Disappointment

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.

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• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  And then, almost as if in slow motion, it exploded into a tremendous fireball on the launching pad. It had barely gotten off the ground, and I cried that night in my living room. I cried watching Vanguard that night on the evening news with Mom and all the rest. It was a sad day for our country, I thought, it was a sad day for America. We had failed in our first attempt to put a satellite into orbit. I walked slowly back to my room. We were losing, I thought, we were losing the space race, and America wasn’t first anymore. When we finally made it into space, I was in junior high school, and right in the middle of the class the loudspeaker interrupted us and the principal in a very serious voice told us that something very important was about to happen. He talked about history, and how important the day was, how America was finally going to launch its first satellite and we would remember it for a long time. There was a long countdown as we all sat on the edge of our seats, tuning our ears in to the radio. And then the rocket began to lift off the edge of the launching pad. In the background there was the tremendous roar of the rocket engines and a guy was screaming like Mel Allen that the rocket was lifting off. “It’s lifting off! It’s lifting off!” he kept screaming crazily. All the kids were silent for a few seconds, still straining in their chairs, waiting to see whether the rocket would make it or not, then the whole room broke into cheers and applause. America had done it! We had put our first satellite into space. “We did it! We did it!” the guy was screaming at the top of his lungs. And now America was finally beginning to catch up with the Russians and each morning before I went to school I was watching “I Led Three Lives” on television about this guy who joins the Communists but is actually working for us. And I remember thinking how brave he was, putting his life on the line for his country, making believe he was a Communist, and all the time being on our side, getting information from them so we could keep the Russians from taking over our government. He seemed like a very serious man, and he had a wife and a kid and he went to secret meetings, calling his friends comrades in a low voice, and talking through newspapers on park benches. The Communists were all over the place back then. And if they weren’t trying to beat us into outer space, Castiglia and I were certain they were infiltrating our schools, trying to take over our classes and control our minds.

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

  That material considerations were primary in the marriage market is unsurprising. The need to camouflage this obvious fact is more revealing. A transparently venal or ambitious engagement was unseemly. Moralists insisted that virtue should guide the choice of a partner. For a fifteen-year-old bride, a reputation for good character can have consisted in little more than the absence of a reputation for anything else. What is truly interesting about the moralizing literature—which, it must be said, is unusually vapid—is the absence of romance. The commentators have little to say, good or bad, about the place of love in the choice of marriage, so distant was the heart from the workings of the marriage market. And yet there are slight but significant signs that affection might pull two lovers toward marriage. After all, the novels are an entire genre of literature built on the idea that two superhumanly beautiful creatures might fall in love with each other at the sight of each other’s body and eventually wed. Although the novels celebrate the reconciliation of the lovers’ passion with the civic order of marriage, in reality the untamed love of young people could disturb the paternalist forces shaping the reproduction of society. In the Roman period we hear ever more of abduction marriages in which the girl engineered, or at least allowed, for her lover to take her without her father’s approval. The great physiognomist Polemo, with his uncanny ability to read faces, crows that he had foreseen the abduction of a girl, contrived by her own design, on the very day of her wedding—twice!82 By the time evidence for Roman marriage becomes meaningfully thick, around the age of Cicero, a revolution in material life had already turned a sleepy, agrarian economy into the most prosperous, urbanized civilization the premodern world would ever know. High mortality and a vigorous slave system ensured that the “Big House” style of habitation flourished. Domestic slaves, considered little more than breathing furniture, were often spectators in the conjugal bedroom; we hear of a rabbi who would ring a little bell when he was about to have sex with his wife, but he was a prude. With in-laws and parents, slaves and freedmen, nurses and children sharing a domestic space, the Romans had little notion of what we would consider privacy. But it is meaningful that the physical house in the Roman Empire was not a castle of the transgenerational gens; as time, circumstance, and resources allowed, the married couple sought residential independence for their domestic enterprise. Urbanization only encouraged young couples to set up their own stead. Material factors thus reinforced the model of affective, companionate marriage.83

