I remember when I first went to see “The Silence of the Lambs.” I walked home from the theater hugging my nipples. I remember telling myself that I definitely didn’t want to have any nightmares about it. Thankfully, that has never occurred.
I think that the character of Hannibal Lecter, played in an unfortunate immortal fashion by Anthony Hopkins, was a misrepresentation of men and of the nature of evil. The film does work in another way, however. As I’ve said before of great art: It has a tendency to transcend the original intentions of the artists who create it. Seeing how Hopkins went on to portray Lecter twice more as some sort of lovable antihero, it is clear to me that the culture didn’t fully comprehend that Lecter can be seen – and in my opinion ought to be seen – as symbolic of truth.
Americans are especially curious when it comes to the meanings of words like truth. Our politicians gather on a regular basis to bloviate about truth, freedom, etc. and they get millions to emotionally respond. Whenever this happens, I remind myself that what the campaigners are doing is manipulating emotions with words, like rapture.
We love truth right up until the moment that it becomes uncomfortable. Then we want our delusions so that we can go on feeling happy. I wrote an article years ago for another website about how I believe truth is like a mountain. You can spend your life researching, hiking, writing poetry, painting, photographing, looking at, and living near a mountain; and only gather a handful of information about it. Your mind and your emotions will change quite a bit concerning the mountain, but it will remain unchanged and unfeeling.
Truth is much the same. Truth is cognizant knowledge of reality, of facts. Reality, like a mountain, does not change shape. (I am deliberately leaving out mountains like Mount St. Helens that are formed by volcanic activity. Duh.) We either fit our minds around reality, as pleasant and unpleasant as it routinely gets, or we spend our lives stumbling about.
In the film, trainee Clarice Starling was warned by her professor not to allow Lecter to ask her any personal questions. Her fixation on her hopeful rise through a prestigious organization, which Lecter immediately gleaned from a fairly impersonal first interview, led her to abandon his good advice:
You’re so ambitious, aren’t you? You know what you look like to me with your good bag and your cheap shoes? You look like a rube. A well-scrubbed hustling rube with a little taste. Good nutrition has given you some length of bone, but you’re not more than one generation from poor white trash, are you, Agent Starling? And that accent you’ve tried so desperately to shed: pure West Virginia.
To this Starling could say little more than: “You see a lot, doctor.” The end result, after being sent unknowingly into the hell of another disturbed mind, is that her professor, a father figure who ascends a staircase just like her real father going up to heaven, is unable to offer her any comfort when Lecter proves that he can get to her anywhere at any time he likes. He knows the uncomfortable truth about her: She’s an orphan from a world of poverty who has nightmares about screaming lambs and fantasies about saving victims. Now that she has a sociopath in her head, certain unpleasant thoughts about herself will never leave.
Not long before I saw that movie, I had the opportunity to be at a presentation that helped to teach me the importance of words. A man and a woman demonstrated for the group. Another man giving the presentation showed a 5X8 card to the man and different one to the woman. Then he held up a third card to the entire group with one word minus one letter: R_PE. He asked the man what word came to his mind. “Ripe,” he replied. He asked the woman. With a slight look of astonishment, she replied, “Rape.” Then he showed the group the other two cards. The man had read a card with words like “strawberries,” “fruity,” and “sweet.” The woman had read a card with words like “crime,” “violate,” and “dirty.”
The truth behind this activity? Just three letters and one underscore can mean the difference between the most pleasant and unpleasant thoughts. By itself, R_PE can mean nothing. It looks like an acronym, and an unknown one at that. Yet when reading the title of this article, I’m sure that every reader knew at what I was driving.
I was driving to Panama Beach, the site of yet another horrifying rape during Spring Break just this month, one that was caught on camera and witnessed by dozens of onlookers. A woman claims that four black college men raped her while she lay drugged on the beach. So full of their rapist bravado they were that they had the balls to film the crime in broad daylight on a crowded beach, while women watched going, “Whoooooo!”
National media is in an uproar, as well as the local sheriff, who called the video the “most disgusting, sickening thing.” People all over this land mass want to look up to sheriffs, and one who joins in the national disgust over the national disgrace of unbridled male sexuality is sure to get his secret desire: to see the end of Spring Break in Panama Beach, which will undoubtedly lead to less worry one week per year, and a great deal less beer bottles to recycle.
