General Notes - Talk at CUNY on Gender and Militarism
[NOTE: This is the text of a talk I did with Freedom Road Socialist Organization/Organizacion Socialista del Camino para la Libertad (FRSO/OSCL) and Friends at the CUNY Grad Center, April 6th. Many of the guests were veterans, so there was some emphasis placed on the role of vets in the anti-war movement. The discussion afterward was probably a lot better, but I don’t have a transcript of that. The following is from the notes I prepared for the talk, but the actual talk was slightly less formal, and time constraints mercifully (for others) cut some of this short.]
Since 9-11, I have been drawn more and more out of my comfortable post-military existence, where I was trying very hard to put some distance between myself and my own past. I have been drawn more deeply into the mass movement that has developed against the current US political regime and its war. This has not been an accident any more than the leading role of military veterans more generally in that same movement.
The Bush administration, since 9-11 provided them the pretext, has moved very aggressivley to hyper-militarize both foreign and domestic policy in the United States. In doing so, they have placed American society on a war footing that has its own relfection in our cultural production, in cultural militarism, andin a corresponding attempt to impose a kind of military discipline on the whole society.
In doing this, it becomes necessary to assign the military as an institution and the members of the military a kind of sacred status, and there has been a climate of intimidation accompanying this super-valorization of the military that compels many who oppose the war to limit the depth of their critique of what is in fact a brutal war of conquest. The veteran, in the abstract at least, is also valorized in this process.
The irony of this situation is that the super-valuation of the military veteran that corresponds to this culture of militarism actually immunizes to a substantial degree those veterans who oppose the war. They are immunized against the self-same intimidation that can be deployed against the larger movement.
The mass movement intuited this immunity early on, and so it has vigorously embaced veteran-based resistance. The movement has not merely accepted this role. It has in many cases pushed us to the front ranks.
In my own role as both a writer and as political cadre from time to time, I have beencompelled to reflect on much more than simply a critique of the specific actions of the Bush administration or the tactical mechanics of anti-war organizing. The minute any of us are clear in our recognition that this adminsitration and this war are both embedded in a larger historical dynamic and a more general social system, we become obliged — both as a moral imperative and a strategic necessity — to try to understand that dynamic and that system. And so, since being pushed to the front ranks with other veterans, I have been forced to think very hard about the question, what is militarism? and with the question, how does militarism fit into that dynamic and that system?
In posing these question, and reflecting as honestly as I know how on my own personal experience during asn entire career in the Army, one thing emerged over and over again out of that experience that I was hearing very little of in the public discourse on the war and on miltarism generally. That was gender.
It is farily easy to find — especially among the more New Age elements of the anti-war movement — the essentialist claims that intrinsic male aggression has broken loose from the bounding influence of some mitigating Divine Feminine. But that is not an account of either gender or a materialist account of gender, and in my opinion is is not even an account of war. I have also heard the notion that men are oppressed by war, because they fight wars, and they bear its most terrible costs. But the facts of who are most killed, crippled, and displaced by war show that women and children suffer more than anyone.
In all these attempts to come to terms with the phenomenon of militarism, we are asked to look through the lens of warfare, and the question of gender comes up only as women someohow fall under our gaze in passing.
So it occurred to me — as it has to feminist for some time — that it might be interesting to make gender the primary lens that sweeps over everything, and see what warfare is when it is situated, along with many other things, within the gendered world. We might learn more about imperial militarism if we make it the object of study under the lens of gender theory, looking at gender as the historical dynamic and the social system.
And gender is a social system. It is not a only a biological phenomenon. Let me take a moment to make a very brief outline of an argument for this claim, since I am saying we can use it as a kind of electron microscope to see into the molecular structures of militarism.
I am not saying that there are no biological men or women. Most of us are demonstrably and biologically men or women. There is a difference, and the fact that there are people for whom this biological status is ambiguous in no way either makes them non-persons or less valuable, nor does it change the fact that human beings are overwhelmingly biologically sexed as men or women.
But it is not the biological difference alone which constitutes gender as I am defining it here. When I say “gender,” I am referring to what is simultaneously a biological and social status. Gender is a social system of oppressive and exploitative social power exercised by biological men as a class over biological women as a class. It is at the same time exercised universally and conditioned variously by simultaneous and recursively interfused systems of class and racial-national power.
Male power over women exists universally. The form and actual exercise of that power varies.
Gender is socialized and policed by the cultural instituton of compulsory heterosexuality. It is not compulsory only by some legal sanction, though two state institutions — marriage and the military — are officially homophobic. Compulsory heterosexuality is socialized and policed by cultural norms.
Norms, or those characteristics and behaviors that are considered normal, do not define themselves independently. They exist as an island of neutrality in a sea of deviance. A norm is defined by what it is not, by what is abnormal. A so-called typical American is seen as white — which means essentialy lacking any race. A man is seen as a heterosexual man, and only gains a modifier as “gay” if he is not heterosexual. Norms are very effective ways to identify structures of power. If we use the term “gendr,” for example, we start with the assumption we are talking about women. If we say “race,” we begin by assuming Black or Brown. If we say “sexual preference,” we think gay-lesbian. The norms, those things that are normal, that are neutral, are resident in the structure of power. Normal means not deviant.
So compulsory heterosexuality is about much more than physiological difference, though it is exercised on real human bodies based on physiological status. Compulsory heterosexuality pairs male with female as a social norm, but this pairing is not mutual or equal. On the contrary, compulsory heterosexuality locks men and women together in a polarity — in the yin of powerful relatd complimentarily to the yang of powerlessness.
It is a system that culturaly and even legally codifies men’s collective power over women collectively. it is a system of power that is so deeply entrenched in our own psyches that we experience it emotionally. Just as men embrace their roles within this system of power, women are trained all the way down to their emotional roots to accept and even embrace and celebrate their own dependence and powerlessness.
And just as we tend to understand the world metaphorically, gender lays the groundwork for seeing the whole universe as sets of binaries, as twos, as dual, and as heirarchical. Mind versus body, with the mind place over the body. Reason versus emotion, with reason place over emotion. Man (of course) versus nature, with man placed over nature. These are reflections of a dual heirarchy that reflects a gendered world view.
Compulsory heterosexuality combines men and women in a heirarchical and complimentary relationship, with man dominating woman, and assigns a kind of behavioral code to each. People are ruthlessly trained in this behavioral code, from birth. The male half of this behavioral code is masculinity, and the female half of the code is femininity. These are behavioral expectations that are imposed on men and women to reproduce male power over women.
Structured systems of unequal and complimentary power — like gender, like class, like national oppression, and these are not separate except as analytical categories — rely on ideology to simultaneously conceal and reproduce that form of complimentary power and powerlessness. That is a kind of hip-pocket definition. When I use the term “ideology,” I am using it as Marx did, to describe something that falsifies consciousness. It’s not like we have the good ideology and they have the bad ideology. Marxism, in the way I most value it, is — as Myles Horton the famous radicall hillbilly said — a tool box, not a blueprint. It is a method,not a doctrine. It is not an ideology. When it is, it is being misused.
So, again, ideology — for the purposes of this discussion — is a set of assumtions and beliefs and a way of knowing that does two things: It conceals power and it reproduces that power. One of the most effective and important weapons of ideology, this enculturatd way of understanding, is what I will call “naturalization.”
We are trained to see what exists — including social power — as natural, as having the power of divine providence or natural law,and therefore beyond our capacity to intervene in the exercise of that power. Naturalization is a message implanted in our heads that says, “Resistance is futile.”
With th system of gender, and its enforcement institution of compulsory heterosexuality, we are raised to believe that even our obedience to the codes of masculinity and femmininity are natural, are hard-wired in our genes — and indeed, we are so thoroughly socialized to these norms that they actually FEEL natural.
Even the way we experience the dimension of gender which is personal sexual desire is deeply socialized. We are taught how to desire. We are taught what is and is not desirable, and the force of that experience of desire — the eroticization of gendered power — FEELS as powerful as a force of nature. So we are not only committed to reproducing the gender order, in many different ways, as an intellectual conviction; we have an extremely powerful emotional attachment to gendered norms, whether we are conforming to those norms or whether we are unwittingly reproducing them when we attempt to rebel against them.
Homophobia is not another generic form of prejudice in a kind of menu of prejudices: racism, sexism, agesism, ableism, homophobia, and so forth. The stigma attached to same-sex desire and same-sex love is directly related to women’s subordination in the institution of compulsory heterosexuality — which combines men and women, and places men as a class over women as a class. The behavioral codes of male power vis-avis female powerlessness are disrupted and endangered when men behave and desire LIKE WOMEN or women behave and desire LIKE MEN.
All we have to do is think back on our own childhood experiences with gender socialization when boys who showed weakiness or the tendency to nurture and relate or the aversion to violence were fag-baited and told to “be a man,” or conversely when girls are pressured — especially when the approach adolescence — to be smaller, more silent, less assertive, more “sexy” and coquettish, more preoccupied with gaining the approval of boys and men. This is gender policing, the policing of this domination binary.
So this is a very brief peek at what I mean by gender, which is the lens I want to use to take an equally brief peek at militarism.
Sex DIFFERENCE is socially codified as hierarchical sexuality. Male becomes masculine; and female becomes feminine. It all appears natural. The ideology of gender both conceals and reproduces this gendered power.
Earlier I referred to the war in Iraq as a “war of conquest.” I used this term intentionally, because this notion of conquest is important to help us understand militarism, seen through the lens of gender, in an historical way, to help us gain a bit of historical perspective.
Now there are dozens and dozens of books I’d like to recommend as part of this talk, but I’ll just suggest three right now, because they are the ones I carried to New York with me to study for the notes to develop this discussion. One is by Carole Pateman, and it is called “The Sexual Contract.” Another is by Carolyn Merchant, and it is called “The Death of Nature.” And last but certainly not least, is Catharine MacKinnon’s book, “Feminism Unmodified.” These are a very good set of what I would call bridge-books for people who have some familiarity with Marxism as in intellectual and political tradition, and who want to understand more about radical traditions in feminism… which I happen to think are just as valuable and important as the economic class analysis we have developed among socialists.
