The American Tragedy of Willie Bosket

The story of Willie Bosket, now serving a life sentence, due only to be released from solitary confinement in 2062,  and once described as New York state’s most dangerous prison inmate, is the kind of tale all too easily described as an American tragedy. Fox Butterfield‘s All God’s Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence makes this quite clear: it’s the story of a life derailed early by a seemingly inherited streak of violence that went back through his father, who was guilty of a double homicide, to his grandfather, who among other things had done jail time for kidnapping and sodomizing a young boy, to his great-grandfather, a Reconstruction Era freeman in the endlessly violent Edgefield county of South Carolina.

We are by now familiar with stories like Willie’s: broken homes and families struggle in crime-ridden neighborhoods; their members afflicted by senseless acts of violence and yet partaking of them because they are bound by codes of honor that stress such acts as responses to ostensible disrespect; troubled children sent from one underfunded reformatory institution to the other, all of whom keep ‘passing the trash’; the easy availability of guns, which facilitate the unthinking killing of innocents; the inability of legal, penal, and judicial systems to accommodate psychologically afflicted and troubled souls.

For all of that, reading Willie Bosket’s story is still saddening and even terrifying. His fearsome anger, which found expression in savage acts directed at all those around him–and in two senseless killings on the New York City subways–is but one component of this tale. There is the dreadful knowledge that Willie, like his father Butch, had intelligence in ample measure; there just was no way for it, given his past and his surroundings, to be expressed coherently over a period of time long enough to have made it his salvation. As Butch’s tragic tale–one of the almost complete redemption of a murderer by the pursuit of knowledge–shows, derailments of reform by the influence of the time spent in jail is all too easy.  And then there is the heartbreak of the photos that show Willie as a seemingly angelic young boy with a smile that could have melted any one’s heart.

Many social institutions are indicted in this tale: racism, of course, but there are jails too, those finishing houses which take criminals in the making and apply the final touches. Surprisingly enough, there are heroes too: those dedicated social workers, therapists, counselors, and teachers who tried to help Willie, tried to compensate for the lack of love in his life, tried to provide an alternative table of values to the one he had come to internalize. That system had taught him that to inspire fear was his highest calling, that the lives of those who got in the way were worth little, that his inheritance of violence and aggression was not a disease to be cured but a badge of honor to be worn with pride.

America, like most other nations, holds within its borders and histories, the usual mingling of the tragic and the sublime, of the horrifying and the inspiring. Willie Bosket’s story belongs to the debit side of that ledger; it is a cautionary tale and a shaming one, of a human being who was perhaps afflicted before he was born, who could never break free of himself, who now, as he sits, alone in a jail cell, can do little but reflect on a life gone terribly bad.

Dexter, Psychopaths, and Vigilante Justice

Dexter provoked a great deal of commentary–as any long-running television serial on a killer-killing serial killer would (and should.) Now that I’ve finished the show–all eight seasons of it, after feeling several times during the sixth season that I would never make it to the end–I’ll throw in my tuppence.

Dexter‘s central conceit–the killings mentioned above–and its attempts to get us inside the head of an introspective, at times tortured serial killer wondering about his humanity, were always likely to need clever shepherding by its directors and writers so as to stave off the implausibility that always threatened to derail it. Most centrally, Dexter was a remarkably sloppy operator, often behaving in ways that should have gotten him arrested and put away several times over. As the show wore on, it became harder to believe that the uncoverings carried out by–in turn, James Doakes, Debra Morgan and Maria Guerta–had not happened earlier and led to his long-term incarceration. So the show did not always succeed in this regard; all too often, I found myself unable to take plot denouements seriously because they rested on exceedingly unlikely developments preceding it.

For all that, Dexter managed to provoke ample conversation about the morality of killing and vigilante justice, which, I presume, will be its central contribution to philosophy classroom discussions in the years to come. (Perhaps I’m being excessively kind in my assessments of its longevity.) There were problems here too, of course: Dexter himself was all too often only concerned with his own mental health, which was befitting a potentially psychopathic killer but which made for little agonizing over the kills themselves; his victims became a little less straightforwardly evil too late and too infrequently; and the Dark Passenger references all too often seemed ridiculous.

