The epistemology of violence

In his article in The New York Times today, James Kirchick has this tidbit near the end, and I might have to do a whole essay on it:

The conflation of “beliefs” and “violence” is a menacing sleight of hand, the predicate to a regime of prior restraint and criminal prosecution of those who espouse whatever the government of the day considers harmful and hateful ideas.

The UN warns the United States to be alert for ethic violence.

Today we became a second world country.

Tough Guise in Paris

I loved the movie La Haine, though I admit a bit of trepidation after reading that it was intense. The last movie that I watched that I described as “intense but completely worth it” was American History X -- also an investigation into violence, race relations and their utter breakdown, scapegoating, and the cost we pay as a society for not doing better. I completely loved that film too, but I wasn’t certain i was up for another viewing.

La Haine shows us a completely different view of Paris than the one we see in film, on postcards, in travel brochures, in depictions of and aspirations to sidewalk markets and cafes. The Paris we explore with Said and his pals is gritty, dirty, depserate and desolate, one with ample idle time from unemployment and little in the way of possible meaningful engagement. My favorite character by far is Hubert, the foil on all the pull-yourself-up talk that we hear in any Western country -- save up, do well, work hard, be your own man. Hubert did that, getting out of a life of crime just in time to avoid a prison sentence, saving two years for a gym that is burned down just before the film opens. Hubert is shown as placidly boxing with his punching bag, acceptance and resignation his tools for handling devastation of his life’s purpose.

His companions, especially Vinz, seem completely opposed to this way of living and looking at the world and their section of society. By contrast, they seem hell bent on respect, convinced that it can be won at the end of a gun, through the right haircut, and to the beat of a tough guise that comes complete with fashion and haircuts as well as swagger.

The misogyny is so pervasive it almost fades into the background. Talk of your sister, your mother, that girl peppers every conversation and even the graffiti to the point that it seems ludicrous that Said takes it seriously enough to be offended. And yet we all are, of course. Women appear to be the only ones who have jobs or homes to share -- the grandmother sits at her dining table while Said and Hubert and Vinz make disrespectful remarks, take food without manners, and shove off to activities unknown.

I loved that the film was black and white, an homage to art films while also nodding to the stark divide amongst those who belong and those who don’t in Paris. There is a subtle moment when the primacy of the Real Parisian shows up during the scuffle on the rooftop between police and the assembled youth. A young man, clearly a True Parisian, is talking with the decorated officer when another officer interrupts. With all the arrogance and authority that only the French seem to have, but have in buckets more than any other country ever, the youth turns to the interrupter, puts his hand up, and tells the non-Parisian not to talk to him, saying “I don’t know you.” There is a moment of tense silence where everyone gets on board, and then the Parisian youth resumes talking with the uniformed officer as though the interruption never happened. There are no consequences for the group, given that the Parisian smoothed things over, but it’s clear that this gathering isn’t wanted, isn’t warranted in the dominant view, and is highly suspicious, despite being guilty of nothing more than indolence, unemployment, and a penchant for hot dogs (which should be a culinary crime in my opinion). The message is clear: No matter what activity is going on, status reigns in Paris.

The film goes on to show us that American machismo culture’s promise of respect through violence and aggression holds sway in Paris no less than in Chicago. The contagion of toxic masculinity continues to spread as we see disenfranchised young men scramble from drugs to guns to find the love and belonging they clearly crave.

Scapegoating is a huge part of this toxicity, on both sides of the fence. Events such as the Charlie Hebdo shooting, the nightclub attacks, and the Champ Elysees incident of last week only heighten the sense of insecurity and widen the fear-driven social divide. The disenfranchised citizens scapegoat the police, while the ruling class tightens its control on definitions of power, authority and identity, leaving less and less latitude and legitimacy for those who don’t make the cut.

Defining the attacks as acts of terrorism blinds us to the chasm of inequality that drives the young men to violence, leaves an extreme arm of an otherwise peaceful religion the most attractive choice for droves of young men who feel left out, cut out and left behind. One is reminded of the IRA in the 1980s, a desperate use of violence for legitimacy and a future that included them by men who had little to do with the tenets of Christianity. The European man today, no less than the northern Ireland man of forty years ago, is struggling against a narrative of nonexistence, one in which he must shout to be heard, where he owns nothing but his tough posture and a gun. We can all agree with Ben Ahmed: “C’est catastrophique.”

A Farewell to Arms: Hemingway

Let’s start this rant with a reminder that Hemingway, a man’s man in the expat days at the freewheeling turn of the twentieth century, was a mosaic of the masculinity narrative: a hard-drinking, heavy-smoking, gun-wielding, suit-wearing, elephant-killing, womanizing force on safari and rolling through the salons of Paris, casting his personality into all the nooks and crannies around him, filling the space and sucking out the air. But for all his seeming success, prowess and power, he was a deeply unsatisfied man, one who would eventually face a firing squad of his own making as he shot himself, ending a life that had become too painful to continue.