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

  In 1992, in the Alsace region of France, Yves helped set up a citizens’ aid convoy to help refugees of the genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the war in the former Yugoslavia. The Alsace-Sarajevo aid convoy, as it was called, set off on February 17, 1993 with more than 60 vehicles and 130 people. The mission was a success—it actually saved lives—but some leaders in the group chastised Yves, for failing to prominently attach the LaRouche name to the convoy. Messer was surprised but, by then, he’d already become suspicious of the group’s motives, which seemed largely designed to cater to LaRouche’s vanity. It happened that Yves was in contact with someone outside of the cult who had started a hunger strike to protest the atrocities in the former Yugoslavia. Yves spent several days with him, discussing all kinds of things including what they called “mind manipulation,” going so far as to design seminars—along with Yves’s partner at the time—for a hypothetical “Research Institute on Mind Manipulations.” One day, several LaRouche leaders arrived at his home to, in their words, “debrief” him but it was clear they were checking out his loyalty. Yves decided to quit the group. He left with his then-partner, in 1994, thinking it was just a disappointing political movement. It took them years to realize that the LaRouche organization was a cult, one that controlled its members by keeping them from feeling that they ever achieved anything real and significant. “What is essential is to preserve the LaRouche doctrine over reality,” Yves said. “The doctrine is the real, superior, and the only reality.” Forbidding children to members was another key way to control members. The policy of enforced abortions left hundreds of couples without any children.105 Yves and his then partner, who are now separated, adopted a little girl from China, and moved to Britain, where he eventually joined with Erica Duggan, whose son died in the group, to expose LaRouche and his organization. Members of the LaRouche Youth Movement left the cult en masse, in 2012, inspired in part by reading my book and reading Yves’ website, http://laroucheplanet.info/ and his efforts. Yves is still involved, through his websites and other activities, in combating cults and mind control. Hoyt Richards and Eternal Values106 Hoyt Richards was one of the world’s first male supermodels and is a writer, actor, producer and filmmaker. He is also an outspoken former cult member willing to give interviews and even help people to leave destructive cults. We were introduced to each other by a woman who had been mind controlled by a gypsy “psychic” in the summer of 2011. During the late 1980s and 1990s, Hoyt traveled the world, walked the runways of Paris, Milan, and New York; graced the covers and pages of high-fashion magazines; and appeared in hundreds of commercials. However, throughout his entire 15-year career, he was a member of Eternal Values, a destructive cult that began in midtown Manhattan.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Ned broke away from the picnic quietly and went on a little rampage which lasted for three days and nights. Perhaps it would have lasted longer had he not gotten into a fist fight down at the waterfront where he was found lying unconscious by the night watchman. He was taken to the hospital with a concussion of the brain from which he never recovered. Returning from the funeral the old man said with a dry eye—“Ned didn’t know what it was to be temperate. It was his own fault. Anyway, he’s better off now. . . .” And as though to prove to the minister that he was not made of the same stuff as Uncle Ned he became even more assiduous in his churchly duties. He had gotten himself promoted to the position of “elder,” an office of which he was extremely proud and by grace of which he was permitted during the Sunday services to aid in taking up the collection. To think of my old man marching up the aisle of a Congregational church with a collection box in his hand; to think of him standing reverently before the altar with this collection box while the minister blessed the offering, seems to me now something so incredible that I scarcely know what to say of it. I like to think, by contrast, of the man he was when I was just a kid and I would meet him at the ferry house of a Saturday noon. Surrounding the entrance to the ferry house there were then three saloons which of a Saturday noon were filled with men who had stopped off for a little bite at the free lunch counter and a schooner of beer. I can see the old man, as he stood in his thirtieth year, a healthy, genial soul with a smile for every one and a pleasant quip to pass the time of day, see him with his arm resting on the bar, his straw hat tipped on the back of his head, his left hand raised to down the foaming suds. My eye was then on about a level with his heavy gold chain which was spread crosswise over his vest; I remember the shepherd plaid suit which he wore in midsummer and the distinction it gave him among the other men at the bar who were not lucky enough to have been born tailors. I remember the way he would dip his hand into the big glass bowl on the free lunch counter and hand me a few pretzels, saying at the same time that I ought to go and have a look at the scoreboard in the window of the Brooklyn Times nearby. And perhaps, as I ran out of the saloon to see who was winning, a string of cyclists would pass close to the curb, holding to the little strip of asphalt which had been laid down expressly for them.