These writers and others have helped us understand how the gender lens exposes the process of history that has preoccupied many of us through the lens of economic class.
We can go back one historical epoch in Euro-American development to an era of feudalism to see how patriarchy — or male social power — adapted itself thorugh more than one historical epoch. There is a story of a forest fire in the habitat of green grasshoppers, where within a few generations the green grasshoppers turned black to adapt to their charred surroundings. I see patriarchy that way. The grasshoppers were still grasshoppers; and male power still exists, but in different forms that fit into a changed environment.
Now men were in power in the feudal system, and those in power were a few men who were constituted as a caste of warriors. Property is a phenomenon that can trace its lineage to social conflict, and war as a form of social conflict can certainly trace its roots to property — which is an abstract entitlement to real things, in the feudal case, most importantly to land. Land ownership was an entitlement for bearing arms on bahlf of one’s sovereign. These special men were also entitled to women — theoretically almost all women within their realm — so there was a patriarchy that Carole Pateman called “paternal.” It was a hereditary entitlement of the head MAN, the political FATHER, to the bodies of all women.
Pateman and MacKinnon note that both conventional and socialist thinkers who conjecture about the origins of patriarchy talk about mother-right and father-right, which talks about the intergenerational passage of property; but neither focus on the question of sex-right — this entitlement of men to the bodies of women. That is a GENDER lens.
Citizenship — the right to participate in political affairs — was a corresponding right, and correspondingly limited to the aritoscracy and its closest MALE advisors.
But as the world changed, and a new dominant class, the male business class, or male bourgeisise, grew strong and contested with the aristocracy for political power, they brought with them their own social system and their own accompanying ideology.
The ideology of masculine divine providence and male hereditary power that marked medieval thought — because dominant ideology is always the ideology of the dominant group — was replaced by the ideology of the male bourgeoisie, and its basis was not in divine providence, but in the Enlightenment notion of “natural science.”
In the medieval cosmos, women were assigned a place below men in a heirarchy that was described by the saying, “God is the head of Man, and Man is the head of Woman.” Head was actually an anatomical reference that called upon the mind-body and reason-emotion dualities, though reason was defined by medievals as scholastic familiarity with church dogma and its corresponding political dogma.
In the Enlightenment, this male-female duality was brought forward and appropriately altered by the bourgeoisie. The bourgeois son was rebelling against the feudal father. Divine providence and hereditary entitlement, the basis of the feudal father’s power, was replaced nyu the rebellious bourgeois son by notions of natural law in a universe that did not resemble a human body any more, but a machine, a giant clock was the favored metaphor. Entitlement was seen to be something that should be open to those who demonstrated their superiority through the characterisitcs of the individual male. Women were no longer forced into submission by a cosmic command, but by their natural inferiority to men.
Hereditary entitlement was replaced by the more egalitarian yet abstract idea of the social contract. The idea of the primacy of the contract is still a key organizing principle in society, because we are still ruled by the (white) male bourgeoisie. The contract is a very clever idea that hs proven a very effective ideology. It is very effective at concealing real power behind abstract equality. Ideologies conceal power. It is also very effective at reproducing power, which is also what ideologies do. It reproduces power through the concealment of power.
The contract narrows and restricts the notion of consent — which is interpreted as liberty — it restricts individual decisions down to a single ahistorical instant. The instant of the contract. Sign on the dotted line. Whatever led the two parties to sign on the dotted line , however, whether really signing or merely “consenting” by word or action, has no relevance. The inequalities between the contracting parties prior to and leading up to the contract are not counted. Only the instant of volition. This assigns the sole recognition of responsibility and causation to the individual, and completely excludes from the definition of of consent the historical totality of social relations and the existence of pre-existing hierarchies, that operated prior to the legally recognized moment of the contract.
With the contract as the weapon, the bourgeois son overthrew the feudal father, and in doing so — because gender is out lens tonight — in doing so, the bourgeois son transformed the special-male, caste-based access of a few men to nearly all women into the abstract access of all men to all women. As Pateman has said, PATERNAL patriarchy was transformed into FRATERNAL patriarchy. The green grasshopper turned black.
Men still remained in control, but the form of that control adapted to a new form of economic class power and its corresponding ideology.
This was a colonial time, during the build-up of capitalism, and the metaphorical world of the bourgeoisie adapted the military language of the new era, that of conquest. Man, who was European and bourgeois, conquered and civilized, as they were fond of saying, no matter how brutal the process. Man conquered nature; Man conquered darker races; Man conquered Woman. Darker races and women were actually identified with nature, and so the bourgeois adaptation of medieval dualism was Man versus Nature… with Man the master. Tamer of nature, conquerer of darker people, master of women.
During the Rennaissance, which was a period marking the twilight of feudalism and the dawn of bourgeois rule, Machiavelli used the medieval reference to Fortune, meaning natural chaos, and the medieval association between Fortune and femininity, to make the following remarks:
“Fortune is the ruler of half our actions… I would compare her to an impetuous river that when turbulent, inundates the plains, casts down trees and buildings, removes earth from this side and places it on the other; everyone flees before it and everything yields to its fury without being able to oppose it; and yet though it is of such a kind, still whenit is quiet, men can make provision against it by dikes and banks, so that when it rises ti will either go down a canal or its rush will not be so wild and dangerous. So it is with fortune which shows also her power where no measures ahve been taken to resist her, and directs her fury where she knows that no dikes or barriers have been made to hold her… for fortune is a woman and it is necessary if you wish to master her, to conquer her by force; and it can be seen that she lets herself be overcome by the bold rather than by those who proceed coldly, and therefore like a woman, she is always a friend to the young because they are less cautions, fiercer, and master her with more audacity.”
Francis Bacon, the so-called father of modern science, used a rape metaphor to describe the production of science.
It has been only a few years since we quit naming hurricanes after women.
Man became a warrior, the bourgeois son claiming the mantle from his feudal father, and with it the right of citizenship. Note that in the feudal and bourgeois epochs, citizenship begins as a right of those with property. But the fuedal male ruler had a concrete entitlement to a specific piece of property, including the women that came with it. The bourgeois male had the abstract entitlement to all property abstractly, regardless of what was concretely recognized as HIS property, and with it entitlement to all abstract women as indivdual pieces of property… through the contract.
The new contractual world was seen in Hobbesian terms: the war of all against all. They were very clear that property is an outgrowth of social conflict, even though they were and still are loathe to acknowledge the real relations of domination inhering in the structures of gender, class, and race or nation.
The contract is desinged to regulate social power, not abollish it. To do that, we must abolish property.
One of the notions of property as a relation of owner and owned, and one that still confuses the gender debates because the contract remains unexamined in them, is the idea that one’s body is property. We even suggest it is property by the way we refer to it, by the way I am referring to a body. YOUR body. MY body. HIS body. HER body. One can’t simply say ME when referring to the body, even though we ARE bodies. The abstraction of the mind is given almost a legal agency over the reality of the living body. we are ourselves divided into a duality. Because liberalism, the political and legal ideology of the bougeoisie, and the dominant ideology of this very period, is based fundamentally on the rhetorical and legal fiction of property.
The absurd conclusion of liberalism’s contract is that one might actually sign a contract — as Pateman points out — to become a slave… and this is called liberty.
With the bourgeois epoch, the old warrior class was rendered obsolete by social organization and its determining technologies. But the idea of the citizen being a soldier did not go away. It grasshoppered, too. What did not change was that this abstract Man was a public being. Citizenship, including warfare, ar public activities, and the oportunity for public acknowledgement and public esteem. I menitoned at the beginning of this talk how soldiers and war veterans are given special public esteem as a payment in the service of militarism. This can hardly be overestimated as a factor attracting young men into the military.
While women have made inroads, and public life has been opened further to women as a precondition for continued capital accumulation, women are associated with the private realm, with the household.
Class power was exercised in public, and gendered power was exercised in the household. It was no accident that the rebellious bourgeois son used the fuedal metaphor: Every man’s home is his castle. Men were subjected to concrete class power in public, with abstract legal equality to veil that power. Women were subjected to male power in the private sphere — the home. the right to privacy is a male bourgeois notion, and its legal purpose was to protect male domestic power from the intervention of the state, to prevent public inetervention against these petty sovereign males of the household.
(The sexual protection racket of male protection of women from the violence of other males is what Pateman calls the exchange-contract of “protection for obedience”.)
This was the essence of fraternal bourgeois patriarchy, and as working class males contested the power of the bourgeoisie, and as males of color contested the power of the white male bourgeoisie, that contest was waged over legal abstract equality, over citizenship, and even over privacy as an entitlement of citizenship. And conpromises were made, important compromises to give workers and women and people of color some space and resources to pursue more advanced social struggles, but the bases of those struggles — being rooted in the white male bourgeois ideology and worldview bsed on property, on contract, on privacy — have only a limited capacity to challenge when certain compromises are made. Abstract contractual equality still conceals and therefore reproduces concrete inequality.
Roe versus Wade — again pointed out by Pateman — was taken up on behalf of women reproductive freedom. But the bais of that struggle was a right to privacy. Instead of Harris versus McRae, which would have guaranteed public funding of abortions for any woman who elected to have one. Real equality of access to abortion would have resulted from Harris. Only abstract quality of access results from Roe, and many poor women are still concretely prevented from freely electing to terminate a pregnancy. Roe is also based on the idea of a woman (a gendered mind) owning her own body… not BEING her body.
This is how gender operates today, here, in the United States.
So now that I have laid out a rough histoirical dynamic, or at least pointed out that there IS an historical dynamic in gender, and that patriarchy is a system of social power and not merely theoutcome of individual prejudice, or so-called “sexism,” let’s take this lens and examine our own experiences in the military. Many of us are veterans, and I also encourage others to weigh in.
If masculinity and femininity are behavioral codes assigned to men and women to reproduce compulsory heterosexuality, and if masculinity is associated with aggression and domination and conquest, and if imperial war is an activity that is the perfect merger of aggression, domination, and conquest, then what do we see in the story — for example — of Jessica Lynch, or the story of Abu Ghraib, about cultural constructions of masculinity and femininity, and about what I’ll call military masculinity?
