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Small Huge Things

"The second victim, Krystle M. Campbell, 29, was at the marathon finish line to cheer for her boyfriend..." slnm.us/SZXWki7
— Salon.com (@Salon) April 16, 2013

Here's the small huge thing. Every bomb, every single one, every single where, cuts the thread of life like this.

Every mass shooting. Every mass poisoning. Every gas attack. Every bullet fired under the Geneva Convention. Every black site.

Every time, there is a world of people around the target, the victim, the injured, who go into that interruption with them.

And every single bomber, every single terrorist suicide bomber, wants one thing. Your pain, your fear, your death.

This is joy to them.

This is the small huge thing. Every shattering is unique for the day, the weather, the circumstance, the perfectly normal everyday civilian people it shatters. And it is huge for exactly that too.

Whoever you are, bomber, enjoying our grief, our shattered bodies, our sobbing children -- for you nothing but a little sadist -- one day not too soon, you too will be small huge thing.

Sleep well.

Tyrannical Government

Dear The Far Right and the NRA,

If someday a tyrannical government comes to power, and should that government have the obedience and support of the US Military, AND local law enforcement (the odds of which are so small that I have a hard time even writing that down), THEY WILL NOT COME DOOR TO DOOR if that tyrant wants to shut you up, stop your patriotic rebellion, or frighten the rest of the population into compliance by making an example of you.

The tyrant you fear will bomb you with an MQ-9 Reaper. It's safe for the troops, and effective for the purpose. Against this weapon, your arsenal will be useless. One day, without warning, your home will simply explode. 

Please stop making that ridiculous and impossible argument. If you need to make it, make with an eye toward what a 21st Century tyrant would do, not a 18th Century tyrant. 

If you're going to live in reactionary fear to the extent that the rest of us must live in a really more dangerous world so that you can live in a safer imaginary world -- at least fear the right thing.

Photo from an article Madison Rupert with great links on the domestic drone program at EndtheLie.com. MQ-9 Reaper mid-flight (Image credit: U.S. Air Force photo/Staff Sgt. Brian Ferguson)

"Senseless" and the Great American Cop-out

I know why we do it. I do. I get it. We say that horrible, criminal, scary events are senseless because it gives us a break from the unrelenting reality of them. Of course, they have only the same reality as happy events, but they hurt, and we recoil.*

2012 was so blood soaked, so many were shot in so many places, that no matter how long I stopped watching TV, the news, every time I tried to check back in, there was another mass shooting. It just hurt, and it hurt in a freshly deep and miserable way in December.


However, that recoil is a huge, huge mistake and one that adults cannot keep making, nor be allowed to make.

And all the "un-talked-about" topics got some Facebook and Twitter and news cycle time: guns in general, assault weapons, extended cartridges, gun control, the pernicious weirdness of the NRA, cognitive disorders, mental health care's blazing dearth in our totally depressed America.
The shootings (or the gang rapes, but that's another, not unrelated, post), however, are not "senseless" violence.+ 

I submit to you that they are anything but senseless. They are screaming at us with meaning, replete, overwhelming, ontological clusterfucks of meaning. They are a sick America bottoming out over and over, and over again in the loop of helpless thrall that is Refusing to Deal. Their meaning is too big and too deep and too real and way too normal and way too about US (not some monster other) to deal with.

But, we are grown ups, we are supposed To Deal. Because when we deal, we get Better.
Pick your guru, Jung or Buddha, Tony Robbins or Jesus Christ, ... Kant ...  no matter. You gotta deal to get better. That shadow ain't going away on its own.

So let's try to examine some of the screaming meaning of these shootings.

Larger, more diffuse, harder to argue for meanings also howl from this abyss. American life, by which I mean the "vibe" here, the general tenor of our civic and cultural life, has intensified in the last four years. Now, this connection is a bit more tenuous, but give it a little slack and see what you think. 

We have reminded ourselves that American politics has always been a caterwauling brawl. But we used to have what we called a "loyal opposition." We had two parties dedicated to the health of the Republic and to the experiment of democracy. We differed often wildly about who counted as a full citizen (still do), about policies concerning the economic and civic health of the republic (still do), and so on. We don't agree about what's best. That's as it should be. But, what has gone awry is that we no longer have a loyal opposition. We have a fairly conservative Democratic party, a few moderate Republicans, and a most disloyal opposition put in place by a small cohort of The 1% and who seem to believe in a heady cocktail of Christian-hypercapitalized-militarized-anarchism. 

