If my own behavior is representative, the wild ride of Alabama's special election for U.S. Senate has been good for cable news ratings, but I find a few of my reactions are far enough off the worn path as not to have received an airing. So, here goes!
I love listening to southern drawls. Actually, anything that's different from my own inflections sounds great to me--Brooklyn, Jersey, Canuck, the drawl. I used to work with a woman who grew up in southeastern Ohio, where the natives have what sounds to me like a definite twang, and when I remarked upon it to her she laughed and said, "When ah first moved here, ah thought y'all sounded like Bob Dylan. Ah mean, everyone!" I once thought that certain social forces, such as the flourishing national mass media, would extinguish regional speech differences, but so far that hasn't happened, thankfully.
Anyhow, I usually abhor man-in-the-street interviews, because the subjects tend to be embarrassingly daft, and God knows the men-in-the-street in Alabama are not exceptions to that rule, but I could listen to native Alabamians talk until they elect a Democrat to the U.S. Senate--in other words, forever, though if the polls are to be believed Roy Moore may actually lose. For the Republican party, it would be better if he did, but I'm pulling for Jones anyway.
Of course it's abhorrent that kids have to be harassed and even molested by ambitious and powerful men in order that I can enjoy listening to southerners talk to tv reporters. Still, I can't go all in on Roy Moore being a villain. To me, he's just a sick-o. I guess I don't buy into this tendency--which is Roy Moore's own--to think of everything as moral or immoral, good or evil, Christian or the devil. The either/or that applies to Moore is rather sick/healthy, and he's sick--not sick like a metaphor but sick like people who study these things could diagnose, give a name to, supply a clinical overview.
When the story first broke, I read something on a right-wing blog that I half agreed with. The author wasn't ready to believe the allegations against Moore because, he said, people who do these kinds of things are compulsive, so there would never be only four victims. Since he was right about compulsive, he was naturally wrong about there being only four. In retrospect, the affecting account of the then-14-year-old should have put everyone on notice--I mean, the detail about how, in the courthouse, Moore so deftly separated his victim from her mother. He was practiced.
What makes it so easy to pile on him is, of course, how quick he has always been to condemn others for what he considers to be their sins. Hypocrite! But I think his desperate-seeming religion is just another aspect of his psychological disease. He's aware of what compulsions are operating on him and has to take steps to hide them--from others but, more to the point, from himself. His practice of "extreme religion" is a compensation for being deviant. He has to have some concept of self and "Christian" beats hell out of "pervert."
In the context of the criminal law, concepts like "illness" and "compulsion" diminish culpability, so I guess the above amounts to a kind of defense of Roy Moore. I don't want to go too far with it. The U.S. Senate is a better place for moral hypocrites than for psychological wrecks. Fortunately!
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