What are the associations with feminizing enemies, calling a male rival a bitch to take him down a notch, or placing prisoners in simulated homosexual poses, or faking the rescue of Jessica Lynch? How is male associated with being tough to the point of denying any feelings of empathy, with being menacing as a defense mechanism, with asserting dominance every time there is a perceived challenge, even if it is at great risk? How do we use terminology to describe male sexual activity as violence; and how do we use terminology to describe violence as male-sex? How is rape understood around the notion of consent, or the unwritten contract? How is rape a mechanism of social control? How is rape associated with warfare? How are prisons like Abu Ghraib and prisons like those here in the US used as weapons of militarized social control? What are the implications of the fact that white men fear prison mostly out of their imagination of the prospect of being raped by Black men? What caconclusions might we draw from this business of rison rape and the reversal of power roles as a form of humiliation, and the activities required by an occupying army to subdue a population? How do we understand the idea that women are victimzed by men — taught to fear rape by men — and then forced to rely on other men for protection? This is a kind of unstated theme in supporting militarism, that the martial MALE has to protect us from the Dark Other. These are just a few questions to get us thinking.
So now lets open up the discussion.
END NOTES
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My new book “Sex & War” is now available.
James M:
I’m somewhat surprised “Brokeback Mountain” didn’t receive a mention here.
The film’s depiction of Ennis and Jack’s relationship is remarkable, and perhaps unique, in that it refuses at every step to adhere to the stereotype of gays as feminized and flamboyant. They are both “man’s men,” thoroughly embodying masculine cultural archetypes in all but the realm of sexual expression, and in this way the movie is ingeniously subversive.
Because the subtext of the film is not homosexuality, but our culture’s enforcement of and insistence on restrictive notions of male-female polarity. Because the real “crime” and “threat” of homosexuality is to gender norms, not to evangelical ideals of “sexual morality” per se.
As you said:
“The behavioral codes of male power vis-avis female powerlessness are disrupted and endangered when men behave and desire LIKE WOMEN or women behave and desire LIKE MEN.”
How confounding, then, to gender conventions to have two gay characters who exhibit nary a shred of “feminine behavior”.
I highly recommend you see the film if you haven’t. Besides being a great work of art, it’s a powerful expression of some of the themes you write about here.
10 April 2006, 11:23 pmr graves:
interesting stuff– i’m sorry i missed the talk, had no idea you were in nyc– maybe you should set up an “upcoming appearances” page to let us know when you’ll be speaking
keep it up!
12 April 2006, 8:54 pmDeAnander:
“The films depiction of Ennis and Jacks relationship is remarkable, and perhaps unique, in that it refuses at every step to adhere to the stereotype of gays as feminized and flamboyant. They are both mans men, thoroughly embodying masculine cultural archetypes in all but the realm of sexual expression, and in this way the movie is ingeniously subversive.”
Here I am going to dissent, at some length.
I liked the film — it moved me deeply, it’s gorgeously photographed, the actors are engaging, the adaptation of Proulx’ short story is unusually faithful and respectful. And its dramatisation of smalltown and back country homophobia is terrifying — that phone call between Ennis and Jack’s widow has to be one of the creepiest in cinema history. It’s good film making — first-rate. But I don’t find it subversive, except insofar as the generally liberal notion “It’s not nice to lynch gay men, really,†is subversive (and admittedly in many parts of the country, alas, it is — but not on this blog).
I think the film is, actually, deeply patriarchal, eagerly obedient to patriarchal definitions of manhood and of sexuality. Watching it I was torn between my emotional engagement with the characters and the tragic story (and personal resonances which it evoked in me, which made it even more powerful and saddening) — and a fidgety itchiness at the patriarchal worldview in which it’s framed.
How subversive is this story really? Stand back from its charm for a minute and look at it structurally.
There’s an alpha male, blond and big. A guy falls in love with him who is dark and more slightly built — and does the cooking… and is the more emotional, ‘dependent’ partner… and is the receptive partner in their sex life — which appears to be entirely phallic, i.e. Dominant Guy fucks Smaller Guy (we never see anything else happening, nor does Proulx suggest it). The “passive†partner just happens also to be the more emotionally communicative (which ain’t saying much, but still, he is), the more loving, the one who wants to move in together and settle down and “get married.†Wow, how original.
Now, just for grins, their first sexual encounter happens like this: the “lesser male” makes a timid sexual overture, just a touch of the hand to the other’s groin area, nothing real threatening. The alpha guy promptly rapes him; yes, I said “rape” because that’s what their first sexual encounter reads like in the story and what it plays like on the screen. Of course “it’s OK” because the lesser male loves the other guy and “wants it” and (ahem) “was asking for it” — and where have we heard that before? Is that really what he wanted? Well, we’ll never know, ‘cos no questions were asked. Nothing was negotiated. The big guy just did whatever he wanted without asking, and wasn’t that romantic?
Ennis, that charismatic cowboy, is a romantic idealisation of the ultimate Western male archetype: the emotionally deadened, affectless dominant male whose only response to intimacy is violence, a defensive assertion of his maleness by immediate and forceful penetration. And what happens in the morning? Not even a hug — just “see you for dinner” and he’s gone to ride the range. This is the good guy? Millions of women could tell you about an encounter pretty much like that, and is it romantic? hell no. You want my $0.02, it’s cowardly and abusive.
Let’s face it — except for the physical anatomy of the “love interest” this is a supermarket bodice-ripper with advanced literary values. Proulx’ astonishing grasp of regional dialect, landscape, local characters and human tragedy lends it dignity; but if we peel off the highbrow wrapping paper it’s the same old story: Strong Silent Dominant Male Breaks Heart of Submissive Partner by Witholding Affection and Communication … Despite Secretly, Deep Inside, Caring a Lot. Sheesh, Harlequin Romance churns ‘em out by the sixpack. Jack, poor fellow, goes on longing and loving and craving, settling for a brief encounter every year or so, like any female protagonist in any weepy romance novel about “the other woman.” His misery drives him to infidelity and guess what, he comes to a bad end through his indiscretion (see, if he had just Stood By His Man and not fooled around with that other guy, he might have lived).
Since this is essentially a “women’s novel” dressed up in male drag, dominant-male Ennis suffers all the torments of the damned — but secretly, behind his tough-guy mask — and comes to a bad end too. Add a few Puccini tunes and we’ve got the basic plot of a dozen operas. Get out yer hankies. (If it were a “man’s movie” I guess he would, like Bogart, have strolled off iron-jawed, elaborately unmoved and arm-in-arm with a buddy, lonely but emotionally safe and secure, while Jack flew out of Casablanca fighting back tears. Whatever.)
And there’s another thing: pay attention to that brief sex scene between Ennis and his wife. It starts out with him taking the trouble to please her with a little manual effort — though he sure doesn’t take long over it — after which the director permits us to see him “flip her over,” as Proulx writes with dour succinctness: “He flipped her over and did what she hated.” Read that carefully. The film hints at it but Proulx’ text makes it clear: the man raped his wife anally and habitually. She hated it but he did it to her anyway, and more than once. Consider the relative size and strength of the partners in that marriage, and her position as a woman with toddlers to feed and clothe. This is not consensual. This is abuse. This is marital rape. And this is our hero.
Now reflect that just about every person who sees the movie feels sympathy for poor, poor Ennis, and if this abuse of his wife is pointed out to them, will most likely say that this is a tragic result of his “natural” sexual desires being thwarted. In other words, the same old rules: men have a god-given right to stick their penis into whatever they want, and it’s someone’s job to provide the orifice. Can’t blame the poor fellow if social repression renders him unable to access the orifice of his choice, too bad for his wife who happens to be the nearest available substitute. Because he’s the puppet of his raging hormonal imbalances, or what? Oh yeah, those “masculine needs,” the ones that supposedly justify everything from lap dancing to “Asian teen tit torture” videos to date rape to priests molesting altar boys… at what point are we finally gonna say ‘Needs Schmeeds, boys, you got two good hands, deal with it yourself or keep it in your pants, it’s nobody else’s problem’?
No, I can’t say I find anything deeply subversive about the emotionally stunted, mechanistic, dominant/submissive, dick-entitlement sexuality that saturates this film and Proulx’ story. Like I say, it’s about as gender-radical as Puccini or Harlequin Romance or any other narrative that keeps grinding in the gender roles and worshipping that brute uncaring male “agonal hero” figure. It’s not that I don’t like opera — I cry at a good production of La Traviata like any other person of feeling. Brokeback Mountain is grand opera. It’s a very ingenious way of tying a central sexual/romantic mythic archetype of our culture to a gay rights message. But radical or subversive? Fuhgeddaboudit.
15 April 2006, 3:32 amJames M:
“Ennis … is a romantic idealization of the ultimate Western male archetype.â€
Sure, he has all the outward trappings of the stereotypical masculine mystique, but to call him romanticized? What the film reveals through its course, at least to me, is the pathetic, wretched truth behind that mystique. At the end, we see he lives in a depressingly-squalid trailer in the middle of nowhere, isolated and struggling to maintain a connection with even his own family. (I responded to that strongly and emotionally because I see the same thing echoed in the miserable life of a certain Marlboro-man relative of mine, who bought into the myth and now, near the end of his life, doesn’t know how to change.) I don’t know how anyone can see that Marlboro man archetype as being glorified, romanticized or in any way endorsed here, or as anything other than exposed for the sham it is.
The “consensual rape†scene between Jack and Ennis: First, this is the only explicit sex scene (to my memory) between the two; just because it’s never suggested that their conjugal relations follow a different script later on, doesn’t mean we have to assume they’re as violent as this one. But once again, if they do follow this script, we don’t have to take that as meaning that the film endorses that script.
Second, in this first encounter, if you watch closely you see that Jack is clearly shown assuming a submissive position without being forced, restrained, or even asked to do so. Whether that posture is truly “voluntary†on Jack’s part, is a more complicated subject than I feel qualified to address. But I don’t think the scene, or the movie, is intended to depict an ideal expression of man-to-man love! It’s attempting to show something like the probable reality of how such a situation might occur. I don’t think anyone I know took it as a Harlequin-romance idealization of forcible sodomy. You see throughout the film that the only script the characters know to follow in demonstrating affection is to wrestle, to be violent, to take or be taken by force. That’s what happens in this scene, and it is ugly and sad. We also see the same scenario transposed onto Ennis’ relationship with his wife, as you describe. That, too, is ugly and sad.
