And Far Too Many of Us Underestimate Their Fanaticism and Power
THE
WORST PARENTAL BEATINGS I ever received as a child – a succession of
three savage assaults that left me so bruised I was not allowed to
attend school until the blemishes had faded to near-invisibility – were
punishment for having dared study comparative anatomy with other
neighborhood children. I was seven years old. My father administered the
beatings as my stepmother cheered him on. The fact he was a presumably
enlightened Marxist made no difference at all in the depth to which he
had absorbed the sadistic anti-sexual hatefulness that is undoubtedly
the darkest, most malevolent aspect of the patriarchal psychosis that
defines USian consciousness – the festering Abrahamic malevolence now
again gleefully resurrected and writ into law and decree by the
Trump/Pence Regime, maliciously applauded by every JesuNazi voter and
undoubtedly endorsed, often secretly, by an overwhelmingly vast majority
of other USians as well.
Ironically
I was never more than a peripheral participant in the
comparative-anatomy studies for which I was so brutally punished.
Pants-down research was vaguely uncomfortable for me because we – a
group of kids ages six to eight, three boys, three girls – conducted
our classes in the black-widow, scorpion and poisonous-centipede
infested spaces under houses raised two feet off the sandy ground in
accordance with wartime 1940s Floridian construction standards. After
our activities were discovered – perhaps another story for another time –
I was repeatedly beaten until I falsely confessed I had been the chief
instigator of such sexual studiousness as had obtained in the Lake
Forest neighborhood of Jacksonville c. 1945-1947. My father beat me
first with a one-inch hickory dowel, which he broke over my legs. Then
he whipped me with a garrison belt. Finally, after he beat me with a
steel ruler, I stopped telling the truth and gave him and my stepmother,
an allegedly lapsed Southern Baptist, the I'm-an-evil-pervert
confession they demanded, thereby confirming my parents' implicitly
hateful Loren-is-a-monster fantasy. Thus were the punitively miserable
conditions of my life determined until, as an 18-year-old University of
Tennessee student, I was hired through the UT employment office as a
motel night clerk. That job and my entry into newspaper journalism two
years earlier were the greatest blessings of my teenage life. Journalism
gave me a permanent sense of purpose, while the motel rescued me from
the prison of my father's household and got me a dwelling that was truly
my own.
I
remember I was not surprised by the beatings. While at age seven I was
certainly not sophisticated enough to recognize the wounds inflicted by
the fanatical anti-sex hatefulness that defines Abrahamic religion
cannot ever be healed – that wisdom was granted me by a (very) brief
affair with the rebellious daughter of a Church of God preacher late in
my 23rd year – I was nevertheless bright enough to recognize the total
rejection expressed by my father's judicially overruled attempt to
abandon me in a Virginia state orphanage after my violently
schizophrenic mother attempted to murder us both. This was in 1945,
eerily enough on the Summer Solstice Eve. My father's reasoning was of
course that given my genetically defective mother, I too was genetically
defective, and from that moment onward – despite our father-son
closeness in prior years – I was literally a despised child, or as I
came to think of myself after a beloved English Setter was euthanized
for protecting me from a stepmotherly assault,“a dog nobody wanted.”
(To read the rest, go here or here.)
