It’s not that Mounties and soldiers are alone in their
propensity for coughing up disgusting sexual interference and assault stories.
Doctors, teachers, construction workers, businesspersons, clergy have been
known to feature in such dramas. All these scenarios—especially those in which
children are involved—disgust us; the tentacles of sexual exploitation reach
out and affect so much: family & work relationships; mental health of
individuals; loss of dignity and respect; undeserved feelings of guilt and
worthlessness, courtroom time, etc. I’m reminded of an onerous clause in
Deuteronomy 5: “For I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity
of the fathers upon the sons to the third and fourth generation of those who
hate Me.” Specific in its wording, this passage (repeated in other places and nuanced
by Jesus in John 9:1-3) serves as a reminder, both in ancient days and in ours,
that iniquities often have far-reaching consequences.[i]
My
revisit of this topic was triggered by a CBC news article on August 1, 2022 in
which a case of sexual misbehaviour of a Mountie was the focus. Established as
fact was that a fine, upstanding Mountie was drinking with colleagues in a bar
after a training exercise, and that he forced a hand under the shirt of a
female colleague and fondled her breasts, was rebuffed and then repeated the
act with another colleague. (Search “Nova Scotia Mountie sexual” to read the
story.) The issue of an appropriate sanction for these acts by this one Mountie
is the question the news story addresses.
Many a
misdemeanour has been blamed
on alcohol, and there’s good reason to consider alcohol’s contribution in impairing
judgment and lowering inhibition. Combine that with the effects of group dynamics
in bars, relationships of those participating in the group, the trends in the
conversation and you might have a broader, more complete picture of what
transpired to allow this Mountie to commit personal sexual interferences on colleagues.
(At the least, a “mad dog” rule must be considered: If a dog unexpectedly bites
a person, only the dog is to blame. If the dog later bites another person, the
owner bears the blame and pays the penalty. You can only blame alcohol for your
misbehaviour once; thereafter, excessive drinking at any time is tantamount to
wilfully releasing the mad dog inside you.)
More
sinister to me is the creeping myth of an age of chivalry in Western Society
and its effect on the general mindset. Medievalism, or a return to the values
of pre-Renaissance sensibility, seems to be running rampant, manifesting in a
strident defense of inherited male domination (knights) and female subservience
(damsels in distress), poisoning even the Christian Church in North America. The
Devil’s Historians by Amy S. Kaufman and Paul B. Sturtevan makes clear that
this longing for a medieval revival is based on a myth, that the noble knight
and the damsel he protects belonged to an elite upper layer of the population
and that in society generally, a rape culture was common. Knights were
chivalrous to women of their own stratum; peasant women existed for their
amusement.
I would
go further and say that our military and the RCMP are heirs to a medievalism that
has long since passed its best-before date. The uniforms, the marching in-step
and in formation, the implied "knightliness" in the scarlet tunic while mounted on
a horse, the male camaraderie, all this is going to be attractive to people
with varying degrees of the medievalist mentality, seems to me. The “knights in
shining armour” are selected by recruitment’s flogging of an image. That good people,
people of conscience and commitment, form the majority of those who find
themselves in our “knighthood” occupations is a saving grace. At the same time,
the likelihood of stories rising out of the dark side of the myth of chivalry are
bound to escalate in frequency if the new medievalism has its way.
I want
to be understood, so let me be plain. The “Devil’s Historians” are exemplified
in North American Republicanism, where an ideological elite of medievalist-style thinkers wish the world to again be a binary of knights-lords-and-pretty-ladies elites alongside
a vast peasantry, most of whom are easily brainwashed to think it's all in their
best interest, while being denied the vote if deemed to be unworthy. We should
be grateful for Donald Trump, Jordan Peterson, Ted Cruz and Alex Jones and that
vast array of wealthy evangelicals who have determined that their future lies
in licking the boots of the Lords of the new chivalry. These all give us
prototypes to look out for; they’ve already tried to teach us that truth is
whatever they say it is—that facts are negotiable. That women must conform to a
medieval-patterned, restricted, domesticated role is part of the propaganda and
as much and as often as Jordan Peterson wants to preach that this is biologically
mandated, and as much and as often as the medievalist church wishes to flog its
Biblical basis, neither takes into account that my very competent female pastor, for
instance, and Mary Magdalene or Martha Washington are not simply grapes from
the same bunch.
There’s
something decidedly distasteful in men pronouncing on women, or in women
pronouncing on men as if each were products of a biological or religious template.
The RCMP
decided through its investigative processes that the individual in question
deserved a chance to prove that his indiscretion was a one-off and done. I don’t
know nearly enough to make a judgment on that decision, but I maintain that in
the structuring, recruitment, training and supervision of our defence and
policing forces, there are plenty of reasons to be aware and wary of how far
they lag behind socio/cultural evolution, and how little or much their very
structures encourage the creeping, insidious nostalgia for an age and worldview
that … well, that never actually was.
[i] Merriam-Webster
lists these synonyms for iniquity: corruption, debauchery, depravity, immorality, iniquitousness,
libertinage,
licentiousness,
profligacy,
sin, vice.
nothing plain here.
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