-Mark

If you think spending our American blood and spending our American treasure in far off lands is a good thing, well, by all means, keep the status quo.
The next generation of Americans will, uh, remember you , uh, interestingly.

Timothy R. Anderson

In other words, how is it that you conclude that women don’t have heterosexual instinct ? which would be expressed in a society without male supremacy, which _was_ expressed in the human societies that lacked male supremacy ?

If our vision is for total social inclusion–education, healthcare, and work for everyone–then this is how to fund it. Seize all the assets of every politician, lobbyist, and businessman that participated in these felonious enterprises.

What other choice do we have?

to summarise his work (which really deserves a leisurely read for its sly sarcasm): the leisure class tends to be culturally conservative and to preserve anachronistic values; these values often derive from a barbaric, conquest-oriented epoch in which the only virtuous or worthy activities for upper class males are hunting and fighting, and mundane labour is disdained; hence the upper classes inherit a contempt for honest work and a cultural preference for predation — conquest or theft, whether by guile or force. this places their values in direct contradiction to the values of the industrialised polity, in which conformity, reliability, probity and workmanship are pre-eminent. it also places them in conflict with “natural” human values like the pride of workmanship and an abhorrence of waste, and with the reciprocal altruism which cements community.

Veblen is struggling to explain anachronistic beliefs and practises, conspicuous consumption, ridiculous gaps between use value and market value, and other cultural manifestations which “don’t make sense” in the early decades of industrial capitalism in America.

he even touches on gender and the position of the upper-class woman as a display object, perpetuating vicarious consumption on behalf of the dominant upper-class male; and he talks about the dysfunctional dispersal of upper-class values downward through the society by emulation of “reputability.” I can’t really do justice to his sardonic view of turn-of-the-previous-century America — his analysis of the clergy (and their vestments) as vicarious consumers for the ultimate aristocracy of God, alone, is worth the effort of wading through his sonorous and sometimes lumbering prose. the book is by turns hilarious in a manner reminiscent of Swift or Twain, and tedious like the last volume of Gibbon (where the elegance of the prose seems not only to have drowned any interesting content, but shot, stabbed, and poisoned it for good measure and buried the body in an unmarked grave).

anyway… certainly he was on to a correlation between the “manly” values of hunting and fighting, and the criminal values of looting, deceiving, and stealing. much of hunting and fighting consists of deceiving and outwitting the prey/enemy; hunting and warfare are viewed in dominant western culture like other extractive activities, as a form of looting (“to the victor belong the spoils” etc). both are considered more manly, more noble and more prestigious than tedious, humdrum honest labour. and criminals often consider themselves superior to (and more Manly than) “idiots” who don’t try to game or cheat the system or prey on neighbours.

the obvious application of a hunting and fighting ethic in the realm of commerce is force and fraud; the absurd overconformant masculinism of the Enron gang is part and parcel of their “criminality” — criminality being a word for overconformant masculine behaviour manifested in ways the State disapproves of as opposed to ways it approves of (such as wars of aggression and occupation or mailfist suppression of dissent).

the risible pseudo-Darwinism to which the Enron honchos subscribed lends a thin ideological/intellectual veneer to their basic faith in bullyism…

how the world would be in the absence of male domination is… well… unthinkable, though some have tried. Utopian feminist sci-fi has attempted to paint us worlds either without men altogether, or with men so reformed and civilised that patriarchy is a thing of the past. this might be an interesting thread sometime: Utopian feminist worlds and our critique of them.

the sf writer CJ Cherryh invented a sentient species and their culture once in which sexual dimorphism was marked and males were more innately aggressive, larger, fiercer, and more territorial. however, this led to their being deemed unstable and traditionally denied participation in political/public life except in a ceremonial capacity the life of the males in this hypothetical culture was centred in the home (their jealously guarded turf), where their innate aggression was turned usefully towards defence of the young and the elderly. the public life of the polity was conducted by adult females. she based the life form roughly on African lions, as far as I can tell.

the point of this digression is merely that even if we were to admit sexual dimorphism and, say, a link between testosterone and aggression as biological facts about hominids, we could still imagine cultural answers to those problems far different from the familiar answers of patriarchy…

But I’ll forgive myself for asking an apparently dumb question like that, because I guess sometimes that’s what’s required in order to make a lightbulb go on & illuminate how deeply, pervasively entrenched patriarchy is … including within one’s own psyche.

In the same way, I have to wonder if there is any way to separate criminality, of any kind, from male criminality… either in definition or practice. There are no boundaries for what is pervasive, and so we cannot draw a boundary around any action that happened within patriarchy and reasonably ask could the same thing, with the exception of male power, have happened differently. in the absence of male domination, nothing would be the same. Nothing.

Interesting. Yeah, the first two names to spring to my mind when the word “whistleblower” is mentioned are Colleen Rowley and Sibel Edmonds.

Not to say these women wouldn’t have spoken out if they were working under a more egalitarian regime, but it’s fair to say that this is what the Boy’s Club gets for being exclusionary … the excluded employees (the ones with any self-respect, anyway) have less of a tendency toward (over)conformity.

I guess the question this brings up in my mind is, would a less-male-dominated Enron have gone to such excess? How integral was this insular male culture to their criminality?

I have some ideas, but I’ve gotta get back to work on my own documentary .

I saw this some time ago and enjoyed it in many respects – tho I am writing from Australia and in that context was able to get a better sense of the scale of it and what happened than I had before.

Politically tho I thought the picture that it painted was still one of corporate “excess” and the way these “guys” were able to pull this off – I thought there was a sort of grudging admination for their ability – just a pity it was used in such a bad way.

So the critique was still a liberal one and in that sense missed drawing out the implications instead focusing on the chief executives – one of whol is still living in the lap of luxury in Hawaii. It seems extraordinary to me (despite being pretty cynical about these things) that Enron could have gone to its Accounting firm (its own internal finance section sure) with a plan to value assets at their FUTURE value and not be told “Arrrm thats bad accountancy” and the banks colluding in what was obviously a scam to buy stock using Enron money to inflate the share price.

Thats the bits I can remember. I enjoyed the film and show it to my sociology classes but the extent of the corruption was far beyond the “smartest guys” and this wasn’t really drawn out well enough I didnt think.

Cheers

Shane