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

  Be a good consumer! When looking for a support group, be careful. Some “support groups” are, in fact, fronts for cults themselves, which use them to lure back people who have recently left the group, as well as to recruit vulnerable people who recently left other mind control cults. When researching support groups online, look for a legitimate e-mail discussion group and/or Facebook page. I also suggest not revealing your real name or any personal information, until you are confident that the group is legitimate. If there is no support group in your area, see if there is an online support group that meets your needs. It becomes apparent to former cult members in the first year after leaving that any pre-cult problems they may have had were never resolved while they were members of a destructive cult. This can be very disappointing to the ex-member, because the illusion of becoming healthier was one of the factors that reinforced continuing membership, sometimes for many years. This realization is often more difficult for long-term members. Imagine going into a group at age 18 and coming out at 30. You’ve been deprived of a huge amount of life experience. Your twenties, typically reserved for self-exploration, experimentation, education, skill development, career and relationship building, have been lost. Chronologically, you are 30, but psychologically, you probably feel 18. Friends from high school have good jobs; many are married; some have children; some have houses. At 30, you may be inexperienced at dating, and have been out of touch with world affairs for more than a decade. At a party, you have little to talk about except your cult experience, which only exacerbates the feeling of being in a goldfish bowl. You have to catch up on everything. You may feel an acute sense of having to make up for lost time. Some long-term former members liken the experience to that of POWs coming home after a war. In fact, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) seems to apply perfectly to some cult member veterans. When they come home, they have to catch up on everything. In the 1970s one person I worked with had never heard of the Watergate scandal, didn’t know who singer/songwriter James Taylor was, and wasn’t aware that we had landed and walked on the surface of the moon. Paradoxically, however, you need to slow down and take time. You need time to heal, grow and develop. You’ll need to discover or create your own path, and be concerned about your own unique needs, rather than compare yourself with other people.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  In the spring of the year before I graduated I actually wrote a letter to the New York Yankees management telling them I would give anything in the world for a tryout at the stadium. Castiglia’s sister Arlene typed it up for me and for weeks I walked around in a daze waiting for an answer, daydreaming about how Dad and Castiglia would drop me off at the Long Island Railroad station that day and shake my hand and wish me luck. I’d be looking at them, pounding my fist into my new baseball mitt: ‘’I’m gonna make it. Don’t worry about it, Castig. I’m gonna make it.” Then there’d be the great moment after the tryout when one of the coaches would come up to me: “Well, Kovic, you really looked good out there today. We think you’ve got what it takes.” It never happened that way. Even though the letter from the Yankees finally came in the mail and I ran over to Castiglia’s house shouting that I had made the tryouts, I chickened out when the morning came to leave for the station. I decided I didn’t want to go after all. Richie and Bobby Zimmer were all over me for weeks, and I was sorry I’d ever told them anything. I still played after that, but it was different. I was thinking about other things, other things I wanted to be. By that fall it seemed the guys on the block were almost grown up. In the halls at school we still gave each other the old Woodchuck Club signal we had started in sixth grade, sticking our hands under our chins, moving our fingers up and down, shouting, “Woodchuck, woodchuck.” It was crazy but it kept us together. And we went from class to class just waiting for each day to end so we could get back home and play touch football out on the street after our homework. Still everything was different. Castiglia was still talking about being a priest or joining the marines, but we weren’t seeing as much of each other anymore. Bobby Zimmer told me one afternoon that Richie was growing his hair long and smoking cigarettes with Peter Weber in some abandoned cement tunnel in the woods at the end of the block. Bobby’s hair was long too. My mother said he had a pompadour just like Elvis Presley’s. Whenever I saw him in the hallways, he had a pretty girl by his side and he was the first one of the guys on the block to get a driver’s license. I was still shy with girls. While I’d be waiting at the bus stop every morning with Kenny and Mike Lamb, Bobby Zimmer would drive past honking the horn of his car with one arm around his girlfriend.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  It gave me the feeling of the horrible inadequacy of the world when brought face to face with truth. It gave me the feeling of the stupidity of the blood tie and of the love which is not spiritually imbued. I look back rapidly and I see myself again in California. I am alone and I am working like a slave in the orange grove at Chula Vista. Am I coming into my own? I think not. I am a very wretched, forlorn, miserable person. I seem to have lost everything. In fact, I am hardly a person—I am more nearly an animal. All day long I am standing or walking behind the two jackasses which are hitched to my sledge. I have no thoughts, no dreams, no desires. I am thoroughly healthy and empty. I am a nonentity. I am so thoroughly alive and healthy that I am like the luscious deceptive fruit which hangs on the Californian trees. One more ray of sun and I will be rotten. “Pourri avant d’être mûri!” Is it really me that is rotting in this bright California sunshine? Is there nothing left of me, of all that I was up to this moment? Let me think a bit. . . . There was Arizona. I remember now that it was already night when I first set foot on Arizona soil. Just light enough to catch the last glimpse of a fading mesa. I am walking through the main street of a little town whose name is lost. What am I doing here on this street, in this town? Why, I am in love with Arizona, an Arizona of the mind which I search for in vain with my two good eyes. In the train there was still with me the Arizona which I had brought from New York—even after we had crossed the state line. Was there not a bridge over a canyon which had startled me out of my reverie? A bridge such as I had never seen before, a natural bridge created by a cataclysmic eruption thousands of years ago? And over this bridge I had seen a man crossing, a man who looked like an Indian, and he was riding a horse and there was a long saddlebag hanging beside the stirrup. A natural millenary bridge which in the dying sun with air so clear looked like the youngest, newest bridge imaginable. And over that bridge so strong, so durable, there passed, praise be to God, just a man and a horse, nothing more. This then was Arizona, and Arizona was not a figment of the imagination but the imagination itself dressed as a horse and rider. And this was even more than the imagination itself because there was no aura of ambiguity but only sharp and dead isolate the thing itself which was the dream and the dreamer himself seated on horseback.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  I was surprised by how large an audience there was for a summer opera in a little town, and for an opera not quite in the standard repertoire. R. didn’t know anything about it, of course, and as we waited for the performance to start, listening to the clatterings of the invisible orchestra, the occasional brass instrument clearing its throat, I gave him a sketch of the story, how a British soldier falls in love with a young priestess, who betrays her vows and then, when she’s betrayed in turn, kills herself in a sacred grove. Well, that sounds awful, R. said. It’s really not the best choice for a first opera, I said, wanting to lower his expectations, feeling protective of the experience I had been so eager to share. But I loved it when I was a kid, I said, and it has some beautiful music; though I worried that even the music would be less transporting than I remembered. And I was right, there was something a little embarrassing about it; everything seemed hopelessly dated, the sentimental music and oriental fantasy of a plot, and the first notes of the overture made clear that the performance wouldn’t be very good. Bulgaria had a storied history in opera, it had produced some of the best singers I had listened to in my bedroom as a teenager, my hoarded recordings; but musicians too were fleeing westward, now that they could, leaving behind them anyone whose talents couldn’t buy them a ticket out. It was a cruel thought, I was ashamed of it even as I cringed at the poorly tuned strings and splattered brass, the wooden movements of chorus and dancers. Most of the singers were past whatever prime they had had, though the oldest were the most impressive, I thought, an almost elderly bass and especially a mezzo whose voices, however they wobbled or frayed, had retained some ambered texture of accomplishment. I wondered if any recordings of their younger voices had survived; I could only guess, from the moments of resonance, the few ringing tones, at the mastery they had once possessed. That mastery must grow feebler by the day, I thought, it must be painful to feel it go. But it was Lakmé herself who mattered most, she had almost the only music in the opera worth hearing: the flower duet, which everyone knows and which has gone dull with repetition, and the bell song, when her father forces her to sing to the point of collapse, the music demanding the athleticism and suffering opera has always expected of its heroines. The soprano in the role was the only singer who was very young, in her twenties, a woman at the start of her career; she was a pleasure to watch, lovely and thin and with a pretty voice that was affectingly pure, maybe too untested for the role, so that the line between character and singer blurred and I was worried for her in the final bars of her big scene.