The continued taking-hostage of the whole economy, government, and large swathes of civil society can't help but add to the constant low-grade freak out that is the American vibe these last four years. In a contextual soup of which this is a key ingredient, even the stock, we should expect more shootings than usual. The free floating tension, the lessening of our ability to listen to each other in regular life,++ these things do not assuage the egos of the sorts of men who go out in public to punish the world for hurting them or preventing them from becoming The Man. 


You need an investigative reporter with some time to explore gun culture in the US, the way that tools whose sole purpose is death are a hobby, are a source of status. Most of us don't see how the gun enthusiast magazines/websites are full of soft porn images, and some of the consumer uncatalogued as well. The link between the gun, the penis, and the hot girl is not subtle in this pages. One does not need a a degree in cultural studies come to this observation. The gun is prowess, status, power, and in no small measure a really big loud cock. So, something very powerful and basic and important about guns, the possibility of violence, the glamour of controlling a tool of death, and sexuality and hetero-masculinity is also screaming at us in these events. One, admittedly perfect, example is Guns and Lace, “Guns and Lace features gun reviews, beautiful girls with guns and just a bit of lace.”  Pretty classy, for what it is.

The shooter in Jonesboro AK in the 1990s targeted only girls and female teachers. He was in middle school. He did it because a girl he had asked to be his sweetie had said no. He got the guns out of his grandfather's house.  Unfortunately, this boy did not grow up to become a responsible citizen. Clearly the counselling and social support he needed in order to cope with his violence and his actions has not been available to him. We could go back a few shootings from this year to Pennsylvania in 2006, another gendered act of violence. There’s so many instances of the deep connection between gender, sex, and gun violence, there’s just no way to present all the evidence, given that so much of it takes place in the home.

Masculinity could find its consolations and homosocial pleasures in other hobbies. A man could accrue the prowess, etc, including all the soft porn, by rebuilding classic cars. Cars that people don't often drive drunk and that kill almost no one at all, ever.

America is living another extended moment of intense insecurity. Threats real and imaginary blare out of our televisions and radios and podcasts and streams 24/7/365. We can be saturated in our economic fears. We can’t pretend that we don’t have an oppressive foreign policy, and we can’t any longer avoid worry over its blowback. We are all existentially aware now of our refusal to genuinely put people first, and of our climate's total willingness to abandon us to our fate.

In this moment in which all is intensified and most of it tastes of acid, the truly mad, the neglected, the angry, the laid off, the ignored, the narcissist, the--usually middle class, educated, white male between 18 and 40 with low social connection--will, from time to time, decide to take his fear, or angst, or pain out on the rest of us. 

When these boys and men, these white boys and men, no longer have access to assault weapons and high capacity magazines, they will still be angry or unbalanced. They will still want externalize their phallic angst, to hurt women, or anyone who happens to be in the theater or mall or mosque or grade school. But, they will have to work much harder to inflict their pain on others. The will have to get closer, maybe look their targets in the eye. They will have to risk injury. They will be easier to stop. 

So, yeah, SENSELESS is the wrong word. These shootings are, once we look past the surface, replete with meaning. They mean us. They mean our collective life is out of whack. They mean that we have lots to do in order to be a genuinely thriving people. You gotta deal to get better.

✁-------------------------------
* 9-11 was "unimaginable" and "senseless" and each of these shootings has been "mad" and "crazy" and "senseless." First, our imaginations are way powerful enough to get to 9-11, obviously; and see above for my refutation of all the latter.

+ I am swimming against the current here. A google search of "shootings senseless" returns just over 5,000,000 hits. 

++ Last year was politically intense. Many posts on Facebook had political, and often agressively political, content. In response a meme went up asking people to stop it so that the poster of the meme would not have to block, mute, or unfriend the politically minded. I suggest a more judicious editing of Facebook settings. After all, when we claim to be friends with someone we do claim to be interested in their values and beliefs and not just the entertainment value they bring to our newsfeed. An instrumental view of relationships is part of the problem of isolation and violent aggression I'm writing about above. 

Contempt #2

Contempt #1

In a previous post, I said : Passive acceptance of continuing and overt misogyny in society and culture. Whining that the girls aren't as nice to us now, after years of 'liberation' for which we did precious little. We men who enjoy our privilege and fail to join with our sisters feel their contempt and it makes us sad and uncomfortable. The cadres of men who belong in these categories have one more thing to understand.

Contempt #2

This is what it is to have another Subject in culture come into its own, alienated. This feeling that you are being seen, thought about, liked or not, that you might have a job to do and you don't know what it will take and that you are failing at it; this feeling is translated by most people as contempt. And, it is. 