The central incoherence with vigilante justice is that it cannot be the norm, it cannot be universalized, it cannot co-exist with systems of law. To tolerate it is to ask for little less than a return to the bad old days–not that they have ever gone away–of unbridled revenge and all the social, emotional and moral costs that entailed. The show’s creators relied on for its appeal to an old weariness with the justice system, one explicitly tapped into in the third season: the machinery of law and justice is antiquated and tired; it moves too slowly; it is worn down by procedural detail; it punishes the good and lets off the bad; it cries out for blunt, fast-acting saviors willing to leap the bureaucratic hurdles it puts in the path of those only concerned with letting all of us sleep a little safer at night. 

Because of this reliance on a kind of knee-jerk impatience with the law, the show was perhaps not as genuinely edgy or ground-breaking as it might have been. To do that, it would have had to really push the envelope and show us a serial killer or psychopath who didn’t put on the vigilante hat; it would have had to explore his psychological development with just a tad more nuance. But that would have run the risk of humanizing the psychopath, not treating him as unanalyzable evil.

That’s still a little too risky.

The Smells of the Homeless: Unpleasant Reminders of Our Good Fortune

I receive, on a daily basis, many reminders of my singular good fortune, of my having scored big in life’s sweepstakes: I have a good job–one that gives me a sabbatical every seven years, a lovely family, and good health. (Despite a sore shoulder thanks to a persistent case of supraspinatus tendinopathy, two busted discs in my lower back that sometimes occasion a sore and stiff back, sciatica on my left side, a bulging cervical disc, and some other minor niggles here and there, I’m still inclined to this assessment; I do, after all, live an active life.)

Because I live in New York, these reminders are sometimes distinctly pungent and malodorous. I am referring to the unmistakable aroma of the homeless. I am no spring chicken when it comes to foul miasmas. I have traveled and visited many public restrooms from hell; I have vainly hunted for a dead rat in urban apartments; I have thrown out rotting food. But the smell of the homeless is something else altogether.

Sometimes you experience it as you step into a suspiciously non-crowded subway car; sometimes when you step off a train and step past a bundle of rags–with a limb or two sticking out–lying next to a bench; sometimes when you walk under a scaffolding on a sidewalk and spy a pair of cardboard boxes thrown together to fashion a makeshift shelter. If it was possible, it gets a little worse in the summer.

The olfactory assault mounted by these unfortunates is obviously grounded in some straightforward physical facts: they are unwashed and have been so for some time; antiquated sweat and grime have been blended together into a toxic compound; and those that are mentally and physically incapable of taking care of their most basic needs have let urine and solid excrement remain on their bodies.

But what I think makes this odor quite as offensive as we experience it is the knowledge that it is associated with a human being, that a fellow creature is the source of it and is wrapped up in it, that their daily existence is inseparable from it. A sensory assault that we find simply unbearable for more than a second or two, that makes us change subway cars at the next available subway station, that makes us hurry on quickly to the exit stairs of subway stations, is, for that human being, a haze that hangs over their every daily moment.

Wrapped up in that smell is a whole history of things gone wrong, of unfortunate contingencies that ended in disaster every time. Perhaps it all began with a mishap–a lost job, a broken home, a mental illness–that derailed an otherwise fortunate life, or perhaps things began badly and steadily became worse.

Whatever its particular provenance, no other sensory input that I receive in my movements through this great city reminds me quite as unpleasantly of how lucky I have been and continue to be; nothing else causes both the wrinkled nose and the shiver down my spine.

Ogling the Antics of the Rich and the Stockholm Syndrome

The New York Times’ Room For Debate features the following question today:

Several Academy Award contenders like “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “American Hustle” glorify white-collar criminals and scammers, and many reality TV shows embrace the wealthy, too. A new series, “#RichKids of Beverly Hills,” is the latest example of our enthusiasm for “ogling the filthy rich.”

Why are we so obsessed with watching the antics of the 1 percent?

Here are the blurbed versions of the respondents’ answers.

Alyssa Rosenberg, ‘writer’:

When rich people we actually envy turn out to be criminals, the idea that wealth is inherently corrupting helps take the sting out of our envy.

Farnoosh Torabi, ‘personal finance expert’:

With reality TV, I fear some viewers are falsely making the connection between the materialism and trivial plot lines and what it really means to be and act wealthy.

Evette Dionne, ‘cultural critic’:

The average black woman can live vicariously through the housewives of Atlanta, basketball wives of Miami and hip-hop lovers of New York

Bruce E. Levine, ‘psychologist’:

While many of us believe in honest work, we also see that wealth is mostly acquired via hustles and scams, and so we relate to stories that validate our experience.

