Charles D'Ambrosio - Loitering - New and Collected Essays

And so we improve one prejudice to rest awhile in another, we embrace errors, we correct, reverse earlier decisions, advance again, struggle pitifully, and meantime as we revise and roll on, Letourneau is caught in the amber of our understanding. This sense of understanding as fossil sample occurred throughout the story, and after many readings of just about everything written on the Letourneau case I entered a near-mad state of chicken/egg confusion where habitual priority starts flipping around, and I couldn’t tell anymore if people were trying to understand and describe Letourneau or invent a theoretical prototype. I started being unable to understand the words people were using, I couldn’t make sense of trust and manipulation and adultery and power base and exploitation and teacher , and other than seeing this as ample evidence of why I’m not a judge or a lawyer or a doctor or a cop or for that matter anybody with any meaningful responsibility or position in this world, and getting a real sorrowful glimpse of why that’s probably a very good thing, I also began to believe that of course Letourneau had to be sentenced, that sentencing her was a way of stabilizing the language. She upset accepted meaning (and by the way I have no problem with Judge Lau’s decision. That’s not my concern here). What I wonder about is language, about what gets lost when laypeople concede the control of words to clinicians, scientists, lawyers, etc., which is, scilicet, the rich, supple instrumentation of language that makes it an encounter with reality, that lets it reach into everything, into every little part of life, and how in this case a circle had formed and experts with fixed language were returning Letourneau to a fixed state, and doing so by excluding, again and again, notions that were not naturally a part of their descriptive vocabulary, like love.

Even though in the following quote I’m cutting a little bit against the grain of her intention, I think Lucy Berliner of Harborview Medical Center framed the problem succinctly when she said, “Even if [Letourneau] does genuinely have feelings for him, there is no context for a relationship like this to be normalized.”

No context, where? In the language of sociology, law, psychology, victimology, penology, pedagogy? And what’s “a relationship like this ”? What’s the omitted word? And why select the evasive, hesitant, nonspecific word “feelings”? And why the qualifier “even if”? And what’s the difference between saying “even if she does genuinely have feelings for him” and saying “even if she has genuine feelings for him”? (Opting for the weak adverb instead of the adjectival form basically cripples Letourneau’s action and in subtle syntactic ways indicates her feelings were never genuine or real in the object-noun world but only in her head, a shift in the direction of subjectivity that feeds right into the psych-soc agenda, the fixing up or at least identifying of errant bad-acting people with defective heads. It’s all very neat and circular, and the system of Berliner’s sentence is well-tuned.)

But right now this is Einstein’s world and both trains are moving, so I want to go back briefly and look at the idea of the discarded. This is pretty common in the sciences, the abandoning of paradigms and the languages that go with them (see Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions ). In contrast, we don’t discard the anguish of a father bent over his dead daughter (King Lear), or a man making a Faustian pact with the bitch goddess Success to win back the love of a woman (Gatsby), and so on. Further, we don’t discard the language that creates this stuff either. In the case of King Lear, the language that lets us see his magnificent ruin has outlasted Newtonian optics. Science deals with things, not human beings, and is speechless.

Fifty years ago Paul Tillich wrote, “It seems that the emphasis on the so-called ‘empirical’ method in theology has not grown out of actual theological demands but has been imposed on theology under the pressure of a ‘methodological imperialism,’ exercised by the pattern of natural sciences.” Basically he says there’s been a corruption of theology by the encroachment of scientific understanding into places where it doesn’t belong. This “methodological monism,” or the idea that a single system can describe everything, spreads out and in imperial fashion colonizes chemistry, theology, the study of literature and history, etc. But, he writes, “reality itself makes demands, and the method must follow; reality offers itself in different ways, and our cognitive intellect must receive it in different ways. An exclusive method applied to everything closes many ways of approach and impoverishes our vision of reality.” You never want to forget that the encounter with life comes first; and an ascendant methodology, foreign to the subject in the first place, shouldn’t stand in the way of that encounter.

“Our descriptions are better,” Nietzsche wrote of older stages of knowledge and science, “but we do not explain any more than our predecessors.”

To examine the description/explanation problem, let’s look quickly at a column by Terry McDermott that ran in the Seattle Times on Sunday, November 16, 1997. Prefatorily: I have nothing good to say about this column. It was smug, it was mingy, it was a skimpy eight hundred words (Anna Karenina, in contrast to Letourneau, was given eight hundred pages before Tolstoy pitched her under a train) that hinged on a kind of fallacious reasoning that had by the day of sentencing become a staple of casual analysis, namely that if Letourneau had been a man and X a girl, we’d have no qualms about sentencing her to “four years in the joint.”

Here’s the song sung in rounds:

— Karil Klingbeil (director of social work, Harborview Medical Center): “I doubt that had there been a male perpetrator, it would have resulted in the same sentence.”

— Nancy Grace (Court TV): “And let me guarantee you that if these roles were reversed and a male teacher had had sex with a 12- or 13-year-old student there would be no question that he’d be sent to jail.”

— Shannon Peddycord (Bothell resident, in a letter to the Times ): “Can you imagine had this been Joe-Stud Teacher and the victim a curvy 13-year-old girl?”

— And McDermott (in his column):

Mary Letourneau, 35, a schoolteacher, has an affair with a 13-year-old boy, a former student of hers.

The affair produces a guilty plea to charges of second-degree child rape. It also produces a baby and, last week, a suspended sentence.

Mark Blilie, 42, a schoolteacher, has an affair with a 15-year-old girl, a former student of his.

The affair produces a conviction for third-degree child rape and child molestation and four years in the joint for Blilie.

What’s wrong with this?

I mean, other than the fact that both these people did horrible things, that they abused children and the hopes and trust of entire communities.

What’s wrong, of course, is the similarity of the situations and the vastly different outcomes.

How did this happen?

The answers are. ”

First off, “the joint”—I love that hard-boiled tough-guy lingo. When McDermott uses it the meaning is deceptive and suggests a real familiarity, not with prison or jails or the justice system, but with the genre of film noir and detective fiction, a filtrated and highly stylized knowledge of the underworld. Or maybe it was borrowed from the mouth of Frank Sinatra circa 1955. At any rate, as language the word just kind of hangs there, archaic and referential. The joint —never mind that it’s antique slang, it’s also about the most colorful and decorative word McDermott uses in the column and thus calls attention to itself, asking for examination. In the piece it functions rhetorically by setting up a crusty hardened term to contrast with the softness of Letourneau’s heart and her weak and womanish insistence on love, love being a word presumably not used a whole lot in the mean dark weary bleak Bogey-haunted Sinatra-soundtracked inky black-and-white precincts McDermott inhabits down around Fairview Ave. — except maybe to describe a desperate broad or femme fatale or some other pathetic delusional female type. In the course of his column that softness of the heart, of her tendrilled hair, of a love that “mystifies everyone but her” is roundly dismissed, and McDermott’s manly argot, the inner language of the knowing, is triumphant. Aided by this trope he concludes what everybody else concludes and does so by eliminating the mystifying element, love, from the equation.