Author: Ophelia Benson

Humans, humans, humans. One despairs sometimes, one really does. How can one help it.

Police and child protection experts are to investigate the extent of child abuse linked to religious practices after three adults who branded an eight-year-old child a witch and tortured her for months were yesterday convicted of child cruelty offences. The girl, known only as child B, was an orphan from war-ravaged Angola and brought to Britain by her aunt who falsely claimed to be her mother. She was cut with a knife on her chest, had chilli peppers rubbed in her eyes, was starved and repeatedly slapped, kicked and beaten…In one incident child B was bundled into a laundry bag and made to believe she would be thrown in a river by Kisanga and her aunt, who believed the girl was possessed by evil spirits…Police say child B was discovered by a street warden near Kisanga’s east London flat on November 24, 2003. She had cuts and bruises and was shivering…Once all three adults surrounded the girl: “One kicked me, one slapped me and one pushed me. I asked myself, ‘What have I done?’

Was anything left out? The child has lost her parents, her country is racked by war, an aunt takes her to the UK – and then turns on her. She’s eight years old and alone with three adults who are not her parents, who don’t (chances seem to be pretty good) love her the way parents (unless things go wrong) love their children. She’s eight years old, in a strange country, and all, all alone with three people bent on torturing her. She’s eight years old, wondering what she’s done. And there are others in the same situation.

Why do people need to come up with these ingenuities? Isn’t just everyday ordinary bad-temper and meanness enough, are these refinements necessary?

One day in November 2003 Kisanga and Ms X told her they were going to kill her by throwing her into the New River, a canal near her home. She was told to take her clothes off and was forced to get into a large red and white laundry bag, which was then zipped up…Ms May said Pinto intervened to save the child and soon after the girl was dumped on the street and was spotted by two Hackney Council street wardens. She was taken into care but because she did not tell the police about her abuse she was allowed to return to Ms X on Christmas Eve 2003…Ms May told the jury when the girl finally opened up about the abuse she had undergone she also admitted to having been traumatised. “She told her interviewers that she had been suffering nightmares about people trying to kill her,” said the prosecutor.

It’s not just Africa or belief in witchcraft, either. Don’t forget the Candace Newmaker case. She failed to bond with her new adopted mother (hardly surprising at her age), so a ‘therapist’ decided she had ‘Reactive Attachment Disorder,’ meaning she hadn’t bonded with her new adopted mother. (Listen, if someone adopted me right now, it would take me a good long time to bond with her, I can tell you that. I don’t care who it is.) Well hey, it was in the DSM-IV, so it must be a real disease or at least disorder, right? Of course. So the treatment for RAD – a new and not much tested ‘treatment’ but hey, nothing ventured nothing gained, right? – was ‘rebirthing therapy.’ Wazzat? Well, what you do is, you roll the child up in a mattress and pile a lot of stuff on top of her so that she feels squashed and can’t breathe properly, and then you tell her to fight her way out. When she says she can’t, and she can’t breathe, either, you tell her she’s a coward and has to try harder. When she starts to cry, you call her a lot of names. When she says she’s dying, you call her more names, and say ‘Good, die then’ for good measure. When she dies – well, you may feel slightly stupid, but it’s too late.

The people in both cases apparently really believed they were doing the right thing. It’s hard to get the mind around that, but it appears to be the case.

Oh dear – that’s one of the best laughs I’ve had in – well, a few hours, anyway. It was the surprise, partly. You know how a surprise can yank a loud sudden blurt of laughter out of you without your consciously intending it. It was that kind.

What, what, you eagerly cry, tell us so that we can laugh too. It was just a letter on the Letters page about my silly parodic wall article, which said ‘This is one of the silliest things I have ever read.’ Well good! That was the idea, so I’m delighted he thinks so! Mind you, he seems to have missed the fact that the silliness was intentional, but that’s all right – all the better in fact. Shows that it’s plausible enough. That was intentional too – I did try to make it enough like the real thing that the parody would be about something as opposed to merely absurdist. (That’s the basic thinking behind the entries in the Dictionary, too, I suppose. They’re meant to be hooked onto the real thing enough that they’re not just random cartoons. In fact my co-author often had to check a tendency in me to go past the borders of credibility. ‘I just don’t believe that one,’ he would say coldly. I would argue and shout and throw things, but in the end I usually gave in. I put most of the rejects on the B&W version of the Dictionary. I finally removed one of those a few days ago, after the fourth or fifth person emailed to tell me that I had ‘Chinatown’ and ‘The China Syndrome’ confused. I knew I did, that was the joke, but if so many people didn’t realize that – well that must have been a joke that didn’t work.) Mind you, I also included one or two fairly broad hints that it was a joke. The bit about decaying corpses, for instance – I’d have thought that was a bit of a giveaway. But probably the reader was so irritated and incredulous by the time he got to that part that he didn’t quite take it in. And rightly so! If you’re not already familiar with B&W, you wouldn’t asume that it’s a joke, so irritation in that situation is the correct response.

All this reminds me of an article Ellen Willis wrote in the Village Voice in response to the Sokal Hoax. I like her writing, but her partiality for the hoaxed Stanley Aronowitz may have clouded her perception on this occasion. Whatever the reason, she made a surprisingly glaring error:

Roger Kimball, who himself had been totally fooled by Sokal’s parody and blasted it at length in an anti-Social Text polemic in the new Criterion…

But – Ellen – oh dear, don’t you see, don’t you get it? The fact that he blasted it means he wasn’t fooled by it, not that he was! The fact that he thought Sokal meant it literally is not the point, the point is that he recognized what Sokal wrote as bullshit, which Aronowitz signally failed to do.

Quite an embarrassing mistake, that.

H. E. Baber reminds us of this splendid item, which I’d read before but forgotten.

Go into any of the little cafés or horlogeries on Paris’s Left Bank (make sure the Seine is flowing away from you, otherwise you’ll be on the Right Bank, where no one is ever seen) and sooner or later you will hear someone say, ‘Les choses sont contre nous.‘ ‘Things are against us.’ This is the nearest English translation I can find for the basic concept of Resistentialism, the grim but enthralling philosophy now identified with bespectacled, betrousered, two-eyed Pierre-Marie Ventre.

All accidentally (as Henry James might have put it), I was gesturing toward the same idea – but not because I remembered Resistentialism. The inspiration was that review of a history of barbed wire we were discussing last week. I was trying to inflate the element of paranoia as much as possible – and ended up in much the same place. Which is quite funny, really.

Clark-Trimble was not primarily a physicist, and his great discovery of the Graduated Hostility of Things was made almost accidentally. During some research into the relation between periods of the day and human bad temper, Clark-Trimble, a leading Cambridge psychologist, came to the conclusion that low human dynamics in the early morning could not sufficiently explain the apparent hostility of Things at the breakfast table…

I have a longstanding, consuming interest in human bad temper. I consider myself an expert in the field.