Not that the New York Times asked, but here is my response.

Ninety-nine percenters watching the one-percent, even if they happen to be misbehaving, seems to have a Stockholm Syndrome flavor to it. As Wikipedia helpfully informs us,

[H]ostages express empathy and sympathy and have positive feelings toward their captors, sometimes to the point of defending them….the bonding is the individual’s response to trauma in becoming a victim. Identifying with the aggressor is one way that the ego defends itself. When a victim believes the same values as the aggressor, they cease to be a threat.

Ogling the antics of the aggressor is certainly one way to edify oneself about the values on display and to perhaps even imbibe them successfully.  It also enables a defensive distancing from one’s own actual station in life, to forget about its often depressing particulars.  (This is the basis of the ‘vicarious living’ answer provided above.) The roots of the often reflexive hostility toward unions, who seem to be committed to reducing the distance between the two classes, may be found here; far better to disdain them and identify with the aggressor instead.

Most importantly, all too many of the ninety-nine percent are still convinced that membership in the one percent club, thanks to their successful promulgation of their class-favoring ideologies, remains an aspirational and achievable goal for them. They continue to believe in upward mobility, despite all evidence to the contrary; they continue to believe the ‘system’ works as advertised; they continue to watch advertisements for their supposed future lives, hoping that they will learn, by careful observation, how they will be expected to behave once they get there.

Movies about the rich and the famous are indoctrination manuals; they derive their diligent audiences from these sorts of reasons.

The Author’s Offspring, the Finished Deal

A few days ago, I received my author copies of my latest book. Five paperbacks, neatly bundled up in a cardboard parcel bearing an impressive array of stamps and customs bills. I tore open the cardboard (with my bare hands, no less!) Inside, they were wrapped up in clear plastic, neatly and tightly stacked on each other. The plastic came off a little easier, and then, there they were, in my hands at long last. (I will pick up a couple of hardcover versions over the weekend from my co-author; they look extremely pretty to say the least, and have managed to surmount the aesthetic barrier raised by the provision of my photograph on the dust jacket.)

The physical affordance of a book–its look and feel, its weight and heft, its distinctive aroma of new paper and printers’ ink–are all too often commented on when people bemoan their loss in the face of the advancing juggernaut of the e-book and the handheld book reader.  I won’t get into that debate here; I’ve done so many times elsewhere.

Rather, I just want to make note of a peculiar and particular instance of the delights of the physical book, the one alluded to above, a kind of converse of the e-book phenomenon: the pleasure experienced by an author when the transformation of the electronic document into a paper-and-ink object is complete. The multiple, scattered word processor files–one for each chapter–with their standard fonts are taken over by the typesetter’s unitary object; the margins and pagination change; frontispieces appear; author biographies are inserted; the cataloging information page is added on; the copyright signs proclaim your relationship to the ‘work’; and lastly, the final piece of the puzzle, the–hopefully, tasteful and artful–covers are slapped on top and bottom (or front and back.)

Your babe is ready for its close-up but you are the one simpering.

When I look at the finished piece it’s hard to not marvel at the transformation of the once-so-familiar; those same pages, which had once made me almost nauseous during the endless copy-editing, proof-reading and revision cycles, now look decidedly more amenable to approach; they do not repel me as much as they did during those final days when the finish line seemed both proximate and agonizingly distant.

So distinct is this change that you are almost inclined to think the content might have changed too, that perhaps your writing might have even become better with all the cosmetic surgery its packaging has undergone. But there is no such relief; the writing remains resolutely the same.

And then lastly, there is the rueful acknowledgment that no matter how hard you try, blemishes creep in. For all my proof-reading I missed out on spelling errors, and readers have already sent in four corrections. Even more embarrassingly there is a ludicrous technical error late in the book. I can only blame it on exhaustion and ennui.

One copy gets given away today, complete with inscription, to a friend. The rest go on the shelves; they won’t be read by me, but perhaps someone else will step up.