If not even white men with enough privilege to leave home, live off the income of their families while carousing in foreign lands can stand the message we are all of us supposed to live and uphold, what chance does anyone of the rest of us ever have?

The contemporary art and literature are rife with discontent and disgust at the modern, pre-crash era, from Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby to any number of works decrying corporate man, to the newly crafted voice of fear and uncertainty that is science fiction and all the mistrust of the dehumanizing elements and aspects of technology that the genre allows us to explore. The twenties wasn’t just fast and loose in the dance hall or on Wall Street; in Chicago and New York, the Italian mob was fighting tooth and nail for power over turf and transit and taxes, the usual purview of governments from time immemorial.

After the crash, those in power, most notably the FDR’s brain trust, the advisors who helped craft the New Deal, saw that traditional American adherence to the hands-off capitalist model, more narrative and rhetoric than actual policy or procedure, had taken the whole of the country from bad beginnings to worse ends by leaving too many holes and not providing any safety nets. The frontier was closed by the department of the interior in 1890 and the era of Industrialization was officially king, but within a generation, policies that favored the factory and its owner were decried as downright un-American, a callous framework for abuse and neglect that were actively sought to be ferreted out by the New Deal.

Today, we have again been seduced by the narrative and rhetoric of self-sufficiency and every man for himself, only now our society provides even less support for the corporate man or the manufacturing Joe. If we do not quickly reverse our course, it will again take us from bad beginnings to disastrous endings, and the writing is on the wall in the blood of black men, police officers and elementary school children of how destructive a path this is.

“Healthy masculinity means hope for the world in places where we have long felt only hopelessness.” One wonders if Hemingway would have liked more options. For all that he succeeded in a society where Wilde was condemned and imprisoned, it seems that Hemingway was the least happy and satisfied of his gang, the most interesting people in the world, while Wilde was vaguely bemused by everyone else’s confusion. While he may well have lost sleep and worried privately, Wilde certainly managed to hold the public veneer of one who was far removed and likely above the fray of common concerns such as adherence to the social code that others crafted long before he was born and to which he had never subscribed.

Oliver Wilde’s weapons remained, as ever, his words and his kind, unflappable demeanor in the face of hostility, confusion, fear, accusation and incarceration. Ernest Hemingway, steeped in the masculinity narrative that expressed itself through guns, wars, knives, domination had little in his toolbox to deal with his life off the page. Failed marriages, lost friends, rejection of family and country doesn’t disappear with a pulitzer, and he ultimately turned to the only tool that made any sense to him.

We absolutely must stop shooting. Ourselves, as well as each other. We need to stop the war on men, the war on women, the war on the poor, the war on the weak, the war on the old, the war on children. We need to stop. One century is long enough.

#StopShooting.

The Color of Destruction and Power

It must be uniquely difficult to be a Black Man in America. He is not seen as having a family, but as being a threat, a walking, breathing cornucopia of violence, lust and theft. Everything you have, we are told, will be taken away by the Black man if he comes near. He will take burn your home, steal you money and screw your women as he passes by. We are so threatened by adult Black men as a culture that we feel justified in shooting them, caging them, rejecting them.  When a Black man comes into the office, we subconsciously clutch our wallets or purses a little tighter, pull our children a little closer, find a reason to have him leave or to leave ourselves. For those of us in the dominant culture, we might only feel that way once or twice, if ever, but for Black men, they feel it everywhere they go -- it is in the air they breathe, and it smells of mistrust and ostracization.

And Black communities don’t provide much solace. Even at home they are suspect, given the label of ne’re-do-wells, junkies, baby-daddies. The American Black family in the twentieth century and thus far into the twenty-first, has formed around the absence of the Black man, coming into its own as best it could with their adult men behind bars or dead when they weren’t running around with the gangs that would seal their fate.

Is it any wonder that Black men, and the adolescents who look up to them, adopt the cool pose? Stripped of economic and educational opportunities, unable to secure housing for themselves let alone for a family, they are seen as parasites on the women-run Black community. How attractive it must be to take the accusations and condemnations and make them claims, reveling in the destructive power that every Black man carries with him, no matter where he goes, even when he sleeps. I imagine a hurricane reveling in the destructive power and glory of itself, sweeping all before it, laying waste to the little people with their little buildings and crops and schools and cars and laundry on the line as though life is normal, ever, anywhere, as if it ever could be, laughing in pure joy of unleashed power, never apologizing.

