Speaking Of (True) Nefarious Stories… And Discernment
Outtakes and various other sundries
To combine two recent topics on this blog, I started reading, Zero at the Bone: The Playboy, the Prostitute, and the Murder of Bobby Greenlease
last night. It is the story the kidnapping and murder of a 6 year old boy in 1953, Bobby Greenlease. I have become interested in police tactics and the justice system in this era and the blurb on the book was incredibly promising.
Bobby was killed shortly after he was kidnapped but the kidnappers, a man/woman team received $600,000 in ransom money, the highest ransom ever paid at the time. The perps were caught right away (this is all in the blurb on the book), and the couple was executed together (in the same gas chamber) just 81 days after the murder. So that’s the story, I cracked the book to read it and I couldn’t even get through the prologue without having the problem.
Bobby is picked up at his Catholic school on false pretense. How they (or more specifically, the woman) were able to just go to the school and get him is interesting but then they put him in the car, drive out a ways, try to strangle him (rope too short) so they shoot him in the head. This all takes place in a matter of minutes but what kills me is the author details, Bobby’s emotions through this… ordeal and I ask you this: How the hell does the author know how, Bobby felt?
Bobby felt like this, Bobby felt like that. Bobby thought this and Bobby was thinking that. Excuse me? This is bullshit and it’s just plain distracting and nauseating to read. Why not just state what you know and NOT state things you have no way of knowing you arrogant son of a bitch! Yes, that’s right. This actually pisses me off and meanwhile the soldier is reading about Joan of Arc and also going crazy.
“I can appreciate her research,” he says of, Larissa Juliet Taylor, author of The Virgin Warrior: The Life and Death of Joan of Arc. She does have her facts straight and I am glad she visited all these places. It is really nice to have all this information but the conclusions she draws are absolutely moronic. They’re beyond moronic, they’re stupid as hell. She projects herself onto, Joan! Why does she do it, P? She forgets the era, she forgets all common sense. She felt like *this* when she was, 15 so Joan must have felt the same way. She’s 15 and she’s bored at home. She doesn’t want to be at home so she does what? She decides to take over the French army? The woman thinks you can become a military genius in a few weeks! It’s not God or anything… it can’t be anything miraculous, that’s just not possible. I do like her facts. Her research is excellent but I sure wish she’d quit interpreting them because she is dumb as hell. She’s got no idea what she is talking about and I wish I could talk to her because if I could I would tell her this: YOU ARE A MORON. How can your research be this good and then you come up with this crap..?”
Back on topic to relate to my personal nefarious stories, I have been in extreme circumstances (like Bobby) and I have been in them repeatedly. With a career in Special Forces, the soldier has also been in extreme circumstances and both of us can actually tell you what our emotions were and I guess what? They are NOTHING like what is found in the imagination (and projection) of some psychologist with a PhD!
That’s right. The thinking and the conventional wisdom on these topics is so misguided as to be asinine. They take one statement someone like me might make and add eleven of their own ideas to make an even dozen and then serve up their pile of crap book as if it is factual.
If you can’t discern when you read, the more you read the stupider you are going to get. So says my Mars Mercury.
21 Responses to “Speaking Of (True) Nefarious Stories… And Discernment”
beth – very similar to how I feel. It’s deeply offensive. People with no experience take the experience of someone like me and overlay it with their ego and ultimately their ignorance.. ::shakes head:: I just can’t stand it.
Yeah, I have the feeling people might do that to me after I’m gone (no idea why) and sometimes it bugs me. As long as people will admit that they don’t really know for sure, they’re just guessing about someone’s state of mind, that’s ok. But when they try to set themselves up as authorities, that’s annoying.
The same goes for people who put words in animals mouths and assume they’re small humans. Just oversensitive, I guess?
“If you can’t discern when you read, the more you read the stupider you are going to get. So says my Mars Mercury”
*chuckles*
People feel like they have to inject emotion into an already-compelling non-fiction story. I’d put money on the fact that the publishers and editors pushed for that kind of ridiculousness. “Biography.” “Reality TV.” “Documentary.” These are told through someone’s eyes. You gotta pay attention to whose eyes they are to get the real story 
I’m trying to read that book right now & the research & background on how France was politically laid out is really good but… yeah.
