[UA] UA this one!

[Timothy Ferguson]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ua-admin at lists.uchicago.edu [mailto:ua-admin at lists.uchicago.edu]On
> Behalf Of Chad Underkoffler
> Sent: Wednesday, 1 August 2001 12:49 AM
> To: Unknown Armies
> Subject: Re: [UA] UA this one!
>
>
> > Date: Sun, 29 Jul 2001 08:13:59 -0500
> >> SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - Three Boy Scouts dug out chunks
> >> of a 190 million-year-old set of dinosaur tracks and
> >> threw the rocks into a reservoir, irreparably damaging
> >> the prehistoric find, a park ranger said.
> >
> > "I mean, it's not like they beat up a homosexual or
> > something.  THIS is a serious breech of our principles!"
>
> I have to say, this anti-homosexual kick that the BSA is on
> truly bothers me.

Odd, isn't it?  Our Scouts haven't had this for years, because we know
Baden-Powell used to get headaches if he and his wife slept in the same room
(He slept on the verandah).  He also had romantic relationships with men -
particularly his roomie from the army.  He wrote such odd letters about the
fun they had shopping for curtains.

I'm not saying they had sex - I am saying that like a lot of men in the army
he had close friendships that look romantic to the modern eye.  He also sent
begging letters to the other side of the Mafeking siege when his special
friend was captured.

> It makes me ashamed to have been a Scout.

BP was pro-nudism in men's clubs, and thought there were few things better
for boys than skinny-dipping.  We also have documents where he seems to
request access to photographs of naked boys in classical poses.  There's no
proof this involved sex - he looked at them much the same way modern people
look at those books of naked babies that the author suggest are fine because
nude babies are asexual, but to a modern person his sexuality includes all
sorts of repressed, odd variants - most notably his marriage to Olave
Baden-Powell because she was so androgynous, so like a boy, both in her
build (willowy) and her attitude (Her father had wanted a son and, lacking
one, had raised his daughter to ride and shoot and muck about in boats,
calling her what he thought was the female form of "Olaf", the name he'd
picked for his son.)  Oddly, he was big on the strong woman, the fighter.

He also loved his Mummy so much that when she decided to change his surname
(adding the Baden-) he went around and bullied his brother Baden into
accepting it.  (Yes, Baden Baden-Powell - it was to sound more German, just
like Victoria and all of the really classy people.)

BP firmly believed none of his friends could be paedophiles, even though we
now know one of the people who ran Gilwell for him was.  He thought that
they were gentlemen, and thus disinterested in sex of any type, much like he
was.  He suffered a real retardation of his maturity.  He asked Olave when
they were courting if she was "his Wendy?", because he thought of himself as
Peter Pan, and even named his son Peter.  He idolised the "boy-man" as he
called it, the man who never grows up.

The thing which odds me is that because I was archetypically a perfect
scout, and then a leader, I'm a product of the "character factory", a system
designed to mimetically clone Baden-Powell.  In a way I'm glad he wasn't the
fascist he's now made out to be by BSA, and was instead a classic English
repressed goofball and a demonstrably self-aggrandising charlatan.

It's just so refreshing to know the Perfect Man was even more f*cked up than
I am.

> This
> principles I learned in my days seemed to have promoted
> tolerance for different sexualities just as it did for different
> religions. (The anti-atheist thing bothers me, too, btw.)

American Scouting has been screwed up by its reliance for leadership on the
Mormon faith...this isn't a slam on the Mormons.  They can believe what they
want, but the rest of the World Movement is marching into the political
left, stressing third world development and the love of shiny new technology
and BSA and Australia are doing this odd rustic thing, pretending to be
living in an era before the invention of the aluminium tent pole or the
hexamine brick.

(OK, so guess who I did my honours thesis on...)


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