by Th. Metzger
In a police state, crude and unwieldy, the populace fears the police. But higher up the chain of political evolution, fear is not just a tool of the thug with a badge and a truncheon. It is amorphous, almost gaseous, the air we breathe.
Fear, like nerve gas, paralyzes some and destroys the minds of others. It reduces us to simpering, sniveling children. Fear is a vaccine, inoculating us against autonomous thought.
What better way to short circuit reason, burn out logic and self-control than to steep us in nebulous fear? And what better way to toxify the atmosphere than to convince a nation that its children are in grave danger? Rumor, innuendo, paranoid fantasy, the photo of the so-called crime scene flashed so fast before your eyes that all you can see is a daub of crimson and a cryptic, supposedly Satanic, symbol: these are more insidious than an occasional nightstick party.
When the sentimental and naïve cult of the child is confronted by images of ultimate evil -- drug-addled murderous pervert devil-worshippers -- fear saturates the air like the miasma of plague. Competent, reasonable adults become dim-witted and docile as sheep. “We fear -- we believe what we’re told -- we obey.”
In schoolroom lectures, seminars, sermons and sensationalist books, the word went out: Satan is on the loose again, ravaging the land, ravishing the young. And on TV, reporters blew their noxious breath on the flames, stoking the coals to a high hysteria.
Who better than the 1980’s prince of self-satisfied sleaze, Geraldo Rivera, to sum up the mania? “There are over one million Satanists in this country. The majority of them are linked in a highly organized, very secret network. The odds are that this is happening in your town.”
The warning bells rang in church towers, and the populace, like medieval peasants, swarmed out to hunt and kill the invisible enemy.
Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority had ushered their senile spokesman into the White House. AIDS killed more in a week than authentic Satanists killed the entire bleak decade. Rambo refought the Vietnam debacle as a muscle-boy wet dream. Schwarzenegger murdered his way into America’s heart, the new Aryan Avatar. TV’s sermonizing shysters bilked millions from their viewers and the biggest theft in human history -- the great S & L scam -- reached its abysmal peak. Pop culture metastasized into every cell of the body politic and the sirens screamed “Satan is here, Satan is back, and he wants your kids.”
Yes, the eighties were a dismal decade, but the bad clothes and worse music were a pimple as compared to the cancer that seethed in America’s guts.
In the wake of Reagan and Falwell and their ilk, a form of hysteria gripped the country and through thousands of nutcase conferences, TV schlockumentaries, college-level courses in “health education” and the inexhaustible grindings of the vast idiot rumor mill, the hysteria was kept alive. Satan’s minions were stalking the land, searching for new kiddie victims. They thirsted for blood, hungered for child-meat, lusted for fresh virginal flesh.
And this imbecilic hysteria, which would be funny if hundreds weren’t still in prison for their imaginary crimes, reached its tentacles into every state, every city, every school, and every fear-mired soul.
Satan-hunters claimed repeatedly that nearly 60,000 Americans were killed every year in secret occult rituals. This figure is greater than the yearly suicide and murder tolls combined. But the absence of reason and proof were no stumbling blocks for the self-appointed guardians of public safety. One source of supposed victims were the so-called altar-babies, secretly conceived and born to Satanic breeders, specifically for sacrifice. No birth certificates and no record of a missing child. But a far greater threat was kidnapping and “near-term babies murdered by their own mothers in the abortionist’s clinics and then quietly taken by the Satanist nurse or doctor for his or her own uses.”
Cult cops such as Mitch White of the Beaumont, California, Police Department claimed that “95 percent of all missing children are victims of occult-related abductions.” This, at a time when the F.B.I. recorded 200 to 300 stranger kidnappings a year nationwide (the rest being child custody tug-o-wars). But why did no mutilated, violated corpses come to light?
Bizzare explanations abound. Some say that cult members burned the bodies in portable high-temperature ovens. According to some, the bodies were buried in double-decker graves under other, legitimately buried bodies. Another explanation: the bodies were disposed of in a crematorium by a mortician cult member. Some say the offenders cannibalized the corpses, while, according to others, Satan used his magical powers to make the bodies disappear.
Such statements make plain the fundamentalist underpinnings of the anti-cult cult. Though some nonreligious DAs exploited the fears to get reelected and some TV ratings whores used the panic to prop up their careers, Satanic hysteria is at its roots a religious movement.
