to blast all available oxygen from the room. Maybe my hair flew back in cartoon astonishment. Then he wound down again into a gasping cough. He’d never talked to me that way, and I froze in it. After a while he seemed to forget I was standing there. He lay back down. He wasn’t exactly coughing, but his breathing had a jagged gasp in the middle of it. When I started nosing around behind the dresser for an electrical outlet, he roared up again. “What you want in here?” More coughs, the tendons on his neck stood out in sharp relief. I turned on the dresser lamp. The room was icebox cold, but he was in a flop sweat, his face bright with fever. The bedclothes held moist wrinkles where he’d been resting. I told him I was fixing to plug the vaporizer in. A bead of sweat hung from his nose. He wiped it with the back of his hand and squinted my way. “Your mother sent you in here, didn’t she?” Then he started a rant against her the likes of which I’d never heard. She was the most selfish person he’d ever known. She’d ruined everybody she ever touched. Including me and my sister. We weren’t nothing. Lecia with her Phi Beta Kappa in physics. Me with my MFA—Mother-Fucking Asshole’s what that stood for. Where he got the wind for all this, I can’t guess. His voice came out in a guttural rasp, like the possessed kid in that exorcist movie. Daddy railed down to his last breath: I couldn’t master my own rosy red ass, he said. Thermometers had degrees, he said. I still didn’t know my butt from a hole in the ground. I was crying by then. Once coughing had shut him up again, I started groping along the baseboard for an outlet. The lamp cord got jostled in the process, so the room plunged to black. He didn’t say anything. When I plugged the vaporizer in, a chubby road of steam started puffing right in my face. It smelled of menthol chest rub. He waved his ropy arm in the mist.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  He just looked at me and whistled. I was mad. If these dang Indians had been this organized when I went to school here, maybe I would have had more reasons to stay. That thought made me laugh. So I laughed. And my laughter was the only sound in the gym. And then I noticed that the only Indian who hadn’t turned his back on me was Rowdy. He was standing on the other end of the court. He passed a basketball around his back, around his back, around his back, like a clock. And he glared at me. He wanted to play. He didn’t want to turn his back on me. He wanted to kill me, face-to-face. That made me laugh some more. And then Coach started laughing with me. And so did my teammates. And we kept laughing as we walked into the locker room to get ready for the game. Once inside the locker room, I almost passed out. I slumped against a locker. I felt dizzy and weak. And then I cried, and felt ashamed of my tears. But Coach knew exactly what to say. “It’s okay,” Coach said to me, but he was talking to the whole team. “If you care about something enough, it’s going to make you cry. But you have to use it. Use your tears. Use your pain. Use your fear. Get mad, Arnold, get mad.” And so I got mad. And I was still mad and crying when we ran out for warm-ups. And I was still mad when the game started. I was on the bench. I didn’t think I was going to play much. I was only a freshman. But halfway through the first quarter, with the score tied at 10, Coach sent me in. And as I ran onto the court, somebody in the crowd threw a quarter at me. AND HIT ME IN THE FRICKING FOREHEAD! They drew blood. I was bleeding. So I couldn’t play. Bleeding and angry, I glared at the crowd. They taunted me as I walked into the locker room. I bled alone, until Eugene, my dad’s best friend, walked in. He had just become an EMT for the tribal clinic. “Let me look at that,” he said, and poked at my wound. “You still got your motorcycle?” I asked. “Nah, I wrecked that thing,” he said, and dabbed antiseptic on my cut. “How does this feel?” “It hurts.” “Ah, it’s nothing,” he said. “Maybe three stitches. I’ll drive you to Spokane to get it fixed up.” “Do you hate me, too?” I asked Eugene. “No, man, you’re cool,” he said. “Good,” I said. “It’s too bad you didn’t get to play,” Eugene said. “Your dad says you’re getting pretty good.” “Not as good as you,” I said. Eugene was a legend. People say he could have played in college, but people also say Eugene couldn’t read. You can’t read, you can’t ball. “You’ll get them next time,” Eugene said.