Beth, my friend Louise said: “Don’t anthropomorphize animals; they hate that.” ::snicker::
I have no tolerance for the “It appears”, “It seems”, “She/he probably” comments from “experts” on those TV biography-type shows. Clearly, they have no first-hand (or even second-hand) knowledge of the thoughts/feelings/emotions of what the subject really thought.
Bravo!
…it’s a trend throughout a lot of media… instead of presenting facts they’re more interested in telling you what to think about them. drives me batty. which should be practicing critical thinking, not regurgitation.
sadly, that’s not what my students wanted to be doing.
primary lesson of saturn in virgo… give me the facts, please? …and take into account whatever preconceptions and biases the author may be writing from. everyone has them, so recognizing them is important in interpreting the material.
and, it can be an ultimate insult to pretend you feel someone else’s feelings for them… regardless of the situation, but, it seems especially so for trauma.
@satori Scorpios especially hate being anthropomorphized. Oh wait…we’re already human! Believe me? It’s ok if you don’t…I wouldn’t either!
Agree completely on the thought processes involved in extreme situations.
The people who do this always ascribe very complex, human emotions. What if Bobby were calling these people out on being incompetent? What if he were in fact a complete monster of a kid who was telling the kidnappers that they were stupid, and daring them to try to kill him?
Now I am falling into the trap, but it was for effect.
In my experience the thoughts that go through my head during a crisis are anything but what most would ascribe them to be. I tend to thrive under those circumstances, and marvel at the stupidity of others reactions.
What kills me is people would rather make the stuff up then talk to people who could actually tell them. It’s like the ultimate masturbation. It’s like screwing yourself with someone else’s life.
I especially like the sociopathy experts who have never met a psychopath in their life. Or alternately they think they see one on every corner. These doctors need doctors as far as I’m concerned.
I seriously had someone tell me they had taught a psychopath to feel remorse and they were now going to teach them to feel remorse “even faster”.
I have to be in rooms with people like this. They talk of their genius and I think, “1. 2. Buckle my shoe. 3. 4. Shut the door. 5. 6. Pick up sticks..”
I do this with my poker face on, what the hell else am I to do?
Adding to this, didn’t mean to publish it so quickly-
This tends to lead to what I imagine must be a meniacal smile on my face. I am not enjoying it, but finding the absurd humor in it all. I always attributed this to my leo.
A good example was the reporting on the Tiger Woods smash up over the holidays. I was out with friends when I first heard about it.
The story I got was that he had had a car accident in front of his house and his wife had to pull him out the the window of the car.
That narrative made no sense. My first honest thought was that she was beating him up and he tried to leave. I stated this, and everyone thought I was nuts.
Facts that I did know at the time- Car accident at night in a gated residential community. Broken back window on the big SUV.
Does anyone know how hard it is to pull a person though a window in a car?
Another clarification, I sound like a know it all, that was not my point, even if I can be a know it all.
My point was that there are any number of stories that can be supported by ‘facts’. Even people who are there make mistakes remembering, and often try to cast themselves in a better light.
I was not there, I have no first hand knowledge of either the people or the situation. I can imagine the cops responding must have had giants smiles on their faces.
This happens in real life all the time. How often are people who are accused of a sensational crime, judged guilty before proven innocent, or innocent before proven anything but, based solely on how they are reacting? The Olympic bombing suspect, Jon Benet Ramsey’s parents, the Atlanta woman who drove her car into a lake with her two children inside, etc. etc. Sometimes our projections end up being true, but sometimes not.
Do you recall the Canadian teen murderers? One girl was lured away from her Catholic school by Karla Homolka. There is no need to wonder what they felt since there are tapes of the poor children being tortured. Later she (Homlka) testified against her lover Paul Bernardo telling all. A truly horrifying story.
Everyone wants to know how a historical character felt, but why feed us information we know isn’t true? I don’t like historical fiction.
I wonder why she did it, Karla Homolka. I like Matthew the Astrologer’s post on it. I think astrology can give us some better inside into these kinds of things:
http://matthewastrology.blogspot.com/2009/03/is-compatibility-always-good-thing.html
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how annoying. Especially the one about Bobby. That’s almost- I don’t know, it almost like erasing someone’s individual personhood to insert yourself.
And Joan of Arc- how can you do that with someone who not only is a stranger, but is a stranger from another country hundreds of years ago? I don’t care if you’re a medieval scholar, you simply have no idea what Joan’s home was like, nor her mind.
The old saying “Biography lends a new terror to death” is right.