What is it to ‘rectify’ something? The dictionary says it is “to make, put, or set right; remedy; correct”.[i] That word was on my mind as we experienced a harrowing end to last week. As it happened, I was also watching a television serial on Netflix called ‘Rectify’. I’ll come back to the television series a little later, but first, I want to explain why things went downhill.

It started with an article in The New York Times. I am sure you have read about the more than 150 young women who chose to testify, in public, about the abuse they had suffered at the hands of one Larry Nassar, the former USA Gymnastics Team Doctor. One of those abused by him, Rachael Denhollander, wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times on ‘The Price I Paid for Taking on Larry Nassar’[ii]. It captured so much of that appalling episode: It brought tears to my eyes when I read it, and the tears kept coming back when I typed out this extract:

“I lost my church. I lost my closest friends as a result of advocating for survivors who had been victimized by similar institutional failures in my own community.

I lost every shred of privacy.

When a new friend searched my name online or added me as a friend on Facebook, the most intimate details of my life became available long before we had even exchanged phone numbers. I avoided the grocery stores on some days, to make sure my children didn’t see my face on the newspaper or a magazine. I was asked questions about things no one should know when I least wanted to talk.

And the effort it took to move this case forward — especially as some called me an “ambulance chaser” just “looking for a payday” — often felt crushing.”

The New York Times article is short, so please read it. It’s not just the abuse, it’s the lack of support, the lack of care by others. What kind of church can’t reach out to a member, whatever the issue? What kind of friends turn away? What sort of organisation is USA Gymnastics? Rachael Denhollander is a remarkable and strong woman, but no one should be expected to be that strong. And while she and all the others have spoken out, so far it appears likely only Larry Nassar will be punished. What about the management of USA Gymnastics? Resign from the organisation, then, problem solved, move on. Another case of men looking after themselves?

The more I read, the more I kept asking myself, how can we make this right? That question is all the more pressing when the issue is only partly about punishment, as it is also about the damage to the self-esteem, the self-confidence, the sense of worth of those young women. How can you rectify that?

I was already feeling dispirited. Two days before, there had been yet another shooting at a school. More children dead. At the same time a story had broken in the UK. The ‘Presidents Club’ had held its annual fundraiser for charity. Two journalists from the Financial Times decided to attend under cover. What they found was that this was an excuse for many of the 360 men taking part to behave badly. No women can be members of the Presidents Club; however, 130 women were hired as hostesses.

Their role was made clear from the start:

At their initial interviews, women were warned by Ms. Dandridge that the men in attendance might be “annoying” or try to get the hostesses “pissed”. One hostess was advised to lie to her boyfriend about the fact it was a male-only event. “Tell him it’s a charity dinner,” she was told.

“It’s a Marmite job. Some girls love it, and for other girls it’s the worst job of their life and they will never do it again … You just have to put up with the annoying men and if you can do that it’s fine,” Ms. Dandridge told the hostess.

Two days before the event, Ms. Dandridge told prospective hostesses by email that their phones would be “safely locked away” for the evening and that boyfriends and girlfriends were not welcome at the venue.

The uniform requirements also became more detailed: all hostesses should bring “BLACK sexy shoes”, black underwear, and do their hair and make-up as they would to go to a “smart sexy place”. Dresses and belts would be supplied on the day.[iii]

And so the story went on. Revealing dresses were supplied, and yes, many of the men were pigs, unashamedly pawing these hostesses, trying to get them drunk, or take them up to a hotel room.

#MeToo has exposed so much, and these two stories captured many of the issues. What men expect, what they believe they can take, why they do whatever they want. Gross, greedy and grabbing. Men feeling entitled, selfish men, men with guns, men treating women as property, men who look to the current President and see avariciousness, selfishness, lying and “pussy grabbing” as the ways to behave. Is everything going downhill, backwards, and falling apart?

Stories like those two are the newsworthy ones. They are important, highlighting unacceptable behaviour, but they can’t convey the other side of these issues, the day-to-day moments of small abuses, small cruelties. We can’t address and solve every one of these, but we can be made to think about them, and how we should act to reduce their incidence. Novels provide one powerful source of insight into the ways of people; and, sometimes, television can do the same.