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

  Chrysostom’s sermons evince a strong will to gather the loose energy of the marriage ceremony into Christian form, but it is striking how gradually and unevenly Christian rituals developed. In the east, priests slowly became part of the traditional ceremonies, blessing the couple and even participating in parts of the ceremony such as veiling, crowning, or the joining of hands. By the fifth century, clerical blessings became routine, although the wedding maintained its profane form and never became truly liturgical in late antiquity. In the west, clerical blessings in which the couple was veiled are attested in late fourth-century Italy. The rite of blessing gave the church a chance to promote its view of marriage: only first marriages were blessed, and Caesarius of Arles reports that only virgins received the honor. But Christian rituals developed late. Augustine, significantly, never mentioned a Christian ritual of marriage. Paulinus of Nola was the first to mention a marriage inside a church, specifically at the altar—but both spouses were the scions of episcopal families (the groom was none other than Augustine’s nemesis, Julian of Eclanum). An important sacramentary, reflecting sixth-century practices, finally presents a full-fledged Christian liturgy of marriage, including a nuptial mass. It would be interesting to know at what moment in history a marriage had to occur in a church to be considered publicly legitimate: the answer is probably not until deep in the Middle Ages.51 The legal record provides an imperfect but revealing index of the endurance of old structures of matrimony and the volatile mixture at times produced by the synthesis of traditional patriarchy and fresh strains of sexual austerity. The reign of Constantine is significant, not so much for introducing Christian values into law as for accelerating a new, more aggressive style of imperial lawmaking. Constantine extensively reformed Roman private law, but not in ways that show particularly Christian inspiration. Rather, he was a fiercely conservative enforcer of traditional Roman values. Constantine, like Augustus, saw himself as the founder of a social order, and like Augustus he carried out a sweeping renovation of the aristocracy, complete with renewed prohibitions on the intermarriage of his aristocracy and women of “humble or low” birth. Like Augustus, too, he simultaneously reformed the adultery statute, which as ever protected decent women while consigning vulnerable women, perhaps more than ever, to systematic sexual exploitation. Constantine, for instance, was more explicit and more severe than the classical law in defining which women were beyond the pale of public respectability. Women working in taverns, who “served the wines of intemperance,” were rendered “unworthy of notice by the public law” by their “lowness of life.”52

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

  I asked Bongani if he spoke Pedi. He didn’t. I ran inside to the dance and ran around looking for someone who spoke Pedi to help me to convince her to come in. “Do you speak Pedi? Do you speak Pedi? Do you speak Pedi?” Nobody spoke Pedi. So I never got to go to my matric dance. Other than the three minutes I spent running through it looking for someone who spoke Pedi, I spent the whole night in the parking lot. When the dance ended, I climbed back into the shitty red Mazda and drove Babiki home. We sat in total awkward silence the whole way. I pulled up in front of her block of flats in Hillbrow, stopped the car, and sat for a moment as I tried to figure out the polite and gentlemanly way to end the evening. Then, out of nowhere, she leaned over and gave me a kiss. Like, a real kiss, a proper kiss. The kind of kiss that made me forget that the whole disaster had just happened. I was so confused. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. She pulled back and I looked deep into her eyes and thought, I have no idea how girls work. I got out of the car, walked around to her side, and opened her door. She gathered up her dress and stepped out and headed toward her flat, and as she turned to go I gave her one last little wave. “Bye.” “Bye.” [image "Part III" file=image_rsrc2UJ.jpg] [image file=image_rsrc2UK.jpg] In Germany, no child finishes high school without learning about the Holocaust. Not just the facts of it but the how and the why and the gravity of it—what it means. As a result, Germans grow up appropriately aware and apologetic. British schools treat colonialism the same way, to an extent. Their children are taught the history of the Empire with a kind of disclaimer hanging over the whole thing. “Well, that was shameful, now wasn’t it?” In South Africa, the atrocities of apartheid have never been taught that way. We weren’t taught judgment or shame. We were taught history the way it’s taught in America. In America, the history of racism is taught like this: “There was slavery and then there was Jim Crow and then there was Martin Luther King Jr. and now it’s done.” It was the same for us. “Apartheid was bad. Nelson Mandela was freed. Let’s move on.” Facts, but not many, and never the emotional or moral dimension. It was as if the teachers, many of whom were white, had been given a mandate. “Whatever you do, don’t make the kids angry.”

