"There is yet another kind of cruel trickery woven into Ednaism that is designed to defend allies and knock detractors back on their heels. The criminal allies of the Ednaist are presented as innocent victims while any accusers are barraged by all manner of egregious allegations that deflect from said allies' culpabilities. While the tactic itself is not new (campus police were caught discouraging rape victims in this manner), it is the lengths to which an Ednaist will magnify and distort the scenario that leaves the social scientists perplexed. Perhaps some anecdotes from my college days would help to illustrate how the Ednaist makes this work.

When my twin brother, Joe, and I were sophomores at SIUe back in 1985, we still received an allowance of $20 (each) from Edna each week. She would attach two $20 bills to the refrigerator for us every Friday before going to work in the afternoon, which we would claim when we got home from Edwardsville. This system worked well until the ritual caught the attention of my older brother, Jeff. He was Edna's everything. Jeff could do no wrong in her eyes despite everyone else seeing that he was doing nothing but wrong. Jeff was Edna's criminal ally.

One Friday evening when we came home from Edwardsville, we looked for the money, but it wasn't there. We called Edna at work and asked if she'd done something else with the money. She assured us that she had 'put it on the fridge' earlier in the day. We looked everywhere for it to no avail. The only thing that was out of the ordinary, aside from the missing money, was that Jeff did not do his usual routine of waiting around for Edna to get home so that he could bum money from her for gas/cigarettes/drugs/etc. We noticed that he left early and in a hurry, but we didn't think much of it at the time. While there was no way to prove that Jeff stole the money (though there were no other possible suspects in the house), Joe decided to make the mistake of postulating to Edna that it was quite likely that Jeff had taken the money. That was a mistake that neither Joe nor I would ever forget.

Edna immediately lashed out, calling Joe a liar and informing him that he had no proof that Jeff had done it. Joe stupidly went forward in laying out his evidence against Jeff, and that sent Edna over the edge. She decisively decreed that Joe must have stolen the money to frame Jeff to make him look bad. Joe and I looked at each other thinking it was some kind of sick joke. But, of course, it was not. Neither Joe nor I received another allowance from Edna for at least six weeks after that even though we were travelling to and staying in Edwardsville each week for college. We did so with no money in our pockets at all. Edna was satisfied that this was a fitting punishment for the transgression of saying a bad word about Jeff. No investigation of the incident was ever initiated. It was just normal life under the rule of Ednaism."

Here are a couple of bonus blurbs on Ednaism:

"As Jeff dug himself deeper into his cocaine habit back in 1987, he decided to fund his habit by stealing the family motorcycles one by one (there were four of them). By the time Max noticed, the garage was bare of everything- including the go-cart that Max and I had built together. When Max came into the house and announced that everything was gone, all Edna said to him (and us) was: 'It doesn't matter. You weren't using them anyway.' That was the end of that. These expensive machines were gone, and there would be no investigation. But, Max proved he was smarter than Joe. He kept his mouth shut when he was supposed to do so. Max only pointed out the truth when he knew he was safe from Edna's wrath."

And,

"Perhaps, the coup de grâce of Jeff-related Ednaisms came when Jeff's house was raided (for the third time) on March 30, 2007. Max and Edna, adamant that Jeff was not a drug dealer, kept a police scanner active in their house just for the heck of it. On that March morning, Edna heard on the scanner that Jeff's house was under attack, so she and Max jumped in their minivan and dutifully raced right down to the scene. When Edna saw Jeff being led out in handcuffs, she exclaimed to the officers, 'You can't arrest my son! He's too lazy to sell drugs!' House and Senate Republicans still have a little ways to come before they can achieve that level of Ednaism."


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