Learning to act right (45)… a racist old white guy

Torrey Orton

Dec 04, 2014

I’m swearing at the tube again…

I’m becoming a racist old white guy, much by the same process of my stopping being a homophobe years ago. Daily I’m confronted with objectively powerful white guys (and some white gals) bemoaning aggressively their perilous condition, if they are not spurring other white guys and gals to fear their own perilous condition as members of a threatened dominant species – white folks. The amount of scaring other white guys and gals they do is proportional to their power – those in government and corporate leadership are more aggressively scarifying than those out of it.

 

That I’m a white-on-white racist is exposed in my frequent resort to expressions like “white, Christian fuckwits” (our current national government is notably avowedly Christian, undoubtedly white and undeniably male, but for one minister) while watching the news.  Few count as “old” in the normal sense of the term, but they aren’t young. They are unified in my appreciation by an absolutely consistent refusal to speak ordinary English and acknowledge that anything they have said might be wrong. It may turn out that this refusal has crystallized into an inability. Whichever, this is particularly galling when they are hiding invasions of others’ freedoms and rights – notably, the usual suspect refugees, unionists, et al.

As one of this government’s cheerleaders J. Albrechtsen said in The Australian (261114) of the ABC funding fiasco:

… But instead of working through that initial error, the government played condescending word games. Finance Minister Mathias Cormann declared: “These are not cuts.” The PM, in question time on Monday, refused to answer the question of a broken promise about cuts.

This utter nonsense leaves voters fuming. When the government doesn’t respect them with straight-talking honesty, voters will respond with even more disrespect.”

Some of us think such mis-spokes (see Bigotry-is-OK-Brandis for another whopper out of the same kettle) actually occur because they do not respect the voters or working families or the community, full stop, not because they are having failures of rhetorical competence. The right wing argument for freedom of speech so often comes down to unintentional, unaware, unconscious (?) authorisations of vile speech (bigotry, etc.) rather than just acknowledgment of it as part of the speech practice spectrum. Dog whistling to the pub standard??

Speaking of bigotry, now that I can draw on its implicit authorisation by the government and the IPA* (surrogate for a beer style of imported popularity from a place over there which specialises in bigotry, racism, classism….), I’m noting that my disdain for the current crop of middle-aged white guys leeches out into the current opposition, driven partly by their being the initial authors of the great moral scandal of our immigration policy and practice and they too being often self-espoused Christians, but more gender generous in their composition!!! And the leeching goes further since the institutions of their belief (the various churches) never act with consistent moral fervour or ethical precision to publically embarrass the hypocrisy of that policy!!

And. in the end it’s the repetition that gets me…of weasels’ words and wishes and the blind and dumb refusal to follow the evidence of their effects, while creating the conditions in which their effects cannot be perceived, hidden as they are in the closet of neo-liberal plus PC plus anti-terror speechifying.

And, most irritating / enraging are the powerful who deny their power either outright by lying or covertly by keeping their processes from us. Deception is a far greater threat to a relationship than a misdeed, or even deeds, for they can be known and that is a kind of certainty. Uncertainty is the greatest threat to stability in all (?) things.

But the coincidence of their behaviours with numerous challenges of deep and broad sorts - climate change, economic conflicts, ethical transgressions – regresses me in rage, itself fuelled by endless public reportage inflammations of all manner of human events into tragedies and smash-ups and truth flipflops and…. My rage is not far in its inarticulate name calling (“white Christian fuckwits” being the higher end of my expressive spectrum in this matter) from that of the anti-abortion fundamentalists at the Fertility Control Clinic, though our terms of condemnation differ. Ah, we are on common ground at last!!

*IPA = Institute for Public Affairs, a self-anointed think shop with a thought range from Ayn Rand on the right to Hayek / Friedman on the left.

Digital outrage with comic relief

Torrey Orton                                                                 

Feb. 7, 2014

Ozemail error…

… the drop down notification remarks every time I attempt (successfully) to download my emails from my Nokia Lumia 625, a recently arrived baby of just 3 weeks age which has had synching problems from birth despite guarantees that its genetic provenance was the same as my laptop – Windows 8! When the drop down first occurred two days ago I said almost loudly ”Oh shit”, as my recently found facility of emailing by phone seemed to go out  the window. Relief was just a restart away. The next time I tried to receive email the message “Outlook synchronising” loped across the top of the screen in 6 point print for a second or two and down came the email and then this drop down denial of access, viz :

We’re having a problem downloading messages. Make sure you have a connection and your account information is correct, then try again.