When we crafted this hostile narrative of destructive power, we left the Black man only one option for defining himself in relation to society and the world. America in the twenty-first century can do better, but only if we hold our eyes firmly on the truth and acknowledge our role in the violence that continues without much to hold it back, pervades every aspect of civilized interaction, from the manufacturing floor to the classroom to the boardroom, survives us all, generation after generation.

All of us have reparations to make to the Black man, those of us in the dominant culture and those in the Black communities as well. We owe Black men a safe space to release this image, to lay down the tools of destruction and relax out of the cool pose he has adopted for survival. We owe it to each other to change the narrative to one of inclusion, trust and the real possibility of being husbands, fathers, brothers, sons, uncles, instead of rapists, thugs, killers, junkies, and thieves.

Identifying Male Privilege

Male Privilege: What is it, how to recognize it at work in our daily lives, and understanding why it matters are difficult tasks at best, and, as undertakings by people who are trying to juggle grocery lists, soccer schedules and career demands, can seem out of place as well as overwhelming. As a culture and as individuals, we often want the end result but are uncertain of how to go about the process of it all, and, even when we are willing to do so, carving time into our schedules to focus on what often seems to be esoteric pursuits is difficult at best, and can be deemed selfish at worst.

When discussing the essay in Voice Male that pointed out that only 28 percent of speaking roles in the top-grossing hundred G-rated films of all time were female, my partner asked me, “Yeah, but has that actually gotten me anything?” I confess that I was a little gobstruck, both by the question and the intellectual framework it revealed.

Several weeks ago, as our family sat playing cards and eating lunch after a morning at the gym, I heard a disturbance outside that sounded distinctly like aggressive, belligerent name calling. I am a firm believer that name-calling matters a great deal, and that it is a village issue, not a matter between two arguing parties. When I stepped outside, the language became clear: “Wetback! Job thief! You don’t belong here!” A man was standing in front of his truck, yelling horrible things at my Hispanic neighbors, two doors down. I couldn’t help myself; I had to intervene -- there are children in almost all the houses on this street, and besides: it’s the right thing to do. But I had the better sense to call to my partner before skittering down the front steps to the sidewalk. Once there, I called to the man, and told him that he needed to leave, that he couldn’t say things like that here. He postured, told me he had a right to say whatever he wanted. I nodded and repeated my demand that he leave. I had, for the moment, forgotten that I have no power over him in his mind, that, in fact, he believes he has power to act with impunity not only towards immigrants, but towards women as well. He stepped towards me just as my partner came down the steps and stood, silent but firm, behind me. And then, something magical happened: The whole conversation changed. The aggressor modulated his tone to be softer, stepped back a bit toward his truck, wound down his tirade, left altogether.

Has the privilege of patriarchy gotten tall white men anything? Of course it has: just by showing up, they set the reality and the tone; they are the standard to which we must all conform, and it is without a doubt that they have unearned income and status simply by accident of birth.

Until I had my partner at my back, I was only effective in adding to the victim count of this racist rant, and was putting myself directly in the cross-hairs of active violence. I forget that I am not the same as everyone else, that I do not stand on equal footing, that by virtue of being present I am not safe in broad daylight, that I am not afforded the latitude to demand that people leave if they can’t behave well. It’s a lesson I hope I never learn, and one I want to actively keep from my daughter. White men need to understand more than ever that those of us not in the privilege zone actively require their support and their protection as well as their acceptance. We all need to understand that privilege is a tool kit that only some of us have access to but that all of us deserve, and we need to share the tools more evenly until everyone has a kit of her own. Tall white men need to show up, stand behind the movement, give weight to the voices as well as participate in conversations of their own. There is a social implication and mandate that goes along with the age old sense of nobility, and we have lost sight of the responsibility of privilege in our efforts to dismantle the patriarchy thus far.

"A Gun Buying Death Spiral"

We, as a nation, have collectively lost our minds when it comes to guns.

Commentators suggest Americans are now trapped in a gun-buying death spiral, where mass shootings spark talk of lax gun control measures, prompting many to believe they need to go out and buy more guns. Then there’s another mass shooting, and on it goes.

How many guns do we need? Well, that's getting harder and harder to figure, since the fear is getting larger every day. With guns, as with money, it's hard to know how much is enough. Brent Nicholson's hoard in South Carolina is confounding police.

“This has completely changed our definition of an ass-load of guns,” said Chesterfield County Sheriff Jay Brooks. Six weeks after the discovery, officers are still cataloging the weapons, many of which have proved stolen, and the final tally is expected to be close to 5,000. “I don’t know if there’s ever been (a seizure) this big anywhere before,” Brooks says.

Gun violence is persistent, pernicious, and pervasive, with over 355 mass shootings this year alone, more than one a day. The conservative right, speaking on behalf of the NRA, wants us to believe that the answer to this insane situation is to make guns easier to buy. Last month we used guns frequently, but not necessarily wisely.