Dear Susan,


many thanks for your comments on my take on things.


Warning: Long Response


I like the Obama example and yes, eloquence does not always amount to successful action. We need to hear (discern) the difference, acknowledge its impact, and then act more openly with others if the benefits of benign rhetoric are to be incorporated into our expectations of politicians. That is, if we anticipate that politicians might be able to bring reflective sanity to situations that trouble our society, then the benefits will multiply.


Trump has obviously decided to illustrate a different approach: say outrageous things, initially, then sit back, relax, wait for the opportunity to speak again, this time as the modifier. We are being taught, by Trump, to expect rhetoric to be a kind of dumbing, numbing, blinding.



TRIGGER WARNING - I'm about to talk about male-on-male street violence.


I have an example of a kind of attempt at public designed language that helps me, in this context, realise that public language is both open to instrumental changes (new pronouns - forms of address) and it is also resistant based on politics/ideology and the recognition that language will always attempt to maintain any and all meanings that have emerged. That is, in terms of emergence, the most un-PC kinds of language do actually say something and hence, language, as a community structure of community meaning, will keep a place for even the worst.


My example came to mind today while watching a political interview show on our public broadcaster (ABC).


The host of the show talked about a "coward's punch". For those that don't know what this is,  a coward's punch is a single blow, usually to the head, of an unsuspecting opponent, leading to injury and most recently often leading to death. The man being hit is not ready for the punch, he doesn't pull back, move sideways etc. and, as a consequence, he is rendered unconscious, falls to the pavement, hits his head with the full weight of his unconscious body, suffers brain damage and often dies.


Previously, this kind of single punch was known as a "king hit". Families of sons that died, innocently from these kinds of brutal assault, demanded that the sporting aspects of KING HIT be taken out of the narrative. So, as a nation, we decided to now call these punches examples of a "coward's punch" in recognition that there was nothing honorable at all in walking up and hitting an unsuspecting man in the head.


So, what could possibly be lost or hidden in this public change in language?


The idea of a KING hit is that, out of the blue, as if by command of the King, your life could be drastically and permanently altered, regardless of your qualities, innocence, honour. Such things happened in the time of Kings.  Hence, it was a possibility for any man that his life could be taken and all his family world could be destroyed simply at the whim of a King.


Hence, this idea of a King hit carries a memory of times before the rule of law and the separation of the Crown from the people. It is fascinating that the USA, the nation that got rid of a King, has reinvented the King hit in terms of some of the extraordinary powers of their President. What is mostly wrong with Trump is the powers that he has - these are the same powers that all other Presidents had. The POWERS are wrong. He, for example, can pardon people charged with Federal offences. Doesn't matter the offence - sound a lot like the British Queen to me.


As a lighter aside: I remember a funny story about pardons. On one of the Queen of Australia's trips to Australia, a Royal subject of hers, petitioned her for forgiveness. He had been banned, for life, from a local football league because he had assaulted a referee. She pardoned him. The first game that he played on his return to football, he punched the referee. Seems he just wanted a second chance to do the same thing.


I have changed the topic to TIME OUT.


You wrote:


>>>>>>

I wonder here if we're not also talking about reflection and discussion before reaction, leading to crafting language in ways that keeps the heat down. Billy still needs at least a time out. It's separate and apart from language use and later discussion. On this I hold to my earlier perspective that victims need justice and perpetrators need to experience the consequences of bad behavior. But I still think that you offer an intriguing perspective in terms of how we engage in discussions that seek to understand the problem as a whole and prevent future bloody noses in particular. Language and how it is structured, it's grammar and syntax also seem to me to play a role.

>>>>>>>


While society assumes the right to define and describe the "consequences of bad behaviour", it can only do so at the level of objectivity. That is, society needs to see that the consequences are real and appropriate and that the wrongdoer "pays the price" for their actions.


The metaphor of "paying the price" goes way back to ideas of restitution of materials and hence there is a real sense of objectivity - you killed my son, he used to look after our cows, you must lend us your son to look after our cows for five years. Sometimes the object required  is merely an apology: "Billy, apologise to Wendy."