Last tried 2 seconds ago

Error code: 80070018

This has happened over and over for the days since (2), a system which threatens with one hand the service it has given with the other. My most secret fear – system failure mid-living – is prodded unrelievedly (so far) by an unintended (but therefore egregiously effective!) confirmation of the fear’s strong evidence-based foundations.

Outrage??

As I discussed this with a very experienced IT systems friend, I learned in passing the meaning of a word I have not till now really mastered – outrage. This is the rage which flails itself into hyperventilating laughter howls. We made quite a nice footpath display for the youngers munching burgers and such around us in Bridge Road. Two old guys falling around screaming, almost.

All of which prompted us to disclose inadvertently wells of techno-rage we knew were present but we had not given voice to in that way a fit of mutual story telling of technicians’ incompetence can do it…a sort of self-inflating sequence of despair, reduced only by realising that the system changes which assault us are assaulting the technicians faster than reports on them can reach the webpages of Microsoft and/or Apple specialists.

That’s not an excuse, so they still get the blame. But it makes the prospect of their getting blame again higher than their pay should warrant. Telstra techos had spent 5 hours in three chunks over three months trying to synch my Windows phones to Windows computers…finally giving up the ghost to my computer set-up techie a week ago who did it (granted with a lead from the last Telstra guy) in 40 minutes…time required to repackage the Outlook Calender in a new Outlook-only email address for my Outlook account…itself an unpublished requirement of Microsoft efforts to mimic (I‘m told) Apple’s success welding buyers to their whole suite of apps by requiring them to open an Apple account to set up their products.

Comic relief…

Having trouble finding the comic relief part here? It’s only outrage at best. When I set out to replace my old self-destructed phone, failed and then was forced to replace my computer by a hard drive failure … I could no longer avoid what has emerged above, plus a gaggle of other inconveniences which arise from systemic interaction glitches. What underlies the rage part of the above is that Microsoft’s new phone company Nokia‘s Windows should synch like the old (2011) Samsung Windows phones did via a downloadable three click app called My Synch.

It didn’t. They just forgot to tell me, or even us, that their Nokia purchase had nothing to do with customer service, increased or otherwise!! Monopoly capitalism where are you? Is there an equation here: that, once large enough, companies either do not or cannot ‘care’ about customers at the level of the individual even though they have the technologies (web, mobiles…..) to deliver person-level emerging information to customers, especially at the junctures of their systems?

Learning to act right (26)… My rage and being right…the making of a fundamentalist?

Learning to act right (26)… My rage and being right…the making of a fundamentalist?

Torrey Orton w/ Charles Brass*
April 17, 2012

My ethical / emotional fumblings at the Fertility Control Centre 

This paper is another step in the process of our attempting to understand what we are doing at the Fertility Control Clinic. Since we and the protestors are de facto actors in dramas beyond our personal reach, making sense is difficult. For lack of sense, the effort to continue defending the Clinic is much larger than the four hours a week we usually spend there. This is one part of that effort. See here for the broader context of this paper. We have been at this work for nine months now.

I have a problem. I can't keep my temper when I see a Fertility Control Clinic patient, especially one who is visibly distressed, being verbally assaulted by self-righteous moral prigs with offers of help to continue an unwanted pregnancy. The assailants go beyond merely offering a leaflet to pursuing the patients with closing words something to the effect: "Don't kill your little baby". Remember, these patients are coming for a wholly legal service, which in no respect implies they are murdering anything!!! Quite the contrary. The protestors' injunction is a grossly immoral assault. And it is applied to any female entering the Clinic, though many do for generic sexual health issues. A few stray passers-by get the same treatment, minus the baby killing accusation.

When I see such assaults (which happen on multiple occasions during any morning at the clinic) I flare red in my gut and my thinking more or less stops. I sometimes verbally counter-assault the offending protestor(s), and sometimes their home team facilitators. The latter are protestors who do at other times admit freely that their colleagues' behaviour is inappropriate. And, like many team members in all walks of life, they cannot rein in the abuses by their own. They cannot because membership and identity come before truth and justice for us all much of the time. As Camus said, "I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice". See the fate of whistle blowers in any culture for a short history of this human ailment.

I flare because of a certain conviction I am right. The flare's strength tells me how strongly I hold that conviction about any particular assault. Hence, I call some of their language "a grossly immoral assault" above. However, I can see how close this is to their opposing position on the same matters. This kind of certainty process is the making and sustaining of fundamentalists, of me as much as them. It is a process fed, driven even for me, by bringing together a number of threatening factors under one trigger. I know my own, I think.