The Cade Rebellion and the Republican Party

Jack Cade, the leader of the Cade Rebellion, is an entertaining Shakespearean character (Henry VI, Part 2), well equipped by the Bard with many memorable lines. So are his followers, one of whom utters the oft-quoted, ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’ As Stephen Greenblatt noted in Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (W. W. Norton, New York, 2004, pp. 167-171):

In a sequence of wild scenes [in King Henry VI, Part II], poised between grotesque comedy and nightmare, the young Shakespeare imagined–and invited his audience to imagine–what it would be like to have London controlled by a half-mad, belligerently illiterate rabble from the country….Shakespeare was fascinated by the crazed ranting of those who hate modernity, despise learning, and celebrate the virtue of ignorance.

These ‘wild scenes’ include the following, where the Baron Saye and Sele is brought before Cade:

MESSENGER: My lord, a prize, a prize! here’s the Lord Say, which sold the towns in France; he that made us pay one and twenty fifteens, and one shilling to the pound, the last subsidy.

CADE: Well, he shall be beheaded for it ten times. Ah, thou say, thou serge, nay, thou buckram lord! now art thou within point-blank of our jurisdiction regal. What canst thou answer to my majesty for giving up of Normandy unto Mounsieur Basimecu, the dauphin of France? Be it known unto thee by these presence, even the presence of Lord Mortimer, that I am the besom that must sweep the court clean of such filth as thou art. Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school; and whereas, before, our forefathers had no other books but the score and the tally, thou hast caused printing to be used, and, contrary to the king, his crown and dignity, thou hast built a paper-mill. It will be proved to thy face that thou hast men about thee that usually talk of a noun and a verb, and such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear. Thou hast appointed justices of peace, to call poor men before them about matters they were not able to answer. Moreover, thou hast put them in prison; and because they could not read, thou hast hanged them; when, indeed, only for that cause they have been most worthy to live. Thou dost ride in a foot-cloth, dost thou not?

SAY: What of that?

CADE: Marry, thou oughtest not to let thy horse wear a cloak, when honester men than thou go in their hose and doublets.

DICK: And work in their shirt too; as myself, for example, that am a butcher.

SAY: You men of Kent,–

DICK: What say you of Kent?

SAY: Nothing but this; ’tis ‘bona terra, mala gens.’

CADE: Away with him, away with him! he speaks Latin.

As Greenblatt notes, Cade is too,

[P]rotesting an actual feature of the law…if an accused felon could demonstrate that he was literate–usually by reading a verse from the Psalms–he could claim ‘benefit of clergy’; that is, for legal purposes, be classified by virtue of literacy as a clergyman and therefore be officially subject to the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts, which did not have the death penalty.

The Cade Rebellion’s modern counterpart–in one dimension–certainly seems to be the Republican Party: a ‘half-mad, belligerently illiterate rabble’ that ‘hate modernity, despise learning, and celebrate the virtue of ignorance.’ Pity they don’t have Cade’s wit or his principled critique of the law. All their imagining themselves as rebels and radicals won’t fix that.

The Never-To-Be-Returned-To Perennial Draft

My email client shows eighty-two drafts resident in its capacious folders; my WordPress dashboard shows thirty-seven; and a quick search through various document folders on my desktop machine shows several dozen others. They are monuments and gravestones and white flags of surrender; they are signposts of intention, evidence of procrastination run amok; they are bitter evidence of an old truism, that you don’t know what you think till you see it in writing (and some of these show that I wasn’t thinking very much); they are caustic reminders of how imagination all too often outstrips effort and completion, how writerly ambition outruns ability.

Unfinished emails, some of them intemperate rejoinders to online commentary, personally critical emails, offensive or presumptive correspondence, some of them idle thoughts left half-formed, yet others overtaken by the turn of events; embarrassing reminders of what might have gone wrong had I ever, hastily and recklessly, hit the ‘send’ button; these sit in my mail folders. Very frequently, I sigh with relief at a bullet dodged, and wince at how I might have irreparably damaged a relationship. Here, there are many a drawn and then subsequently holstered gun, put away with its chambers still cold.

On this blog, my unfinished draft count had run as high as eighty; it needed some persistent cleaning up–deletions–to bring the number down. Some are mere notes to myself, with a pointer to something I felt needed response and commentary; yet others bear the mark of an incompletely worked out thought, simply run aground for lack of inspiration or perspiration. And my document folders show that I have started many more academic projects than I have finished. Like the blog posts, I have set out and then given up; the inspirational thought of the evening all too quickly turned into the laughable conceit of the morn; and sometimes, awed and intimidated by the dimensions of the presumptive task, I have let my shoulders droop, battened the hatches, and retreated. 

