In the 1980s, U.S. feminism fractured along political fault-lines defined by
conflicting views of prostitution and pornography and related conceptions of
power, agency, and sexuality.1 The “sex wars”—as they were unfortunately, popularly
labeled—were apparently settled by the end of the decade, with “pro-sex”
advocates declared the winners. The radical feminist anti-pornography and antiprostitution
position has been effectively marginalized—at least within the
academy. Interestingly, the same cannot be said for debates around similar issues
in a new transnational arena of feminist politics. Since the 1990s, numerous feminist
nongovernmental agencies and grass-root groups across the hemispheres
have been organizing to stop global trafficking in women and children.2 In this
context, old feminist debates about prostitution have reconfigured themselves
along familiar theoretical lines. The contours of the debate are largely defined by,
on one side, activists who align themselves with a radical feminist and abolitionist
approach that defines prostitution as an institution of male domination. On the
other side, activists who are “pro-sex-work” aim to distinguish prostitution as voluntary
“work” from “forced prostitution,” and to distinguish voluntary migration
from (sex) trafficking.3 The radical feminist camp has largely prevailed in terms
of how international protocol is currently formulated. The “UN Optional Protocol
of Trafficking in Human Beings,” known widely as the “Palermo Protocol”
was signed by 105 countries in 2002 and specifically does not construct a separate
category for “forced” prostitution but rather, classifies prostitution (unmodified)
as a major component of trafficking.4 Pro-sex-work advocates, however,
continue to press for the distinction between “free” and “forced” prostitution. The
feminist debate over trafficking offers a timely opportunity for feminists to revisit
central philosophical questions concerning agency and power. Given the magnitude
of the problem, namely, the vast numbers of women and children whose
lives have been devastated by sex-trafficking under globalization, such questions
reemerge with a new political urgency.

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“Sexualisation” has become a much-debated issue in recent years, and a noticeable feature is the assumption that feminists who oppose sexual objectification are generating a “moral panic”. Ever since sociologist Stanley Cohen introduced the term in 1972 it has been used as a shorthand way of critiquing conservatives for inventing another “problem” in order to demonise a group that challenges traditional moral standards.

So apparently feminists are now the conservatives fomenting unnecessary panic about the proliferation of “sexualised” images while the corporate-controlled media industry that mass produces these images is the progressive force for change being unfairly demonised. What a strange turn of events.

To suggest feminists who oppose the pornification of society are stirring up a moral panic is to confuse a politically…

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It is a great slogan that puts in bold relief the immense power of the one percent of humanity that exists parasitically on the rest.  “We are the 99%.”  It is a declaration that in some significant way, people are more awake to their circumstances than they were.  Around this slogan, we have seen courageous and principled people take to the streets in a great shout of “No!” at the powers and principalities of late neoliberalism; and we have seen that this outburst resonates with far more people than the ruling layer of society expected.  We have seen the protestors demonstrate with their bodies that under their façade of civility, this ruling layer relies in the last instance on truncheons, teargas, guns and jails.  This unmasking is more important in many ways than what will come afterward, because without it, we accommodate – and we all accommodate in one way or another, even those protesting – without any clarity.  Let these thousand flowers bloom.

Still, the 99% are not actually protesting.  99% of the 99% are just doing what they do to get by in the world the best they know how, far from the demonstrations.  We know this is true, and we know the reasons are as numerous as the people who do not protest in the street.  And so we are required to acknowledge that the movement, such as it is, is representative of its claim, not the number 99’s actualization.  And therein is one seed of mischief.

In Latin, it was once said, perversio optima quae est pessima.  The perversion of the best is the worst.  Some protesters will come to believe they are representative of those they do not know.  Some will try and formalize that representation as power.  Many are already spinning out programs (God, save us from parties and programs!) that purport to represent the 99%, though they are mostly utopian projections cobbled together by handfuls of people who still believe something called the “future” can be subordinated to human management schemes.  Some will begin to articulate what it means to be an “authentic” representative; and the divisions will begin.  Nothing stays the same, and this won’t either.  Lord, have mercy.

I am one of the 99% of the 99% this time around.  I had my day in the sun as a protestor; and if I’d have stayed a day longer, I would have taken up more room than one person should, because movements privilege clever talkers and angry writers more than they ought to.  Now I am one of the 99% of the 99% who is restricted in my movements by personal duties and obligations, the lack of money, and the lack of time.  I am far from any urban center, far from the big schools, far from the cohorts and committees, far from those places where people debate social theory and movement strategies.  And I love it out here in the sticks.

I love the Occupy movement, too.  I repost everything I see on Facebook that is not downright offensive (thickheaded sexism in this movement is alive and well, sorry to say).  I promoted the movement in my church with a supportive article in the bulletin, which generated a whiff of controversy that promises a dialogue about this thing we have named “economic inequality.”  I attended a rally in Lansing, though the mayor there agreed with the protest, so we didn’t generate any hostility from the police.  Sherry sports bumper stickers that say “OWS” and “99%.”  This is what we can do right now, so we are glad the demonstrators (I like the Spanish term “manifestantes” better) are out there keepin’ on.  In so may ways, you are speaking for us.  I get a little giddy at how long it has already lasted.

I love the movement’s sense of satire.  My favorite video was a bullfighting spoof around the Wall Street bull statue, with two capering clowns and a matador who mounted a police car and snapped his cape at the 7,100 pound bronze bovine.

I love the energy, and the courage, and the general understanding that the power of the movement is pacific.  Movements succeed when they inspire violence, but only when they inspire the violence of the oppressor that accomplishes this unmasking.

