The Other Closet


A couple of days ago I wrote a letter to Salon regarding their coverage of Craig's arrest, and expressing my puzzlement why the military interrogators at Abu Ghraib are not considered outed homosexuals. It seems that the term is reserved for one closet, but not for the other. And what's coming out of that other closet is a real killer.
Consider the following quote from Seymour Hersh:

"Basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys/children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. The worst about all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror it's going to come out."

There is a dangerous assumption that all homosexuals are feminized, because those are the homosexuals that people notice. The ones they should be noticing are excessively mascullinized, and so removed from feminine qualities that they project their denied qualities onto anymore weaker than they are, and exercise a radical control over them, which from an external viewpoint is unrestrained brutality.

This passage is from Richard Plant’s, “The Pink Triangle,” regarding Hitler’s Chief of Staff, Ernst Roehm:

“What was needed, Roehm believed, was a proud and arrogant lot who could brawl, carouse, smash windows, kill and slaughter for the hell of it. Straights, in his eyes, were not as adept in such behavior as practicing homosexuals" (Snyder:55). "The principle function of this army-like organization," writes historian Thomas Fuchs, "was beating up anyone who opposed the Nazis, and Hitler believed this was a job best undertaken by homosexuals" (Fuchs:48f)

Much of this material is contained in previous blogs, but perhaps not succinctly presented. The following is excerpted from a paper on Eugene Monicks's, "Phallos: Sacred Image of the Masculine," presented by Harvey Hall:

One most striking reference Monick makes in Chapter 2 is his reference to the concept of the homosexual "radical" introduced by the Danish psychoanalyst, Thorkil Vanggaard. Monick agrees with Vanggaard that this radical is present in all males. "Every man has the capacity for some degree of homosexual interest ..." [36] He goes on to say: "How this appears in any one man is a factor of the masculine/feminine balance in his psyche, the configuration of archetypes in his unconscious, the environmental influences, genetic inheritance and the extent to which he has suppressed or repressed his homosexual interest."

The division of men into straight and homosexual will appear naive when viewed as history, and we would do well to wake up to what is missing in the obviously feminine men. They are carrying the unwanted femininity of some other men, who, without it, can do things most of us would rather not even hear about. These other men are not John Wayne or the Man With No Name. They are the men Blondie has to hunt down and kill in order to restore psychic balance.

The problem is of course is concentrated in "control" professions, such as prisons, the military, and law enforcement. These are the people who have to clean up their own ranks by standing up against the sadists in their ranks. That is hard to do when the sadists take over the top leadership, as was certainly true under Rumsfeld. He, and Cheney, don't stop the sadists because they identify with them.

One would have to be a fool to not recognize what Rumsfeld was doing when he fingered Joe Darby, who blew the whistle on Abu Ghraib, on national television. That wasn't a mistake. It was a warning to anybody else who might blow the whistle on the abuses of this cadres of sadists that the penalty of standing up to them is death.

Certainly it is a mistake to project onto these men a decency that would preclude their using murder to consolidate their power, and to intimidate the journalists they couldn't get in bed with them. But it will take a few years, and the penetration of revisionist history, for the complete story of this administration's lawlessness to be told. Of course if we don't get the country back from these people, the revisionist history will stand, with the complicity of the networks, which rely on the government for the right to do business.

I don't know that Wellstone and his family were targeted, but if I had to bet one side or the other I'd give odds they were. I'm certain that the journalists in the Palestine Hotel were targeted, and that anybody else who gets in the way of the expansion of American power into the Caspian and Central Asia, where the oil is, have been and will be targeted. Sometimes it's enough to destroy their career and or reputation. At other times that isn't possible, as it was not with Senator Wellstone.

I'm sure he had his shadow side, as do we all. But he wasn't Norm Coleman. That's bordering on beautification.

Posted: Sun - September 2, 2007 at 01:25 PM