The feeling aimed at you, Contempted Men, might have been exasperation or impatience or even sympathy and solidarity. But because you got through the first and second and third waves of feminism without ever seriously examining your own role, even your passive role, in the social hamstringing of women, well, because you did not get our backs, we find you lacking.

We published the books, we formed the organizations, we taught the classes, wrote the songs, made the movies -- and you didn't join in.

So, yeah, at this point, the fact that you still want us to gaze appreciatively at your oblivious ego is contemptible.

If you want to look at women, or at pop culture an not feel that contempt, then stop being a contemptible guy and you won't see the world that way and you won't feel so rejected. If the shoe does not fit, you can't wear it.


Learn, join, get your solidarity on, question your privilege.



Inside the feminist movement, we have these kinds of conversations between white women and our privilege and women of color. Feminists of color often look at white white feminists, who should be their allies, with contempt born of betrayal and impatience. We often don't think past our white middle class world, and given the books and classes and songs and movies women of color have produced to teach us about our blindness and our blithe innocence, they have every right to feel that contempt.

Grown ups don't complain that other people don't like them. They find out why other people don't like them, and do something about it. Get a conversation going between the Subjects in culture, and join us in our desire for a world made richer for all of us, and you will feel something new : that appreciative gaze you so want.

A Gaze Returned

*Note Bene: This post will contain some, I hope a minimal amount of, theory-speak. Take the word "gaze" for example. In theory-speak, it means what it means (a sustained observation, a manner of looking), but it is understood at both a personal level (I gazed at ________ in wonder) and at a more cultural level (the male or masculine gaze). At this level, a gaze is also the interpretation that one (dominant, powerful) part of the world makes of another (subordinate, powerless) part of the world. So, the male gaze is shorthand for the historical collection of judgements that a male culture has made and does make about women. Similarly, the white gaze re: people of color; or the straight gaze re: LGBTQ people, and so on. A gaze is associated with agency, legitimacy, power, with a body of knowledge (or superstitious bullshit, depending on your education and political persuasion).

Now, the thing is that straight, white, male gazes are not the only gazes zooming around the world and interpreting stuff or people. The American gaze is not the only way of looking at the world, and hosts of other gazes regard and interpret America. See how the wor(l)d works? Good. There is a female or feminine gaze, for instance. In the case of this essay, that feminine gaze is also coded as white and straight for reasons that will be made clear in just a sec.

 Circulating among some feminist women on Facebook is a recent post a Jezebel critiquing an essay in Esquire (hence the white and straight--and well educated and privileged--context in which we are working here). It's a sharp and funny and ruthless critique of an essay that doesn't make a lot of rational sense but that expresses an unexamined and not terribly focused sense of dread or anxiety or anger on the part of (at least some) hip and upwardly ambitious white men. The worry is that women view them with contempt, that the feminine is gazing at them with an angry kind of disappointment. The essay coincides with some recent main-stream media discussions about the familial and cultural implications of women in many families earning more than their husbands, more women getting advanced degrees than men, etc.

This trend does indicate a change at the root, of the very pattern of our culture--eventually, maybe. It also means that women, as a general class, are achieving a gaze. Men and the masculine elements of our culture are not at all used to being gazed in this way, they're not used to sharing cultural or social power (one element of subjectivity) with feminine kinds of people. Not surprisingly, some women are not or are no longer impressed with what they see.

Now, partly this is because there is a real, and radical, shift going on and men and the masculine in our culture are slowly redefining themselves and being redefined by other forces. That passive voice there, being redefined, which indicates men/the masculine as an object in the way that women/the feminine have been for centuries, millennia, this is new to men and understandably uncomfortable.

In the theory-speak of radical feminism: the masculine is now in the unenviable position of having to critique and investigate its own subjectivity, and likely change it--a lot. The Masculine has to take itself as its own object and, with the inflection of the feminine gaze, do a lot of self-referential work. Sort of like going through a 12-step program for getting over the bad parts of the masculine subject position, rewiring one's gender reflexes. It. Is. Hard. To. Do.

I would like to take my response to Stephen Marche's essay in another direction, and respond not his particular writing performance (or the editorial standards at Esquire, WTF?), but to the creeping malaise he wants to diagnose, but actually cure.

The way that Marche worries about this contempt is a worry from the masculine side, of course. It thinks about the sources of feminine contempt as being those that men in our culture would expect, would have for each other. Not being well educated, not earning more than the next guy, not being good in bed or choosing a relationship other men find questionable or dissatisfying. That is, real stuff. Real stuff that really happens because, as West at Jezebel put its, people are complicated. People being complicated is not part of the world view, the gaze, of the masculine. People are surfaces and outward actions and pretty easy to know and judge (objectify) in the traditional masculine gestalt (superstitious bullshit).

