Tag: Identity

06Nov

The Lurid Tale of Talhotblond

I must shower after reviewing this yucky story. In 2005, a jealous 46 year old machinist and Sunday School teacher named Thomas Montgomery killed a younger coworker, Brian Barrett. The two were in love with the same cyber entity, an 18 year old blonde girl named Jessi, who had the handle “talhotblond” on a video game chat room. Montgomery had been posing as a 20 year old marine combat veteran. His posts apparently exhibited some troubling “rage issues” and he expressed the desire to “slide all the snake slowly into his lady.” (His Sunday School pupils will likely need some therapy after this).

Many of the creepy twists and turns of the story I will pass over, but they are the subject of a documentary and a recent article by a Larry Getlen in The Daily Beast. As police investigated the murder, they were led to get in touch with Jessi, the young blonde. However, they quickly discovered that although Jessi was a real person residing in Oak Hill, WV, she had no clue about the communications. Her photos and identity were actually being used by none other than her own mother, 45 year old Mary Shieler. Mary had taken revealing photos of her daughter and used them to fuel a fantasy life online.

Mary, who is now divorced, apparently expressed no remorse, and said to her daughter during the proceedings, “Why don’t you just get over this?” Getlen concludes:

The final irony to this case and talhotblond is that behind the well-matched youthful sizzle of the Jessi and Tommy personas lay another, equally well-matched pair: the two malcontented strangers who created them. Montgomery and Shieler were both lonely people who reached their mid-forties with their best days behind them, who then created deadly deceptions in the hopes of recapturing the glory of youth, and of finding real intimacy by fervently denying their true selves.

Few stories better deserve the appellation of our recurring category, “Reflections of the Fall”

18Jun

The Tragic Tale of Mr. Marsh

On Sept 26, 2010, a man was discovered hanging in the basement of the D.C. home he shared with his new wife. The man was an ace attorney who had been part of the botched government prosecution against Alaska senator Ted Stevens, and he was now facing a long investigation of his own role in the fiasco. In a fascinating article entitled “Casualties of Justice” the New Yorker magazine detailed the tragedy of Nicholas Marks:

Marsh woke up and went downstairs to the basement. At around three in the afternoon, Bermudez went to check on him, but he wasn’t in front of the television. He had hanged himself near the washer and dryer. There was no note.
Bermudez still lives in the home she shared with Marsh, and his voice still greets callers on the answering machine. “I don’t think I understood the depths of how the allegations affected him,” she told me. “He took his duties and his ethical obligations very much to heart. Even thinking that his career would be over was just too much for him. The idea that someone thought he did something wrong was just too much to bear.”

I find myself quoting pastor and author Tim Keller perhaps a bit too often these days, but this tragic story reminds me of some wise words he has said about work:
One of the scary things to me about this whole approach is that the culture’s approach weirdly enough is supposed to be liberating but it’s actually quite crushing. … But today in our modern culture, your work becomes your identity. How much money becomes your identity. It’s not just what you do but who you are! And that will crush you. (sermon transcript available here).

By all accounts Marsh was a very smart young attorney who had a bright future. He allowed a singular focus on career to become the entire locus of his identity, and when something went wrong it derailed him. This temptation to make an idol of career, to pin godlike hopes on it, is a common temptation, particularly in our culture. This is a tragic mistake. We are of course to work, and furthermore to “work as for the Lord”, giving our best efforts, striving for excellence; work is a good thing, but we shouldn’t let it become an ultimate thing. Our identity doesn’t come from what we do: “Our identity in Christ is received, not achieved.” (Keller)

The article about Nicholas Marsh concludes:

… Although Marsh’s reputation had suffered a severe and largely deserved fall for his actions in the Stevens case, skilled lawyers have rallied from far worse professional disasters. There is every reason to believe that he would have gone on to a distinguished career, and perhaps even to the judgeship he sought. But something in Marsh could not let the official system for discipline play out, and instead he imposed an unfathomably harsh punishment on himself.

Read more at The New Yorker.

07Mar

White Woman Insists She is Transracial

Rachel Dolezal now styles herself Nkechi Amare Diallo. The white civil rights activist and former NAACP leader had lied about her past, claiming to be African American, which allowed her to rise to become a lecturer in Africana studies at Eastern Washington State University, and president of the Spokane chapter of of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She lost both of these positions, and gained a heap of notoriety, when she was outed by her estranged parents in 2015 for passing herself off as black. (Subsequently, investigations have suggested that 8 hate crimes she alleges to have been perpetrated against her when she was living in Idaho are also fraudulent).

Defiant to the end, Ms. Dolezal has borrowed from the debate about gender identity, insisting that race isn’t purely biological, but can be chosen.

For her part, Diallo is doubling down on her insistence that she is “transracial” — a woman who is the product of two white parents but identifies mentally, emotionally, physically and culturally as black. “I feel that I was born with the essential essence of who I am, whether it matches my anatomy and complexion or not,” Dolezal told The Guardian earlier this week. “I’ve never questioned being a girl or woman, for example, but whiteness has always felt foreign to me, for as long as I can remember. I didn’t choose to feel this way or be this way, I just am. What other choice is there than to be exactly who we are?”

Read more at NPR.

Ms. Dolezal now has taken to heart the idea of “making a name for yourself”, and has legally changed hers to something else. She feels that this name reflects her true self. Identity trumps biology. Biology is therefore something malleable, to be altered, rather than accepted. We are self made.

Christians believe that we are not self made, but rather that our identity comes from God. Of supreme irony here is that Ms Dolezal’s new West African name means “what God has given.”