I know theirs are quite variable in intensity, as are their respective behaviours towards patients. I treat their behaviour as one thing because the patients' primary experience is of their worst behaving members, couched in the context of the HoGPIs' simple presence being experienced as an expression of disapproval by patients. Patient vulnerability at the moment of arrival varies, but the HoGPIs show no capacity to recognise and act on this awareness, as demonstrated by the persistence of their assaultive behaviours.

Collateral contributions to my rage
For me the initial trigger of my rage is the patient abuse by HoGPIs. Some of the collateral threats are also ethical ones more or less tangentially related to that trigger. Here are three of them – a suite of moral obligations foregone by the protestors, which in my view are grounds for a judgment of major hypocrisy against them.

But first, what is an obligation? For these purposes, it is an action required to sustain the meaning of another value. So, if the values (so-described pro-life values) that HoGPIs espouse are rooted in an institution that devalues life in its other actions (unprosecuted priestly paedophilia, for example) we can wonder about what their real values are. This is clearly the case where authorities debase their espoused values by practicing, or allowing to be practised, values which contradict the espoused ones. The fading of the enlightenment project in the light of late capitalism is rife with such contradictions. Our political and commercial authorities resist with similar vigour and tactics to the Catholic resistance: denial, obfuscation and finally pretences to acknowledgement. The Church's Melbourne Response is one such tactic. It is in turn under attack by local members of the priesthood concerned citizens and victims groups for failing tests of transparency, fairness and legitimacy.

What makes an obligation command our attention?
Then, why do these three 'obligations' count as obligations? First, because they are couched within an organisation – the Catholic Church – which is openly and happily hierarchical in its authority, infallible in its claims and so authorising infallibility in their application by the community of its parishioners. The Church's actual fallibility in matters sexual is increasingly on public display across the world, accentuated by its pathetic denials for decades.

Second, the organisation is trying to step into the domain of democratic government with an infallible dictum; that is, to impose a behaviour (notably a negative one: things not to do – abortion, contraception, multiple self-identified sexualities) which is a matter of personal and familial choice. Its agents – the HoGPIs – make it clear in their documentation and on-site behaviour that these matters are never negotiable options for Catholic humans.

Two laws – religious and legal
There are two 'laws' here: the law of the land and the 'law' of God. The second enjoys a special place in the law of the land – namely, being religious and therefore unassailable. This is the source of the Church's effective, to date, claim in Victoria to keeping the handling of what are illegal behaviours (child abuses!!) in house – that is, outside the jurisdiction of the law of the land!! On site at the Clinic, HoGPIs have no qualms about using any tactic they can to influence patients, and deflect defenders. Two laws yield different rules of engagement. We cannot act within their rules, because we do not play by their law.

The nature of the religious law on certain things is to claim superiority over the law of the land, handing therewith to its organisational practitioners a right to disregard the rights of those acting under the law of the land – e.g. patients seeking sexual health advice and abortion services. One need only see what's happening these days in the US and UK for a glimpse of how all sexual health issues are being presented by religious conservatives as matters for reduction to family rights issues – another haven of miscreants and upper-middle class rent seekers. The step from constraining abortion rights to removing contraception rights is small, and the action of HoGPIs at the FCC are in fact constraints of both for patients.

Third, the Church's sexual fallibility partly derives from their one-sex leadership policy. Ours is not a one-sex universe (yet). Continuing to focus on female sexual outcomes as their only locus of control unbalances the responsibility equation. What would a family life campaign look like which especially stigmatised male sexual irresponsibility and was led by nuns and sisters with priests and bishops in the background as support troops?

I will accept that a collateral damage of my seeking to protect FCC patients from unwarranted assaults is facilitating abortion when the HoGPIs accept that one collateral responsibility of theirs is pursuing and preventing priestly predations! That their systemic avoidance response is so untouchable isn't surprising when the Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne Denis Hart said on the ABC at a press conference he convened on April 14, 2012 afternoon that what happened in the diocese of Bendigo for decades in the mid 1900's isn't the business of the diocese of Melbourne. As if all Catholics are not tainted by this??

At last, the 3 obligations
One of the HoGPIs home team members is a priest in training who is a "prayer", that is, one of those protestors who only recite prayers and sing hymns, never approaching the patients in any other way. He is among the facilitators of the assaults on patients. Uniformly, they refuse an implicit moral obligation of their working under the headings and formulas of the Catholic Church's judgments on matters of life/death. This obligation is to restrain behaviour which exceeds the range appropriate to normal human interactions for reasonable discourse – that is, not harassing or demonising, the FCC patients. These limits are published in the Forty Days for Life website. They are routinely disregarded both by assaultive HoGPIs and their facilitating colleagues.