Whether the vandalism and violence of a few protestors is from fools or police provocateurs (probably a measure of both), it has been thankfully minimal.  Those youngsters who got pepper sprayed at UC Davis were more morally effective in their non-resistance than 10,000 macho-boys throwing rocks and setting fires.

I love the way OWS stays unpredictable.  That is absolutely this occupy-thing’s greatest strength.

I have questions, and ideas, however, about what happens next, about follow-up, about what the 99% of the 99% can do and, more importantly, should do.  I’m not proposing, as many leftists will, that the movement “get itself organized,” select leaders, develop a strategy, etc.  In fact, I vigorously oppose strategies on principle, because I believe most of them are simply designed to put a few people in charge of a lot of people who are then charged to carry out the strategy.  More on that further along.

Before I can explain myself, I need to at least describe the premise for these ideas.

Premise

The premise begins that all the changes that are implied in the demands – such as they are – of the movement are not applicable to all people in all places at all times.  The greatest value of this movement is not in its ability to expose certain sufferings and change certain policies, but in its ability to expose – with no unified intention to do so – all the reasons we need to abandon the entire system of which “policy” is only one essential working component.

This is an argument that is not won in this movement yet, because many people who are supportive of OWS et al still maintain the sincere and good-willing belief that governments and other policy-making institutions are somehow independent of their actual actions, like machines, and they can be taken over – like exchanging a bad driver for a good one in an automobile.

I respect that belief insofar as it is a belief people cleave to out of genuine good will.  These people are not collaborators or sheep; and those who characterize them that way are both wrong and mean.  I love the people who want to change the policies, because I am convinced that they want to do it out of a genuine sense of care about others.

My argument:  Even machines cannot be made independent of their makers and users.  The problem with the system is not the driver.  It is the car.

This is my premise.  If I am wrong, then ignore everything hereafter.

Failure of the Future

I think this car that is breaking down might be named “The Future.”

The deeply-parasitic infrastructure of society is coming apart, not temporarily, but in the face of some real trends that put real limits not only on the autocratic futurism of the right, but the “progressive” futurism of the left, too.  I ripped off Ivan Illich above with his reference to perversio optima quae est pessima.  I’m quoting him again when he said, “To hell with the future.  It is a man-eating idol.”

I agree with that.  A lot. This car is breaking down and there is going to be a wreck.

Illich wrote in 1973 about the energy infrastructure crisis.  What he said has proven prophetic in both senses of the word.  Prophets are wrongly believed to be people who simply foretell the future.  In fact, prophets are those who speak truth to power and who have visions, not predictions, that forewarn us of dangerous possibilities in the future.

Every generation has some.  Illich showed in 1973, in a pamphlet entitled “Energy and Equity,” that our faith in technology as redeemer of humanity is a terrible mistake.  Now we see the big secular trends that prefigure the collapse of many infrastructures.  Climate change.  Peak resource extractions.  The very economic crisis that spawned OWS.  War for the fuel to make war.  That’s next, and not far off either.

This crisis is not short-term, and it will force people to adopt new tactics for everyday life.  It represents both a trauma and an opportunity; but that opportunity, in my opinion, is not available through policy.  Policies may alter and change in response to material changes.  What has to change is not policy, but our entire built environment based on some more personal and less abstract narratives than Progress and The Future.

This is where the 99% of the 99% can do something, and they can begin doing it right now, without leaving their hometowns.  Let’s put this in another context before explaining why and how the 99% of the 99% can make some of those changes.

Devolution & Design

All social orders eventually devolve and are forced to reorganize, and the globalized world we live in is witnessing the devolution of the social order.  These periods of discontinuity never last forever, because society eventually self-organizes out of these devolutions, and a new order is established.  When an order collapses, there is an accompanying crisis of ideas.  More and more in our own period, we are seeing the de-legitimation of our ideas not only about capitalism and socialism, or their ugly merger into neoliberalism, but about what they held in common that have proven to be dangerous idols.  Progress.  The Future.  Technological Salvation.

When I was part of the organized activist left, I cooked up an alliterated recipe for resistance: de-legitimate, disobey, disrupt.  For the present, I will add a fourth D.  Design.

We are not going to force policy-makers to remake the world.  We have to do it ourselves.  We have to take our entire built environment, one piece at a time, and re-design it.  This will take everyone, because where you live is different than where I live; and there is no one-size-fits-all solution.  To hell with policies.  They are people-eating idols.

The Money Grid

One nub of the whole situation at the end of 2011 is a longstanding fact.  People have been captured by their dependency upon a vast, technocratic apparatus that has de-skilled them and rendered them 100% (not 99%) dependent on money.  The technocratic apparatus makes all our stuff, controls our climate, fixes our boo-boos, educates us, feeds us, moves us around, lights our homes, and puts us to work – all inside our most excellent technocratic life support system – and the only thing that makes the system respond… is money.  As it is in 2011.  As it was in 2010, 2000, 1990, 1980…  it just got worse with time.

Money is generated by banks and printed by the government.  It is designed to work a certain way to benefit governments and banks, which are run by the rich.  Governments and banks are never going to be the ally of any movement like OWS, so there is little likelihood that activism will change the nature of money any time soon.  Money is designed to transfer power; and it does it very well.  Money is not a morally-neutral sign any more than a gun is a morally-neutral tool.  Each is designed for a purpose.  Guns are designed to kill.  Money is designed to commodify, that is, to make everything into a thing for sale.  Including you.