I won’t bother linking to the endless comments below the endless articles that call for genital removal, life sentences, and the death penalty for the men. I won’t “blame the victim” for other people’s sickening ideas of “justice.” I will, however, point out that we have moved away rather rapidly from a culture where angry young women hold up signs saying, “Don’t tell me not to dress like a slut; tell men not to rape.” We now live in a R_PE culture where we hear, “Don’t tell me not to drink and drive; tell the road to bend to my drunken will.”
Since at least the Sexual Revolution, this one week per year has been about one thing to the young adult participants: going wild. The seemingly limitless jack-off videos of “Girls Gone Wild” are commonly shot at numerous Spring Break and Mardi Gras locations. We are asked to believe that the truth is that even women cannot tell, when bikini-clad and half drunk, when another drunk and bikini-clad woman is being raped. How long before Women’s Studies programs in universities nationwide become mandatory for the young ladies?
They’d better pull it off soon, before Florence Welch does another video for another one of her songs. As you can see in this linked video, the songstress behind Florence + the Patriarchy Machine spends the bulk of the video simulating a gang rape bang. The difference, I suppose, is that she’s not on Spring Break while it happens.
What is the message women are being sent when they watch a gang bang, I mean rape, I mean bang, I mean r_pe, I mean, “Whoooooo!”? It’s the same mixed message, complete with mixed signals, that they asked for with the premiere of “50 Shades of Grey,” a movie that mainstream media brags about breaking this, that, and the other box office record. I have no need to see such a movie, because I already know what it’s about, having sat through a far more sexually explicit French movie entitled “Romance” (yeah, right), about a young woman with a gorgeous boyfriend who’s content, in herbivore fashion, to hang out with her like brother and sister rather than have sex. After numerous casual encounters behind his back with numerous other men, she decides on a rather ugly but well-established middle aged man who ties her up and sexually assaults her. To solidify their “harmonious” relationship in her mind, she picks up the baby she made with her boyfriend, turns on the gas stove, blows up his apartment while he is sleeping in it, and runs off with her abuser, obviously because she is not bikini-clad and drunk on a beach where everyone goes to have sex.
The political Left has always understood the power of semantic arguments. They have usurped the word “liberal” that was once tied to tolerance of differences, and bastardized it, as they do with language in general, to mean the state of being extraordinarily generous with everyone else’s money. Having won this victory, they are now free to redefine any word they choose: black, feminist, rape, minority, union, oppression, and now “Whoooooo!”
They also know how to tie up the political Right in their never-ending semantic game, and the political infighting has now reached such a degree as to make any meaningful debate problematic at best. Both the Left and the Right want power over discourse so badly now that truth itself remains largely silent because few are speaking it.
Fortunately, like a mountain, truth also remains large. The truth is that on beyond semantics, words are important. Words are, like music, a distinctly human language. Words are symbolic, and symbols call words to mind. A culture where hateful people are in charge – people who listen to hateful women – is a dying culture, because hate cannot produce life-oriented thoughts and behavior. The words that “liberals” control continue to have various meanings, contexts, and symbols that they will never be able to completely control.
When free speech becomes a privilege and is guarded by something as sickening as political correctness, it dies. When men are sent mixed signals, and continue to believe that fast-and-easy sex with the opposite sex is possible in a dying culture, they can ruin their lives.
The truth is: It is long past time for men to spend Spring Break bonding with each other, far from the influence of women. When men lead the way, women are sure to follow, except that this time they’ll have to do so by going in their own direction, like the men. More male bonding means women are further from men. This will lead to more female bonding, and a resurrection of the mystery surrounding the opposite sex.
It should be painfully clear that the empire’s all-encompassing desire to regulate humanity is failing, when heavily regulated universities filled with heavily regulated learning and heavily regulated minds filled with heavily regulated guilt over politically incorrect thoughts go on largely unregulated Spring Break to have sex with women whose minds are filled with thoughts (and fantasies) about r_pe.
Want more truth? Here’s some truthful advice: If you don’t want to have regretful bad sex with men who will now regret it for the rest of their natural lives while they suffer the mother of all public lynchings, don’t go on Spring Break. And don’t tell me what to write; tell yourself to stop reading.