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  It has been remarked that as the Soviet Union finally disintegrated in 1991, it left the Russian Orthodox Church as ‘arguably the most “Soviet” of all institutions’ remaining in Russia. [41] One remarkable symptom was that the FSB, the Russian intelligence service that had rather seamlessly succeeded the Soviet KGB, lovingly restored a Moscow parish church for its own use. In 2002 the Church of the Holy Wisdom was reconsecrated with full Orthodox pomp by no less a figure than Patriarch Aleksii, who amid the festivities presented the FSB’s Director, Nikolai Patrushev, with an icon of his name-saint Nikolai. [42] In 1999 President Boris Yeltsin nominated as his successor a little-known St Petersburg politician and former KGB officer, Vladimir Putin. It was a decade before Putin decided to weaponize sex as part of his consolidation of power, reversing a direction set by Yeltsin’s regime. Yeltsin had repealed Stalin’s criminalization of male homosexuality in 1993 as part of dismantling Soviet-era legislation, and gay activism had become increasingly visible in public, at least in Moscow or St Petersburg. Increasingly, conservative–nationalist political groups seized on this issue in their anger at the Western humiliation of the Soviet Union and the chaos of post-Soviet Russia. A debate on sex in the Duma (Parliament) in 2002 was nevertheless significant for what it failed to achieve: a restoration of Stalin’s law on male homosexuality, not to mention a ban on lesbianism and even fines for masturbation, all decisively voted down. [43] At this stage President Putin showed little support for such moves, evidently cautious about openly repudiating the assumptions about human rights that governed social change in the European Union and the West generally. Conservatives nevertheless learned from their defeat. They would have to be more precise in their campaigns for what they increasingly called ‘traditional sexuality’, a new coinage to describe a new idea. This meant turning the focus on homosexuality. Official support came in the wake of the world economic crisis of 2008–9, which had ended the domestic economic growth that had made Putin popular despite the obvious corruption of his regime. Twenty eleven brought a sudden surge in new legislation across the Russian Federation banning ‘gay propaganda’ aimed at minors. It is not clear how far Putin orchestrated this, but at the end of the year, he suffered a personal humiliation when attending a wrestling match in Moscow at which he was mocked by the spectators (of course, overwhelmingly male). That was a particular trauma for a leader whose public propaganda already cultivated his bare-chested macho outdoor image, though in the West that might have been labelled as rather camp. [44] In 2012, Putin quietly backed one of his associated Duma politicians, Elena Mizulina, in drawing up blanket legislation against ‘non-traditional sexual relations’. Its passage was surrounded by much denunciation of paedophilia, silently eliding that with homosexuality in general, and adding strident concerns that sexual deviancy had a part in contemporary Russia’s striking demographic decline.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  Karin gave her a long, opaque look. “Is it something we should celebrate, ma’am?” Ramona flopped down into one of the Shaws’ stupid modernist chairs, as expensive-looking as they were uncomfortable, and bit back a hiss of pain as she banged her cut elbow on one of its metal arms. “Don’t,” she spat as Karin started toward her. “If you spend one more second fussing over me I swear to Christ I’ll put a bullet in your kneecap.” That’s good. Scream at your staff. Piss your whole future away over some stoner eunuch who didn’t even love you. Karin stood silent, eyes downcast, face flushed. Ramona forced herself to take a steadying breath. “Anything else?” “There’s someone from the Screw here to see you.” “She can have five minutes,” Ramona snapped. “But if she’s here about the farms, you can tell her to fuck off. They’re ours now.” Karin left. For a minute Ramona sat stewing in the bad smell of her own temper tantrum and watched the bright sodium flare of arc cutters take Hyannis apart at the joints. How the fuck had that thing got so far up on the shore? It must have been going like hell when it ran aground, swarming with changed men, the handful of women in the crew either dead or barricaded in a single cabin while the massive engines thundered and the deck rolled beneath their feet. Maybe they’d prayed. She heard footsteps in the front hall. In the window a woman’s reflection swam out of the dark mouth. Slim and lanky, sandy hair around her shoulders and in soft, feathery bangs creeping uncut toward dark eyes. Fran flashed a nervous smile. “I hope you don’t mind,” she said quietly. “But I really think we should talk.” “Thanks for coming,” said Rachel, hopping aside to