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  I tried unsuccessfully not to let my disappointment show. “I’m not the only person with questions about this case, Mr. Chapman. There’s a whole community of people, some of whom claim to have been with Walter McMillian miles away when the crime was committed, who believe in his innocence. There are people for whom he’s worked who are absolutely convinced that he did not commit this crime.” “I’ve talked to some of those people,” Chapman responded, “and they can only have uninformed opinions. They don’t have facts. Look, I can tell you right now that nobody cares who slept with Karen Kelly. There is evidence that implicates Walter McMillian for this murder, and my job is to defend this conviction.” He was becoming more argumentative, and his voice was rising. The calm and curious look he had initially given me was shifting into anger and disgust. “Well, you’ve indicted someone for perjury for contradicting the state’s case. Do you intend to prosecute everyone who challenges the evidence in this case?” My voice was now rising in exactly the way I wanted to avoid, but I was provoked by his attitude. “Alabama case law is clear that a perjury charge can’t be filed in the absence of clear and convincing evidence that a false statement has been made,” I went on. “A perjury indictment seems like a tactic designed to intimidate and discourage people from coming forward with evidence that contradicts the State’s case. The charge against Mr. Houston seems really inappropriate, Mr. Chapman, and legally indefensible.” I knew I was lecturing him and knew he didn’t like it, but I wanted him to know that we were going to defend Walter in a serious way. “Are you representing Darnell Houston now, too?” “Yes, I am.” “Well, I’m not sure you can do that, Mr. Stevenson. I think you might have a conflict there,” he said, and then his voice shifted from argumentative to blandly matter-of-fact. “But don’t worry, I may drop the perjury charges against Houston. Now that the judge has denied your motion to reopen the case, I don’t have any interest in pursuing charges against Darnell Houston. But I do want people to know that if they make false statements concerning this case, they are going to be held accountable.” I was confused and a little stunned. “What are you talking about? The motion to reconsider has been denied?” “Yes, the judge has already denied your motion. You must not have gotten your copy of his order. He’s down in Mobile now, so sometimes there are mail issues.” I tried to conceal my surprise about the court’s ruling on the motion without even permitting a hearing.

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

  In the peaceful middle decades of the second century, a Greek speaker of Samaritan origin settled in Rome. He had, by his own account, passed through the hands of Stoics and Aristotelians, Pythagoreans and Platonists, during the course of his studies. He was impressed by the Platonic doctrine of an eternal soul. But this seeker, Justin, was unconvinced until he found Christian philosophy. Following baptism, he became a Christian teacher and the first of the apologists whose work survives. Justin studiously maintained the persona and trappings of a philosopher. His two apologies and his Dialogue with Trypho are usually mined as evidence for the gradual accommodation of Christian theology with Platonic metaphysics. But they are at least as interesting as statements of a second-century sexual ideology that parted quite as much from Plato as from the regnant norms of imperial society. For Justin the conversion to Christianity meant leaving behind a life of entrenched sexual indulgence. “Those who once reveled in fornications now cleave to chastity alone.” The sexual propriety of the Christians was one of the chief recommendations for the new religion, and it stood in sharp contrast to the patterns of sexual conduct not just allowed but institutionalized in the ancient Mediterranean. “We see that nearly all of them are led into prostitution, not only the girls but also the males. In the way that those of old are said to have reared herds of sheep and cattle, goats and grazing horses, in these times children are reared, but for shameful use. So too an abundance of women, she-men, and ineffably wicked ones are set up for this sort of pollution. And you receive income, revenue, and taxes from those whom you ought to cast out of your civilization.” The centrality of prostitution stood as a stain on the oikoumenē, the hard-won civilization of the Roman Empire.34