Why do people often resist a simple apology? One can suggest, they resist because they don't see an apology, on their part, is the appropriate object of restitution - they in fact are seeking some kind of restitution for themselves. Watch Judge Judy any day of the week and you will see people that are obviously guilty, resisting "paying the price". So: "Wendy apologies to Billy?" "But I did no wrong Miss, I am the innocent victim." On one reading, at least, Wendy was innocent, in this case. But, Billy still feels wronged. "Shut up - both of you - everybody apologize or no play time for a month."


Why do courts demand contrition, shame, tears of guilt? These are the lineaments of evident understanding of the wrong and the need for contrition that society requires.


I sat in a juvenile justice meeting between the perpetrator and the victim (me). A young Maori boy, living in Australia with his family, smashed a window in my car in an attempt to remove the radio. Crappy car and the radio didn't work but hey, he smashed my window.


His mother and his aunty were not going to leave the room until they had made this wretched kid cry. I had no interest in his tears. Some women like humiliating boys. I wanted him to see how his mates that didn't get caught weren't his mates. I wanted him to see the courage that was required of him, in the crime and in now moving forward, with no pride, no mates and family shame. He earned NO badges of pride but he had faced a number of demons, many of which, in traditional Maori culture, would have amounted to badges of pride.


Commit a crime - how much courage is required? Did you never lie to your mother as a quest for psychological autonomy? A child that can NOT lie is not a child open to their own life. They are a moral construct incapable of good or bad actions in the world.


Billy may have been wrong but OUR wrong would be in hiding the full nature of his actions from him. SUBJECTIVELY, the complex of emotions experienced by the ACTOR, in any and all situations will be more difficult to untangle than the complex of emotions experienced by the victim. Whoa, what did I just say? We have more to learn from ACTORS than victims? Maybe.


Hence my question: what are the proper uses of TIME OUT?


Interrupts can open consciousness to new understandings. The example in a previous posting was that Wendy, seeing her bloody nose as a scientific event, might go on to become a brain surgeon or a happy mum of many boys or a gardener, or a foreign minister, or a teacher, or a postal work - whatever - she might be relieved of her victimhood, in an instant, and see the world through openned eyes. This is a ZEN approach - it aims to relieve consciousness of baggage and allow perception to just see.


We, as Westerners, are fascinated with narratives of good and evil. We LOVE our baggage with a passion that makes us great literary cultures. Yes, there are versions of this in ALL cultures. Zen was, is, and will remain, a minority way of viewing the world.


So Billy is somewhat stuck with TIME OUT as his only option for moral deconstruction of his CRIME.


I might have reflected, with the young Maori boy, on the way that car windows smash. I probably would have been thrown out of the meeting. But, hey, have you seen how car windows smash? Go to a junkyard, pay for a car window, smash it (wear goggles etc.). We love movies where cars get wrecked with no injuries - my kids laughed their heads off when they first saw Blues Brothers.


So, NO ergative comments, in TIME OUT, on the way blood gushed from Wendy's nose. BUT Billy did see the blood gush. AND, this aesthetic event IS in Billy's consciousness. One of the major difficulties in deconstructing actions is that the moral overlays disguise the underlying sensory information that IS part of the victim's and the perpetrator's experience. Many people LOVE crime scene investigation TV show for precisely this reason: they want to know, in detail, what actually happened. They don't rest assured with the good and evil accounts.


So, if Billy is humiliated to tears, as evidence that he KNOWS he did wrong, and, if he is instructed in the suffering of his victim as the APEX, he may, at best, come to understand the grammar of how good and evil are balanced in society. Sure, the syntax of this TIME OUT could have levels of nuance and subtlety but so long as the structure is accusative, Billy will leave the TIME OUT with an imagination filled with knowledge that he does not understand. He may then bring on a similar situation, in the future, as a way of trying to untangle the complex in his brain. He may even escalate because as a key part of his TIME OUT he was probably introduced to the SLIPPERY SLOPE of criminality as a moral certitude. We all know that all naughty boys, that don't stop their naughtiness, grow up to be criminal men.


What I am saying is that we need to take every opportunity to expand the ergative space. This may mean that we have to review our accepted moral understandings that we possibly hold deeply and dearly because all our personal crimes were minor. To be Christian about it: Judge not lest ye be judged. To be Zen: look, a full moon.


keith











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