The anthropologist Alf Hornborg said that money dissolves cultural and natural systems in an ecosemiotic process.  “Viewed from outer space,” says Hornborg, “money is an ecosemiotic phenomenon that has very tangible effects on ecosystems and the biosphere as a whole.  If it were not for money, nobody would be able to trade tracts of rain forest for Coca-Cola.”

That’s a lot to think about.  Think about it.

The Institutional Grid

Institutions are required to administer the technocracy upon which we all abjectly depend.  Institutions are always somehow imbricated within the system of money that benefits banks and government.  There is probably nothing controversial about saying that institutions can be corrupted by money.  What I am about to say is that institutions – all of them, even your favorites – are inherently and unavoidably corruptible.

If OWS develops “lists of demands” and programs and the like, there will be predictable appeals to target institutions for particular policy changes.  Money controls the institutions.  Money controls the policies.  Money will come to control the institutions that are created to fight the institutions.  As it ever has been and ever shall be.  The movement will become “focused,” it will deploy a strategy, and let the games begin.  The movement will be placed under management to oversee and coordinate the strategy.  The movement will come to depend on money.

Policy games controlled by money will be able to frustrate the original objectives of activists, either by crushing them or co-opting them.  Then the demoralization will start anew, amid more nihilism because the devolution will have advanced throughout the process.

If OWS itself begins to unravel over time, which it hasn’t so far but certainly may eventually, the follow-up options may appear to be (1) play by the rules for scraps or (2) to argue for more direct force against the system.  The latter will increase the probability of outright destruction, and the former might lead people to believe that nothing, in fact, can be done.

Welcome to the institutional grid.

Relations On and Off the Grid

I believe there is a way out of that impasse.  To explain it, I need to make reference to an anthropologist named Robin Dunbar.  He calculated that human beings have the cognitive capacity and the time to sustain a very finite number of caring relationships.  His guess was around 150.  I give this a lot of leeway, but I accept the general idea.  Finite brain.  Finite time.  Finite capacity.  Got it.

These primary relationships are built on trust and empathy, requiring no formal agreements, no contracts, no administration by a third party.  Most close family relations fall into this category, as do friends.  My own trick for categorizing these relations is to think of them as covenantal as opposed to casual or contractual.  Your relation to your boss is contractual.   Your relation to a grocery clerk you see once a week is casual.  Your relation to your friend, lover, child, mother, etc, is covenantal.  These covenantal relations are built on care, on trust and empathy.  They imply certain non-monetized, highly personal duties and obligations to one another that are accepted out of love.  These relations do not require formal rules; and in fact, formal rules would have a deleterious effect on these relations.

“A contract is an agreement made in suspicion. The parties do not trust each other, and they set “limits” to their own responsibility. A covenant is an agreement made in trust. The parties love each other and put no limits on their own responsibility.”

-Wambdi Wicasa

Once a group exceeds this fuzzy cognitive limit, this “Dunbar’s number,” it begins to require third parties to administer, manage and resolve conflicts.  This is the genesis of administration and management, and it becomes inevitable with greater scale, more people.  This new layer of relations is more impersonal, first by some small degree.  With more people and more administrators come greater degrees of impersonality.  The uprooted impersonality of administration is inevitable.  The tendency of these social formations is summed up in the way we can refer to administration as an “apparatus.”

A remarkable moral shift occurs with the emergence of this apparatus.  Doing the right thing because you care for someone is superseded by doing the correct or legal thing because of an impersonal rule.  The rules are necessary because the third parties of these apparati have to be seen as disinterested parties.  In this single moral shift, those who administer the rules gain a new kind of social power that makes them inherently corruptible.

This applies to a corporation, a club, a rifle platoon, a progressive non-profit, a church, a school, a hospital, a town, the water supply system, the food system, everything… because our technocratic society is administered by an apparatus that is approaching perfect impersonality.  Plain size can begin this pernicious process, so small “organizations” beware.  Simply calling yourself an organization carries this risk of impersonality.  The corruptibility of these institutions inheres in the enormous power they accumulate purely through the authority to administer and manage.

The Fetishism of Bureaucratic Competence

So while we are unmasking ideologies – those constellations of ideas that simultaneously conceal and reproduce power – let’s look at this ideology of “progress” and the “future.”  It is entirely built on force, and that power has accrued to the one percent, and we have not unmasked what Alasdair MacIntyre calls the “fetishism of bureaucratic skill,” part of the ideology of progress that both reproduces and conceals this administrative power.  Most of the left and the right have fallen prey to this fetishism.

“The modern American is culturally conditioned to think of nature as nothing more than matter-in-motion, as a standing reserve that through technological and entrepreneurial prowess is converted into a consumer’s cornucopia.”

-Max Oelschlaeger

To this adds MacIntyre:

“The fetishism of commodities has been supplemented by another just as important fetishism, that of bureaucratic skills… the realm of managerial expertise is one in which what purport to be objectively grounded claims [e.g., to the knowledge of the good society and how to achieve it] function in fact an expression of arbitrary, but disguised, will and preference.”

Power.  His qualification is at the heart of it, “to the knowledge of the good society and how to achieve it.”  This is a delusion of the ideology of progress, this notion that people can render the future predictable and manageable.  Experts, managers and administrators take full advantage of this ideology to exert will and preference behind a mask of special competence.

MacIntyre continues, in 1984, that “we know of no organized movement towards power which is not bureaucratic and managerial in mode, and we know of no justifications for authority that are not Weberian.”

