How Essential Is the Female Perspective to Rape Discussion?

            In case you harbor any doubt that humiliation, domination, and perpetrator self-aggrandizement, not sex, is the motive behind rape, check out Unbelievable, a Netflix series that began Fri., the 13th. It’s the dramatization of real case reporting done for ProPublica by T. Christian Miller & Ken Armstrong.  More importantly, it was directed by Susannah Grant, who did not succumb—as Hollywood men can’t seem to resist—to the temptation of casting pretty women as rape victims.

            While Unbelievable is a more-satisfying-than-average police procedural with Toni Collette and Merritt Wever playing the intriguingly contrasted lead detectives, the authencity of the rape victims is key to its plausibility. Here, Unbelievable goes above and beyond brave and true: one is a 50-going-on-60 gray matron, working in a food service; another is a plumpish, retiring 20 or 30-something, living in a strange city away from any support network, if she even had one where she came from. I surmised she left because she didn’t.

Make no mistake, that is a victim hallmark, or so the literature I read on the topic, when I got drafted onto the Rape Task Force in the 70s as a National Organization of Women (NOW) member in my Denver days.

            The quintessential victim is Marie Adler, attractive enough, but so cowed by the foster care system, which has never stood by her or helped her stand up for herself, that the minute police detectives doubt her, she begins to doubt herself.  So thoroughly undermined by the system, Marie is incapable of outrage till the thing turns around, but before that, she can’t mobilize even her natural allies. No less go looking for any! (In feminist organization or…)

Of course, to get good drama, you need “bad guys,” and  in this film they are a couple “desk sergeant” types who refuse to believe Marie, (hence the title) and extend her foster-care-victimization right through the rape investigation up to filing a complaint against her for a false reporting of a crime. The viewer can get outraged if she isn’t—part of what makes this so satisfying, I suspect.

Most of the time, though, the police dealing with rape victims if it is a special unit, are savvy and sympathetic—at least in the early 70s Denver NOW Task Force believed they were in the victim’s corner. The attitude of the courts/public was the problem.

Which, of course, brings us all to the scary place of knowing a guy like Brett Kavanaugh is sitting on a court, any court.

Who Pays for Street Repair? Who Benefits?

Last night’s city council meeting featured an agonizing discussion of the weight limits on trucks in town, the truck route, and how to keep trucks on it.

Ironically enough, after the meeting was over, I got on my bike, rode up town hill, and just as I arrived to the grade school corner a Jim Like cattle transport with a lime green cab, was in the process of turning.

To do so, the driver had to make the widest arc possible—if there had been any cars parked on the west side of Tyler St., it would not have been doable. He was obliged to use the whole street to make the turn, and still dragged the back wheels of the 18-wheeler over the curb & gutter repaired in early May.

At the time, I was wondered publicly who pays for this? Clearly, taxpayers of Cascade, and we don’t even have the use of the parking in some places because it must be left open for these turns. It seems Council needs to take the rights of the people who pay taxes 

A Labor Day Look at Immigration

On or about 22 July, I cut out the last paragraph of an edit in the Progressive Populist edited by Pulitzer Prize winner Iowan Art Cullen. That graph begins, “Immigrants contribute everyday to this society…”  Under the guise of benefit op-ed writer Kenia Alcocer listed several jobs Hispanic immigrants typically do, but staunchly—as most of the rest of the U.S. press—ignored other effects of immigration on the U.S.:

1.      the demise of unions,

2.      the tenacious persistence of a minimum wage neither native nor immigrant can live decently on,

3.      the fabulous enrichment of the 1% (primary beneficiaries of low wages) and resultant income inequality,

4.      the burgeoning suicide rate in parts of this society,

5.      the rising death rate of blue collar workers,

6.      the demise of the middle and lower classes in the U.S.,

7.      the election of a demagogue who made affected voters think he would remedy the situation, but hasn’t.

While immigrants to this country are the same decent, desperate people my own great grandparents were, historically, we now know they (yes, our own forefathers) wreaked havoc on the indigenous population. We are told history doesn’t repeat itself; it rhymes—and usually with the bottom line. Follow the money. Ask yourself: Who benefits from immigration? Who loses? You can’t (logically) promise people “life, liberty & the pursuit of happiness” and give them a situation where they lose their houses and can’t afford apt. rent. A demagogue like Trump knows this, but the liberal press and their supporters can’t seem to sort it out.

With Labor Day around the corner, we need to stop ignoring the real effects of immigration—the entitled classes using indigents to undermine the native population for their own benefit—and find real solutions.