let Beth in through the lighthouse door. The air inside was damp and cool, morning light slanting in through high, narrow windows above. Shadows lay heavy on the older woman’s lined and wind-burned face and the wrinkles in her unwashed linen pants, tied off just under the stump of her right leg. She moved quickly on her crutches. “Dr. Varma said you might be able to give us a hand with a little programming problem.” The lighthouse’s ground floor was a rat’s nest of cables and scavenged electronics in various states of assembly. On the far wall, in a chair under the rusted spiral stair, Persephone sat hunched in front of a trio of mismatched monitors surrounded by computer towers. Somewhere out of sight a generator whined.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  My point is this: Scientology is there to make the able more able.” “Another way of saying that is: you’re interested in folks who’ve got money.” Miscavige objected, claiming that the money in the church goes to good causes. “We are the largest social reform group in the world,” he said, adding that if a person stays in Scientology long enough, he’ll have plenty of money. Then he referenced Sawyer’s report again. “The one girl there that was complaining about it, a girl named Vicki Aznaran, which by the way, this is a girl who was kicked out for trying to bring criminals into the church, something she didn’t mention.” “You say a ‘girl.’ I think we’re talking about a grown woman, right? ” “A grown woman, excuse me,” Miscavige said. “She violated the mores and codes of the group.” “Either you have made an accurate charge against someone or—what a number of … the pieces written about Scientology suggest is that when you have a critic before you, you destroy those people.” “That’s easy to say—” “You smear them.” “That’s easy for the person to say, but she’s the one on that program smearing me.” As for Richard Behar, the Time reporter, Miscavige remarked, “The man was on record on two occasions attempting to get Scientologists kidnapped. That is an illegal act.” The hour had ended, but Miscavige had just made another unsupported allegation. Koppel decided to extend the show “a few minutes,” but it went on another half hour without any commercial breaks. He asked Miscavige to explain what he meant about Behar. “Some people had called him up and he was telling them to kidnap Scientologists out,” Miscavige said. “Now, kidnapping, as you well know, is a federal crime,” Koppel observed. “So, why didn’t you bring charges against him?” “He didn’t succeed,” Miscavige said. “Ted, Ted, you’re missing the point.” “There is such a thing as attempted rape, attempted murder, attempted kidnapping. It’s also a crime.” “I think you’re really missing the issue, Ted, because my point is this: that man represents himself as an objective reporter. Here he is on record a full three years before he wrote this article, stating that he felt Scientologists should be kidnapped to change their religion. “Second of all,” Miscavige continued, “let’s look at this article, and let’s not fool ourselves. It wasn’t an objective piece. It was done at the behest of Eli Lilly,” the pharmaceutical manufacturer. “They were upset because of the damage we had caused to their killer drug Prozac.” “I’m sure you have evidence of that,” Koppel said. “You have affidavits?” “Let me tell you what else I have—” “You have affidavits?” “From them? Of course not. You think they’d admit it?” Miscavige said. “We put in a call to Eli Lilly. Their response was, ‘We can neither confirm nor deny.’ ”1 In Sawyer’s report there was a brief clip of Hubbard telling his followers, “ I was up in the Van Allen Belt.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  The early colonialists stormed violently into the New World as if they were conducting a giant acquisition raid, greed melding seamlessly with pious intent. The Portuguese set up sugar plantations in the Cape Verde Islands, and between three and five million Africans were torn from their homes and enslaved there. No American colony would be as gravely implicated in slavery. When the Portuguese finally rounded the Cape and exploded aggressively into the Indian Ocean, their bronze cannons made short work of the slender dhows and junks of their rivals. By 1524 they had seized the best ports in eastern Africa, western India, the Persian Gulf, and the Malacca Straits, and by 1560 they had an oceanwide chain of settlements based on Goa.7 This was a purely trading empire: the Portuguese made no attempt to conquer territory inland. Meanwhile, the Spanish had invaded the Americas, slaughtering the indigenous peoples and seizing land, booty, and slaves. They may have claimed to fight