The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
In the New Yorker...
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: serious crayons on April 25, 2019, 08:40:16 pm ---It might be online but I’m reading it in the 4/29 issue. Don’t think I’m that up to date. I’m sure my pile contains issues going back to at least October.
--- End quote ---
Yeah, 4/29 arrived in my mailbox today. I see it's in there. I just finished the article in 4/15 about the arbitrators involved in paying out money to victims of clergy sex abuse.
How can any amount of money ever make up for being sexually abused whether by a priest or by anybody?
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: Jeff Wrangler on April 25, 2019, 10:39:55 pm ---How can any amount of money ever make up for being sexually abused whether by a priest or by anybody?
--- End quote ---
I actually know someone who got money for this. I'm sure he's an extreme outlier, but he was completely nonchalant about it. This guy did some small painting jobs in my house last year over a period of weeks, as I was getting it ready to sell. He was a friendly, chatty guy, prone to long conversations (luckily I didn't pay him by the hour and I was working from home back then so my time was pretty flexible). He told me within the first five or six times he was here I saw him that he was a plaintiff in this big Catholic church abusive priest payout.
What happened, he said, was that a priest invited him and his brother to stay overnight. At bedtime, the priest asked them to strip down to just underwear, not to wear their pajamas. Then the priest got in bed with them and sort of horsed around -- but, the painter said, didn't do anything to them or touch them in any overtly sexual way. The next day when their mother picked them up, they told her what happened and she screeched the car to a stop, demanded details immediately and told them they couldn't stay overnight there again.
So the explanations include:
1) The painter is lying -- not to me (his photo was in the paper at one of the events) and not telling a fake story just to get money. but possibly downplaying the abuse from something more severe. He was very friendly and frank, but there were one or two other things, unrelated to this, that raised my suspicions about his honesty (not as a painter -- that part was fine). So maybe he was just feigning his happy-go-lucky attitude.
2) The circumstances -- underwear left on, no out-and-out sex stuff, his brother was with him and their mom immediately believed them and took action -- softened the trauma and lasting damage. Though he did say it had bothered his brother throughout life more than it had him.
Anyway, he was now one of a group in a class-action suit splitting millions of dollars. I can't remember the exact numbers, but if they'd just divided the money by individuals he would have received well into the 6 figures.
But the painter said they were planning to divide it according to some sort of ranking system by the survivors' degree of assault or level of trauma. That sounds like it would be really difficult -- as his own story attests, two people can have the same experience and be affected differently by it. But I secretly thought that if they did divide it that way the painter shouldn't get much because he seemed very untraumatized.
Front-Ranger:
--- Quote from: serious crayons on April 26, 2019, 08:40:16 am ---
.... he did say it had bothered his brother throughout life more than it had him.
--- End quote ---
Possibly the brother was abused but the other one wasn't.
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: Front-Ranger on April 26, 2019, 11:09:16 pm ---Possibly the brother was abused but the other one wasn't.
--- End quote ---
Right, but I got the impression they were either in the same room or had shared stories enough to know they'd had the same experience. Who knows.
But sometimes different people react to things differently. Stormy Daniels found herself in a hotel room with Donald Trump and figured she had to go ahead and have sex with him because she'd gotten herself into that situation. For other women it would be a huge #metoo story (not to mention sickening in many other ways). But people just have different levels of sensitivity, I guess.
Front-Ranger:
I read the article about John Hersey. Seems like I would know of him better but I'm only vaguely familiar with him. The article is a bit of a review of the new biography The Straight Arrow.
Funny that it talks a lot about the notion that fiction is better than nonfiction, that we were discussing on The Renters topic. Apparently, Hersey, Tom Wolfe, and other journalist/authors had the same impression that fiction is superior. But the notion didn't hold true in practice. None of Hersey's fiction works had the same acclaim as his nonfiction.
Then, there's the notion of the nonfiction novel. In many cases, it's essential to novelize a person's story in order to breathe life into the pages. But authors can get carried away easily.
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