As the power of administrators grows, an ethic of care becomes more and more antithetical to the rules-regime of administration.  Impersonality metastasizes, and we wake up to find ourselves not living in the world but moving plugs around on a switchboard to get what we need from the technocratic grid.

Management makes rules that help management.  Management is the administration of administrators.  Administration makes rules that benefit administration.  As Haitians say, ti tig se tig.  “The child of a tiger is a tiger.”

The original purpose of a rule – often created out of good will – is subverted by the administrative application of the rule.  In common parlance, “the tail starts to wag the dog.”  The letter of the law is administered against the spirit of the law.  This dog-waggery leads to the incomprehensibility of the rules and resentment of administration and management, which in turn becomes defensive, setting up a power struggle in which administration is already advantaged by the growing dependency of the administered on administration.  Remember that Stalin accrued his immense power through control of an administrative apparatus.

One of the reasons we have so little power to act creatively in the face of so many crises is not just that we are fragmented, but that we’re cut off in a much deeper way by the lack of social cohesion that can only happen in the small, intimate group.  Covenantal relations are strong bonds.  Contractual relations are weak bonds.

Every infantry squad leader knows that.  Every good mother knows it.  The rest of us ought to, too.

Management is the enemy of social cohesion, because it substitutes secondary (weak) bonds for primary (strong) ones. By re-strengthening primary bonds, we develop a greater capacity to resist power, but also to creatively adapt to (without direct resistance) rapidly changing circumstances.

Strategy and Tactics

Strategy and tactics as they are commonly understood are war terms, and they can’t escape their conflict implications.  Michel De Certeau, however, draws a distinction between them that leaps over some of the martial interpretations of these ideas.

In military parlance, strategy is the identification of key campaigns that are necessary to accomplish the main objective – in most cases, winning the war.  Operations is a level of planning that determines key battles necessary to win campaigns.  Tactics are those techniques that are required to win battles.  So the tactic is subordinate to the campaign, which is subordinate to the strategy.  In other words, “In the beginning, there was Strategy, and without it the world was shapeless and void.”

De Certeau wrote about people in their everyday lives, not conditions of extremity and conflict, in a book entitled oddly enough, The Practice of Everyday Life.

Strategy, notes De Certeau, is always the purview of power.  Strategy presumes control.  Strategy is self-segregating, in the same way administration and management is self-segregating, setting itself up as a barricaded insider.  The strategic leaders become the Subject; and the led become — along with any enemies — the Objects.  Strategy presumes an in-group that executes the Strategy.

“Strategy is the calculus of force-relationships; when a subject of will and power can be isolated from an environment.”

-De Certeau

The financial masters of the universe at Wall Street oversee the strategy.  They are the institutions.  In many ways, the rest of us cannot escape their Grid.  They are the subject, and the rest are the object. They are inside; and we are outside.  They live behind guarded walls.

De Certeau calls tactics, on the other hand, the purview of the non-powerful.  His version of “tactics” is not as a subset of Strategy, but adaptation to the environment (which has been structured by A Strategy).

The city planning commission may determine what streets there will be, but the local cabbie will figure out how to take best advantage of lived reality of those streets.  This making-do is what De Certeau calls bricolage, and it often implies cooperation with others as much as competition with others.

While the masters of the financial universe at Wall Street protect their guarded walls and ensure the system keeps paying the imperial tribute, we are making do.  We do things that they can’t control or fully account for.  We barter, clip coupons, work under the table, trade labor, share tasks and expenses with friends… all those little cheats to bypass the more disadvantageous routes along the Grid.  Making do.  Bricolage.

Bricolage is so detailed, so numerous in instance, so adaptable, that much of it escapes the notice of the Big Strategists; more importantly, it is beyond their power to control.

Agility

Strategy makes two presumptions:  control and an in-group.  The contradiction of strategy is that the control is never perfect and the situation upon which the strategy was constructed is always changing, making aspects of the strategy obsolescent.  The self-segregation of in-groups magnifies these myopic aspects of strategy, because the walls that keep others out also obscure their view of the outside.  Strategy becomes self-referential.

Tactics, on the other hand, or bricolage, is action in a constant state of reassessment and correction based directly on observations of the actual micro-environment.  Tactical theorist John Boyd rather schematically diagrammed this process as an OODA-loop, meaning people observe their surroundings (O), orient on the most important developments in the environment (O), decide on an immediate course of action (D), take that action (A), then revert immediately to observation (O) of the environment to see how their last action might have changed it (orienting again, deciding again, acting again…and again).  There is no presumption of how things will turn out, as there is in strategy.  There is, in fact, readiness to take advantage of unpredictable changes; this is called tactical agility.

Ignore that Boyd studied aerial combat for a moment, and we see that this is sense in many other scenarios.  It just requires recognizing the radical limits on our ability to control something called “the future.”  That future has always and always will remain unpredictable. As it should.

Strategies are undermined by unpredictability.  Tactics (bricolage, OODA-loops) can make an ally of unpredictability.

The intrepid street manifestantes of the Occupy movement can benefit from the OODA-Loop.  They are in a tactical contest with the authorities to perform their prophetic tasks.  For those among the other 99%, what kinds of bricolage can begin to directly and intentionally reduce our degree of dependence on the technocratic grid?

Strategic Without Strategy

Nero – both an emperor and a sadistic misanthrope – is said to have wished humanity had one throat so he could have the pleasure of cutting it.  This is the statement of a strategic principle.  The centralized structures of one’s enemy are considered strategic targets.

Sherman’s great arson campaign was principally aimed at Atlanta, where both the railroads and telegraphs of the Confederate forces converged.  His march to Atlanta prefigured what would later become strategic bombing.

