Not With a Bang But A Whimper (2008)

Not With a Bang But A Whimper (2008)

Theodore Dalrymple, Not With a Bang But a Whimper: The Politics and Culture of Decline (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2008), pp. xi + 252

I've mentioned a previous collection of Dalrymple's essays that powerfully impressed me with its descriptions of the British underclass. This is the most recent of these collections: powerfully penetrating in explaining the disasters that have become dramatically worse as liberalism has become dominant in Britain, they also reveal a good and decent man doing a hopeless job: psychiatrist in a charity hospital and prison, in a society where intellectuals are intentionally destroying any hope that the poorest Britons will ever have of making something of their lives.

Many of these essays first appeared in City Journal, and I was fortunate to find this one, "A Murderess's Tale" online. I suspect that if you read it, you will be tempted to read more. And perhaps seek antidepressants. Make sure you cut Dalrymple's work with something encouraging and uplifting, or you are going to be miserable.

Anyway, I've mentioned before the statistical evidence that shows that child sexual abuse (CSA) survivors are disproportionately represented among homosexuals--as even some very PC books admit, and throw out implausible explanations rather than admit that messing with a child sexually when they are emotionally immature might cause sexual confusion later in life.

We also have examples of prominent homosexuals who acknowledge being CSA survivors, such as Elaine DeGeneres, and her former partner Anne Heche (now married to a man). And when you see that a prominent lesbian gets arrested for lewd acts of little girls? What's the first thought in your mind? Is she recreating the situation that she was in--but now she's in control?

Anyway, back to "A Murderess's Tale." Dalrymple tells us of a case in which he testified, a murder case:

Every murder raises deep and disturbing questions, philosophical, psychological, and sociological: none more so than one in which I recently gave testimony in court. The accused was a girl aged 18, who had stabbed her 16-year-old lesbian lover to death. There could be no doubt as to who had inflicted the fatal wounds: a tape from a closed-circuit camera in the entrance hall of the accused’s apartment building showed her following her lover out of the building with a long knife in each hand, raised ready to stab, as in a too-melodramatic rendition of Lady Macbeth.

Dalrymple tells us of the barbarism in which the 18 year old was raised (which, by his other writing, is apparently pretty common in Britain today):

One of the characteristics of relationships such as that between her mother and her stepfather is their all-consuming nature, at least for the woman. She can think of, and has time for, nothing else: she is the star, albeit the unhappy one, of her own mental soap opera. In this case, the mother noticed neither the stepfather’s habitual violence toward her children by her former lover nor the fact that her oldest son was having intercourse with her daughter while the boy was between the ages of 13 and 17, and his sister was between the ages of eight and 12.

Eventually, her daughter, now 14, plucked up the courage to tell her what had happened. Her mother said she didn’t believe her, flew into a rage, and threw her out of the house. She went to stay with a friend and then asked her mother whether she could return home. As a condition of doing so, her mother made her apologize to her brother and swear never to say anything like it again.

Her mother also failed to notice that, from the age of 12, her daughter had begun to drink heavily: or if she noticed it, she considered it a matter of no importance. Her daughter skipped school in order to drink; by the evening, she was often very drunk and soon got to the stage when she drank first thing in the morning to steady her shaking hands. She was also smoking marijuana. She said that she drank and smoked to obliterate the reality of her life, which was too awful to bear unaided.

Is there anyone that finds her substance abuse surprising? Is there anyone that finds it at all implausible that her sexual response would be seriously affected by this? When you put this together with the disproportionate problem of substance abuse in the gay community (both among men and women), why isn't anyone making a serious effort to study the connection?

Hey, maybe it is all a big, astonishing coincidence that CSA survivors have many characteristics disproportionately in common with homosexuals (such as substance abuse problems, difficulties in forming long term relationships, high suicide rates) and homosexuals are disproportionately CSA survivors. But I think everyone knows that the reason that this question doesn't get studied is because a lot of people know that there probably is a causal connection (at least for some homosexuals)--and the "I was born this way" argument would be demolished.

UPDATE: One reader takes issue with this because Dalrymple's work is about the underclass, and homosexuals are smarter and more capable than straight people. His evidence for this is a collection of marketing data compiled by someone named Tony Marco:

Any claims that gays as an entire class are seriously "oppressed" seem clearly bogus in light of emerging, highly accurate marketing studies done by gays themselves that show gays to be, to the contrary, enormously advantaged relative to the general population -- and astronomically advantaged when compared to truly disadvantaged minorities. A July 18, 1991, Wall Street Journal article, entitled "Overcoming a Deep-Rooted Reluctance, More Firms Advertise to Gay Community", reported the following findings by the Simmons Market Research Bureau and the U.S. Census Bureau; cf. also The Marketer, "The Gay Nineties," September 1990; Quest magazine, a Denver gay tabloid ("Invisibility = Stagnation"), February, 1992; and Overlooked Opinions studies, cite to follow:

• Gays have an average annual household income of $55,430, versus a general population income of $32,144. Mean income of disadvantaged African-American households is only $12,166 (Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1990).
• Factoring in comparative household sizes, gays average annual individual income is reported as $36,800, compared with $12,287 for average Americans and a mere $3,041 for disadvantaged African Americans. This means gay individual income is more than 300% greater than average Americans' -- and an enormous 1,200% greater than disadvantaged African Americans' (The Marketer, op. cit.).
• More than three times as many gays as average Americans are college graduates (59.6% vs. 18.0%; gays average 15.7 years' education vs. 12.7 for average Americans) -- dwarfing achievements of truly disadvantaged African-Americans and Hispanics. More than three times as many gays as average Americans hold professional or managerial positions (49.0% vs. 15.9%) -- making gays embarrassingly more advantaged than true minorities in the job market.
• 65.8% of gays are overseas travelers -- more than four times the percentage (14.0%) of average Americans -- and more than 13 times as many gays as average Americans (26.5% vs. 1.9%) are frequent flyers.

I remember when gay marketing companies first started putting out these claims, the "gays are victims of oppression" crowd insisted (and probably with some truth) that these weren't typical homosexuals, and these companies trying to sell their marketing services were engaged in some sort of fraud in portraying homosexuals as America's new overclass. I think that there's some truth to this.

The bigger problem, however, is that there a lot of "men who have sex with men" out there who usually deny that they are homosexual, and who homosexuals (like the gay supremacist who gave me that link) deny are homosexuals. Yes, that's right! Men who have sex with men are really heterosexuals! And yet that same gay supremacist admitted that these heterosexual men who have sex with men are generally poor, poorly educated, and criminal. Hmmm. It's amazing what fun you can have making your definitions fit your desires.