A second obligation arises from the continuing history of unprosecuted sexual exploitations carried out by priests and brothers under the umbrella of the same church which authorises the demonising of unknown others for using their legally authorised rights - access to abortion, same sex relationships, contraception, etc. The HoGPIs failure to engage themselves with this history is an implicit endorsement of the abuses and abusers. Expecting consistency about such matters is not nit-picking because the sexual failures of the church are in the same moral domain as the patients' rights. In Australia, paedophilia is a distorted sexuality, both in law and religion. Abortion and contraception are only seen as distorted in some religious practices.

In the same vein, this hypocrisy is more than the banal variety of everyday life because the Church's claims about life and death are made without exceptions allowed, absolutely, and so must be sustained by absolutely reliable behaviours by practitioners and priests and sisters and brothers…!! We know, however, that the level of everyday Catholic practitioner support for these rules is less than 20%. They, the communicant masses, are of course vilified mildly by descriptions claiming they aren't the real Catholic thing…just liturgical communicants, perhaps.

A third obligation is to assail (to evangelise, in religious idiom) their own fellow believers who do not follow the teachings the Church espouses on matters of sexualities. Some 80% of practicing Catholics use contraception, and/or avail themselves of abortion when necessary and / or, as appropriate, couple same-sexually if not merely claim their sexuality publically. One protestor acknowledged their failing when I pointed it out to him and waved it away as a lost cause.

Other factors contributing to my rage
Beyond these three factors are those derived from my appreciation and judgment about the current state of our small corner of the universe – mostly sad, enraged…depressed. Overall, powerlessly assaulted myself, but not to my face like the patients are by the HoGPIs. These feelings have nowhere practical to go…as many have noticed, our politics are close to terminally damaged as are the surrounding social structures – family associations, work – all consumercialised in the one size economic containers that pass for the best living standards in the history of humanity…

So, it is easy for these feelings to attach to any available, apparently relevant outlet: fundamentalist depredations of the weak, for instance. My feelings system decides what such outlets are. And maybe, as Charles suggested, it's not the HoGPI assaults on patients which trigger my responses but these other factors triggering first – hard to tell. I'll watch a little more closely the next time I take the street at the FCC.

Some of our FCC defence colleagues cannot speak to the HoGPIs because they are so angry at their behaviour (and attitudes and values and…). Some of us think they don't deserve normal human treatment because of their blind devotion to their rightness. For months, Charles and I have related to them as human, though not all were interested in being treated as human by us for fear of corruption of their beliefs/faith. They were right, since some of those who do talk to us acknowledge some growth in their views of the whole situation and other related matters.

For me their way of holding their morality at the FCC – as incontrovertibly true / right – conflicts loudly with my number one professional principle: that everyone is capable of learning to some degree and my job is to identify and support that capability (in other words to treat them all as human), and so the door to a hope condemned to failure opens once again, and I get another kind of rage – that of the helpless child confronted with a necessary but unachievable objective.

How to act in this conflicted context?
One option is to treat HoGPIs as morally dead human ciphers, the way they view and treat patients, and to systematically abuse HoGPIs quietly about the moral obligations they are failing to acknowledge or fulfil in their "helping" activities. That they know they are breaching such obligations is clear whenever I mention them quietly; they flinch and deny the connections suggested…akin to their hidden camera work: acts of shame caught out. It's not true they are "morally dead". But their morality is deadly for patients. Not surprisingly, they very seldom get any patient uptake even if their handouts are accepted. This does not teach them anything about approaching others. Is punishment their real personal objective?

This option of treating them as morally dead is encouraged by the black/white, right/wrong universe which emerges unavoidably for me during patient arrivals at the FCC. At those times I must be clear whose side I am on, and that is not in doubt. Not fronting up to the harassment means another patient is assailed wrongfully. These moments are the "certainty process" I mentioned at the beginning of this discussion. They are also radicalising moments as a result, since each encounter with the HoGPIs' group indifference to patient pain encourages a more robust intervention from us which attracts more robust ones from them. And around it goes.

To possibly achieve some reduction in patient pain, be consistent with our commitment to non-violent counter-protest and maintain some sense of our moral integrity, we are moving towards an agreed tactic of active blocking HoGPIs when they breach the harassment barrier – when they step beyond a patient refusal of their offer and continue verbal assault. The block is physical, moving between them and the patients and accompanied with words to the effect: "They said no." No belittling, demeaning or demonising allowed towards HoGPIs. Just a block between them and the patients, and a reminder they have stepped over the legal line into harassment (a line they know because they act within it when police and local council law officers are present).

We also continue the effort to get all HoGPIs to respect the white line separating them from the public walk space.