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

  The more he studied, deliberated and prayed, the more clear it became that the Mormon Church was not what he had believed it to be. He found that it was full of ulterior motives and deception. This confirmed his own experience: he had known people in the Church who were power hungry or greedy. To this day, Tom doesn’t feel that the Mormon Church or its leaders are intentionally malicious—but that they do harmful things, because they believe that the ends justify the means. The church’s leaders and followers are indoctrinated to believe that the Mormon Church is the true religion, and they cannot stand the idea of their friends and family suffering, or going to hell, or attaining a lower degree of glory, because they are not active in the Church. Tom’s story is online at iamanexmormon.com and he wishes to add his voice to those of other courageous former members at exmormonfoundation.org. I was invited to speak to their annual conference in 2008 when I explained the BITE model. For me, meeting two hundred and fifty former LDS people was quite an intensive education. I had helped people exit the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (FLDS) cult of Warren Jeffs but, until the conference, I was not clear on just how much the mainstream organization was problematic. The talk I heard at that conference given by Ken Clark, a former LDS CES Institute Director for 27 years, entitled: Lying for the Lord: Deception as a Management Tool of the LDS Church was an eye-opener for me.122 The people who were willing to share their stories in this chapter represent just a fraction of the amazing human beings I have come to know since my own exit from the Moon cult. There are so many other people whose stories deserve worldwide attention. The Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) is the largest polygamous cult in the U.S. and is far more extreme and destructive than the modern day LDS organization.123 There have been many excellent books and documentaries on this cult. Rebecca Musser, ex-wife of “prophet” Warren Jeffs, published her biography, in 2013, The Witness Wore Red: The 19th Wife Who Brought Polygamous Cult Leaders to Justice.124 Carolyn Jessop, with assistance from Utah Attorney General http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Shurtleff, had gone into print ten years before. Carolyn became the first woman who left an FLDS community to be awarded full custody of all of her children. She wrote the best-seller, Escape, in 2008. Her cousin Flora Jessop, who is an incredible activist helping victims of FLDS, published Church of Lies, the following year.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  She didn’t answer right away. She didn’t see how this followed her comment about the old lady. “I don’t know.” “I don’t think you’re very sexual,” he said. “You’re not the way I thought you were when I first met you.” She was so hurt by this that she had difficulty answering. Finally, she said, “I can be very sexual or very unsexual depending on who I’m with and in what situation. It has to be the right kind of thing. I’m sort of a cerebral person. I think I respond to things in a cerebral way, mostly.” “That’s what I mean.” She was struck dumb with frustration. She had obviously disappointed him in some fundamental way, which she felt was completely due to misunderstanding. If only she could think of the correct thing to say, she was sure she could clear it up. The blue puffball thing unfurled itself before her with sickening power. It was the same image of him holding her and gazing into her eyes with bone-dislodging intent, thinly veiling the many shattering events that she anticipated between them. The prospect made her disoriented with pleasure. The only problem was, this image seemed to have no connection with what was happening now. She tried to think back to the time they had spent in her apartment, when he had held her and said, “You’re cute.” What had happened between then and now to so disappoint him? She hadn’t yet noticed how much he had disappointed her. He couldn’t tell if he was disappointing her or not. She completely mystified him, especially after her abrupt speech on cerebralism. It was now impossible to even have a clear picture of what he wanted to do to this unglamorous creature, who looked as though she bit her nails and read books at night. Dim, half-formed pictures of his wife, Sharon, Beth and a sixteen-year-old Chinese hooker he’d seen a month before crawled aimlessly over each other. He sat and brooded in a bad-natured and slightly drunken way. She sat next to him, diminished and fretful, with idiot radio songs about sex in her head. — They were staying in his grandmother’s deserted apartment in Washington, D.C. The complex was a series of building blocks seemingly arranged at random, stuck together and painted the least attractive colors available. It was surrounded by bright green grass and a circular driveway, and placed on a quiet highway that led into the city. There was a drive-in bank and an insurance office next to it. It was enveloped in the steady, continuous noise of cars driving by at roughly the same speed. “This is a horrible building,” she said as they traveled up in the elevator.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  By the way, you haven’t got a fountain pen you’d like to sell me, have you?” “Just sign right here,” he said, pretending to ignore my remarks. “And here, that’s it. Now then, Mr. Miller, I think I’ll say good day—and you’ll be hearing from the company in a few days.” “Better make it sooner,” I remarked, leading him to the door, “because I might change my mind and commit suicide.” “Why, of course, why yes, Mr. Miller, certainly we will. Good day now, good day!” Of course the installment plan breaks down eventually, even if you’re an assiduous buyer such as I was. I certainly did my best to keep the manufacturers and the advertising men of America busy, but they were disappointed in me it seems. Everybody was disappointed in me. But there was one man in particular who was more disappointed in me than anyone and that was a man who had really made an effort to befriend me and whom I had let down. I think of him and the way he took me on as his assistant—so readily and graciously—because later, when I was hiring and firing like a forty-two horse caliber revolver, I was betrayed right and left myself, but by that time I had become so inoculated that it didn’t matter a damn. But this man had gone out of his way to show me that he believed in me. He was the editor of a catalogue for a great mail order house. It was an enormous compendium of horseshit which was put out once a year and which took the whole year to make ready. I hadn’t the slightest idea what it was all about and why I dropped into his office that day I don’t know, unless it was because I wanted to get warm, as I had been knocking about the docks all day trying to get a job as a checker or some damned thing. It was cosy in his office and I made him a long speech so as to get thawed out. I didn’t know what job to ask for—just a job, I said. He was a sensitive man and very kindhearted. He seemed to guess that I was a writer, or wanted to be a writer, because soon he was asking me what I liked to read and what was my opinion of this writer and that writer. It just happened that I had a list of books in my pocket—books I was searching for at the public library—and so I brought it out and showed it to him. “Great Scott!” he exclaimed, “do you really read these books?” I modestly shook my head in the affirmative, and then as often happened to me when I was touched off by some silly remark like that, I began to talk about Hamsun’s Mysteries which I had just been reading. From then on the man was like putty in my hands.