I don’t watch live to air television. My day is structured, from my breakfast muesli (the Peter Sheldrake recipe!), orange juice and a mug of strong coffee, through my morning and sometimes afternoon sessions writing, alongside preparing for teaching and mentoring. Towards the end of the afternoon, I need a break, and treat myself to an episode from a television series on Netflix. Right now, I am watching one episode a night of ‘Rectify’; I’ve just finished the third season, with one more to go. I had seen the first two seasons a while ago.

It is a compelling, pressing drama. Like the two other great series I loved, (Hill Street Blues and The Wire), Rectify puts everything under high resolution scrutiny. To misleadingly steal from Marx and Engels: “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind”. [iv] Great television because it is about the realities of people close up, their challenges, the real mess of their lives, the bars people put around themselves, their desperate search for reassurance, and their unwillingness to confront mistakes and misunderstandings.

Rectify swirls around a character who finds it difficult to talk, to explain his feelings, clumsy with other people: his stumbles and silences throwing everyone else’s actions, comments and arguments into vivid relief. It’s compelling, yes, but also unrelenting: it’s not easy watching.[v]

Briefly, Daniel Holden has been in prison for nineteen years, on death row in Georgia, following the brutal rape and murder of a young woman. Then DNA evidence appears to clear him, and he is released. Nearly catatonic, he has survived solitary confinement by reading and meditation, to the point he is lost inside himself, and hopelessly ill-equipped for the world outside prison. After nineteen years, the unfamiliar challenges of the family he left behind swirl and crackle around him. It is as if some unexpected subterranean force has erupted, cracking and breaking the fissures and faults on the surface, while simultaneously creating new tensions and stresses.

The nineteen years had allowed everyone to accept what had happened: now they have to reimagine their lives. His mother has remarried; his new step brother, Teddy, thinks Daniel will try to take the family business away from him; and his sister, the only one who believed in his innocence, is drinking heavily, and is in an uncomfortable affair with his defence attorney. Daniel meets Teddy’s wife, Tawney: she tries to convert him to Christianity, and he listens, while sensing there is some kind of trouble between her and her husband. By the end of the first season, Tawney is spending time talking to him, while Teddy’s resentments are growing, and even his mother’s new husband, Ted, is suspicious of him. Daniel is beaten up by some locals, as his prosecutor from nineteen years earlier keeps asserting his guilt: meanwhile, the local Sherriff keeps following up inconsistencies in his case. And all that was in the first season!!

But Rectify isn’t really about the story. The events are the props for a complex, subtle and at times quite depressing series of insights into the human condition, to life in the south in the USA, and into the miseries of people dealing with one another imperfectly and insensitively. It is about a world in which you can’t “make things right”. I had to stop after the first two seasons because it was too hard to watch. Now, I am locked in again, hoping that some things will be sorted out, while hoping they won’t! Why not? Perhaps some issues will be addressed, but I don’t want this outstanding series attempt to make the past ‘right’, because that’s impossible.

In life, you can fix machines that don’t work or breakdown, but you can’t fix people. Daniel can’t be ‘rectified’, nor can the young athletes abused while training at USA Gymnastics be taken back to the way they were: they may get some satisfaction at seeing those responsible punished, but that won’t obliterate what happened, nor how they feel about it. In the same way, the stories resulting from #MeToo reveal hurt and emotional damage that cannot be remedied.

Rectify is a word that has fallen out of common use. Is this because we are unable to remedy or correct what happens? Can we rectify anything? As we hurtle on destroying our environment, denuding our biosphere and damaging our planet, can we put it together again? We may be able to address some of the physical challenges, but when it comes to people, is everything beyond repair? No longer a practicing Christian today, I still hold to the principles I learnt from the Anglican church: the ethics of care, love for one another, equality, and justice. Those beliefs are fine, but they don’t tell me how to ‘set things right’: “fine words butter no parsnips.”

[i] You can choose your source, but I used an online dictionary <http://www.dictionary.com/browse/rectify>

[ii] <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/26/opinion/sunday/larry-nassar-rachael-denhollander.html>

[iii] < https://www.ft.com/content/075d679e-0033-11e8-9650-9c0ad2d7c5b5.

[iv] OK, that was appropriation. Marx and Engels were talking about class relationships, of course, but the wording is so apt – and powerful: K. Marx and F Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Chapter 1.

[v] < http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2183404/>