Projection?

I was planning to let this pass, but as Lee Siegel digs himself deeper and deeper into some catacomb of self-righteousness over James Kincaid, he's begun flinging his dirt all across the left, a schtick that's grown tiresome. Now, because too few people appear to agree that Kincaid is a child molester, we're all a bunch of "liberal automatons" and "clueless knuckleheads" who "respond like growling Pavlovian dogs to any suggestion that people cannot indulge their every sexual appetite."

So let's talk this one out -- one blogofascist to another. Kincaid is an English professor who studies the sexualization of children in American media. The other day, he wrote a piece for Slate on the reemergence of Jon Benet, arguing "JonBenet would not get all this attention did we not want to bestow it. It's not the media forcing on us something we'd rather not have: We're lining up at the trough to be fed...[it] allows us to fulminate against trivial problems while ignoring huge problems close to home, meanwhile wallowing in self-righteous porn babble: We are able to use the half-clothed bodies of children as centerfolds while professing shock that anyone would so display them. The story is always the same: Somebody else finds the bodies of children irresistible and we want the chance to rail against these monsters, meanwhile relishing the details of the very bodies we claim indifference to. It is a classic example of scapegoating."

Siegel criticizes Kincaid for being a "a very snide and superior writer," which, for obvious reasons, I can't help but point out (Writer, heal thyself!). More alarmingly, in three posts entitled "James Kincaid and Pedophilia," he asserts that Kincaid's belief that we view children sexually and so take a subconscious glee in fulminating endlessly about those who would sexualize them, obviously reveals him as a pedophile. Siegel, floating high above any evidentiary standards or textual support, has now made this accusation with ever greater degrees of explicitness, the last of which accused the left of being in cahoots with pedophiles. His advice for us, as I understood it, was that we'd begin winning elections when we ceased supporting NAMBLA. Wonder why James Carville never thought of that.

I grew interested in the Kincaid smears, though, so I took a look into his book "Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting." Here's the capsule:

Citing examples from the tabloids, celebrity trials, and popular movies starring children, the author explains society's need for horrors such as ritual abuse, "kiddie porn," and accusations against clergy and day care workers. Preoccupation with this misguided sexuality allows the public to ignore the poverty, neglect, malnutrition, and poor education that constitute true child abuse. Kincaid suggests abandoning the Gothic model and acknowledging that erotic feelings are a normal part of life that rational adults can control.

I assume the preschool gangbang comes later. But maybe his views are different in the Slate piece Siegel's focusing on. Let's take a look:

For kids really do not fare very well in our culture: Millions of children are, in fact, abused in unspeakable ways. Five hundred thousand kids every year are classified as "throwaways" (children whose parents or guardians will not let them live at home, as distinguished from "runaways"). As many as 800,000 are beaten horribly. Even more are subject to emotional abuse and neglect. How much attention do they get? Instead, we focus our attention, almost all of it, on stranger-danger: things like abductions, of which there are between 100 and 200 annually. Our carefully controlled outrage is generated for our own purposes, certainly not to protect the children.

Oh. While Kincaid is irritated by the excess attention lavished on this murdered white princess while the nation's urban children suffer far more systemic, and controllable, ills, Siegel is irritated by Kincaid's self-righteousness:"[Kincaid] He apparently has never tried to imagine what kind of society would let the murder of a little girl pass without massive amounts of attention and anxiety."

A glance at Siegel's blog shows that Benet's reemergence went unnoticed until Lee got in a huff about Kincaid's article. But a check of the Siegel ouvre is more interesting. So far as I can tell, the only thing Siegel has written on pedophilia is a lament that he didn't engage in it. In the March 15, 1999 issue of TNR, he published a diarist detailing one of his life's great regrets: His refusal to fuck Uma Thurman when she was sixteen, and he was her 26-year-old tutor. As Siegel tells the tale, "Uma was a model at the time I met her, not yet famous. She had an open face and slightly swelled features and pale blue eyes that seemed wide with surprise and also moist with deep recognition of the nature of their surprise. Just hanging out, she looked like she was on the brink of physical ecstasy. She seemed to be willing her inwardness out through her pores, all for the pleasure of others...She began to flirt with me. Putting her cat provocatively in her lap, she stroked it and described a suggestive fantasy to me." I can't imagine why Kincaid thinks the media describes children in erotic terms.

Lee was not aroused, and it appears to have caused him considerable psychic anguish throughout the years. His unwillingness to abuse his position as a tutor and sleep with a sixteen-year-old caused a decades long shame so acute he finally had to exorcise it, 13 years after the fact, in the pages of a national magazine, copiously detailing the years of regret and resentment he endured. Siegel did not commit an act of pedophilia (or, for that matter, statutory rape), and he spent a decade plus feeling ashamed of it. And now, he has the gall to accuse Kincaid of pedophilia for believing that our culture sexualizes children. Children, like the sixteen year old English student who "an open face and slightly swelled features and pale blue eyes that seemed wide with surprise and also moist with deep recognition of the nature of their surprise...[and] looked like she was on the brink of physical ecstasy."

What's that Kincaid wrote about scapegoating?