Concerning KJA...

What's KJA, the King James Apocryphal? Does it condemn the wicked?  Praise the righteous?  Did he even have one of those?  Who knows. No, the thought of the day has to do with the Knee Jerk Acronyms America so loves.  The government got it all started of course: ATF, CIA, FBI, NSA... the alphabet soup.  But it’s an important soup, dammit.  It started spreading out as the government migrated into people's daily lives: SSN, HEW, DHS, CPS... things of that ilk, the places where the population interfaced with their government.  Even more important things, you might have those in your day to day life.  I suppose after three or four generations were raised on alphabet soup it shouldn't be much of a surprise that eventually the children decided that if you want to claim something for yourself that sounds really important it should have an acronym of its' own so it can take it's proper place in the bowl with the rest of the soup.  Off to the races they went. Well, more appropriate to say into the bowl they jumped, but anyway.

By now everyone knows which specific acronym I like the least, bdsm, a few folks may even have a bit of an understanding as to why.  However I'm sure there's many who can't begin to conceive of why I feel the way I do.  If they didn't agree with me that I could understand, but they seem genuinely confused as to the reason for the conflict.  Of course, for them those initials are more a flag and tag to a fad gone generation gap counterculture than who can say how much documented misery condensed into four letters for the sake of brevity in print.  So why did they latch onto those four letters instead of say NIMH? (National Institute of Mental Health... fictional villains in an old cartoon movie) It sounds crazy, it may be crazy, but I'm about to believe the answer just might be the first documented case of a major Freudian slip by an entire segment of society.

The kids most desperate to have something sound important about their lives, what do those kids all have in common? What they have in common is surviving an attempt to homogenize them body and soul (not to mention heart and mind) into an image of social perfection.  What they have in common are parents (and grandparents and possibly even great grandparents at this point) so insecure they allowed the ever enlarging domain of psychology to both define and validate beyond questioning their parenting style.  What they have in common is Psychology made God.  The psuedo-science of psychology, which coincidentally has its' very own bowl of alphabet soup to make itself sound overwhelmingly important, ended up taking the place of culture and convention, religion and history.  Psychology is a science, and science won't steer you wrong, right?  Right.

Don't get me wrong here, there's nothing wrong with psychology as such, it's simply the study of the mind.  So what's the problem then?  The problem is when you raise major portions of entire generations using exactly the same parenting techniques taken verbatim from the same few academic sources what you get is some really nasty compression bruising on a good size chunk of the population, those who really didn't fit the mold they were forced into.  Point of fact what you get is a fair size chunk of your population that might as well have been raised in state run institutions.  I'm talking about the kids who were raised to believe social acceptance equates to mental health.

(Well, maybe, but somehow I doubt any institution of psychology has ever bothered to define just what constitutes a society ethically competent to certify sanity, they kind of take that one on faith at least until the insurance runs out.  Of course such a loophole as that leaves the entire situation wide open for any group from a high school clique to an international espionage movement to validate sanity in exchange for loyalty, just pick your poison of preference.)

Anyhow, once they got away from mommy and daddy and into the real world it didn’t take them long to figure out just how bruised they really were, and for no good reason: they found literally hundreds of different societies all intermingled and already up and running.  They realized they had been betrayed, and abused. Instantly their very legitimate question became why did mommy and daddy try and stuff us in that mold when there were so many others that might have been a better fit? After all, mental health had been the holy grail of their life and all the rules said was social acceptance equals mental health.

Long story short it didn't take the kids long to figure out they could certify their own sanity as long as they all agreed, being as how what the hell, as long as they stuck together around some common thought then they were a society too, right?  All they needed was that common thought and their own acronym floating in the soup to serve as a flag and they could be free.  What did they share in common?  Of course, they shared the common facts that had formed them: bitter daddies (playtime is over, go to work and feed your family) and scared mommies (OMG, can I really do this?). 

From the perspective of their ever more enraged inner child what they had in common was bad daddies and sad mommies.  And damn, when they looked around in the bowl of alphabet soup they discovered their flag was already flying!  Bad daddies and sad mommies... BDSM, of course! 

I give you the birth of a fad every bit as dangerous to the cause of genuine freedom and happiness as any and every tyrant that has ever plagued the history of Planet Earth, because  BDSM does not stand for bad daddy sad mommy.  What it has signified for centuries, nay, millennia, are the psychological  accommodations mandated in the lives of those who suffer the psychiatric affliction of sadomasochism, the mis-wiring of the brain to interpret pain as pleasure, deformities that in the end inevitably cause the absolute inversion to destruction of any and every positive emotion possible between any two humans, gender of no consequence, when adopted by those whose brains are not hard wired in such a manner.

It is the most bitter of ironies that the vast majority of the kids swimming in the soup just wanted permission to consider themselves sane, normal, as if they ever needed it in the first place, and all their desire did was lead them into the most subtly destructive and insidious forms of mental illness known to mankind.  The current structures of bdsm are obviously nothing more than the best effort of those so afflicted to contain and limit the damage done to their lives, and the lives of those around them.

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This thought to be continued, and concluded, in the forthcoming post "The Lesser of Two Evils…" at which point this subject will be retired for a time, I need the time to restore my own self and soul…