Public life Subscriptions

Joseph Klahr / Public life Subscriptions @ Leroy’s Text by Jasminne Morataya December 2025 / Los Angeles, CA The young child which lieth in the cradle is both wayward and full of affections; and though his body be but small, yet he hath a great heart, and is altogether inclined to evil… If this sparkle be suffered to increase, it will rage over and burn down the whole house. For we are changed and become good not by birth but by education… Therefore parents must be wary and circumspect; they must correct and sharply reprove their children for saying or doing ill. — Robert Cleaver and John Dod, A Godly Form of Household Government (1621) There are stories the public claims it cannot bear, and there are grisly, brutal stories which the public consumes eagerly, efficiently, and without disturbance. These categories are unstable and frequently overlap. The same images, the same facts, the same injured bodies move back and forth between refusal and appetite depending on how they are framed. Declarations of incapacity (such as “I can’t look at that”, or “that’s too much”) function less as limits than as techniques, allowing the public to absorb what it claims to disavow, while preserving a vaporous sensation of innocence. In public life, cruelty towards children is managed through two complementary responses: the performances of refusal and of consumption. Together, they structure how this cruelty is made permissible and repeatable under the guise of virtue. This oscillation is starkly visible in the case of Genie, the feral child subjected to extreme isolation in early life and later to intense scientific scrutiny. I was young enough to feel the story before I could analyze it. She had spent the first 13 years of her life in a back bedroom with the windows sealed shut, strapped to a chair during the day and fixed into a straitjacket-like harness at night, with very little in the way of visual or auditory stimuli. Her mother was strongly discouraged from talking to her, and seldom did. Her father, a former machinist, responded to the infant’s noises by barking violently in order to silence her. She had not been able to acquire any language during her period of imprisonment, which ended in 1970. In the years following her discovery, Genie became the object of intense scientific interest. Linguists, psychologists, neurologists, and psychiatrists converged around her at Children's Hospital Los Angeles in East Hollywood, all of them evidently seeing a rare and lucrative opportunity to study language acquisition, cognition, developmental plasticity, the whole nine yards. The language Genie struggled to acquire was treated as evidence: proof of what could still be recovered, what damage might yet be reversed. Genie’s life became visible primarily through data points and transcripts, charts, syntax trees, and case reports. a. Sheila mother coat. b. Small two cup. c. Little white clear box. d. Pretty blue car. e. White big boat. f. Or Sheila mother purse. But as the attention on her case waned and the funding dried up, private and professional disputes fractured the research team. Genie was moved between foster homes and care facilities, and eventually lost her newfound abilities of speech. The very institutions that had framed their involvement as rescue withdrew once the promise of a grand scientific discovery was diminished. What remained was a person whose formative years had been shaped by confinement, followed by an equally invasive form of exposure, neither of which she had chosen. The arc of her story reveals a familiar pattern: extraordinary care mobilized at the moment of spectacle, followed by quiet abandonment once the moral or intellectual yield declines. What fascinated me about Genie was not only the extremity of her deprivation, which was nearly total in scope, but the consensus that gathered almost immediately around her afterward: that whatever followed her discovery, however invasive or extractive, was justified by necessity. It was for her own good. By learning to speak, she would be saved. By being studied, she would be helped. By being watched, recorded, tested, and interpreted, she would be given a future. The story of Genie showcases a few of the enduring fictions that undergird public life: that exposure is the same as empathy, and that withdrawal can be rendered morally neutral once usefulness has been exhausted. What is taken is framed as necessary and corrective, and what is lost is written off as collateral. Harm becomes an acceptable byproduct, justified by the claim that damage must be done now in order to prevent something worse later. In this way, interventions that promise salvation are not exceptions to institutional harm but its preferred form. They initiate a cycle in which exposure authorizes extraction, extraction produces exhaustion, and exhaustion licenses disappearance, allowing institutions to act with moral certainty while remaining insulated from accountability to the lives they irrevocably alter.