in the name of Christianity, but Hernán Cortés was brutally frank about his real motivation: he simply wanted “to get rich, not to work like a peasant.”8 In Montezuma’s Aztec Empire in central Mexico, in each city Cortés would invite local chieftains to the central square, and when they arrived with their retainers, his small Spanish army would gun them down, loot the city, and go on to the next.9 When Cortés arrived in the Aztec capital in 1525, Montezuma was already dead, and his now-shattered empire passed into Spanish hands. Survivors were decimated by European diseases for which they had no immunity. Some ten years later Francisco Pizarro, using similar military tactics, brought smallpox to the Inca Empire in Peru. For Europeans, colonialism brought unimaginable wealth; for the native peoples, it brought death on an unprecedented scale. According to one estimate, between 1519 and 1595 the population of Central Mexico fell from 16.9 million to 1 million and between 1572 and 1620 the Inca population had been halved.10

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  I mean, adults are afraid that kids might see the word “boner” or read about masturbation or things that, of course, no high school kid has ever thought about in the history of time. SA: Well, in various places, kids actually led the efforts against the bans. In Boise, Idaho, this young woman actually led the effort. She ended up in a city park distributing copies of True Diary to the public to battle against her own school board. So I’ve gotten letters from all sorts of kids like that who are fighting their own parents. Even last night at my son’s school, there was a man who was a liberal—it’s a very liberal school in a very liberal city—and we were talking about the influence of culture on our children and he advocated getting rid of your television, and I just shook my head. I mean, what a cliché, number one. And also, how censorious. What a censorious impulse. Does that man even recognize his own censorious impulses? That he wants to get rid of the outside world. That he wants to get rid of any image, any idea, any story, any thought that might upset him, that might cause him to have a conversation with his own child. Or, “Oh my God, there’s going to be something on that box I disagree with. Oh my God, I have to stop that.” Book banning punishes the imagination. Book banning punishes dialogue. Book banning turns disagreement into something evil and unwanted. Book banning turns opposing ideas into sins. Book banning is fundamentally religious, regardless of the religion. And I’m a secular warrior for free speech. JW: The book has given you so many opportunities to speak to communities about that, too. SA: Oh yeah, it’s been amazing, and it’s also so cute and quaint. It actually makes me feel so positive about books. That people are still so afraid of books that they’ll ban a book, they’ll keep their kid from reading a book, and yet their kid has an iPhone in their hands, access to every porn site in the world, access to all the porn that has ever been created, and yet they want my book banned because a teenage boy twice mentions masturbation. I think it says some-thing about books still being far more powerful. That the written word is still far more powerful than people think it is. JW: That immersion, that their kids are not just going to see pictures, they’re going to get ideas. SA: Yes, yes, yes. Scary books. Scary books. JW: This was your first YA book. Did it cause you to look at that genre differently?

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  He just looked at me and whistled. I was mad. If these dang Indians had been this organized when I went to school here, maybe I would have had more reasons to stay. That thought made me laugh. So I laughed. And my laughter was the only sound in the gym. And then I noticed that the only Indian who hadn’t turned his back on me was Rowdy. He was standing on the other end of the court. He passed a basketball around his back, around his back, around his back, like a clock. And he glared at me. He wanted to play. He didn’t want to turn his back on me. He wanted to kill me, face-to-face. That made me laugh some more. And then Coach started laughing with me. And so did my teammates. And we kept laughing as we walked into the locker room to get ready for the game. Once inside the locker room, I almost passed out. I slumped against a locker. I felt dizzy and weak. And then I cried, and felt ashamed of my tears. But Coach knew exactly what to say. “It’s okay,” Coach said to me, but he was talking to the whole team. “If you care about something enough, it’s going to make you cry. But you have to use it. Use your