As the United States Armed Forces, to their chagrin, discovered in Iraq and Afghanistan is that when there were no longer centralized political structures to attack in Iraq, there was a complete loss of tactical initiative.  The US forces were metaphorically reduced to fighting off a swarm of hornets.  Their strategy became incoherent.  The problem was further magnified in Afghanistan, because there even the material infrastructure lacked centralization.  Rumsfeld’s first complaint about Afghanistan, when the Bush administration was preparing its war, was that Afghanistan presented the US with “no good targets.”

One thing this might be telling us, if we are listening, is that we are safer from the strategies of ill-wishers in decentralized groups.  The more the merrier.

In nature, decentralized diversity generates resilience.  Centralized monoculture, on the other hand, is vulnerable precisely because it is centralized.  One electrical failure can plunge 50 million people into opaque helplessness. One new fungus can wipe out a monocropped food staple.

I bring this up, because I want to suggest a mode of strategic decentralism.  Being strategic without developing A Strategy.  The 99% of the 99% need to have some answer to the question, “What can we do?”  My answer is make new facts on the ground.  Start re-designing the built environment, especially in those spaces that are being ignored or abandoned during the process of devolution.

I want to propose a strategic goal without any general staff, without any hierarchy of any kind, part of which almost anyone can accomplish.  No requirement for management, and no implied requirement for conflict (some will always find you), and no one-size-fits-all instructions on how to get it done.

I want to propose that we begin a systematic effort to reduce our dependency on the technocratic grid, by a lot of people working at or near their homes.  One of the most powerful dependencies we have on the grid is food.  The power of the food institutions is already well known and well understood, from Monsanto, to ADM and Cargill, to the Food and Drug Administration.  Our very survival has been lashed to this grid by food-production monopolies.  The entire world is groaning under the depredations of the food giants.

I have witnessed food riots firsthand.  It is an unforgettable experience.  Our dependency on food is a terrible weapon in the hands of the one percent.

I want to propose we build a million food gardens.  Two million.  However many.  However many conditions.  However many designs.  There is the strategic direction:  make food, and not just for the same reasons Gandhi made salt.  Make food because it puts that much of our lives back into our own hands, and the hands of our communities.  Into the hands of our friends, our families, our covenantal relations.  We can meet one of our own needs without any bureaucratic apparatus.

Making Food

In the town where I live, with around 20,000 souls, we built a garden this year.  A group of people built the first of several food donation gardens on what the city has called “orphaned properties.”  The city owns them, but they have no particular use for them during this devolutionary contraction.  Next Spring, we want to make two more gardens.  A friend from church just offered the use of a portion of her country property for garden cultivation.  We have around a million maples worth of leaf mulch and compost, mountains of chipped wood (from ice storm damage last year), and those long Northern summer days of sun.  We have barely begun to learn how much food we can grow here… off the commercial food Grid.

I, for one, do not intend this to be some strategy to force new policies into the commercial food grid.  Speaking for me, I see this as a way of serving divorce papers on the commercial food grid.  And no one has figured out a way to call helmeted, militarized police out to stop anyone working in the gardens.  The cops I talked to this year said it was a good idea, the garden.

Multiply this by a million, then instead of a quarter acre of re-designed facts on the ground, you have 250,000 acres of re-designed facts on the ground.  These are easier to defend than a policy, and it presents no strategic targets.  Certainly there are threats and potential threats, but there is no one neck so Nero can have the pleasure of cutting it.  Instead there is an accumulation of intimate victories, accomplished by convenantal communities, communities made that much stronger by the reduction of their dependency on the technocratic grid and the recognition of their very personalized interdependency on each other.

Walking on Two Legs

Demonstrating in the street, this unmasking work that OWS has done so incredibly, inspiringly, lovingly well, is not done yet.  I am not by any means arguing that anyone ought to return from the street.  Those of us who can’t be there do need you to represent.  You are the allies of unpredictability, the agile OODA-artists of the street, the magicians who can abracadabra bits of stunning clarity out of your hats.  Your job is exhilarating, exhausting and crazy risky sometimes.  If you can do it, that is where you need to be.

There will never be more than a fraction who have the flexibility at a particular time to be manifestantes.  We love you, and we want you to go on, and we have been both instructed and entertained by your courage, creativity and endurance.

When you can no longer do it, there is something you can do, and so can the 99% of the 99% who can’t be those shock troop manifestantes, right now.

What can be done, and without any strategies involved, is a straightforward and strenuous effort by 99% of the 99% who are at home to make food. If there are 500,000 OWS protestors, then there need to be 1,000,000 more people who are making food in their yards, their neighborhoods, their churches, temples and synagogues, their workplaces, their schools, their land trust plots, their fallow fields, their empty lots, their apartment decks, their patios and their kitchen windows.

Even when the demonstrations end – and they will end – we are not left with nothing to do to continue dissolving that power.  Every square yard of land recovered for food is a material victory in the face of little resistance, and that same square yard is a square yard of independence from the Grid.

Do not pit your weakness against their strength.  Exercise your strengths where they are weakest, where you live.  The system is falling apart, and nothing will stop that.  More and more niches will appear.

Even more important to me personally:  gardens are peacemaking.  Peacemaking is still the most important form of resistance.

Let a million gardens bloom.

Swadeshi.

Shanti.

