The novel

One of the timelines in my novel Quantum Cannibals is set in a post-modern city where everything is relative, and almost all behavior is acceptable.  The police act primarily as psychologists, with the right to summarily execute people.  It’s a society where intolerance is a capital crime, where the unthinkable became normal.  Is that where we’re headed?

Our non-fictional world

Divorce used to be considered evil in non-fictional America, to be used only as a last resort.  Today fifty percent of marriages end in divorce.  Fifty years ago it was less than one percent.  The unthinkable became normal.

As a corollary, twenty-five percent of American children live in single-parent households.  Sixty years ago it was nine percent.  There is a clear connection between doing poorly in school and living with only one parent.

The common term for men who dressed as or pretended to be women used to be “perverts.”  Now RuPaul has his own mainstream television series.  If you don’t praise “trans rights,” you get canceled. The unthinkable became normal.

Armed robbery, drug dealing, or theft usually lead to serious criminal charges and jail time.  Alvin Bragg, the new District Attorney for Manhattan has announced it won’t seek jail time for anything short of murder or deadly assault.  If this trend catches on like the “defund the police” movement did, theft and violence won’t be high-risk projects.  Look at the crime rate in just about any major U.S. city.  The unthinkable became normal.

Although adults having sex with children was common in some ancient civilizations, it is mostly taboo in contemporary western society.  Mostly? A reputable psychologist placed foster children with pedophiles for thirty years, all with German government approval.  The beat poet Allen Ginsberg promoted the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA).  An academic press published a scholarly book promoting intergenerational sex.

From criminal to conventional

Homosexuality used to be a serious crime.  Armed robbery, carjackings, assault used to be serious.  Single motherhood, divorce, were frowned upon.  Slavery was ubiquitous throughout the world.  Women were property, considered too dumb to vote.  Murdering Jews and other lower forms of human life wasn’t a crime… As the poet-pederast Allen Ginsberg said:

I don’t think there is any truth. There are only points of view.

Progress

We’ve gotten better at some things.  Although Kinsey’s fake research played a large part in contemporary acceptance of homosexuality, it doesn’t invalidate the change in attitudes.  But how far do we take it?  If a lesbian is sexually harassed by a trans “woman” she considers a man, is the lesbian being intolerant?

What about NAMBLA?  Are we going to be cool with man-boy love?

In the 1960’s civil rights activists were murdered by racists, sometimes by authorities.  We remember and eulogize them.  Now when the authorities kill violent criminals, we lionize the criminals.

Some old boundaries deserve to be smashed.  But that doesn’t mean all boundaries, whether ethical, legal or physical have to go.  A world in which everything once unthinkable became normal, would not be livable.

The post The Unthinkable Became Normal appeared first on Quantum Cannibals.

This is the first in a series of posts introducing characters from the novel Quantum Cannibals

Alex is a secondary character in Quantum Cannibals. He’s a renowned poet whose wife tells a friend “Alex likes young men and boys.”  The character was inspired by the pederasty of beat poet and cultural icon Allen Ginsberg. He said:

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked…”

Howl was a brilliant poem, a work of art.  Not so brilliantly, Ginsberg also said

“Prepubescent boys and girls don’t have to be protected from big hairy you and me, they’ll get used to our lovemaking in two days provided the controlling adults will stop making those hysterical noises that make everything sexy sound like rape.”

I recall reading a transcript of his chat with fellow icon William Borroughs where they declared that the younger the child, the better the sex.  A progressive literary magazine in the 1970’s featured a story about a man who pursued sex with prepubescent girls (I won’t use the story’s obscene term).  The journal was progressive, it was cool.  Not perverted.

The issue of sex with children goes back farther.  There is a debate among scholars of ancient Greece and Rome whether sex with kids was considered normal.  “In Athens a man would have been regarded as perverted if he sought a relationship with another person equal to him in age and status.”

Sexy cuties around the world

In Afghanistan, the sexy cuties were found  in the widespread tradition of bacha bazi ‘dancing boys,’ some as young as ten.  Men force these boys (no transitioning counselling) to dress like little girls, then abused them.  Among the Sambia of Papua New Guinea prepubescent boys had sex with adult men.  It was crucial for them to swallow the men’s semen in order to develop into warriors.  I can’t find anything cute about that.

Given the wide history of sex with children, isn’t it just another cultural norm? Doesn’t progressive ideology believe that all cultures are of equal value?

If so, does ancient slavery justify contemporary slavery?  How about mass murder, pillage, cannibalism?  There are plenty of precedents for those throughout history.  Should we remove their contemporary stigmas because someone else did it at some other time?

There is a story in ancient Jewish writings about a rabbi (352-427 CE) who vilified the Biblical King Menashe (reigned 698-642 BCE) for pursuing idolatry.  Menashe appeared to the rabbi in a dream and rationalized, “If you had lived in my day, you’d have picked up the hems of your garment to run after idols!”  Maybe if we’d have lived in those eras, in those places we’d have no problems with slavery or cannibalism…  But we don’t live in those eras.

Is there anything you can’t do for the sake of art (and money)?  Many critics have accused the Netflix series Cuties of sexualizing young girls.  The creators of the show argue that they’re actually combating the sexualization of children by showing kids behaving seductively. Given all the history and culture of sexualizing children, should we really condemn Netflix’s sexy Cuties?

Better we learn from, rather than replicate the misdeeds of the past.  We shouldn’t look for history or art to excuse wrong behavior in the present.  There are poor rationalizations for the making of “Cuties,” but no justification.

The post Sexy Cuties: Art or Abomination? appeared first on Quantum Cannibals.

The novel Quantum Cannibals has a large cast of characters, some evil, some saintly.  Most are complex, neither black nor white.  A person can be a good character, but simply confused when facing an impossible situation.  All of the characters in the book are intended to reflect back on our non-fictional world, to say something about how we can respond to both the impossible and the ordinary.

Many of the characters were inspired by real-world people or other fictional characters.  Nonetheless, Quantum Cannibals is a work of fiction.  Names and characters are products of my imagination and are not to be construed as real.

I will write a series of “Good Character” posts, introducing people from the novel: who was their inspiration, and what is their relevance today.  Some of the people (and their inspiration) you will meet are:

• Eric (Eric Cartman, from TV show South Park)
• Alex (poet Allen Ginsberg)
• Simon (the Rabbinic sage and mystic Simon bar Yochai)
• Lillith (Lillith)
• Asenath (Asenath Barzani, a 16^th century religious academy leader in Kurdistan)
• Mustafa (Ottoman general, Siege of Famagusta (Cyprus), 1570-71)

  

• Aua (early 20^th Inuk (Eskimo) shaman)
• Taiku (the Talmudic concept of a question that cannot yet be answered)

Some people say I’m too didactic, always finding a lesson in something.  Others say I’m always making jokes out of everything.  I hope when you read the “Good Character” posts that follow, they inspire you to reflect, and inspire you to laugh.

Oh, yeah, and inspire you to buy and read the novel.

Click here to read the post about Alex/Ginsberg/Cuties, and romanticizing kiddie porn

The post Trying To Be a Good Character appeared first on Quantum Cannibals.