tears. Use your pain. Use your fear. Get mad, Arnold, get mad.” And so I got mad. And I was still mad and crying when we ran out for warm-ups. And I was still mad when the game started. I was on the bench. I didn’t think I was going to play much. I was only a freshman. But halfway through the first quarter, with the score tied at 10, Coach sent me in. And as I ran onto the court, somebody in the crowd threw a quarter at me. AND HIT ME IN THE FRICKING FOREHEAD! They drew blood. I was bleeding. So I couldn’t play. Bleeding and angry, I glared at the crowd. They taunted me as I walked into the locker room. I bled alone, until Eugene, my dad’s best friend, walked in. He had just become an EMT for the tribal clinic. “Let me look at that,” he said, and poked at my wound. “You still got your motorcycle?” I asked. “Nah, I wrecked that thing,” he said, and dabbed antiseptic on my cut. “How does this feel?” “It hurts.” “Ah, it’s nothing,” he said. “Maybe three stitches. I’ll drive you to Spokane to get it fixed up.” “Do you hate me, too?” I asked Eugene. “No, man, you’re cool,” he said. “Good,” I said. “It’s too bad you didn’t get to play,” Eugene said. “Your dad says you’re getting pretty good.” “Not as good as you,” I said. Eugene was a legend. People say he could have played in college, but people also say Eugene couldn’t read. You can’t read, you can’t ball. “You’ll get them next time,” Eugene said.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Twenty years later, the church was $1 billion in arrears, with only $125 million in reserves. The founder had placed Scientology’s head on the executioner’s block. The war between the church and the IRS had already gone on for more than two decades, with both sides waging a campaign of intimidation and espionage. Miscavige accused the Criminal Investigation Division of the IRS of engaging in surveillance of church leaders, wiretaps, and illegal opening of the church’s mail. Now the church upped the ante by besieging the IRS with 200 lawsuits on the part of the church and more than 2,300 suits on behalf of individual parishioners in every jurisdiction in the country, overwhelming government lawyers, running up fantastic expenses, and causing an immense amount of havoc inside the IRS. Miscavige boasted that the entire legal budget of the federal agency was exhausted: “ They didn’t even have money to attend the annual American Bar Association conference of lawyers—which they were supposed to speak at!” The church ran ads against the agency, using the images of beloved celebrities (who were not Scientologists) such as John Wayne and Willie Nelson, who had been audited by the IRS. “ All of America Loved Lucy,” one ad said, over an iconic photo of Lucille Ball, “except the IRS.” A ten-thousand-dollar reward was offered to potential whistle-blowers to expose IRS abuses. Private investigators dug into the private lives of IRS officials, going so far as to attend seminars and pose as IRS workers, to see who had a drinking problem or might be cheating on a spouse. Stories based on these investigations were promoted by a phony news bureau the church established, and also published in the church’s Freedom magazine, which Scientologists passed out for free on the steps of the IRS headquarters in Washington. The hatred on both sides for the other was intense. It seemed bizarre that a rather small organization could overmatch the US government, but the harassment campaign was having an effect. Some government workers were getting anonymous calls in the middle of the night, or finding that their pets had disappeared. Whether or not these events were part of the Scientology onslaught, they added to the paranoia many in the agency were feeling. Both the church and the IRS faced the challenge of addressing the question of what, exactly, constituted a religion in the eyes of the American government. On the church’s side was a body of scholars who had arisen in defense of what were called “new religious movements,” such as the Hare Krishnas, the Unification Church, and of course the Church of Scientology. The term was employed to replace the word “ cult,” because these academics found no reliable way of distinguishing a cult from a religion. They believe that new religious movements are persecuted and ridiculed simply because they are recent and seem exotic. Often, such experts are paid to testify in court on behalf of these organizations.