Changing History

[Update/07July: My apologies to those of you who came looking for this post and couldn't find it today. Blogger must have suffered a glitch, or maybe I fucked something up. In any case, it disappeared for a period of time, and I'm not sure how long. I hope it's back to stay now.]

I felt a twinge of a dilemma last week when a commenter on my May 21 blog post, "Oh, for one good sex blog," asked that I remove the post. It's a post about sociopaths in general and the late Susan Crane Bakos in particular. An alleged family member (I do believe she's a family member, but I don't know for sure) wrote to me and to at least one other blogger and asked us to delete our posts because she didn't want her family's younger members to find out about Crane Bakos like her 16-year-old daughter already had. You can read her request and my response in the comments section of that post.

I sympathize with her. Even a whiff of a sociopath as one passes by on a city sidewalk is enough to cause hours of nausea and diarrhea in those of us who recognize their particular evil stench. Who wouldn't want to cut the rot out of their family tree -- at least on the interwebs -- if they could?

I had to decline though. Sympathy aside, I can't see any benefit. I've only pulled a post once -- coincidentally it too was about sociopathy -- and it didn't change anything. The history stayed the same, and the story ended the way it was going to end. I might as well have left the post on my blog, because a significant number of readers related to it and thanked me for writing it. Because it rang true for them, it was healing. Taking it down did nothing.

It's important .... I'd go so far as to say it's part of the healing process for those of us who have been afflicted with a sociopath to share our stories. We need to affirm that these people exist, that they share certain traits, and that they really do make life a living hell for nice, normal people. And it doesn't hurt to warn other people so the sociopath can't take advantage of them too.

 Deleting them from our stories won't make them go away though. The only way to make them go away is to stay the hell away from them. Susan Crane Bakos is (allegedly) dead, so  I guess her family won't have to deal with any more of her craziness. Except in their family history.

That's not the only reason I didn't delete the post though. The other reason is that I didn't like the way the argument was made. If I were analyzing it with one of my classes, we'd be looking at it through the lens of Aristotle's appeals -- ethos, pathos, logos -- and that of argument fallacies as well. As I said in my comment on the post, I don't like feeling manipulated, and this was a terribly manipulative request.

First, I don't like the purely emotional appeal of using the children. A 16-year-old is old enough to understand that Aunt Suzie was a bad person. By her own admission, she was a bad person. Few families get to avoid having at least one rotten piece of fruit dangling from the tree.

She's also old enough to understand that somebody else's behavior has nothing to do with how she should feel about herself. Why would she be embarrassed by what a crazy old woman did? She didn't do it herself.

Better to sit her down and give her the truth, no matter how painful it is. And tell her if she gets near anybody who acts like that to run away and never look back. Sociopaths don't change. They just learn to manipulate their victims better over time.

Second, colleges don't google the thousands of applicants they get every year. Even if they did, they don't give a shit about what an applicant's elderly crazy aunt wrote years ago on her website. I can't think of a worse appeal to make to a college English teacher than this one. I can understand that the family cares; colleges don't and won't. It's a slippery slope argument, and an obvious one at that.

I'm bothered as well that some information about these children is hidden. It appears to be an equivocation, one of those almost-lies that people use to manipulate a situation. The implication is that these poor, suffering children are grandchildren, isn't it? But the commenter doesn't really say what their relationship to Bakos Crane is. What is certain is that the adults in the family are sick of her and her antics, and they want her erased from the blogosphere. Fair enough. Equivocating about the children causes fatal damage to the argument.

Finally, I also have a problem with the ethics of this request. I don't trust someone who asks me to change history. I know too well how painful family secrets can be, and how devastating it is to find out your whole family lied, supposedly to protect you. No fucking thanks. Tell the truth and deal with that shit. Lying about who Susan Bakos Crane was is just as dishonest as what she did. The reason doesn't matter.

Look, I appreciate that Shawn put her name out there and offered to discuss her request. I didn't contact her. If she is who she says she is, I pity her for the hell she must have gone through being related to that woman.

Hell, I feel so sorry for her, I'd give her a guest post right here on this blog if she wanted to tell her side of the story. I'm sure she has one. Sociopaths are rabid users of good people. I have no doubt Aunt Suzie will provide hours of painful retelling of stories around the potluck table about the holidays, weddings and funerals she ruined for everybody else.

But I'm still not willing to help anybody change history. I won't whitewash a sociopath, not even by deleting a post. Once was enough. It just gives them power when we're so embarrassed by their behavior -- or so ashamed they fooled or used us -- that we try to erase the truth and act like they are just normal people. Like us.

They aren't normal. We shouldn't pretend like they're normal by only talking about or remembering the times they were able to fake being caring humans.

This time the post stays.