I have deleted many drafts over the years. Some were too ludicrous to tolerate any longer; why had I ever thought that line of thought was worth pursuing? And some too, were so incomplete, so grotesquely misshapen, that I could not even recognize the thought that had initially germinated it – let alone proceed with it any further.

And so there are the ones that remain. I humor myself, often, with the thought that I will return to them, to move them on, to push them on beyond the proverbial finishing ribbon, to bring them to conclusion and pat myself on the back for having shown persistence and gumption. But some of them will never be completed; I have moved on; I leave them around to tell me where I had gone wrong in the past and where I might again; and for all the various edificatory reasons listed above.

There is uncertainty here aplenty and certainty too, that their count will increase. But that thought is reassuring; for perhaps they will only increase as the completions do. That much is enough for now.

Ta-Nehisi Coates Attacks One Privilege, Defends Another

Last week, Ta-Nehisi Coates rightly took Dylan Byers to task after the latter’s snarky response to Coates’ anointment of Melissa Harris-Perry as ‘America’s foremost public intellectual’:

What sets Byers apart is the idea that considering Harris-Perry an intellectual is somehow evidence of inferior thinking.

I came up in a time when white intellectuals were forever making breathless pronouncements about their world, about my world, and about the world itself. My life was delineated lists like “Geniuses of Western Music” written by people who evidently believed Louis Armstrong and Aretha Franklin did not exist. That tradition continues. Dylan Byers knows nothing of your work, and therefore your work must not exist.

Here is the machinery of racism—the privilege of being oblivious to questions, of never having to grapple with the everywhere; the right of false naming; the right to claim that the lakes, trees, and mountains of our world do not exist; the right to insult our intelligence with your ignorance. The machinery of racism requires no bigotry from Dylan Byers. It merely requires that Dylan Byers sit still.

Good stuff. But as part of his defense, Coates also said:

This began because I claimed that Melissa Harris-Perry is “America’s foremost public intellectual.” I made this claim because of Harris-Perry’s background: Ph.D. from Duke; stints at Princeton and Tulane; the youngest woman to deliver the Du Bois lecture at Harvard; author of two books; trustee at the Century Foundation. I made this claim because of her work: I believe Harris-Perry to be among the sharpest interlocutors of this historic era—the era of the first black president—and none of those interlocutors communicate to a larger public, and in a more original way, than Harris-Perry.

Again, mostly good stuff. The bit that bothers me is the bit about ‘background’, which abides by another conventional sort of privilege: the credentialing capacities of the Ivy League. (In my mind, almost synonymous with ‘expensive private university privilege.’)

Duke, Princeton, Harvard. (There is Tulane too, another private school; I’m aware Duke is not Ivy League.) Coates deploys these names as any other exponent of Ivy League privilege might: the mere fact of association with them is evidence enough of intellectual quality. What was the Ph.D on? Was the dissertation any good? Did it make dissertation-level contributions to its field or was it pretty perfunctory stuff? Coates also mentions ‘two books’. What were they on? Were their arguments any good? (They were published by Yale and Princeton University Presses incidentally.)

What if Melissa Harris-Perry had done exactly the same work, but had gone to the University of North Carolina with stints at San Diego State and the University of Illinois? And had her books published by Florida University Press and University of Texas Press? Would Coates still be citing her ‘background’? Somehow, I don’t think so.

Ivy League privilege is real. Presidents, Supreme Court justices, the list goes on. Remember that old football chant that Ivy League students use when their teams are losing to a state school: ‘It’s alright, it’s OK, you’re going to work for us someday’?

Why not just concentrate on the intellectual quality of her work and forget about her credentials? Like you know, we should forget about race and just concentrate on the quality of her work? Down with all privilege, right?

There is something problematic, also, about turning the business of being a ‘public intellectual’ into some sort of competition, but more on that later.

Note: I didn’t attend the Ivy League.

Parents and Children: Perfect Strangers

A couple of days ago, I received news that a gentleman who had known my father during their years of service in the air force had passed away. A dozen or so years ago, we had established a brief correspondence by email; in his messages, he had briefly detailed the extent of his contact with my father and spoken glowingly of him. (In other messages, he regaled me with stories from his own flying days, including one sensational instance of having walked away unscathed from a spectacular, fiery, crash-landing.) I am saddened by his passing, an emotion that has a selfish edge to it: yet another bridge to my father’s life has been folded up and put away.