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  And then by the end, the last third of the illustrations, she was coming up with her own ideas. She came to inhabit that character from an outside perspective, so I think my insider perspective and her outsider perspective combined to create this original character. JW: And in the end, Arnold talks again a little bit about the different tribes we can belong to. By the end, and having met Ellen, she— SA: She belongs to a thousand tribes at once. JW: She does! SA: I had never even thought about it that way—my collaboration with a white person, with a white woman, echoing the collaboration of Junior inside the novel. It never even occurred to me, Jess. JW: Yes, it did. SA: No, it never did. It never did. It never even occurred that my artistic collaboration with Ellen Forney mirrored Junior’s collaboration and introduction to the white world through the white kids in Reardan. JW: Another question I know you’ve gotten over the last ten years is about the movie. And whether there’ll be one. SA: Well, immediately there was interest in the book, and I said no. And at the same time I was angry about saying no and angry there wasn’t a movie because we Natives are so screwed in Hollywood by representation, by inaccurate and racist misrepresentations, just crappy movies, and I didn’t want to go through the process. I mean, I’ve been working in Hollywood since Smoke Signals. I worked on my own projects that never got made, I worked on other people’s projects that never got made. So the constant demoralizing failure to get anything made and dealing with Hollywood and the hypocrisy of all these Hollywood liberals behaving like rapacious Wall Street capitalists at all times, and the racism and sexism and homophobia of the most supposedly liberal community in the world—Hollywood—so all of that, there was just no way. Twice, all I had to do was sign a contract and I would have had a movie deal. And I said no. Never in my life has anything felt more like signing a treaty than trying to sign a movie deal with Hollywood. Never have I felt more compromised and in danger morally than signing a movie deal with Hollywood. JW: Were you feeling protective about the book itself, about Junior and his story—that either they won’t make it or they’ll get it wrong? SA: Yeah, that it would end up in the maw of nothingness, the factory of nothing being produced where it just cycles, it’s on the spin cycle in the Hollywood washing machine forever and ever.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  My fellow tribal members saw me and they all stopped cheering, talking, and moving. I think they stopped breathing. And, then, as one, they all turned their backs on me. It was a fricking awesome display of contempt. I was impressed. So were my teammates. Especially Roger. He just looked at me and whistled. I was mad. If these dang Indians had been this organized when I went to school here, maybe I would have had more reasons to stay. That thought made me laugh. So I laughed. And my laughter was the only sound in the gym. And then I noticed that the only Indian who hadn’t turned his back on me was Rowdy. He was standing on the other end of the court. He passed a basketball around his back, around his back, around his back, like a clock. And he glared at me. He wanted to play. He didn’t want to turn his back on me. He wanted to kill me, face-to-face. That made me laugh some more. And then Coach started laughing with me. And so did my teammates. And we kept laughing as we walked into the locker room to get ready for the game. Once inside the locker room, I almost passed out. I slumped against a locker. I felt dizzy and weak. And then I cried, and felt ashamed of my tears. But Coach knew exactly what to say. “It’s okay,” Coach said to me, but he was talking to the whole team. “If you care about something enough, it’s going to make you cry. But you have to use it. Use your tears. Use your pain. Use your fear. Get mad, Arnold, get mad.” And so I got mad. And I was still mad and crying when we ran out for warm-ups. And I was still mad when the game started. I was on the bench. I didn’t think I was going to play much. I was only a freshman. But halfway through the first quarter, with the score tied at 10, Coach sent me in. And as I ran onto the court, somebody in the crowd threw a quarter at me. AND HIT ME IN THE FRICKING FOREHEAD! They drew blood. I was bleeding. So I couldn’t play. Bleeding and angry, I glared at the crowd. They taunted me as I walked into the locker room. I bled alone, until Eugene, my dad’s best friend, walked in. He had just become an EMT for the tribal clinic. “Let me look at that,” he said, and poked at my wound. “You still got your motorcycle?” I asked. “Nah, I wrecked that thing,” he said, and dabbed antiseptic on my cut. “How does this feel?” “It hurts.” “Ah, it’s nothing,” he said. “Maybe three stitches. I’ll drive you to Spokane to get it fixed up.” “Do you hate me, too?”