If one truly frightening thing happened in the ’80s, it was the way paranoids and hate-mongers got slick, high-tech and media savvy. They were no longer unwashed yahoos and products of inbreeding. They learned the subtle and sophisticated ways of manipulating the populace: TV, mass mailings and later, the Internet. And though their mania was clearly religious in nature, in order to make it sell to the general, nonfundamentalist population, it was cast in terms of sadistic crime, not blasphemy and sin. You didn’t need to believe in a real, personal Satan to be terrified of Satanists. It doesn’t matter if the Lord of Darkness exists, as long as his vicious acolytes do. They were real; they were “widespread, powerful, insidious, secretive and virtually impossible to detect.”
For obvious reasons (no body, no crime) very few arrests were made of accused ritual murderers. But hundreds of men and women were arrested for an infinitely easier crime to prosecute: sex abuse. The little victims were everywhere. And even if there was no evidence that would stand up outside a kangaroo court, even if the claims were ludicrous (kids spirited away on secret airplane rides, biologically impossible couplings, implanting bombs in kids’ stomachs, chocolate-covered feces, etc.), even if not one frame of kiddie porn has ever been found that shows children from the ritual abuse cases, still the fear-mongers had their so-called victims.
The most prominent instance was the McMartin preschool abuse case. This longest criminal proceeding in U.S. history managed to convict no one, but it stirred up such a frenzy of fear that dozens of copycat cases sprung up, in some instances putting totally innocent people in prison for life. Eager DAs, therapists who used the Satan-scare to milk millions in grant money from the government, cult cops like Sandi Gallant and Ted Gunderson who made paranoia pay, were more than willing to travel and speak, to give lectures and flog books about the devil-worshipping conspiracy, to serve as “expert” witnesses at trials where ridiculous claims, tissue-thin evidence, and such novel techniques as interrogating preschoolers with devil puppets and dismembered Barbies, sent dozens to prison.
The McMartin case begins with a motif that recurs endlessly in this wretched tale: a strange interest in other people’s rectums. Judy Johnson, the initial fingerpointer and hysteric, was quite simply obsessed with her son’s anus, taking him to the hospital for imaginary rectal problems and making repeated inspections on her own. A woman with a long history of mental illness (she later told the police that someone had broken into her house and sodomized her dog) Judy Johnson used her rectal obsession as a kind of psychic lightning rod, directing much of her anxiety, hatred of medicine, and paranoia toward the offending orifice.
On August 11, 1983, she came to the delusional conclusion that her son had been sodomized at the McMartin preschool. From this seed grew the 28-month-long McMartin trial, ruined lives, the blossoming careers of Satan-hunters and the flourishing of protective agencies such as the Children’s Institute International (C.I.I.).
Looking back a decade and a half later, it’s obvious that Johnson was a pathetic, delusional drunk. She claimed to have divine powers, threatened people with a shotgun, and ended her life in a pool of vomit, dead from liver failure. Yet she was the prime accuser on which the case was based: tales of rampant sexual abuse, child pornography, Satanic rituals and cannibalism. The extent of the investigation that followed -- which gleaned not one single scrap of incriminating evidence -- is astonishing. Hundreds of families were interviewed by dozens of investigators (all at public expense). Twenty one homes, seven businesses, 37 cars and even a National Park hundreds of miles away were ransacked for evidence. Thousands of pornographic movies and photos were checked over, searched uselessly for the face of any children who claimed to have been abused. The F.B.I. and Interpol in Europe were called into the case. Excavations were made under buildings, looking for the secret tunnel system where Satanic rituals were thought to have taken place. Known pedophiles and supposed Satanists and a psychic were questioned. The result? Absolutely no sign of abuse. But, of course, this didn’t stop the crusaders from targeting new enemies of purity.
Judy Johnson’s obsession with blood rites and the “goat man,” candles and her son’s anus might seem now to be the stuff of bad jokes. But local police and the state of California took her very seriously. In 1983 and 1984 over 400 kids were extensively grilled about alleged sex crimes and for each of these interviews, the C.I.I. billed the state $455.
In the McMartin case, and dozens that followed, the rectal and genital inspections constituted real sexual abuse. However, it was doctors of medicine, not the dark arts, who performed the bizarre rites. They stripped hundreds of children naked, stretched and measured their private parts and then took close-up, high magnification photos. Many of these crotch-shots were then shown in courtrooms, a perfect example of the moral watchdogs becoming, or acting out, exactly what they claim to most hate. Like the Meese Commission’s total immersion in rough sex, bestiality and fecal love, the Satan-hunters dove deep into their own private pools of filth.