In historiography, the Idea of Progress is the theory that advances in technology, science, and social organization inevitably produce an improvement in the human condition. That is, people can become happier in terms of quality of life (social progress) through economic development and the application of science and technology (scientific progress). The assumption is that the process will happen once people apply their reason and skills, for it is not divinely foreordained. The role of the expert is to identify hindrances that slow or neutralize progress.

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Manifest(o)ing Feminism: Occupy Patriarchy!

The New Now-Moment of Occupy Wall Street

The whole world was erupting as we U.S Americans were watching.  Our noses pressed to the screen-monitors of history we watched as waves of mass rebellion rippled from Greece and Spain to Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria in the Arab Spring where dictatorship after dictatorship was toppled.  And then, who knew? I for one never expected that the waves of protest would find our own shores.  As we watched, only occasionally would a plaintive or angry question pop up: When will we get out on the streets? Yet when pushed to the brink and over of desperation at the beginnings of the economic onslaught on this country, people were still echoing the noxious nostrums of the new president who preached “no more excuses” and “individual responsibility” to a people suffering the brunt of a crisis put in motion by a financial system that–contrary to the delusions of the left–had put Obama in office.

When the nation began to crash in the first month of the new president’s first term, we did not rush to the streets when Obama appointed for fixing the crisis the same miscreants culpable for creating it. Nor did we riot upon word that while record numbers of people were plunged into joblessness, homelessness, and health crises, corporations were making record rates of profits. Yet Obama called for self-sacrifice and personal responsibility, instructing us that “everyone” had to pitch in in hard times. That we are all one family. Our uncles presumably are not then the thirty major corporations who paid no income tax in the last three years, while making 160 billion dollars?

And there was no revolt among people of color despite the fact that f…

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and the second article:

Branding Feminism

Branding Feminism: Brand-Slutwalk

By now everyone knows the comment that sparked the first Slutwalk (Toronto) and its wild-fire spread across the globe.  It began with a classic scene of mansplaining: A man  schooling women about how to avoid rape. To make things worse, the man was even more legitimized/authorized as a mansplainer due to his status as a police officer. In this instance the cop advised his audience that if women didn’t dress “like sluts” it might help with the rape-prevention. The feminist outrage spurred by the comment was fierce and a terrible thing to waste—which is precisely what happened when outrage against victim-blaming in a rape culture was (and is) redirected and de-fused into shallow and bubble-headed libertarian credo: If you’ve ever been called a slut, stand up now and say together – I am a slut. . . stand up and say it with me: I am a slut. I am a slut. I am a slut. This is Third-wave feminist celeb, Jaclyn Friedman working the crowd at Slutwalk Philadelphia. For those who don’t instantly visualize a Saturday Night Live style parody of feminism, that’s due to years of priming by the “sex-positive-empowerment-industrial-complex” which has hollowed out feminism from within to a one dimensional version of itself. One dimensional feminism means minimally a feminism that joins the pop up individualisms of a neoliberal era.

Thus rather than arousing sheer incredulity from the Left, the pageantry called Slutwalk earns points from the main bastion of liberal-left media, namely The Nation where…

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This day began as a celebration of peace (Armistice Day); and now it is a celebration of military nationalism.

This 60th birthday coinciding with Veterans Day wouldn’t normally occur to me as somehow significant.  But it so happens that my country, to whom all honors are being given on Veterans Day, is sending soldiers — professional and mercenary — all over the world, and they are killing people.  This is not news, but a lot of people naively believed that this war business was somehow the exclusive purview of the Republican Party, and that Barack Obama was a new messiah that was going to put things right again… whatever that meant.  What we are seeing as clearly as possible yet again is that the Comander-in-Chief of the most powerful military force in history will always use that force, and that on this neither party stands out.  Democrats are every bit as enthusiastic about war as Republicans; they just argue about which wars are the most important.

I’m 60 now, and I have come to believe that we cannot invest hope in politicians.  Period.  This is up to us, up to a lot of different us’s.

Some people say that 60 makes you an “elder” (or an old fart).  I don’t know how I feel about that, but six decades, looking back on it, is a lot of time for a lot to happen, and sometimes learn from what happened.  And Veterans Day makes me very sad, though not in the sentimentalized way people feign sadness for an idealized and mainly nameless dead-soldiery every year during this annual ritual of “remembrance.”  It makes me sad that the shooting and bombing and beating and imprisoning that characterize war are just as horrific in Afghanistan or Pakistan or Iraq or Libya or Somalia or Yemen or Iran (all these places are now being actively targeted by the United States Armed Forces)… as they were when I got my first dose of it in Vietnam in 1970.  Later I went to other places, where there was more war.  Veterans Day makes me sad because it is a day designed to paper over that same horror that my country continues to use so people can make a lot of money.  It makes me sad because my country cannot see itself honestly.

I’d like to do some remembering — for anyone who is interested — from the standpoint of a late Baby Boomer, North American white man, raised in public schools and suburban homes during the Cold War.  There were two fetishes, consciousness-altering fetishes, that defined us as boys (boys like us being the norm, of course).  One fetish was the gun.  The other was the television.

The Gun

What can you say about guns, eh?  Anyone who has handled a gun knows that the sight of it and the cool touch and the weight of it alters your consciousness with its terrible potential.  No matter what juridical and cultural structures do or do not inhibit the use of firearms, the possession of a firearm confers power whether it is welcome or not.  People who have a strong aversion to firearms are just as aware of that power as those who are obsessed with and attracted to firearms.  Both groups know from firsthand experience that a gun is not representative of power, it is power.  It is an instrument with which you can take life, in an instant, with the quarter-inch movement of a single finger.