Maybe Jack’s seemingly willing submission in the sex scene is a bow to patriarchal values, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the film *endorses* those values.
I don’t agree that Ennis is meant to be the “hero†of the film, at least in any conventional sense. Does being the central character automatically qualify one as a hero? I just can’t understand how anyone could see him as anything other than pathetic, and I can’t see how anyone would see the movie’s intent as anything other than to depict the state of his life as wretched. In general, his relationships are characterized by violence and lies – not exactly romance-novel material.
The crux of our disagreement seems to be our estimation of the film’s intent. We get into murky territory when we try to define the filmmakers’ intended message … unless some definitive statement is made by the writer, these arguments aren’t empirically verifiable. I have read endless rants from both sides about one of my favorite movies, Blue Velvet, concerning whether or not David Lynch is a misogynist. When the writer is as tight-lipped about his motivations as Lynch was, ultimately it’s up to the viewers to duke it out in forums like this. And I don’t know if anyone ever really wins.
As to the triteness of the movie’s themes (the gay variation on that theme notwithstanding), I can’t disagree. But being merely a middlebrow country-bumpkin from South Louisiana, who doesn’t get out to see much Puccini, I appreciated the accurate (damned accurate, for Hollywood, anyway) depictions of rural characters and the exposure of the stoic masculine archetype for the soul-destroying role it is.
And I still maintain that it’s subversive, for the same reason I stated previously. Because the person who accompanied me to see the film related how she’d earlier brought a “manly†male friend of hers to see it, and not without trepidation. She was surprised, however, at the degree to which he embraced the story, which he explained was because the characters weren’t feminized — and therefore their gay relationship was “okay†and even somewhat “natural.â€
Well, clearly he missed the point I took from the movie, that that stoic masculine ethos contributes to the slow rot of the soul, but it exposed something in him that he probably didn’t recognize before (and maybe even after): that his previous negative attitude toward homosexuality had less to do with the manner of sexual congress, than with the violation of the sacrosanct principle that “Men shalt not behave like women.â€
And I’m sorry, it came as a shock to me to see a film that had as one of its themes something as heretical as that, which exposes the subtext of our discourse about homosexuality. I call that subversive.
15 April 2006, 10:10 pmDeAnander:
I flipped back through the short story last night and saw that in Proulx’ version, during that first sexual encounter (I can hardly call it “lovemaking”), what Jack actually does is take Ennis’ hand and put it on his (Jack’s) penis. I may have remembered the screen version wrong, or perhaps it varied slightly from the short story in this detail. This makes Ennis’ reaction (aggressive anal penetration) even more “logical” under the Patriarchy Rulebook: as the dominant male it is not his place to give pleasure but to take it; he is threatened by even this small and relatively gentle initiative on the other man’s part and compelled immediately and forcefully to demonstrate “who’s on top.”
Again I think many women can testify to disappointing and/or terrifying and/or devastating experiences with men who react with this kind of kneejerk, instant violence/aggression to a tentative sexual overture. My problem with the film is that, like most of Hollywood’s output, it legitimises, romanticises, and valorises this constructed (imho deeply dysfunctional) masculinity.
15 April 2006, 11:29 pmDeAnander:
Good discussion James! glad someone responded.
I’m actually disturbed by exactly that reaction that you describe in your FOAF — that he can manage not to be offended by gay relationships as long as the guys aren’t “faggy” — in other words, the film makes a special-pleading for “acceptable” gay men, men who obey all the rules except the one about not fucking other men. So does the FOAF now reserve the right to despise faggy gay men, but not manly gay men? and is that a step forward? If the field of discourse is narrowed to “gee, a wider range of sexual behaviour is OK for men as long as they are Manly,” that doesn’t seem to me a huge step forward. The FOAF you cite certainly endorses received opinion: only agonal, emotionally stunted masculinity is seen as “normal” and therefore OK even if it is seen in “gay” men…
If the FOAF came to the conclusion that “men shall not behave like women” and vice versa was not, after all, such a sacrosanct principle then the film would, I think, be far more subversive. But if he walks away confirmed in his belief that only Manly Men are Real Men (even if they love other men), then imho he has got the message I took from the film, i.e. Manliness is Cool and Romantic (even if tragic).
I’ll pose a provoking question: is the BB Mtn message really any different from the ideology of prison rapists, who believe that as long as they are “manly” they are not “gay” (i.e. despicable, unmanly, like women)?
See Stephen Donaldson’s mindbending address on this topic:
There are, I note in passing, numerous gay pornographic books and videos featuring an incarceration setting, but it is obvious that very few of them were written by former prisoners and they are generally wildly inaccurate in depicting sexual reciprocity.
The prisoner subculture fuses sexual and social roles and assigns all prisoners accordingly. Feminist analysis would note this as a patriarchal trait, and I would add that in my experience confinement institutions are the most sexist (as well as racist) environment in the country, bar none. As R. W. Dumond noted last year, “prison slang defines sexual habits and inmate status simultaneously.” This classification system draws a rigid distinction between active and passive roles. The majority, which in this case is on top in all senses, consists of the so-called “men,” and they are defined by a successful and continuing refusal to be sexually penetrated. A single instance of being penetrated, whether voluntary or not, is universally held to constitute an irreversible “loss of manhood.” The “Men” rule the roost and establish the values and behavioral norms for the entire prisoner population; convict leaders, gang members, and the organizers of such activities as the smuggling of contraband, protection rackets, and prostitution rings must be and remain “Men.”
It is important to realize that whether a Man is sexually involved or not, his status is sexually defined. A Man who is sexually active (in both senses) is called a “jocker.” (A note here: although the term “man” is universal in prisoner slang, other terms vary considerably from one region to another and in some cases with time. Since I do not have time tonight to go into linguistic usage, I will pick the most commonly understood prisoner term and use it here to the exclusion of all others. The term “jocker” was well established at San Quentin in 1925.) If a jocker is paired off, he is a “Daddy.” If he engages in sexual coercion, he is a “booty bandit.” Men almost always identify as heterosexual (in a few cases bisexual) and the overwhelming majority of them act heterosexually before and after confinement.
[the whole document is worth a read, though it will break any feeling heart…]
My point is that the men who have gay sex in prison and identify themselves as “straight” are (my reading) subscribing to the same reality that the film offers to straight audiences to legitimise the gay relationship: these men are not sissies. They are Real Men. Therefore what they do sexually is irrelevant and does not imperil their privileged gender role.
This doesn’t get us any further from patriarchy — we can look back to the Theban Band to find patriarchy, warmongering and all the rest happily co-existing with gay (male) sex.
BTW I do also read your subtext, the film as a comment on the hopelessness and self-defeat of the agonal, Lone Male Hero role — Ennis as a tragic antihero, not a happy hero. But I think it’s a subtext mostly readable by radical feminists and pro-feminist men
[I note that a side effect of the movie is that cowboy chic is back in gay male fashion mags — the Fantasy Studly Butch is once again wearing chaps and cowboy hat.]
At least one reviewer seems to agree w/me that Praise of the Masculine Ideal is the more accessible text of the film:
Is Brokeback Mountain, as it’s been touted, Hollywood’s first gay love story? The answer—in a very positive sense, I think—is yes to the love story, no to the gay. Make no mistake: The film is as frank in its portrayal of sex between men as in its use of old-fashioned romance movie conventions. Its stars are unabashedly glamorous. The big-eyed Jake Gyllenhaal is a far cry from Proulx’s small, bucktoothed Jack Twist, just as the blond, square-jawed Heath Ledger is nothing like her Ennis Del Mar, “scruffy and a little cave-chested.” Yet, even if, in their tailored jeans and ironed plaid shirts, Gyllenhaal and Ledger sometimes look more like Wrangler models than teenagers too poor to buy a new pair of boots, the film neither feels synthetic (in the manner of the abysmal Making Love) nor silly (in the manner of gay porn). On the contrary, his stars’ outsize screen presence provides Lee with a means of bringing to vivid cinematic life what is in essence a paean to masculinity.
And masculine the film is. Ledger’s astonishing performance reveals an unsuspected vein of tenderness in a character more likely to express emotion through violence than words. His Ennis Del Mar is as monolithic as the mountainscape in which—with the same swiftness, brutality, and precision that he exhibits in shooting an elk—he fucks Jack Twist for the first time. (”Gun’s goin’ off,” Jack grunts in response—in the story, not the movie.)
[…]
Indeed, with the one exception of the scene in Juarez, nothing in Brokeback Mountain cries “gay.” Neither of the heroes eschews sex with women; instead, they simply assert that they prefer sex with each other. At one point in the story, Ennis asks Jack, “This happen a other people?” and Jack answers, “It don’t happen in Wyomin and if it does I don’t know what they do, maybe go to Denver.” Mb “Lover” isn’t a word Ennis and Jack ever utter. Instead they call each other “friend.” When they kiss, their teeth hit. Respect for some burdensome ideal of masculine struggle underlies and at the same time undercuts their ability to love each other: an idea that Ledger in particular brings home by investing his performance with the deadpan, reticent tenderness of Hollywood Western stars from the 1950s. His stoicism drives the movie, and nowhere more movingly than when he utters its signature line: “If you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.”
Anyway, I think that “subversion” or critique of the Tough Guy Masculine Ideal is a minority reading of the film, and the majority reading is the legitimisation of a gay relationship by making it “OK because they are manly.”
16 April 2006, 10:48 pmDeAnander:
Ouch, I wish there were a Preview feature on this blog. A sentence that I boldfaced got lost there:
At one point in the story, Ennis asks Jack, “This happen a other people?” and Jack answers, “It don’t happen in Wyomin and if it does I don’t know what they do, maybe go to Denver.” Interestingly, McMurtry and Ossana leave this lone mention of possible urban refuge out of the movie, the point of which seems to be less to subvert the conventions of male bonding than to extend them.
