Hey, have something I wrote for an X Files anthology!

Paddock Calls

Die Hand Die Verletzt is a satire taking aim at pious people who just go through the motions, people who perform faith as a virtue but don’t heed faith’s demands.  The episode draws a comparison between Christianity and its inversion.  The Parent Teacher Committee at Crowley are Satanists.  The barb is how little difference it makes.  They fret about blasphemy and bad language; they just do it in the name of Satan.  If you can swap Satanism for Christianity, and retain the social structures in which Christianity flourishes, what does the content of Christianity matter?  

This is a critique of the way religion, while employing moral and metaphysical language, often plays the role of gluing together repressive, reactionary, and hierarchical social structures.  The school implies a wider critique, since school reproduces the structure of society, sorting people into roles, getting them accustomed to turning up every day and submitting to authority.  That’s why schools are such a flashpoint in the ‘culture wars’, with reactionaries obsessing over keeping their religion dominant in classrooms.

Into the school comes a witch.  Some have seen her as demon or devil.  But she fits a different template better.  ‘Paddock’ is an ancient name for a toad.  Toads fall from the sky at her advent.  A toad is a traditional witch’s familiar.  

She could be a member of the “greatest criminal conspiracy in history” that Scully rejects.  This conspiracy is the stuff of the 80s ‘satanic panic’, especially the belief in widespread satanic ritual abuse (SRA).  The hysteria saw many accused of membership of cults which supposedly perpetrated horrifying crimes against minors.  All these accusations were baseless, the product of social anxieties interacting with religious mania, media hype, and a fad for dubious ‘therapy’ which ‘recovered’ abuse memories.  Add credulousness and overzealousness on the part of parents, police, and prosecutors, and you’ve got a classic moral panic.  People ended up saddled with memories of horrors that never happened.  Other people ended up on trial and/or in jail for crimes they didn’t commit.  The comparison to the Salem witch trials is obvious and apt.  

The episode riffs on this.  Ausbury’s stepdaughter Shannon tells a tale straight out of the accounts of people who believed themselves victims of satanic cults.  But her memories are, to an extent, accurate.  Her parents really did include her in their satanic rituals.  It’s just that, by then, they’d already become ‘Christmas and Easter Satanists’, picking and choosing which bits of the rituals they wanted to do, inflicting no physical harm on her.  Shannon melds her memories with, in Ausbury’s words, “that crap from Geraldo and the tabloids”.  Geraldo Rivera’s TV special about satanic abuse probably helped escalate the hysteria.  This is the social background to the episode.  And the episode’s attitude to SRA is as incoherent as the show’s attitude to the similar UFO hysteria it is based on.

But this incoherence is only a stepping stone to the episode’s deeper concern.  Mrs Paddock’s true faith, and her ability to commune with actual diabolical forces, is a wrathful assault on the comfortable, bland, bourgeois hypocrisy of not only the lapsed Satanists but also, by extension, of America.  The witch, a figure used to persecute uppity or inconvenient women, has also been reclaimed as an icon of rebellion.  This ambiguity was always present.  Terry Eagleton wrote of Shakespeare’s Macbeth that “[t]he witches are the heroines of the piece… by releasing ambitious thoughts in Macbeth, [they] expose a reverence for hierarchical social order for what it is, as the pious self-deception of a society based on routine oppression and incessant warfare”.  One of the witches in Macbeth has a toad familiar called Paddock.  

This is what Paddock does in the episode.  Like the witches in Macbeth, she rejects authority, infiltrates society without being of it, plants suggestions, dissolves oppositions (dead and alive, for instance), and vanishes into air.  She punishes the PTC with a suitably infernal method: contrapasso.  Like the sinners in Dante’s Inferno they are punished according to their crimes.  Refuse to sacrifice?  Sacrifice is taken.  She leaves hypocritical authority and fake piety in ruins.

Paddock brings diabolical justice.  She kills Shannon to punish her parents.  She kills a teenage boy for mirroring the empty rituals of his elders and holding a ceremony just to “get some”.  But she fits into a long tradition of the villain as the radical rebuke to conventional morality and social stability based on injustice and hypocrisy.  This is the value in the Satanic.  Eagleton says “[O]fficial society can only ever imagine its radical 'other' as chaos rather than creativity, and is thus bound to define the sisters as evil.”  

Ausbury says that he owes his comfortable life as a big fish in the small pond of small town America to his faith.  But Ausbury and his cohorts welshed on the deal.  They got in bed with the system their faith rejects and opposes.  Paddock punishes them for being interchangeable with Christianity.  We can take some satisfaction in her vengeance.  The piety of comfortable America has caused, or been complicit with, much suffering.  The SRA panic, for example.  It has supported and benefitted from many bigotries and oppressions.  Many of today’s scariest people come from comfortable America and spout the virtues of Christian civilisation.

Scully reads an antisemitic screed from the Nazi paper Völkischer Beobachter that she finds on the (very early) internet, and points out the similarity with the modern day Satanic panic.  Both imagine a huge conspiracy involving secret murders and sacrifices.  Antisemitism isn’t just the oldest bigotry, it’s the oldest conspiracy theory.  In the McMartin Preschool case, one of the most famous irruptions of the SRA panic, young children were inadvertently coached into describing Satanic abuse by staff, occurring in tunnels under the building.  No tunnels existed.  This might remind us of the equally non-existent cellar under the Comet Ping Pong pizza joint in DC, where reactionary online hysteria imagines Hillary Clinton and others engaging in ritual abuse of children.  Today’s internet is a breeding ground for hate.  As Charlottesville 2017 showed, it has circled back to the Jews, as well as finding new targets.  And it still works by contagious hysteria, paranoia, and conspiracy theory.  It’s irrational, but the hypocrisy it rejects - that of failing neoliberalism - is real enough.

Paddock is an ambiguous figure.  We should rescue the revolutionary core to that which gets consigned to the category of villain.  We should embrace the witch as avenging angel.