Guns have come to mean something very special and sought after by boys: recognition, which they easily confuse with power.  And not just because most of us in my demographic categories are descended from armed settlers, though that has a good deal to do with this boy-gun thing.  I grew up with guns in the house.  My father born in 1906, was a very competent hunter; and my mother even had her own bird gun — a 16-guage Browning automatic shotgun.

Guns are male icons, however, not merely tools; and we see guns as icons every day on TV.

The Television

Our first television was a circular looking black and white, where I never missed an episode of Gunsmoke, the Lone Ranger, Bonanza, or Wagon Train.  Guns became instruments of justice and power in my mind, as I soaked up these powerful moving images of a mythical American frontier masculinity.  The one that really got me, though, was a character who was a soldier, a rebel, and a trickster – Swamp Fox, a Disney production where Leslie Nielson played the Revolutionary War guerrilla leader, Francis Marion.  That was the first impetus that led to my eventual entry into the non-televised world of Special Operations in the army; and it was seeded in my brain a decade before I even graduated from High School.

Television has been one of the most significant formative forces on the psyches of most Americans born in the last 60 years; and as society has evolved, television has co-evolved.  Representations of gun-masculinity have become more sophisticated, more technologically sexed-up, more graphically violent, bigger, and more callous.  Representations of men have become more smart-mouthed and cocky.  Guns have become more eroticized, as has the kind of destructive power that gun-masculinity represents.

The average kid now watches television around 28 hours a week, though now that is also mixed up with video games where the boys can simulate killing hundreds of times a day in ever more “realistic” settings.  Girls, unfortunately, also have plenty of girl-oriented programming that trains them into the superficial consumer-darwinism of patriarchally-defined femininity; but I am talking to and about boys now.  Even old boys like me.

War

I started studying war when I was 18 years old; but when I left the military in 1996, I began to study war differently.  After the attacks of September 2001 destroyed the World Trade Center, I was drafted into the service of an anti-war movement.  This compelled me to talk about militarism — about ideologies that glorify, foster, support, and prolong wars.  The more I talked about militarism, the more I was forced to answer questions about militarism; and so the more I was forced to think about militarism.  Gender was in my face at every turn, so by 2005, I was writing a book that attempted to show how gender is related to war.

Every time I looked deeply into the subjects of war and militarism, I found all sorts of gendered language, and all sorts of gendered activity, and all sorts of gender segregation; yet most critics of war insisted that war was an outgrowth of perversions in the public economy (which it certainly is) and that the gendered aspects of war were secondary considerations that were being taken care of elsewhere — perhaps in the gender study ghettos of the universities, or in white middle-class women’s fight against corporate “glass ceilings.”

But what I found – once I started looking for it – was that war has always been formative of masculinity, and masculinity has always been reproductive of war.  I also found that resistance to a criticism of something I call “conquest-masculinity” came from every direction, left and right and center; and that my thesis on the relationship between war and masculinity was most unwelcome.  People’s very identities were involved, all the way down to some subconscious level where disruption of the gender order presages a fearsome cosmic chaos.

Still, the evidence piled up.  Violence is eroticized. Violence is a male erotic ideal.

This is what I am thinking about this Veterans Day.

The Dangerous Erection

During the opening phases of the invasion of Iraq, we saw the introduction of a condom called “Shock and Awe.”  Everyone gets the joke, but few will attest to how this conflates male sexual “prerogative” with domination and violence.

Television is being displaced in the overdeveloped world by its younger cousin, the personal computer.  And what many, many, many boys and men do on those computers is twofold:  they play war games and they masturbate while they watch pornography.

We are all familiar with the various references to the phallus as a weapon,with aggression-as-sex and sex-as-aggression.  Here are samplings from the front pages of the first web sites that came up when I Googled “porn.”  “Asian bitch.  Black ass orgy.  Black cocks ruin white wife.  Watch her punishment.  (Name) gets pounded and face-fucked.  Little slit pussy fucked hard.  From ass to mouth.  Horny torturer at work.  Showing whose boss.  Gangbang brunette slut.”

A liberal acquaintance of mine once said he wanted to “hate-fuck Sarah Palin.”

Internet pornography is actually a venue where male ideas and attitudes about sex and power are distilled and concentrated.  The ideas of domination, destruction, control, and humiliation reoccur again and again.  The idea of the weaponized phallus is everywhere.  The re-inscription of racial stereotypes is everywhere in porn; and I will suggest that racial stereotypes are also an essential adjunct to war.

It must be a terrifying world for women where so many men take these attitudes for granted and even celebrate conquest-masculinity, where a considerable number of men are obviously turned on by images of a male phallus that is plunged first into a woman’s anus then into her mouth.  Men have been trained somehow in this culture to be aroused by the humiliation of women.  Women are to be slammed, hit, banged, pounded, shown who is boss; and these ideas are sexually arousing to many men.

Women, Nature, Colonies

So how does this relate to war, you may be asking.  And I’ll tell you.  Conquest-masculinity defines a man as someone who conquers, dominates, and humiliates.  When a man is trying to dominate another man verbally, he calls that other man a pussy, a bitch, a faggot (a male who acts like a female).  The ultimate insult is to call a man a woman; because a woman is someone who exists to be conquered and dominated.

Real men control their women.  Real men exercise control.  Real men control their environment.  Real men control lesser men.  And here is the stick with that carrot.  If you aren’t a real man, men, then you are fair game to be a lesser-man, now subject yourself to domination and humiliation.  That’s the man-trap.  I know.  I was in it for a very long time.  That is why I am writing this for Veterans Day.