16 April 2006, 10:50 pmstacia tolman:
I was listening to Rush Limbaugh around the time Brokeback Mountain came out, and a self-described Republican Christian came on, from Virginia, I think, or Illinois, definitely somewhere deep in Red State territory, and she had called in to tell Rush all about Brokeback Mountain, how differently she understood the issue now, how she realized that love was just love, and it didn’t matter who the parties were who loved each other, that putting restrictions and limitations on who was allowed to love each other led to terrible violence in society. Rush spluttered something about not having seen the movie and not planning to, and the woman said well, I just wanted to recommend the movie, that it really was important for everybody to see it, and Rush should consider seeing it, too, and got off. Rush spluttered some more and quickly cut to station identification.
There is an inherent conservativism in works of art. Given the limited space a movie makes its choices in, part of its power lies in its ability to reflect reality the way it is. If a movie made sure to contradict every socially-loaded power relationship, right down to the hair color of the principal actors, it probably wouldn’t work that well as art. Viewers would be watching a visual treatise on power relationships, not a movie. In order to reach people like our Republican Christian friend in Virginia or Illinois, the movie needs to persuade her that ‘this is really happening.’ Then she invests emotion in it, then it has a chance to change her mind. I’ve seen plenty of ‘gay’ movies whose PC credentials (and I use the term lovingly) were far more pristine, and therefore subversive, I suppose, than Brokeback Mountain, but who was being subverted? Me, and the two or three other people in an art house in Cambridge or NY or LA, but we there because we were already singing in the choir. Some of those movies worked as art, some didn’t, but none of them reached the audience Brokeback Mountain did, and none of them got a plug on the Rush Limbaugh show.
18 April 2006, 11:55 amDeAnander:
Hmmm, so once again we put women’s rights last?
I’m only sayin’ — there’s no acknowledgement anywhere in the story or the script that Ennis is a rapist. In cinema history of feminist awareness, looks like we are back to Gone with the Wind.
And this normalisation of rape is one thing that keeps patriarchy ticking, and women at risk of sexual predation.
I’m all for the movie as a lever to pry open a wee space of tolerance for gay cowboys, or gay men in general. And to instil a sense of horror or shame at the lynching of gay men. It works great. But it does so by plea-bargaining.
In other words, it does so only by legitimising the mythology of male sexual entitlement and dominance and the associated violence, deadening of affect, destructive and self-destructive behaviours etc.
I would be just as disappointed by, e.g. a movie that treated rape seriously but only in context of a white character being raped by a Black character — thus bringing sexual violence into the realm of public conscience and discussion, but only by wrapping it in culturally obedient racism.
This notion that we can only address one issue at a time in cultural activism is imho imposed from above, a divide et impera strategy that works very well: we’re never allowed to address injustice holistically, only in a futile piecemeal fashion that reinforces one injustice even as it highlights another, and keeps the media audience from ever being challenged beyond their comfort zone. It’s as if we have to give them patriarchy candy to soothe them if we talk about class or race, racist candy to soothe them if want to talk about rape, misogyny candy if we want to talk about gay themes (Priscilla, QOD anyone?)…
I don’t actually believe that media (lit or film) have to be dead boring or preachily PC in order to address multiple social justice issues… in fact I think BB Mtn would have been far more exciting, engaging, fascinating if the women’s point of view, and the inner feelings of the men, had been more vividly drawn.
18 April 2006, 5:16 pmR. S. Morris:
I am going to “side” with Stacia on this one (though I think everything De said is super-important).
Having talked to MANY people after showing the film in our theater, and especially now that it is out on video and people who wouldn’t be caught dead watching BB Mtn in public have been able to take it back to their respective closets, I think the angle taken by the filmmakers has had a MUCH more significant impact than if they had made a full-on political push-piece.
There has been almost universal acceptance and admiration for the film by everyone who has actually seen it–and this is in a reddest of the red, deep baptist/catholic/mormon, rural conservative community. They LIKED the movie! Think of the potential impact, of the possibility for that positive experience to help rewrite the myths they live by.
I know that the gender/patriarchy rabbithole goes much deeper than what was addressed in BB Mtn, but I think it might just be the bridge that is needed–from my experience anyway.
18 April 2006, 6:00 pmDeAnander:
Argh. But my very gripe, which I don’t seem to be able to get across, is that this film does not “rewrite the myths they [we] live by” — which is the whole reason why it wins unexpected audiences. What it does is try to wrench a gay-rights argument into a cultural frame that does not challenge those myths.
Thus making that gay-rights argument kind of like the case for token wealthy Republican Blacks — having been made nonthreatening and obedient to the hegemonic myth, they become acceptable — and we call this “progress” in the struggle against racism… even as racism intensifies against those Blacks who do not fit into that myth… (as in NOLA). If I wanted to get really gloomy I could suggest that the success of BB Mtn might be part and parcel of the remasculinising and remilitarising of US culture, part of the same meme flow as Peggy Noonan’s post-911 upchuckworthy hymns to Manly Men, as Dubya’s codpiece posturing on an aircraft carrier, as the courting of the NASCAR-dad demographic and the popularity of civilian copies of military vehicles for urban commutes (the SUV mania): finding a masculine, tough-guy, all-American packaging for “gay rights.” As in Jeff Gannon/Guckert?
Where does that leave women?
The kapu against male/male sex is not nearly so strong in patriarchy as the kapu against gender ambiguity or nonconformity. BB Mtn picked the easier target, is what I guess I am trying to say, and by doing so contributes (mho) some damage to the feminist cause even as it contributes some positives to the gay rights cause. I don’t think BB Mtn builds a bridge towards a deeper discussion on gender/patriarchy/misogyny, but rather an escape route away from such a discussion, by managing to sever homophobia from the rest of the patriarchal baggage.
Whereas, if we look as the antecedents of the Duke incident for example, we find that as we would expect, some of the lacrosse team members were gaybashers as well as racist hatemongers as well as punters as well as [alleged, and I am not too skeptical] rapists. one big ugly ball of wax. If we found that two of ‘em had a secret sexual liaison on the side while still screwing women and abusing prostitutes of colour, it wouldn’t change the masculine scripts they are following… the scripts that are not challenged by BB Mtn, which fits well with the renewed national mythos of American Cowboy Manliness.
I think I’m gonna have to rest my case
I had the same itchy feeling watching BB Mtn that I did watching Tous Les Matins Du Monde: a) this is a beautiful film and very tragic, b) this is “Opera, or the Undoing of Women” — [cf Catherine Clement]. I’m by no means immune to the pull of that Lone Cowboy myth. But I get a very strange feeling, watching a film that makes me feel sympathy with a rapist.
18 April 2006, 7:15 pmR.S. Morris:
I think I really do get where you’re coming from De. What I would pose is this: can sitting Joesephine Average down and lecturing her on all the things that you put so eloquently here actually change her perception toward gays/patriarchy/militarization/etc.? Will she have anything close to the communication/paradigm tools necessary to even hear what you are trying to get across? My experience is “no” and “not even close.” That’s not being arrogant or patronizing on my part–I still struggle with the concepts that get thrown around so effortlessly by you, Stan, Yolanda, et al.
Notice, I never said that BB Mtn has “rewritten” our myths. No way, that’s why I agree with so much of what you say on the subject. But what do we expect from a relatively mainstream Hollywood flick, anyway? I was trying to point out the possiblity that BB Mtn might open some doors in people that, up to now, have been welded shut.
Is it possible that the film relinquishes many deep statements it COULD have made, but is still valuable for the inroads it might have made into peoples’ psyches? What if some of the people who watched and enjoyed the film BECAUSE IT DIDN’T CHALLENGE THEM TOO MUCH ALL AT ONCE are now open to viewing something that takes them further toward the worldview we are trying to promote? Inroads here, loss of territory there…I really don’t know.
Now, to play Devil’s advocate to myself:
Unfortunately, it’s all academic anyway. People will not embrace a new way of thinking or living until their perception of survival is threatened–or very rarely will they in my experience. I deal with this in politics far too regularly.
I had an interesting and somewhat disturbing conversation with a female associate of mine a few nights ago. I had just finished Stan’s new book and was flexing some of the concepts during our discussion. Specifically, I pointed out that the political situation would never work right until we had true equality between men and women–both in practice and perception–and the patriarchy was permanently dismantled. This female associate then proceeded to explain in great detail how that would NEVER happen, and that she was quite comfortable with things the way they are between men and women, and that she was just fine with a status-quo, sex-on-demand marriage…just so long as the man could provide for her adequately.
Needless to say, I was floored.
I politics, I regularly run up against the fact that people are incapable of thinking “outside the box.” A stretch for most in my area is VOTING DEMOCRAT. That’s right–they feel like they are stepping out on a political precipice whenever we meet and talk about replacing our Repub congresscum with a Dem.
So, the system needs to be brought down anyway, why try to bring the ignorant masses along into the epistimological light? Why do I keep trying to drag them along? Yet every time I open my mouth and use words like “revolution/misogyny/patriarchy/gender/etc” they invariably retreat back toward their mainstream comfort zone, and not without a certain amount fresh of hostility toward my politics. There is NO point of reference that reflects the truth of what I am trying to push them toward without a willingness on their parts to begin the process of personal study and deprogramming.
“Where does that leave women?”
THAT movie obviously won’t be made by Hollywood, will it? Because you’re right: the taboo is too strong. But maybe now some brave, independent filmmaker will make, and I will show, a film that really does address the true nature of patriarchy–and people will come see it because they have had their preconceived notions ever-so-slightly challenged by BB Mtn and lived to tell about it.
I sure hope I live to see it happen.
Keep fighting De, you’re awesome!
Randy
19 April 2006, 1:13 amJames M:
Many great points on all sides, and a very enjoyable & informative discussion. I’m glad my thesis was challenged, and though I stand by the essence of it, the discussion has broadened my understanding of the of the subject.
My final $0.02: Maybe, going back to my orginal standard for why it’s subversive, this movie will cause an uncomfortable reckoning in the kind of conservatives R.S. is talking about, who view the film and love it: Having had acceptance of at least ONE gay relationship Trojan-Horsed into their formidable citadels of prejudice, they might - maybe, with the faintest of hope - ask themselves why, if Jack & Ennis ‘ relationship is okay, all the other gay relationships like the ones in San Francisco and other urban environs are unacceptable. And maybe, in certain individuals more predisposed to free thought, that would provoke a confrontation with their notions of gender.
