Tales From The Third Lobe

About the author: Descended from old English money, Vidicon was raised by spiny echidnas in the mountainous rainforests of the North American Southeast. Lured back to society by time-traveling gray/reptiloid alien hybrids posing as renegade Jesuits, he has managed to maintain his outsider's perspective and an appetite for crunchy insects. Today, Vidicon is a world-class synchronicity surfer and an unlicensed quantum mechanic. He has a fourth-degree black belt in weird. About his bi-weekly column: Tales from the Third Lobe are the unfocused meanderings of the World's Smartest Moron. Topics range widely over the sciences, religion, philosophy, technology, modern culture, mysticism, Vidicon's personal history and viewpoints, and whatever pissed him off in the media last week. View all articles by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. "Vidicon" Xalieri, 2HC Columnist...

I'm watching the first Addams Family movie. I just saw that wonderful line from Christina Ricci as Wednesday Addams, saying, "Is there a God?" -- naming the game she was playing with Pugsley in the electric chair.

That juxtaposition of evil and innocence.... Watching that, I caught a flash of what it must be like -- what the appeal must be -- for people who fantasize (and do more than fantasize) about having sex with children. And why it's so popular among people who are purportedly purveyors of holiness.

I know, I know. It's an easy topic these days. Catholic priests have been fondling choir-boys for thousands of years and reactions range from salacious sniggering to studiously pretending it's not going on. It takes a witch-hunt to get the slavering masses to start demanding action -- and let me say that's damned hypocritical, if not just extremely dangerous in precisely the same way that all witch-hunts are extremely dangerous.

But consider: nothing has changed. It's been going on forever. You've known about it. Not coming forward about it until everyone else has -- not complaining until it's safe to complain -- is cowardly at best. Not bothering to make a stink, not bothering to press charges leaves the perpetrators free to perpetrate, perpetually. Your silence makes you partially guilty for the crimes against the next victim. Victims.

This circus should have happened about the same time as the Renaissance, I figure. What's a few more hundred years of sex acts with unwilling minors? At least it's happening in the church, where forgiveness is cheap and easy.

Don't think I'm just picking on the Roman Catholic Church. There's just something about religious authority (or, to be fair, many similar absolutist, authoritarian positions -- parents, headmasters, tutors, teachers, athletic coaches -- just wander through your local porn emporium¹ and pick up any magazine or video with a picture with a plaid skirt in it for an example, and note that religious themes are very common, if not the rule) that makes children sexual objects.

Back in the late nineteen-eighties I took a series of classes -- basically a kind of catechism -- in Wiccan belief and practice from a group local to the Atlanta area known as Y Tylwyth Teg. It was run by a man who struck me as fitting the stereotype of the wannabe authoritarian -- the sex-starved egotistical bastard with delusions of godhood. His name was Bill Wheeler (a cohort of mine in the computing industry, actually), who styled himself "Rhuddlwm Gawr" for official Wiccan purposes. It didn't take long for me to decide the whole setup was a scam (at least on his part) for sex and money, and it went something like this:

Students taking the series of classes to find out what Wicca is about would pay something like ten dollars per class² for a series of a dozen classes on various topics associated with the tradition. They were also required to purchase a short series of truly stultifying books -- and I do not exaggerate when I say they were absolutely dreadfully tediously bad, not interesting even as textbook examples of horrible prose -- detailing the ersatz Rhuddlwm Gawr's spiritual journeys on Earth and Earth's "astral plane".³

After you've made all this investment of hours and moolah and sanity, you would be offered the honor of joining the Y Tylwyth Teg coven -- after it is drilled into you that it is impossible to practice correctly in a solitary manner. It was slowly broken to you that initiation into the coven was by way of The Great Rite, which includes ritual, and entirely non-symbolic, unprotected sex with Bill Wheeler⁴, if you were an attractive female, one of his inner circle of high priests if you were a somewhat less attractive female, or Bill's wife, if you were male. Most students were female, with a smattering of homo/bisexual males, with hetero males in the clear minority. The threat of sex with Bill's wife, while not completely unattractive to straight men (if a bit saggy and wrinkly by my tastes at the time), was a great method of deterring homosexual males from joining.

In retrospect, it reminds me of one of Dr. Robert Sapolsky's descriptions of how a troop of baboons functions. The guy at the top gets a comfortable living and first choice of all the poontang -- and if you want to be a member of the troop, you have to prove your willingness to eat shit. But you'll put up with it because that's the price for feeling like you belong somewhere. Your company, your family, your church. That's just how society, at its very fundament, works.

It's a drastic understatement to say that our teacher for the classes was a bit disillusioned. I wheedled her into a position of explaining how things really worked in Y Tylwyth Teg -- and she admitted that she was bailing as soon as she was done teaching the class. And she recommended that unless we found the thought of sex with dumpy Bill Wheeler (or, as the case may be, his vaguely droopy, vaguely wrinkly wife) a remotely tempting scenario, we should seriously consider joining another coven in town -- and she named a few -- or practicing Wicca in a solitary fashion.

I asked whether I missed the fine print that said that students and applicants to join Y Tylwyth Teg should be eighteen years of age or older, and she just shuddered. I was reminded that the age of consent in Georgia was fourteen at that time⁵. But her haunted look told me that she had witnessed something she didn't care to see again -- or maybe she was just trying to imagine whether Wheeler would balk at what the civilized world considers jail-bait.⁶

I think everyone in the room felt a sympathetic spinal chill. None of our group joined Y Tylwyth Teg.

And then there's that truly bizarre situation down in Eatonton, Georgia. As if that affair earlier this year in Noble, Georgia, concerning the bodies piling up since 1985 at the Tri-State Crematorium hadn't been fucked up enough....

