I’d give today a solid 3. Didn’t sleep enough, accidentally destroyed someone’s weird metal sculpture before 0600. There was a pretty wicked storm over the entirety of Anhedonia raging today, so my hair was a ludicrous and chaotic mess by 0700. Beyond repair. It still looks ridiculous now. I’m supposed to meet a friend for drinks in a bit and I’m considering wearing a hat. A hat. That’s how bad this is.
Anyway, I was just reading some headlines and saw a couple of things that made me sneer and growl. The first was about the documentary on Netflix now called “Abducted in Plain Sight.” If you haven’t watched it, go do that…there be spoilers immediately ahead. The headline that pissed me off was this, in The Telegraph:
The director of Abducted In Plain Sight on her shocking documentary: ‘Why are we blaming the parents rather than the paedophile?’
You idiot. The working of the question is the issue. If she had asked, “Why are we blaming the parents as well as the pedophile?” I could deal with that. I’d still think the asker was an idiot, but at least the wording of the question would reflect reality. I’ve spoken with a number of parents about the documentary, and exactly no one is suggesting or even thinking the the pedophile is to blame. But that goes without saying: of course “B” is the causer of the problem and the direct inflicter of the damage. But he’s a pedophile: that’s what he does. That’s his job. And according to this documentary, he did shamefully little to disguise that fact. But the reason viewers outrage is not focused on him is the same reason people aren’t outraged at a shark that takes a bite out of a swimmer in the ocean: it”s conduct is not “outrageous.” The shark is very clearly a shark and it is simply doing exactly what sharks do, which is eat animals it finds swimming through its kitchen. I can understand being very angry at the shark if its lunch was your legs and you’ve gotta roll around in the chair for the rest of your life. That really sucks. But you can’t find the conduct of the shark to be “outrageous” by any standard. But as understandably angry as you may be, deep down you know that by getting in an ocean that is full of man-eating sharks, you were basically offering yourself to the shark. So it is with the pedophile in this documentary. He made no real false representations about who he was. He wasn’t a priest or a 5th grade teacher. He was pretty much the next door neighbor who came over and fucked his way through the family until he could get to his real target, the barely teenage daughter. No one is excusing or forgiving that at all. But that’s not what is outraging viewers of this movie. The outrage is save for the parents, and, for me, at least, the father. To carry the shark analogy over, imagine if the shark-bite victim was a child who had no interest in swimming in the ocean, but her parents threw her into the sea anyway, where she was immediately bitten by a shark. But she survives and somehow manages to swim to safety. So her parents throw her in again. And the same shark again, instantly, of course, bites the child. Is the shark the problem in this equation? No. And if a sexual predator shows up making open overtures and leering at your wife and children, the youngest child in particular, you do not respond by giving him a hand job. My viewing of the documentary was sort of landmarked by the various points at which I would have killed B. That is blaming the pedophile. No outrage necessary: he did what he was supposed to do, so I did what I was supposed to do. The outrage would be warranted if I failed to protect myself and the fam. And that’s what’s going on with the response to your documentary. You dolt.
The other article that irked me was about Panera Bread stupid socialist idea for “pay what you want” restaurants has failed (as it inevitably would) with the closure of its last “Panera Cares” restaurants, where people were promised “a loaf of bread in every hand” and encouraged to “take what you need…leave your fair share.” The board members had to be high as the cost of living in California to think that letting people what they wanted for food (or any product) was a sustainable business model. Giving your product away is not a business model at all. So now that they;re shuttering this stupid restaurant, is it fair to say that Panera Doesn’t Care? No, of course not. They just had a lesson in economic reality. They’re a successful company that can afford to throw away some of it’s money on doomed socialist experiments. But they quickly learned that they would no longer be a successful company if they continued to not charge for their product. Radiohead and Trent Reznor conducted similar experiments, but for very different reasons. I’m not too familiar with the Radiohead situation (other than knowing it didn’t work and they stopped the practice), but Mr. Reznor’s motivation had nothing to do with socialism but rather how to make money in a market where everything is already available for free (pirated music), So he released an album on a “pay what you feel like” basis, and made something like $47. After that debacle, he quickly went back to the more traditional business model, which he summed as, “My album costs $9.99 or you can go fuck yourself.”
N.P.: “She’s A Beauty” – The Tubes