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

  It was a Saturday night, end of the week, which meant Abel was drinking with his workers. I walked out to his garage, and as soon as I saw his eyes I knew: He was wasted. Fuck. When Abel was drunk he was a completely different person. “Ah, you look nice!” he said with a big smile, looking me over. “Where are you going?” “Where am I—Abie, I’m going to the dance.” “Okay. Have fun.” “Um…can I get the keys?” “The keys to what?” “To the car.” “What car?” “The BMW. You promised I could drive the BMW to the dance.” “First go buy me some beers,” he said. He gave me his car keys; Tom and I drove to the liquor store. I bought Abel a few cases of beer, drove back, and unloaded it for him. “Okay,” I said, “can I take the BMW now?” “No.” “What do you mean ‘no’?” “I mean ‘no.’ I need my car tonight.” “But you promised. You said I could take it.” “Yeah, but I need the car.” I was crushed. I sat there with Tom and begged him for close to half an hour. “Please.” “No.” “Please.” “Nope.” Finally we realized it wasn’t going to happen. We took the shitty Mazda and drove to Babiki’s house. I was an hour late picking her up. She was completely pissed off. Tom had to go in and convince her to come out, and eventually she did. She was even more gorgeous than before, in an amazing red dress, but she was clearly not in a great mood. Inside I was quietly starting to panic, but I smiled and kept trying my gentlemanly best to be a good date, holding the door for her, telling her how beautiful she was. Tom and the sister gave us a send-off and we headed out. Then I got lost. The dance was being held at some venue in a part of town I wasn’t familiar with, and at some point I got completely turned around and had no idea where I was. I drove around for an hour in the dark, going left, going right, doubling back. I was on my cellphone the whole time, desperately calling people, trying to figure out where I was, trying to get directions. Babiki sat next to me in stony silence the whole time, clearly not feeling me or this night at all. I was crashing hard. I was late. I didn’t know where I was going. I was the worst date she’d ever had in her life. I finally figured out where I was and we made it to the dance, nearly two hours late. I parked, jumped out, and ran around to get her door. When I opened it, she just sat there. “Are you ready?” I said. “Let’s go in.” “No.” “No? What…what do you mean, ‘no’?” “No.” “Okay…but why?” “No.” “But we need to go inside. The dance is inside.” “No.”

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  “Poor old Alexandre! They’re all like that, even Ginou! You’re in love with her, and you must be ready to pay the price!” Slowly, I made my way home to our Passage. To reach our hallway door, I had to chase away the flock of night-prowling cats that fed out of our ashcans. Not in the least scared, they waited a few feet away, their eyes bright in the darkness. Late though it was, I couldn’t sleep. One more road that I was closing, that closed itself ahead of me. Had I really wanted very deep in me to become a middle-class bourgeois? I wasn’t one and no longer wanted to be one. How could I ever be like Jean-Jean, like the Gazelle, like Michel, like the Commissioner? Polished as pebbles picked up on the seashore, they had no memory. Would I ever be able to forget Pinhas and the others who are like him, merely to save myself? How had I ever been able to believe that I would be able to lead a futile and self-satisfied existence? That evening, perhaps, I caught a glimpse of what their life really is. But that was also the time when I thought I had discovered in myself the signs of a calling, to teach philosophy. The bohemian manner of Poinsot, my admiration for him, the satisfactions that my successes in philosophy classes assured me, all this made me feel that teaching was an intellectual profession that was not committed to middle-class values and that maintained its independence as far as prejudices and earnings are concerned. It was also about that time that I began to develop the habit of going on long walks, all by myself, in the poorer districts of the city. ~ 10. COMMENCEMENT DAY ~