Back in 1998 I stumbled across a one-sheet promotional inviting people to visit a site in Putnam County where a religious commune had set up on a four-hundred-acre ranch, complete with pyramids and night clubs, where visitors and worshippers could commune with their space-alien masters in the traditional African fashion.

I shit you not.

They named themselves the United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors⁷, and Dwight York was the Grand High Whatever over somewhere between a hundred and two hundred fellow Nuwaubians imprisoned here on Earth with us.

This was the sort of high weirdness I lived for, and it had bothered to come visit me in my home state. I was obligated. I got ready to get in my Saturn and zoom down to visit Nuwaubia Central, checking the flyer's map for the fiddly details and directions. The man who showed me the flyer said, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. It didn't say anything about it in the promo, but, umm, you're white. I don't think you'll be as welcome as you might think."

Well, crap. I decided my religious curiosity wasn't much worth risking getting shot or beaten, so I resolved to watch the newspapers, convinced I would see them again. And here they are.

York has been charged with seventy-four counts of child molestation, twenty-nine counts of aggravated child molestation (including a few charges that are basic variations on that theme), and one count of rape.^8,9 His "associate", Kathy Johnson, was only indicted in five counts. Esther Cole, Chandra Lampkin, and Kadijah Merrit also racked up one or two. Allegedly some of these abuses we committed to alleviate the boredom and stress of a long drive with a bus full of tykes to Disney World fifteen or twenty times in the last four years.

And of course the head Nuwaubians took a bunch of holiday snapshots and videotaped some home movies to jack off to later. Convenient for the Federal prosecutors to jack off over, too, although hopefully for different reasons.

Imagine all those little children, in a combination of awe and fear, required to do anything we tell them on pain of our disfavor and the tens of thousands of ways we can make their lives a living hell. We are literally gods to them. When they make us happy, they are genuinely happy -- not just of the reprieve from our displeasure, but also in the innocent sharing of joy with those they love, respect, fear, and admire. We laugh; they laugh. The evil that we make them do can't possibly be evil in their eyes. How can causing happiness be evil? How can preventing torture and punishment to themselves and one another be evil? They commit crimes against themselves and one another with guiltless abandon and enthusiasm, hesitating only because they haven't had enough experience to get the technique right -- steady hip motions, the guarding the teeth with the lips and tongue, the gauging of the appropriate amount of lubricant.

In a society where guilt is associated with any pleasure, where are you going to get a chance to have someone give you pleasure without any reservation, with enthusiasm, with abandon? The more restricted and repressed you are, the harder that selfless act of pleasure-giving is to come by.

And then there are those who do it because they know it's dirty -- the ones that know they can command silence by threatening to expose their charges' complicity, by threatening to use their higher status to make fictional testimony stick. My guess is that many of this latter category would prefer to be the former, but end up in the latter group as their charges grow older and wiser and they have to come up with ways to protect themselves from discovery, prosecution, and the occasional getting beaten to death by outraged relatives of victims.

My own molestations took place when I was a toddler, just out of diapers. I remember the couple of times quite well. They weren't very traumatic, and they were both pretty much identical. It's not quite off-topic to state that they didn't seem to be religiously motivated.

Our neighbor, who sometimes babysat for me and my sisters, would visit and bring her younger brothers. The younger of the two (was he nine? ten?) would ask me to go outside to play with him. He would help me down the back steps and around to the entrance to the crawlspace under my house. He would then unfasten the bib of my overalls, pull them and my tighty-whiteys down around my calves, drop his own pants, and then pretend to clean my ass-crack by rubbing his limp, wriggly penis up and down it a few times. After a moment or two, he would pull his pants up, help me fasten my overalls' straps, and then ask me not to tell anyone else.

He was never ungentle, although I never much saw the point to what he was trying to do to me. I put it out of my head -- because the topic basically never came up -- until I later learned a bit more about the manifold nature of sexual activity.

Nearly simultaneously with my realizing that my neighbor's penis in my ass-crack hadn't quite been on the up-and-up, I realized that he hadn't known he was doing anything wrong. He was just doing something he had been taught to think was normal ... which sure as hell incriminated his older brother and/or his father and/or someone else further up the pecking order.

My point is that we have a tendency to think that what we experience is ordinary until someone tells us otherwise. And then we have a tendency not to believe it when we're told because our own experiences carry a greater weight than some busybody's say-so. And when we finally fucking figure it out, we're too ashamed of having been both a victim and a willful moron to bring it to the attention of a friend, the district attorney, or the occasional avenging relative.

Don't you get it? A normal guy, priest or not, doesn't say, "I read in a newsgroup somewhere that it might be fun to fuck a four-year-old boy up the ass." He does it because it happened to him. When he was four. And he never figured out that it was really a bad thing to do, because, well, he turned out okay....

If you're going to remember anything out of this hellish diatribe, remember the next sentence; hell, print it on t-shirts and bumper-stickers: The tendency to molest children is a sexually transmitted disease. It is very contagious. It is difficult to treat. It almost never goes into complete remission. And it's been treated like it's a perfectly ordinary thing since all we could say was "ook".

If we're going to criminalize sexual contact with children, we shouldn't be so half-assed. As soon a child can find and correctly label his or her ass best two out of three, we should inoculate them against this disease by telling them that we need to know if anyone asks or forces him or her to touch, kiss, or lick them anyplace usually hidden by Underoos® -- or asks or forces the kid to touch, kiss, or lick anyone else.

And the biggest link with religion is our attitudes of shameful silence regarding our own or anyone else's nether regions -- but that silence, in combination with unquestionable, overbearing authority, makes for a devastating combination.

Vidicon has been the buddha, but the pay was lousy.