I know, it’s a longshot. You may say I’m a dreamer.
Interestingly, the most recent “Sopranos” episode also addressed this theme and some of the issues of gender / patriarchy you’ve brought up, DeAnander. It seems a certain character, Vito, has been involuntarily outed and has fled New Jersey. In the course of his Mob family’s investigation of his previously-surreptitious homosexuality, it emerges that Vito was once observed engaging in oral sex with a male security guard.
The family is shocked and repulsed, but the interesting thing is, *they assume Vito must have been on the receiving end* of the fellatio, and when told the scenario was reversed, the real apoplexy begins. It’s clear through this scene what the real crime was.
The same theme was also introduced when another high-ranking member of the family was discovered to have a talent and a penchant for cunnilingus. He is made the butt of jokes, and loses the esteem of his capos. The episode ends with him vicioiusly attacking his girlfriend, as if to restore his diminished sense of masculinity.
OK, enough pop culture references for one post. Peace out.
19 April 2006, 5:09 amStan:
One thing I’ll give BBM is that it got this conversation fired up. This is showing again the importance of cultural criticism to politics. It is, however, at the end of the road, about politics — the struggle for social power.
There are some political issues raised in this discussion that cry out at us — political assumptions, that is.
One is that persuasion is the sole and-or central task in a struggle for power… in this case, I’m with De, the question is “What about women?” The issue of “What about LGBT?” is actually contained within that question, but that’s a longer conversation. In short, homophobic oppression is directly related to and a sub-set OF patriarchy.
But attempts to infiltrate subversive messages to Joe & Jane Sixpack (a very risky generalized category all by itself) are not the essence of politics. Frederick Douglass hit the nail on the head when he said:
“Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reforms… The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions, yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing… If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters… This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
The key to ending oppression is not persuasion of one’s enemies, but the development of clarity and unity among one’s allies, and organization to TAKE power from those who hold it.
A frind of mine in Haiti told me once: “There are people who think we can quietly make the revolution while the bourgeoisie is asleep. But the bourgeoisie never sleeps. We have to make the revolution right in front of them.”
Provide the clarity, identify the needs, consolidate the advanced to win over the next layer of the intermediate, give people organization so they can learn IN the struggle, and push back.. hard. That’s politics.
Jane Sixpack is among a population where half will be sexually assaulted, one in four battered. She’s not going to be convinced by portrayls of rough cowboy sex that there is anything here for her, but the same ol’ same ol’. When Jane gets conscious and unified in organization, Joe can get right or go to hell. She doesn’t need to persuade him by degrees. ‘Cause she no longer needs him.
19 April 2006, 8:06 amElaina:
I’m not too big a fan of any big Hollywood production. I mean, I don’t know how many of y’all saw the HBO (I think) thing “Iron Jawed Angels.”
The Women’s Coordinating Council @ UT wanted to show it, and I think I was probably the only one to say I didn’t really think it was worth showing- it downplayed the racism in the suffragette movement. It glamorized the whole thing. It made it look like women had “won”, when they really hadn’t. It had a disgusting montage-segment where the main characters get “dressed up” and put their makeup on to stupid modern music. It made these women look like martyrs because they went to prison- when they at least got to GO HOME after it was all said and done to a decent middle class life, blah blah. Blah.
So I’ve been hesitant to carve out 2 hours of my life for Brokeback Mountain.
I’m with De and Stan, and will report back once I’ve actually seen the movie- but it the general message they’re giving sounds enough like “enough’s enough” for me to agree. We can’t forget that the system uses vehicles like Hollywood Movies and the advertising industry to do their own kind of political indoctrination- I keep thinking about what R.S. said about his female friend, how she’s just fine playing the role of dominated female as long as the male who’s dominating her “does her right” or is able to provide sufficiently for her.
It looks like the machine has worked on her. The whole capitalist media-mega-orgy: the movies, ads, the internet, TV shows, this fucked-up notion of consumerist bourgeois happiness that we’re supposed to swallow, etc. I’m not saying that the woman mentioned here is HAPPY or anything like that; I’m not saying that she’s mean or bad. She’s admitted defeat.
That, to me, is the purpose of the system in this capitalist country that sings and moans about libertarian “values.” We’re supposed to look at all this shit and come to a point where we say “we can’t fight it. Might as well just roll with it.”
That’s why De’s commentary, and others like it, are so important- they show us where the little tricks are, if that makes sense, so that we can weed them out for ourselves in other places, see what’s really happening, and go from there.
But I’ll talk more once I’ve seen the movie.
19 April 2006, 1:09 pmDeAnander:
Well I already had my Last Word on BBM
but while we are at it, we night talk about another “subversive” film “V for Vendetta” based on a graphic novel by a left British author. the movie is subversive of the neocon agenda; it satirises the Bush or Berlu type of mafia capitalist militarist government in cahoots with religious wingnuts, it draws the parallels between Bushismo and historical fascism. it also includes a gay male character, and a lesbian character, who are martyred by the fascists. It includes a powerful message of solidarity. There’s much here to like and it is an elegant flick, visually tasty and fun in a flashy, splashy graphic-novel way.
BUT [and this is spoilers] it is also a story about a Girl In Trouble (pretty and young of course) who is Rescued From Thugs by a dashing, mysterious tall dark stranger who becomes her protector. Of course she falls in love with him. She endures many trials, including capture and interrogation and torture by the Bad Guys, but discovers her own courage and becomes a committed revolutionary. Except there is one twist here: her capture and torture are actually faked, that is, carried out by the mysterious V, her “protector”. What he has done with this young woman in his power is “season” her (much like a pimp with a young girl he wants to prostitute) into a revolutionary, “testing” her by imprisonment and torture.
When she discovers this, does it shake her love for him? Of course not, this is Movieland. She goes off to pursue her destiny, carrying out his noble plans. Though there is no explicit sex in the film the whole setup is disturbing, pseudofeminist and and the same time deeply antifeminist…
I don’t expect much of Hollywood or any major film industry. I would say however that films have been made about patriarchy. Some of them even semi mainstream. ‘What’s Love Got To Do With It’ biodrama about battery in the marriage between Ike and Tina Turner; ‘Broken Mirrors’ a brilliant Dutch flick about the use of women in patriarchal systems — marriage, prostitution, targets of serial killer; ‘Viol d’Amour’, ‘Question of Silence,’ ‘Born in Flames,’ ‘Bandit Queen,” just off the top of my head. I would consider ‘Strange Days’ to be fairly subversive as it deromantices porn and gets close to the heart of that porn really means. ‘Mona Lisa’? Generally antipatriarchal films are kind of depressing
which may explain why few become box office hits.
In defence of the makers of BBM I would say they held true to the flavour of Proulx’ Wyoming stories which take a detached, cold, almost casual attitude to rape and battery, and take male violence and dominance in stride as just another fact of the landscape. My frustration with the film is not entirely the film makers’ fault but in keeping with similar feelings I had while reading the anthology in which the story appears, ‘Close Range’.
19 April 2006, 2:44 pmR. S. Morris:
I had a huge rant all typed out, but then I realized that it was just more personal/political whining on my part.
Instead, I’d like to ask a very serious question of everyone: How does local community figure into your vision of resistance?
I’m doing my resistance homework as frantically as I am able, but I still can’t rapidly or cleanly process many of the concepts you advanced practitioners wield so adeptly. In other words, I need you to speak to me about practical aplication in laypersons’ terms. Oh, and try to talk slowly.
Randy
19 April 2006, 4:29 pmStan:
In the July 2005 edition of Socialism and Democracy, Yussif Nuruddin published an article entitled “Inside/Outside vs. Left Pole/Mainstream.â€
“Mentored by black power activists,†he writes, “the radical strategy which I had always been taught, and in turn have taught to my own activist students, is the ‘Inside/Outside’ strategy, i.e. work inside the system to dismantle it, create liberated zones, speak truth to power, challenge the status quo, learn skills, gain a livelihood, expropriate resources, etc. – and simultaneously work outside the system to build independent, alternative revolutionary institutions, so that a network of such institutions could sustain a vibrant oppositional counterculture… those romantic revolutionaries, utopian separatists, and extreme Afrocentrists, cultural nationalists and religious cultists… thought that we somehow could or should just walk away from white supremacy, that we should distance ourselves through total disengagement, and build a black utopia in the midst of Babylon, rather than dismantle and transform the evil empire… and a strategy that presumes such is unrealistic and unworkable… A total reliance on working within the mainstream – even at the left end of the mainstream – is as flawed, in my estimation, as working completely ‘outside the system.’ … Yet there is something that the left can learn from the black nationalist institution building emphasis. By investing all our hopes, dreams and energies in a left pole of the mainstream, we will neglect to build the institutions and networks of institutions – the alternative schools, think/act tanks, cafes, bookstores, media outlets, etc. (we have many free-standing but fragile institutions, so viable ‘networks’ is the operative word here) that can sustain an oppositional movement when we fail to elect our mainstream left pole candidates or when hundreds of thousands of participants in mainstream peaceful protest fail to divert an administration hell-bent on war.â€
Earlier this year, I was asked to speak in Chicago at the Puerto Rican Cultural Center. When I arrived, the center was plastered with references to “Boricua†(the Taino name for Puerto Rico, and a nationalist appellation). There were around 150 people attending and around 80 percent were young people, half of them in high school. The center itself was fully owned by this community, but after the event, in which elders that included the principle of the school talked about the relation between imperialism and gentrification – and called their space “liberated territory†– I was given a tour of the neighborhood. The students who had attended also attended the Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos High School, a bi-lingual, bi-cultural school completely under the control of this community, where Puerto Rican nationalism was advocated and Puerto Rican anti-imperial history was taught… in the classroom. This community had, over a period of thirty years, bought buildings, conducted local campaigns, elected their own city council representative and their own member of the US House of Representatives, established their own park, their own dance school, their own beauty and barber shops, their own parade, their own college counseling service, their own day-care center, etc. etc. etc. This patient local work was constantly under attack from outside influences, but the same patience and commitment had consolidated a powerful sense of community that has proven hard to break. As part of their political and cultural education program, they invite outside speakers to come. That’s how I got invited.