Dr. Bruce Woodling, whose testimony was crucial in many of the sex abuse cases, developed the “anal wink test” to determine if a child had been sodomized. In the exam room, he pulled apart the child’s buttocks and touched the rectum with a cotton swab. If the anus came apart -- “winked” in Woodling’s testimony -- this was “proof of sodomy.” With his anal wink test and by sticking glass tubes in kids’ rectums, Woodling convinced juries and judges that Satanists had indeed abused their innocent little victims. In one case, pictures of little girls with their vaginal lips spread wide apart by Woodling’s fingers were waved at a jury like placards at a football game. In a rancid-smelling theater full of scummy old men, this would be the vilest of kiddie porn; in a court of law, it is scientific evidence.
Similarities to the Salem witch-hunters’ search for the devil’s marks on supposed slaves of Satan are impossible to ignore. In Puritan Massachusetts, but hundreds of times elsewhere too, women were stripped naked and inspected by divines and learned men to find “witch’s teats” or other secret marks where the devil had fed on the witch’s vital juices. An egregious example is Rebecca Nurse, aged 71, who was stripped and publicly examined. The witch-hunters found a “preternatural excressense of flesh between ye pudendum and anus,” causing the judge to demand a guilty verdict from the hesitant jury. Nurse was hanged by the neck as a confirmed minion of Satan.
Naked children on display, human sacrifice, bestiality, ravening murderous rage, cannibalism and anal violation: these are endlessly recounted as the evil fruit that springs from Satanic seeds. For fundamentalists, Satan is real, a perfect repository for all their fears and intolerable impulses: rebellion (especially against God), sex for pleasure, aggression, disgust with the family, self-defilement, furious hate and utter selfishness. Satan is the monster who rises from the sink where we’ve flushed away all our dreads and damned desires. With a black face, he’s the weed that grows in foetid nightsoil. Or cloaked in crimson, he’s theatrical, throbbing in the light of his raging ego, demanding that we look. With goat’s legs and hooves, horns and bristly fur, he’s a perfect image of our repressed animal natures.
Satan-hunters, in short, see him everywhere because they can’t bear to see him in themselves.
But America has always been the promised land of repression. Why did Satan make a comeback, talons sharpened and eyes lusty-bright, in the 1980s?
Rumblings of his return could be heard in the 1960s. He slithered into the limelight in such films as Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist. The Manson murders too gave Satan an updated, real-life face. Stephen King and his legion of imitators found an eager audience for their literary equivalent of a flu virus: causing chills, nausea, faintness, and the shakes.
Oddly enough, feminism, or one flavor of feminism, helped to call the Prince of Darkness from his abode. Before kids were supposedly disappearing into secret tunnels for Satanic abuse, they were appearing on milk cartons and shopping bags. In 1979, six-year-old Etan Patz vanished in New York City. Not long afterward, the most famous kidnapped child since the Lindbergh baby -- Adam Walsh -- was snatched and beheaded. A grassroots movement, made up largely of women, developed, claiming to struggle for child safety. But a deeper impulse was at work. The obsession with child abuse and abduction is a perfect outlet for female rage: it’s highly emotional, gives the impression of doing something very valuable without shaking up the male-dominated status quo. It substitutes hatred for the generically-male child molester for hatred of fathers and husbands. Women in child-saving crusades have it both ways: their traditional nurturing role is rewarded and simultaneously they can fight the oppressive, sexist family in the name of saving it. Aiming their spleen at traditional male role models, crusader mothers claimed that children were being abused by Satanists wearing police uniforms, by secretly devil-worshipping Christian clergy, and repeatedly said that “high-ranking officers in the U.S. military” were also involved in the conspiracy.
A strange coalition developed to fight the devil. Fundamentalists joined with child-saving activist moms. The twelve-step movement lent its particular combination of egomania and self-loathing. Books such as Sybil made victims into celebrities. In an atmosphere of crumbling social order -- gays and real feminists challenging sex roles, mainstream churches losing members to cults and new age cliques, horrific violence everywhere in the news and pop entertainment -- the malefic presence of Satan was bound to reappear.
It took only a few hysterical first-hand accounts to set off the entire avalanche of fear and recrimination.