Now, I think there probably is a good deal of feminine contempt panoramically surrounding the masculine. In the present circumstance, I would expect so. I just don't think it's about what Marche thinks it's about. Here's what it's about:

It's about policy, its about culture and daily life, it about the "stand up" men in our lives not getting our backs.

In the last year, we have seen state after state come after women's general health care and reproductive choice. That's what it means when clinics close, when states and feds want to defund Planned Parenthood. It means lots of women (and kids, and men) won't get even basic health care. It means that our lives and our families are at risk. We have seen hosts of women protesting these reversals of public policy.

More obviously, the attacks on contraception mandates in the Affordable Health Care act are a central nervous system twitch from the old guard of masculinity that cannot abide the idea of women, or men, having sex for fun or love, or any purpose other than procreation. This after we have been doing just that for two generations. This after spending billions of dollars to create Viagra so that Baby Boomer men can keep having sex for fun. And when we watch these defenders of tradition, we can see how seethingly angry they have been all this time. In the symbol of Sandra Fluke, we have all been called sluts (again) because we have and like to act on our sexual energies. And again, our own private sexuality has been the public subject of rather unkind male fantasies and a desire to consume our sexuality as fair exchange for contraceptive medication. Women know all too well this kind of sexual extortion. And we have seen women protesting and responding to these attacks on our sovereign personhood, and we have seen precious few men at our sides.

I will spare us a discussion of rape culture, the rape jokes that about on Facebook, the recent blow-up over Jason Tosh, and all of that, street harassment, and so forth. It will just take too damn long. But, I will say that all of that is a sign of just how badly the masculine and its gaze want to hang to their position as The Boss. Rape culture goes hand in glove with recent policy reversals made by cultural conservatives in state and federal legislatures. We do not see lots of men telling other men to cut this shit out and change their attitude. A few, but not a lot.

This all has a very real impact on women. We feel the male gaze too, and we feel its anger and its danger, the threat in it, the deep-seething desire to get us girls back under control. We also know that our culture and our economy have changed so much that this mean desire is totally impossible to satisfy, so we have to live within that threatening panoramic male gaze.We remember what has been done to us before, the stones, the fires, the beatings. We know that these stones and beatings and fires are, right now, raining down on and destroying the lives and bodies of our sisters around the globe. We really do know what you are capable of.

And we know that you (many, most of you) are not standing with us, are not holding up placards, are not raising a ruckus, are not getting arrested with us. You do not have our backs. (Now, some of you do--you're home with the kids while we're at the demonstration, or you are at the demonstration, gods bless you.) The men who feel the way Marche does are the men who are not with us, who don't quite love us, who are not at the demonstrations and have not done the hard work of critiquing their own relationships with masculinity and with women in this new world. And so, yeah, we hold you in contempt.

No shit.

The tension running underneath Marche's essay and responses to it is the same tension in the apocryphal story about a professor who asked the men and women in class what they most feared from each other. The men said they most feared women laughing at them. The women said they most feared men killing them.

I can live through a bit of chagrin.

And that, well that is why a particular cadre of men might be sensing some contempt in the female gaze right about now. But, I tell you, that gaze can also shower you with admiration and gratitude and love and desire. All depends on what you do next. On whether you have the courage to question your subject position and get our backs. Because just being a boy and breathing does not suffice anymore.

Cleaning Out My Pocket

Yeah, I know. Like my father, I'm apt to squirrel things away. Two of my favorite caches: pens (crystal bics especially) and things to read. Pocket (the google app) is a dangerous thing. I can just store-it-for-later. It's time to clean. Here's some of the 23 pages of lint:

Women, buried with high honor, in Greece (!), on Mount Ida (the birthplace of Zeus). Apparently there's something about the ancient Greeks that we need to learn.

A complaint against our middle brow, bourgeois, lack of artistic adventure.

The fabulous, but largely ignored, intercultural work of one of my besties, Alison Scott-Baumann.

A feminist dust-up, with smartness.

Aggressively queer blogging.

The Philosophers Magazine, often interesting, and not ridden with academese.

Michael Ondaatje's homepage. ???

Elizabeth Hatmaker's book of poems. (A schoolmate and poetic genius).

The Dalai Lama's webcast page .

A book review of some conceptual poetry that I once enjoyed.

Military contractors, problematic.

The Facebook page of a band I should remember to catch.

A great photograph from NASA.

That should do ya for now.