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  She returned to her office in a mildly muddled state that was both combative and uncertain. She stopped in the ladies’ room to look at herself in the mirror and saw with an unhappy loss of confidence that one side of her face had fallen into a jowly state of despair and that her eyes looked terribly tired and sad. She put on more makeup and entered the office. Luckily, there were only three people there, two assistants and an associate whom she liked. On her desk was a copy of a story being considered for publication. She read it twice and took it into the associate editor’s office. “Steve,” she said, “do you like this?” “What’s wrong with your mouth?” “Ignore it. I look spastic, but I’m not, I just went to the dentist. Do you like this?” “Yeah, I do. It’s—” “No, I mean really. Tell me the truth. Do you like this?” Steve looked provoked, then cornered, then he marshaled himself. “Yes, Connie, I like it. It’s terse, it’s quirky, it tricks you into thinking you’re safe, and then you find yourself on the edge of a cliff.” “Yeah, so does everything else we publish here.” “Connie, what do you want me to say? I know you feel frustrated about what we’re publishing, but this is what Fulford likes. I don’t have a problem with it.” “But I thought you liked the thing I showed you a few weeks ago.” “I did like it! I liked it a lot! But Fulford didn’t.” “He never likes anything I like. I don’t know why he hired me.” “You don’t like many things. If you did blurbs for novels they’d read ‘Mediocre! raves Constance Weymouth.’ ” “You like everything.” “I’m ready to like things. That’s true.” He leaned back in his chair and tipped his head backward as if he were on a talk show hosted by an obnoxious crank. Then he banged his chair forward again and smiled.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  “Letting a place alone isn’t the same thing as artificial maintenance. Anyway, this is artificially accelerated development.” She argued with him happily, pointing out that he was contradicting an earlier-expressed belief that the government should manipulate the economy to protect the poor. “Yes, I suppose you’re right about that,” he said after her short speech. His indifferent capitulation left her forceful argument charging foolishly toward a vanishing target, and she changed the subject, telling him about the previous night. He especially liked the drunken argument with the lesbian, and said “fabulous” three times. Their eggs came in oblong dishes. The piped-in woodwinds sang stirringly of decency and order. “What are you doing now that you’ve left Christine’s?” he asked. “Are you working or writing?” “Neither one, really.” She thought: I’m trying to re-form my personality. “I’m looking for a job, probably some clerical thing. Maybe something part time.” “Have you considered something in an editorial capacity?” “I tried that when I first came here and it didn’t work out.” “Why not?” She shrugged. “I guess I wasn’t really interested enough.” She thought of trying to explain herself further, but ate her eggs instead. She remembered herself newly arrived in New York, nervously planning her future. She saw the ensuing events as a series of comic-strip pictures separated by dark borders. This was especially true of her job search—there she was, the round-shouldered applicant before the monotonous, large-handed boss. She remembered her interview with the most respected editor of the most prestigious publishing house in town: “Oh, yes, I remember Georgia Helman.” The editor had rolled his eyes as he mentioned the woman who had referred Stephanie to him, a woman who had been his associate for two years. “A rather pathetic case. The only reason I hired her was as a favor to a personal friend. She was so messed up with drugs and men, you know. But about you.” He looked at her as if she’d already been in his office several times. “If you really want to be a writer, then don’t move to New York. You’ll just wind up in some dank little dump in the East Village with bars on the windows, and oh, I don’t know.” He grimaced and flapped his hand with distaste. She reminded him that she had already moved to the city and he said, “Well, in that case, maybe you should try The New Yorker. They generally hire only friends and family, but you have a certain, I don’t know, fresh, insipid look they might like. I’ve gotten quite a few people in there. Would you like to have a drink tomorrow evening?” She had to admit that a large part of the reason she was even trying to get a job was for the approval of people she’d known in Illinois, many of whom were living in New York and thought of her as a hopeless neurotic who couldn’t do much of anything.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  Virginia tried to get Jarold to be nicer to Lily. “She’s got a special kind of charm,” she said. “She’s gentle and low-key. She listens, and she has fresh insights.” Sometimes Jarold looked as though he were listening to this. But Lily wouldn’t or couldn’t show Jarold her charm. To him, she displayed only her most annoying aspects. And they really were annoying. She almost never said anything at family meals; she either kept her head down and chewed, or stared at people. She ignored Jarold, and sometimes she ignored Virginia too. She was judgmental; she was always talking about what was wrong with the world. She never helped with the dishes or anything else. She was always going into the refrigerator and eating the last piece of pie or cheesecake or whatever dessert was there. She’d say weird things, and when you’d ask her to explain what she meant, she’d say, “Oh, never mind.” She’d sit around looking as if somebody had been beating her with a stick. She’d droop on the wall. She was depressing. — In September, Lily would sit with her books on the floor of the den at night, reading and underlining sentences with fat turquoise lines. Virginia would be on the couch reading the paper, her square brown glasses on the end of her nose. The TV would be on, usually a talk show neither of them wanted to see. On the coffee table there’d be a fat economy-size jar of olives, which they both ate from. They’d talk intermittently, and Virginia liked to think that her silent presence was an encouragement to Lily’s studying. — In September, Lily got good grades on her quizzes. Her art teacher said nice things about her drawings. She got an A-plus on a humanities paper, and the teacher read it aloud to the class. Virginia called Anne and read it to her. During October, Lily stopped studying on the floor of the den. She left her broken-backed books on the couch and went upstairs to her room and shut the door. Virginia could hear the radio playing behind the door for hours. She wondered irritably what Lily was doing in there. On weekends her long-haired friends would come to the door and she’d disappear for the entire day. At night they’d hear the screen door slam, and Lily would pat through the den, her bell-bottoms swishing, her face distantly warm and airy. She’d float down the hall without a word. The second week in October, Mr. Shin, the school disciplinarian, called Virginia. He told her that Lily was rude in the classroom and that she used obscene language. Two weeks later he called again, this time to say that he thought Lily was taking drugs.