What a Difference the Mob Makes

How it all ties together. Re-reading Ethan Mordden's Some Men Are Lookers, which I just finished again this morning, I noticed, in all its significance, the erotic/masochistic spanking by Carlos of the ever-reforming Little Kiwi/Virgil/J. Which entirely escaped me when I read it first a month or so ago--I thought it was a hot scene and sexy, but truly I did not understand it, did not understand that it had significance--because as recently as a month ago I had not read Sam D'Allessandro's taunting little essays, and I had not read Roy Baumeister's Masochism and the Self, or Escaping the Self. I had no idea. Which brings me round again to my self and to the Self: What's funny/odd about this Western Individual Self is what a paradoxical worry and an onus it seems to be to be free and responsible only for one's self. Not that it necessarily is so for me--but I would be unlike anybody else in the world, apparently, if it were not so, at least sometimes, maybe in ways unknown to myself. And I am really not prepared to view myself, with all my self-defining differences, as a wholly new species. Or maybe I am. After all, I don't view myself as gay--or American--in any sense having anything whatsoever to do with the Stonewall riots. How dare I not? Well--try and understand--the Stonewall Inn was a Mafia-run bar. The corrupt-by-definition Jew York police who raided it were used, by long habit of corruption, to harrassing homosexuals, and specifically to harrassing homosexuals in Mafia-run establishments which didn't pay adequate "protection" money to them. I'm glad, of course, that those heroic drag queens finally showed the world what horrible brutality they were suffering at the hands of the Police--but no one even noticed that the whole system had been exposed as corrupt: It didn't matter then (the New York Times certainly never mentioned it) to anybody, and it doesn't seem to matter now. What "Americans" East of the Rockies don't understand, don't seem to grasp, is that being inured to, putting up with--having put up with all these years--the Mob and a corrupt-by-definition police force, makes them utterly unlike us who live where (the prosperous, rural Pacific Northwest) there is not and never has been a Mob or a corrupt-by-definition local politics and police force: unlike and inferior to. Sorry. The sad truth is: Suffering does not ennoble. Living mired in moral squalor, so long that you don't notice it, just makes you squalid.