The first, however, was published almost ten years before the McMartin case hit the headlines. Mike Warnke’s The Satan Seller is a shabby, preposterous, and by current standards rather tepid call to arms. Claiming that he’d been a part of a Satanic cult in the mid-sixties, Warnke (now know mostly as a preacher and evangelical comedian: “Jester in the King’s Court)” paints a picture of drug use, sex slavery, brainwashed “illuminati” and, of course, bizarre and disgusting rites. It’s probably generous to say that Warnke’s book is half outright lies and half junior high school power fantasy. An indepth investigation by the Christian magazine Cornerstone outlines all the fabrication, twisted truth and feverish figments that Warnke cobbled together to build his story. One example will suffice to show the degree to which Warnke will remake his past. At a time when this self-styled High Priest of Satan supposedly had waist-length hair and six-inch fingernails, a serious drug habit and 1,500 crazed devil-worshipping followers, a photo shows him with his fiancée in a slicked spaz-boy haircut and classic mid-sixties nerd suit. His ex-wife, acquaintances and friends from the time all agree that Mike Warnke was a great story teller, but the contents of The Satan Seller are just self-serving and highly lucrative fantasy. He even tried to get two friends to sign affidavits affirming that everything in this book was true. Baffled and insulted, they refused.
Warnke made a bundle on his book when it came out, and when the cult craze hit ten years later, he was ready to exploit the fears he’d helped stir up. He appeared on a 20/20 report called “The Devil Worshippers,” and in his traveling road-show cum ministry talked frequently of a mythical boy named “Jeffy,” who Warnke claimed to have saved from Satanists.
“Supposedly, Jeffy was this little boy who had become a vegetable, because all the Satanic abuse he’d had,” explains one of Warnke’s former employees. “The story was used to raise money to ‘help all the Jeffys in the world so there wouldn’t be so many Jeffys.’ Mike would say ‘What if your child was sent to a preschool and this happened? How’d you like this to happen to your child?’”
The ploy raised tens of thousands of dollars. Of course, there was no Jeffy, but in the Ronald Reagan say-it-often-enough-and-it’s-true mode, Warnke’s fabrications become part of the cult scare mythos.
As America’s soon-to-be Robot Prez stumped around the country in 1980, tapping into the country’s phobic fury, a book called Michelle Remembers appeared, and with it the full-blown Satanic abduction and abuse scare was upon us.
Michelle Smith’s autobiographical tale of torment was the first to make an explicit link between Satanism and missing kids. In it, she claims to have been imprisoned by cultists in 1955. Then followed an amazing parade of grisly high kitsch: five-year-old Michelle forced to smear feces on a Bible, locked in a cage full of writhing snakes, being raped and buggered with candles, watching the murder of other children, trapped in graveyards and tombs, and -- my favorite -- having a Satanic tail and horns surgically attached to her body. Finally, however, Little Michelle’s faith in God defeated the cultists and they had to release her. She conveniently forgot the entire year of torture until memories of it were awakened by her therapist, coauthor (and sharer in royalties) Dr. Lawrence Pazder.
A poster child for false memory syndrome, Smith conjures a life of secret horror out of a fairly mundane existence. There’s almost no evidence that any torture could have taken place, let alone did. But in the overheated atmosphere of the early 1980s, evidence and logic were in very short supply.
We have Dr. Pazder to thank for coining the term “ritual abuse,” and as a devout follower of the Roman Catholic Church, he’s perhaps responsible for transplanting the grotesque images of violation and redemptive torment from the pulpit to the psychiatrist’s office. Selling well, especially to folks who responded to its Catholic damnation/salvation motifs (it even includes photos of the Virgin Mary’s apparitions), Michelle Remembers set off a Klondike run of ritual abuse gold diggers. Suffer the Child, Satan’s Underground, The Edge of Evil, Satan Wants You! and a book for preschoolers, with large print and big colorful pictures called, Don’t Make Me Go Back Mommy: A Child’s Book About Satanic Ritual Abuse (showing kids being whisked off by robed and hooded teachers to backwoods Satanic rituals) and dozens of others reached a market eager for thrills and paranoid fantasies. Stephen King may have sold better, but for real devotees of disgust and titillation, he was nothing compared to the real thing.
In 1984, tens of millions of dollars were diverted by Congress for child protection programs. How was this money spent? Not surprisingly, the loudest voices in the scare ended up with new, high-paying jobs in the therapeutic/government bureaucracies or had barrels of money delivered to their doors to beef up anti-abuse efforts. For instance, the National Center for Child Abuse and Neglect had its nearly two million dollar budget quadrupled, with $146,000 earmarked for more interviews with McMartin “sex-ring” victims. The C.I.I., in 1985, received $350,000 from the state of California to fight ritual and sadistic child abuse. Certainly the authors of the panic-driving screeds did well. And TV talk shows and documentaries about abuse got great ratings too. But money is only one part of the puzzle. Deeper, and in a way more disturbing, forces were at work.