This is a very advanced example of what Yussif Nuruddin was describing. But it is not a lone example. Efforts like this are rooted in many places where I and others have been invited from the outside to speak, as part of on-going public education and discussion venues sponsored by these local, institutionally developed formation. San Pedro, California (theater, local media outlet, film-making school). Grand Rapids, Michigan (community theater-auditorium, lending library, local radio and television stations, paid staff). Hudson, New York (lesbian-operated, multi-purpose warehouse for film screenings, open forums, youth, community projects, theatre performances, music, dance performances, literary readings, art exhibitions). A great groupd called Activist San Diego. These local concentrations with infrastructure are far more common than many of us realize.
There is a reason I emphasize that people are invited from the outside to speak to these formations. Many of them are run by independent socialists, feminists, etc., or by people who are very open to socialist, feminist, etc., politics and ideas. They also have highly-developed organizing skills, solid local relationships, and a great deal of political street savvy.
TYhis is where national initiatives can hook up with local, and employ Nuruddin’s inside/outside strategy.
The left is being reconstructed almost under our very noses, and not via some overarching national directive that tries to impose ideological conformity or cookie-cutter programs from a toy Comintern. The development of both a revitalized national left and the provision of local efforts with a more powerful connection to an anti-imperial and anti-patriarchal project are conceivable, and – I would argue – highly desirable.
The local is where it is at. If it isn’t, it is time to patiently build it… right where each of us live.
19 April 2006, 4:42 pmDeAnander:
Hakim Bey on Temporary Automomous Zones
Mike Ferner on the difficulties and rewards of making the step from anti-war to pro-democracy movement
Scott Ritter on the Art of War for the Anti War Movement
The old left was centralist and Taylorist, I will boldly generalise that it drew from a naive “poetry of industrialism” i.e. a romanticisation of industry — large scale, monoculture, and replication — and Cartesian math. If the New New Left has any sense imho it will be fractal, dispersed, complex and draw on a poetry of biotic systems and chaos theory. That’s glib as hell but the best I can do in haste…
19 April 2006, 4:58 pmDeAnander:
BTW, speaking of gender, patriarchy, and war…
Feminist Israeli “Unfit To Serve” Due to Beliefs: IDF
“The committee said that her feminism, not pacifism, seemed more dominant and that, on the basis of holding such views, she would be unfit to serve.”
OK guys, when the draft starts up I have a whole new resistance stragegy. Cite the IDF case and become feminists — fast. You can organise study circles.
19 April 2006, 8:51 pmR. S. Morris:
As always, you’all come through for me with some more great commentary and reading material.
De, thanks for the readings–I printed them out and am going over them tonight. Looks like good stuff.
Stan, I appreciate the direct answer to my question; what you said actually fits perfectly with what I have been trying to communicate within my community. I tell people every chance I get that we can no longer be a part of the top-down political structure, and that building a new vision of community is our only way out. I just hope I can put all the important pieces of the puzzle together in such a way that I can communicate the “WHY” of it effectively. Right now I’m still bumbling through this stuff pretty poorly.
20 April 2006, 12:02 amR.S. Morris:
Well, De…all I can say is “Thanks.” With the Hakim Bey link you’ve given me an amazing gift.
So much reading and thinking to do and so little time…
Thank you again–and to everyone who pushes my boundaries at this blog.
I can feel freedom tickling me.
21 April 2006, 1:50 pmDeAnander:
@RSM Hakim Bey is a mixed bag, obviously he is far from being my soul mate
but the TAZ is a tremendously powerful concept. I think it connects directly to — among other things — the workers taking over the closed factories and bringing them back to life The Take: Review — the factory becomes a TAZ for the duration of the action.
The point Hakim made which stuck with me was that the Powers that Be have unparalleled toolage and weaponry at this point in history: tools for surveillance, enclosure, and destruction superior to any that they have ever had. They have, in theory, the firepower and the technology to enslave us all, and at times it seems that they are working on just that.
If we take them on head-to-head in the agonal male confrontation model we are very likely to lose, or at least to suffer such losses that any victory would be Pyrrhic at best. But if we make like small mammals in the fading years of the dinosaurs — unable to duke it out over control of large areas of turf, but fast-moving, adaptible, inventive, way smarter than the big guys and hard to catch — then we may not only survive but (along the way) have some fun and in the end prevail (if there is an end, which in history of course there ain’t).
Or so I read it. The idea of not fighting over turf but taking the revolution with us — nomadic revolution — is not a complete concept. In the end it fails before our manifest need as embodied humans for turf in the form of agricultural resources: we need food. We can’t escape from the fundamental need for land and water justice, for the stewardship and repair of a strained and shopworn commons. But in the near term, when confronting organised power in urban settings (which is where the great political battles over democracy tend to happen), being fast, mobile, and hard as quicksilver to catch has a certain appeal.
Maybe I’m just succumbing to a strain of romanticism in Bey, the notion that there is a way around these behemoths of fossil power other than a direct attack with millions getting killed. I dunno. Stan’s the military theorist. I’ve never even been in a fist fight; avoidance and cleverness have worked so far for me.
22 April 2006, 8:23 pmStan:
I’m not in the army any more. I am in politics. These meta-issues leave us little chjoice, it seems, and no shortcuts… though I am all about displaying tactical agility and resourcefulness.
No replacements in sight right now, at least from here, for consciousness and unity.
And having money and weapons doesn’t make them powerful. Having our minds and our fear does. Cindy Sheehan figured this out… the fear thing… and she knocked the piss out of them, just by not being afraid and not letting them rent space in her head.
Biko said it: The greatest weapon in the hand of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. They killed Biko. Then Biko won.
And I completely agree with De’s strategy on fighting. Good way to get hurt.
22 April 2006, 10:03 pmR.S. Morris:
Heya De, Stan:
The reason Bey’s TAZ essay affected me so profoundly is probably because, 1. I am currently locked in an internal struggle over how best to make so sort of meaningful “external” contribution to the cause, that then will feed back toward improving the potential future of my kids and community, 2. I felt that our Gulf Coast march was a pretty concrete manifestation of what Bey was talking about, albeit contained in a pretty cramped amount of time and, 3. I’m absolutely useless at biding my time within the system while organizing for resistance actions (of which far too many never impressed me as very useful in the long term, though the people involved nearly always impress me a great deal) and Bey’s thought experiment spoke to me and drew me outside one of the boxes I’ve been trapped inside for a long time–the “change the system” box. Not to say changing the system is not a valuable goal, but rather that I felt like I was trapped in some sort of closed loop where I could no longer see more than a couple of strategies concerning that problem.
I think that some of us really NEED a little romanticism (in the generic, epic tale” sense rather than the philosophical sense) to keep our attention. While I am a pretty capable cogitator (heh), my brain rarely processes information in any sort of consistent, linear way. Instead I find myself with a sort of “idea viewscape” that informs my next course of study or action. It’s messy and it definitely doesn’t lend itself well to structured debate. But once all that non-linear processing finally works itself out, I tend to be pretty confident in the next phase I’ve settled on (though rarely to the point of being dogmatic). A little romanticism can help keep me focused on a project or issue long enough for the non-linearity to work. Some don’t need that, but I seem to.
One of the “romantic” ideas he tapped into with great effect (for me anyway) was the whole “Pirate Utopia” thing. The idea of siphon-living off the excesses of modern leisure appeals greatly. What better way to hasten the erosion of the System than tugging at it like a million drag-chutes (all emblazoned with some appropriate “Jolly Roger” expedient, of course), all the while subverting the System’s message of fear and apathy by enjoining people to party their asses off rather than work for “The Man.” Not implying this is “the way,” just that this was a valuable box-cutter for me.
Another aspect of the TAZ concept is that it fits very well with the application of “Boyd Cycles,” tactical agility, etc. with the added benefit of PARTYING!
YO HO, YO HO, A PIRATE’S LIFE FOR ME! AVAST! ARRRRRR!
I’m still deciding what to do with all this stuff, but I definitely feel a little better–like the lid of my pot has been lifted enough to release some of my recent steam build-up.
Again, thanks. I love coming here.
(P.S.–I loved Bey’s take on Conspiracy Theory…check it out on the same website.)
Randy
22 April 2006, 11:45 pmDeAnander:
heya RSM — I see Bey hit the same notes of new hope for you that he did for me
a pleasure to share. now may I introduce you to the Pirate Party of Sweden, whose aim is to abolish copyright.
And to Ran Prieur, feral philosopher and author of the classic “How to Drop Out” and “The Slow Crash.” Ran like Hakim wanders a little far out on the edge for me sometimes, but he’s sharp as a tack and visionary… we need our wild eyed dreamers as well as our nutsnbolts organisers.
If you have not read Derrick Jensen’s The Culture of Make Believe I recommend it, though it is more likely to be heartbreaking than uplifting. It does tell us what we have to gain by consciously critiquing and undermining what we now call “civilisation,” i.e. highly organised and affluent barbarism.
25 April 2006, 6:46 pmDeAnander:
@RSM here is more food for thought:
What is truly sustainable ag?
The total economy, astounding in its ability to absorb every challenge, is well on its way to transforming organic food from a reform movement into an industry - another flavor in the global supermarket. It took capitalism less than a quarter century to turn even something as ephemeral as bagged salads of cut and washed organic mesclun, of all things, into a cheap international commodity retailed in a new organic supermarket. Whether this is a good or bad thing, people will disagree; probably it’s a little of both.
Joel Salatin and his customers want to be somewhere that juggernaut can’t go, and it may be that by elevating local above organic, they have found exactly that place. By definition, local is a hard thing to sell in a global marketplace. Local food, as opposed to organic, implies a new economy as well as a new agriculture - new social and economic relationships as well as new ecological ones. It’s a lot more complicated.
somewhere that juggernaut can’t go: the TAZ.
25 April 2006, 9:03 pmStan:
When I did a bit of socialist pedagogy recently, tho we covered all the basics on surplus value extraction, etc etc, we sent the participants away with a twofold mandate:
(1) Attempt to identify “natrualization” as part of everyday conversation, in order to spot ideology in action (defined as a narrative that simultaneously conceals and reproduces power by portraying a social relation as “natural”).