*I credit Charles with part authorship because his persistent demand for clarity of expression and convincing argument has been essential in pushing me through this morass. Failures in these regards are wholly my responsibility, much as I'd like to share them.

Learner therapist (11) … Touches for life

Learner therapist (11) … Touches for life
Torrey Orton
July 30, 2011

Get a grip on yourselves before the roof blows off.

Non-verbal communication is recognised as much in its excess (hitting, slapping…) as its shortage (touch-free upbringings, non-contact sports….) in everyday life. More ordinary levels like handshakes and arm touches are the unconsciously applied media of daily interactions, from intimate to instrumental. Their therapeutic potential may be unnoticed. I offer three recent experiences for your appreciation.


M and A have explosively volatile struggles around their respective needs for care, powered by very different but equally searing injuries to self. These struggles have improved countably over three months of work (weekly) from daily 2-3 hour storms to weekly ones; from standing at the edge of the abyss of relationship implosion to enjoying each other much of the time. But still the volatility remains. The injuries will never fade away, especially his – he has a congenitally weak lower back. She only has interpersonally catastrophic parents, so far.


The signalling of their needs is still not fine enough and they turn any single glitch into another in the running sores of their past failures, still in often uncontrollable emotional flashes. Fine enough is what? It's a capacity to catch an emerging need default to disappointment when it's only a difference in the prevailing atmosphere of their joint life. Need defaults are moments like this:

Typically, he's having a bad back day, which means unpredictable pain grasping an apprehensive attitude (because always on edge for the unpredictable) and she's having a bad recall (which means direct experience of parental abandonments). He needs stillness; she needs a hug. Two into one don't go. He tenses and she pushes her need. She feels abandoned and he feels crowded. The great disappointment blast off.

Creating a fine enough treatment looks like:

This day they show up in therapy (session 12) with an increasing sense of achievement and a reminder of the distance to go – the blast off above, just a day before. In a guided revisit, they experience their respective hurts under control and agree that her hug is unreasonable for his pain. So then what? I ask her what would help her need for reassurance. She knows immediately and precisely: a held hand would do just fine.

I ask her to move a seat closer to him, within easy hand reach, and show him where to offer his hand. She places hers palm down just above her knee. He slides his under hers and she says "No". Through his shock he figures out the slide is a slip (but not what slip; it's the sexual one). She lifts hers and places his on top. Success. Abandonment defeated with visceral relief. Guilt at being unable to respond to her need fended off appropriately.

I think I may have primed this result by telling them a story of another couple (F and D) in their age range who were sitting in these seats a week before, separated by a similar need gap. It was crossed by the guy taking action to respond to her pain about their relationship arising from conflicted feelings about his responses to it earlier – that she often needed space and he needed closeness at the same moment. This typically happens at the end of the work day.

He initiated the same seat change spontaneously and grabbed her ambivalently available hand from a slightly cringed position in her chair. This allowed exploring just how close was too close, and considering how their attachment styles differed around a critical mutual reassurance behaviour. Joint distance regulation was tested live, and controllably, as they adjusted the hand holding to achieve optimum need fulfilment at the moment: giving help for him and acknowledging her distance for her in the same act.

These events seem to come in pairs and triplets, or just surges. A day later, a twenty years older couple (C and P) appeared, struggling with increasing success with rages driven largely by him and facilitated by her chronic passivity. His rage driver is an undiscoverable family history – an absent father of a one night's burst pregnancy untraceable by his mother, plus years of deception about his adoption heritage. At 17 he finally caught his otherwise caring adopters messing up their version of his life, an exposure he had long felt coming.


It leaves him hugely vulnerable to rushes of anxiety at perceived performance failures of his, or others in regard to him – a threat of not getting to anything on time will do it. This one was on the way to see me together, with her driving to pre-empt such a rage, but the tactic failing on the road. So,

...they had one of the blow-ups they so fear, but constrained enough by their joint therapeutic work to so reduce it that he just fumed in the passenger's seat about being late, maybe! Like the others above, these two had had a major explosion (first for some weeks) earlier that week.

Trouble is, the fuming is contagiously electric and bad memory inducing for her – will this be another rage or just a low grade trash fire?? So, she reached out to pat his head and he ducked away into a foetal sulk, with emanations of fury growth. They wondered what she could have done differently. It took us some while to come up with the insight that her intuitive touch had been conceptually right, only practically clumsy.

A head touch is not benign, but three others are: the shoulder, upper arm and forearm touches. These are almost universally recognised as OK touches, even between sexes/genders. Most others are sexual, domineering, or both.

The touch is essential to break the rage cycle once it has started. Words just feed it. The touch allows another level of consciousness to be accessed, wherein the path to freedom of the moment's disruptive passion.