For conservatives, the normal target of paranoia -- the federal government -- was hard to hate in the 1980s, because their man was in the White House. The economy congealed at the same time greed and success were touted as basic American values. Instead of demonizing the president for the social chaos and collapse of values, conservatives went for a more obvious target: Satan himself.
Lunatic right-wingers howled about bloody murders and violated rectums. McMartin tunnel excavation leader Ted Gunderson buddied up with crackpot militiamen and claimed that demonic forces were at work in Washington. He also told Geraldo Rivera that Satanists had set up a secret “rest and relaxation farm” and were involved in political assassination. Not surprisingly, ultra-conservatives pointed the finger at the C.I.A., convinced that the agency was involved in ritual abuse of kids and the creation of preschool age Manchurian Candidate murder drones. The usual suspects -- big government, jews, and secular humanists -- were at work to destroy our children. But as a novel twist, intelligent sea-life was also implicated. The C.I.A. was, according to breathless revelations, using trained dolphins to rape children underwater -- the brainchild plan of a malign Hasidic doctor named Greenbaum.
Echoing the old Protocols of the Elders of Zion anti-Jewish slander, a book called the Wicca Letters was supposedly discovered by a San Diego cop. He, of course, never showed the original in public, but his transcriptions describe a Satanist convention in Mexico, where witches, cult leaders, and devil worshippers from around the world gathered to create a “master plan to conquer the world by infiltrating daycare centers and corrupting America’s preschoolers.”
Cult cops, self-appointed to fight the Satanic threat and keep the U.S. pure, spread out across the country, stoking the fires under their own careers, but more importantly, adding another dose of paranoia and hatred to the already-poisoned American psyche.
Many cult cops were evangelicals and fundamentalists and their obsession with the demonic invasion was the outgrowth of their belief in Satan and his intention to destroy America’s youth. Though not all Satan-hunting police touted the Wicca Letters as authentic, many did do workshops in which the “features common to ritual abuse cases” were spelled out. Among these one might find: sticking needles into children’s feet, cutting up Barbie dolls, playing with feces as a kind of demonolatrous fingerpaint, using the American flag and the Bible as toilet paper, and the use of “occult” implements such as a chalice, capes and robes, liturgical candles and sacrificial foods. From the small town lecture circuit to presentations to F.B.I. agents in Quantico, on credulous newspaper writers, college professors and local lawmen, the traveling occult cops dumped their great steamy loads of hysteria. Setting up displays to wow the believers and convince the skeptics, self-appointed cult experts showed off collections of skulls, candles, makeshift altars, alchemical and occult texts, Dungeons and Dragons figurines, and out-of-focus photos of supposed ritual sites. Sandi Gallant, devil-hunting cop from San Francisco, reveals the level of her forensic sophistication with such statements as this: “Satan’s goal is to defeat God’s plan of grace and to establish his kingdom of evil in order to ruin man. Satan needs men and women alive to accomplish his work for him, because he is a disembodied spirit.”
Perhaps Gallant knows more than she’s letting on. Satan may indeed need men and women. But if the number of real Satanists is a thousand times smaller than the crazed army of Satan-hunters, if cult cops have an infinitely larger collection of occult accouterments than any deluded cultist, if child-protective activists are the ones with the real passion and devotion to the idea of Satan, then who exactly might Gallant be talking about?
And what was the result of the Satanic scare of the 1980s? Bigger government bureaucracies, more ammo (real and spiritual) for the police in their efforts to exterminate all deviants. But most important is the higher level of helplessness and dread. Americans are now even more fearful, distrusting each other and often themselves. Americans are weaker, more dependent and more apt to run mewling in sheeplike stampedes. Fear -- narcotic, addictive, poisonous -- is churning through the American bloodstream.
And somewhere, I’m afraid, Satan is smiling.
The Satan Sellers
What better way to short circuit reason, burn out logic and self-control than to steep us in nebulous fear?
This imbecilic hysteria would be funny if hundreds weren't still in prison for their imaginary crimes.
Dr. Bruce Woodling, whose testimony was crucial in many of the sex abuse cases, developed the “anal wink" test to determine if a child had been sodomized.
Somewhere, I’m afraid, Satan is smiling.
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