But even if he had been alive, or for that matter, even if my father had been, I don’t think the mystery surrounding my parents would have been any lesser. It strikes me as a curious irony that the relationship between two entities–parent and child–that are ostensibly so close to each other, closer perhaps than any other type of human pairing, should be infected with so much that is destined to remain unknown. When I look at my daughter, I often catch myself wondering, ‘Just who is this person?’ I know that a great deal of her life will transpire away from my eyes, my presence; I know that despite no matter how much I seek to guide her along carefully planned trajectories of physical, moral and intellectual development, she will ultimately etch out her own grooves and paths in her own way and surprise me all too often. Hopefully, only some of those unexpected occurrences will be unpleasant ones.

I will be a mystery to her too. Forty-six years of my life had rolled by before she was born in a country remote–physically and culturally–from the one I was born in. And by the time she is grown up enough to start taking an interest in her parents’ life–in general, and in the portion before she was born–many more years will have gone by. She will have photos, stories–told by us, and by others–and her interactions with us to help her; the standard paraphernalia we all equip ourselves with to make sense of others. But the enormity of the task seems insurmountable.

Obviously, the problem I raise here is only a special instance of the oldest conundrum of all, the seemingly utter inaccessibility of our fellow human beings. We do not think too much of this enigma when it is manifest in strangers. But when it comes to lovers, partners, parents and children, we are brought up short by the proximity of this inscrutability. We are disconcerted by it; this person, most well-known of all those around me, is perhaps just as much a stranger as those I have never met.

This should be no surprise at all, but the unease we feel is real and palpable. And that too, is entirely unsurprising; for here, as in many other domains of our lives, we vainly seek reassurance we are not  well and truly on our own.

The Conformist Non-Conformist

In yesterday’s post I had quoted W. H. Auden‘s review of  David Luke‘s translation of Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger and Other Stories in responding to his acid assessment of a reductionist impulse in art criticism.  Today, I quote him again, on a topic that is of similarly perennial interest, the problem of conformism as a hallmark of non-conformity:

In all technologically ‘advanced countries, fashion has replaced tradition, so that involuntary membership in a society can no longer provide a feeling of community. (The family, perhaps, can still provide it, but families are temporary societies which dissolve when the children grow up.)

In consequence, the word ‘normal’ has ceased to have any meaning. Community still means what it always has, a group of persons united by a love of something other than themselves, be it racehorses and poetry, but today such a love has to be discovered by each person for himself; it cannot be acquired socially. Society can only teach conformity to the momentary fashion, either of the majority or of its mirror-image, the rebellious minority. To belong to either is to be a member, not of a community, but if a ‘public’ in the Kierkegaardian sense. Today, all visible and therefore social signs of agreement are suspect. What a pleasant surprise it would be to meet a crew-cut hippie or a company director with hair down to his shoulders.

Auden’s observations should ring true to us. We have now become accustomed to the sight of the rebellious, the fringe, the ‘outsiders’, all too often, dressing and behaving lock and step in conformity with their chosen cohort. This isn’t surprising: having placed ourselves outside one group, we quickly seek another. True exiles, the hermits of the social sphere, are exceedingly rare. And in the quest for membership in a new group, visible signs of identification are very useful . These are the secret handshakes by which we enter the inner councils and proclaim our bona-fides. (Incidentally, Auden’s latter demand would appear to have been taken care of by the phenomenon of, most recently, the Internet start-up, some of whose directors are indeed long-haired and considerably more unkempt than the standard businessman.) Once inside the group, we seek to avoid summary excommunication by speaking and behaving alike. A ‘local’ vernacular or colloquial mode is quickly picked up as are standard expressions and targets of approval and disapproval. The overt adoption of these is necessary to continue and sustain the distancing from the older ‘normal.’

Such wholesale adoption of the trappings of the new group–especially speech forms and ideological commitments– require too, constant maintenance. This is best facilitated by persistent, frequent and sometimes, in extreme cases, exclusive, contact with other members of the new group. These interactions facilitate the upkeep of the new garb; they enable an inspection of slight changes in fashion that may need urgent responding to if membership is to continue.

The problem then, as Auden highlights it, is that the rebel only learns how to reject and leave a group; he does not learn how to live outside of one.