(2) Begin to look at everything around you through the lens of commodification. Not just the ususal products and services as commodities, but things like mental health, scenic vistas, self exteem, etc etc, transformed into commodities… things for sale.
Localism can be a very good test-bed and a place to build consciousness and unity and organization and infrastructure. But it can’t stop there. Local efforts that simply try to escape the grid without simultaneously using those local bases to project struggle against the system itself will eventually be undermined, usually by one or another form of commodification.
Capitalism must continue to seek new dimensions for commodification. It is in its genetic code. It is restless because it ceases to exist when it ceases to accumulate using the commodity form. The fact that it now presses further and further into every aspect of our lives is an indication of systemic crisis — notwithstanding all the ‘well-adjusted’ smiling we see in capitalist advtertizing. (We need to study advertizing… it is very revealing. Note that one never observes an exchange of money in product ads… but there is lots of smiling…)
What we build in the interstices of this doddering system is extremely important. But it should not be seen as a way of simply withdrawing — like going into the root cellar to wait out a tornado. We have to fight for the political interstices, too. Politics does not tolerate a vacuum, and the failure to contest for those political spaces by remaining engaged creates an opportunity for brown-shirted reaction. Right now that reaction is turing its attention to immigrants, btw. (How do we defend them?)
Lefties have erred, however, imho, in sometimes dismissing localism. Just as we did with feminism, we got one snapshot of one aspect of it, generalized about that, then reactively turned away from our own generalization as a “dangerous deviation.”
The other thing that is happening locally all over the country is that local organizers are accumulating (sorry, didn’t have another word at hand) actual physical space, offices, warehouses, theaters, etc, and concerting them into community assets for progressive political work with strong, local, relational networks. Integrating these with local-food initiatives (as has been done in a few places), etc, has huge potential.
On the political end of this, next year a few of us lefties who have looked at the potential inhering in these local efforts want to create a kind of travelling show panel that talks about openly revolutionary socialist and feminist politics, that moves through these spaces to begin testing the waters for the development of left-unity with some political teeth.
These local formations have had me along for several speaking engagements, etc, and in each place I have met a lot of people who are feeling very connected locally, but very constrained and baffled politically. So they link up with PDA etc, trying to find any way possible to give their convictions some kind of political outlet. They are, in short, ready.
The greatest containment tool out there against us right now is the Democratic Party and the whole “two-party” duopoly. We desperately need a movement that is brightly clear that democratic mass action has to be the centerpiece of a politics of resistance, and that electoral politics has to be seen as a contingent and subordinate tool, not the lodestar of all strategy. (When we develop sufficiently to make real and not symbolic challenges in the electoral arena, we will do the Chavista thing on them
As a thought experiment, how would folks here consider relating to the recent tectonic uprising of Hispano-Latinas? This is the biggest mass action we have seen in many decades in the US, maybe ever.
How can this local infrastructure best link to, amplify, build consciousnes and unity, and so on?
I’d be interested in y’alls thoughts. This is a very stimulating conversation.
26 April 2006, 8:51 amR.S. Morris:
My instant thoughts on the last couple posts:
I like the relation of local ag to the TAZ concept; when the farm is a network of yard-plots or community acreage it’s really hard for the beast to find and devour it. And it’s funny that you mention Ran Prieur–my ex-wife has been corresponding with him lately, apparently agitating his sensibilities a little with her cynical political views (and I mean that in a respectful way–my ex and I see politics pretty close).
On localism as it relates to larger political action, well, maybe there is value to some folks who might be sympathetic to the political cause staying out of the line of fire. Perhaps some amount of invisibility is necessary for those supportive island-communities that provide safe haven to the visible, but more mobile, direct-activists. Just a thought, and probably not very clear.
On the Hispano-Latina uprising, I think you probably meant to ask “how do we SUPPORT them?” didn’t you? You get my fantasy/machismic-patriarchal blood going when you use words like “defend”–like the whole Achilles-fighting-for-the-polis analogy.
Anyway, I think VFP is a perfect network for supporting the “Immigrant” and Hispanic population’s actions because it adds a white-acceptable militant element, a “muscle” made up of a demographic that people wouldn’t normally see in association with the afflicted community. Just like the positive discordance I saw in many bystanders during our march in the Gulf Coast. Veteran’s marching militantly adds teeth in a way nothing else can in small numbers.
Another thing VFP can be, aside from “muscle,” is a “bridge” between the target of xenophobia and the xenophobe. Seeing a “respectable,” familiar face participating alongside a crowd that threatens your every comfort-zone can help a lot. Others will have better ideas on this, as I am no rally-goer normally, but I wanted to get these basic thoughts out.
As to my personal willingness or ability to participate, I would be willing to directly support another similar uprising in person, but that would require advance notice (2 days advance, I think would be sufficient to do a Denver walk-out) and I see obvious logistical, and not-so-obvious security issues associated with disseminating that kind of info widely outside the Hispanic/Immigrant community. I think that that community benefits (only on the op-sec level, tho) from a certain amount of political invisibility. Once that invisibility is stripped away by networking there is a far greater opportunity for opposing forces to anticipate actions and counter-act. Probably just pointed out the obvious just now, but hey…
Stan, where would a person send a snail-mail letter to you? Got a P.O. box?
Randy
26 April 2006, 12:37 pmR. S. Morris:
P.S.:
Please don’t take my term “white-acceptable” as representative of my viewpoint on how the Hispanic/Latina/Immigrant should develop its strategies–I don’t necessarily think they should factor in “white-acceptability” when they decide what to do. My problem is often that I try to mediate for the minds in my local community, attempting to find ways to bring them along as rapidly as possible. Alosing battle? Probably so…
26 April 2006, 5:19 pmDeAnander:
example of localised activism on global topics
the Reel Work film festival is annual, local, most showings are free. friendly locals and businesses donate space… part of that mycelial infrastructure that Stan talks about upthread (or at least I see it as part of the same persistent movement). films, readings and theatre focus on labour history, anti-racism, anti-war work, feminism.
26 April 2006, 8:37 pmStan:
Check this out:
The Senate voted Wednesday to divert some of the money President Bush requested for the war in Iraq to instead increase security on the nation’s borders and provide the Coast Guard with new boats and helicopters…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-5782450,00.html
This is what I refer to in defending immigrants. This is just the beginning. Fascism requires a scapegoat population… and a complacent majority. Any of us with privilege have to put ourselves between these folks and the clubs with whatever political clout we can muster.
26 April 2006, 10:23 pmR. S. Morris:
I hope you understood the tongue-in-cheek component of my “rebuke” Stan. I get where you’re coming from, and I agree.
There is more to this, but I don’t think a public blog is the right venue. Just let me know if you need a body.
26 April 2006, 11:06 pmR.S. Morris:
Well, since someone else addressed it first…
From Counterpunch http://www.counterpunch.org/santos04272006.html
“Immigration Endgame
By JUAN SANTOS
We can no longer use the term loosely –America’s war against migrants is real, and the nation’s rulers mean to sweep the nation’s barrios the way Katrina swept the Black wards of New Orleans. And like the military operations visited upon the Black population of that city in the wake of the winds and floods, the war against migrants is a race war –one directed from the highest levels of power.
The recent strikes by ICE against migrant workplaces in dozens of cities across 26 states served as a crystal clear declaration: no matter what immigration bill passes in Washington, “enforcement†is the order of the day.”
27 April 2006, 7:33 pmR.S. Morris:
I’m going down to Denver Sunday night to see what I can do to help during the May 1st Huelga General.
Any recommendations? I don’t have any experience with this kind of resistance, so advice would be helpful.
Thanks.
Randy
28 April 2006, 3:21 amR.S. Morris:
Just dug up the now de-linked .pdf of the DRO’s “ENDGAME” strategic plan. This is quoted directly from the attatched memorandum written by Anthony Tangeman, Director of the DRO. See if this language doesn’t sound familiar:
“SUBJECT: Office of Detention and Removal (DRO) Strategic Plan 2003-2012: Endgame
…
…As the title implies, DRO provides the endgame to immigration enforcement and that is the removal of all removable aliens. This is also the essence of our mission statement and the “golden measure” of our success. We must endeavor to maintain the integrity of the immigration process and protect our homeland by ensuring that every alien who is ordered removed, and can be, departs the United States as quickly as possible and as effectively as practicable. We must strive for 100% removal rate.”
The full .pdf can be found at: http://www.yuricareport.com/Civil%20Rights/Endgame.pdf
28 April 2006, 11:36 amDeAnander:
I’m a resident alien. [moment of fear]
but I don’t think I’m who they are gunning for.
OTOH my sense of “first they came for the Gypsies and I said nothing” is strong.
28 April 2006, 5:05 pmR.S. Morris:
De:
Your quote from pastor Niemoller is the one identifiable record that informs and fuels my desire to do something NOW. For anyone unfamiliar with the whole quote (tho I’d be amazed if anyone didn’t know it):
I don’t have much to offer politically, as what little clout I do have is with the Wyoming Democratic Party (HA!) and that has been mostly eroded now by my radicalization at the hands of people like Stan, you and others here and elsewhere. So I will show up at actions I can get to, that seems to really mean something, and I will stand there offering myself in solidarity to the cause. Lots of the time I do this I end up looking like a dope because I just don’t know what to do.
But I figure as long as I keep showing up, eventually I’ll figure out what my part is in all this (aside from raising my kids to be better people, of course). Maybe my part is to communicate the message of the revolution to the insular communities of the Rocky Mountain West. Or maybe it is to take the baton-swing that was aimed at someone a little frailer than myself. I don’t know yet, but I will.
And maybe they won’t “come for me” because they will never have come for the “Gypsies, Jews and trade unionists” in this country to begin with–that is if enough of us go to Denver, Chicago, L.A., New York, Mobile-New Orleans, etc. and bare our teeth at the bastards and say “You can take my comrades when you can pry them from my loving embrace!”
Keep expanding my horizons, y’all.
Randy
29 April 2006, 1:29 am