The same idea of conquest and control that characterize this form of masculinity with regard to women, characterize a need for control over nature and colonies.  I borrowed this association from a writer named Maria Mies, because I believe she is onto something.  If you look at the propaganda for wars of conquest, and you look at the propaganda for the destruction of nature in the name of progress, and you look at the propaganda against women represented in some of those porn titles; these all relate themselves back to an idea of what it means to be a real man.

Here is a short video a friend and I made as a kind of crash course on this association.

The Dishonest Holiday

Veterans Day is a collective worship of soldiers; and the religion is American nationalism.  It is a dishonest holiday (a term from the phrase Holy Day).  Veterans Day tries to reduce war to platitudes – freedom and democracy and so forth.  Veterans Day is a day of selective remembrance, where soldiers are honored for their sacrifices for the nation-state.

On the one hand, we will hear that the soldiers are to be honored because they sacrificed for these ideals, that they ensure our “freedom.”  This presumes that the wars they participate in – in whatever roles – were actually conducted to protect freedom; yet few people can explain how the freedom of people in the United States was under threat in most of these wars.

When this objection is voiced, the premises are shifted.  We are honoring their willingness to sacrifice, even though leaders may occasionally send them on unholy missions.  Without them and their willingness to follow orders to kill and die, we would be under threat from various and changing dark forces from the outside.  So the sacrifice is not for freedom now, it is for our “security.”  Their virtue is in being there, willing to follow orders.  Like good Germans.  And so the obedient soldier is valorized, not the citizen-soldier fighting to protect “home and family and freedom.”

Women are now included in these shifting rationalizations, in a sense, because there are more women in the military now.  But I contend that the idealized soldier is still a man.

This obedient man-soldier is not cherished then for his good motives; the reasons for killing and dying are immaterial.  And so this idealized man is now valued simply for his necessity.  He is to be honored because he makes himself available to fight, whether he knows why he is fighting or not, and whether he agrees with the reasons or not.  And the overarching reason — the deity to which we can make some final reference to justify this soldier — is the nation-state.

Without belief in the civil religion – American nationalism – this soldier is merely a hired killer.

So let’s get this straight.  Veterans Day is not a celebration of actual veterans — who are too diverse to characterize; Veterans Day is a High Holy Day of our nationalist religion.  It is a proliferation of flags, a mass genuflection before the altar of the late modern Rome.

And our ideas about masculinity make us men particularly susceptible to this idolatry.

The soldier is the epitome of male — the guy who will visit death and destruction on the enemy, the guy who will take the risks, the guy who will put his hands in the gore (so we don’t have to).  The solider will die “for his country,” but just as importantly, he will kill for his country.  He will conquer the enemy, those dark, vaguely threatening outsiders whose names we need never know.

Veterans Day is a dishonest holiday, because in public we talk about sacrifice and dying for one’s country, but we go behind closed doors with the boys to celebrate the juicier stuff: the war stories with the body counts, the counting of kills, the trophies, the names we used to dehumanize them – Japs, krauts, gooks, slopes, hajjis.  And this more visceral remembrance, this remembrance of eroticized violence, this celebration of conquest-masculinity, are the wet, dark, moving entrails of nationalism.

The less sophisticated among us will express it more directly on a bumper sticker:  “God, Guns, and Guts Made America Free.”  God is a subset of nation, a weaponized Jesus that has the same auxiliary religious status as guns and guts.  But let’s be honest. The attraction of this message is not its content, but its domination machismo.  That is the grail for the individual male psyche that can be so readily mapped onto the nationalist project.

It will be traumatic when the ideology finally collapses.  For some, it already is.

The Toddler Age

The ideology that is dissolving into incoherence now, and the same ideology that brought us into the present age, is one that told us more and bigger is always better, that selfishness is some kind of civic virtue (which we ought to let run free in order to ensure the good order of society), and time is a commodity to be accumulated like other commodities – meaning we should go faster and faster, meaning the ideal is getting stuff done Now.

Now Marx described society as an overall form that develops not unlike a person, with developmental stages along the way:  infancy, early childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, and maturity.  I don’t agree with his formulation of these stages, or even with the presumption that there are some inevitable and predictable stages that society goes through that could be called “progress,” an idea that Marx shared with a lot of capitalist apologists. But I do believe that there is a childhood development metaphor that describes the actual, contingent and current form of social development, which should remind us of some of the obligations of actual maturity for actual human beings.

This ideology that is crumbling right now, even as it still holds sway over many imaginations, is what I call the ideology of the Toddler Age:  we live in period where virtue has been replaced by value, and what we value are the same as toddlers, that is, we say “Mine,” “More,” and “Now.”  This is the credo of consumer society, which also happens to be the society that fetishizes guns and television, and which also happens to revolve completely around the business of war.  Like everything else in consumer society, war can be commodified, too.

Now I am going to reminisce again about my own childhood.  When I was two, 58 years ago, my dad had been hunting birds in the desert Southwest (I was actually born in San Diego, a true native Californian) .  My dad took a break and leaned his shotgun against the outside of a little Airstream camper trailer (hitched to a Nash Rambler).  My mother was in the trailer, changing my baby sister’s diaper.  I waddled over to the shotgun leaning on the outside of the Airstream, fiddled with the pieces around the trigger housing — like most curious 2-year-olds do — and I managed to blow a hole in the silvery skin of that Airstream, missing my mother’s head inside by so narrow a margin that she felt the shot go through her hair.  She screamed.  My baby sister screamed.  I screamed and cried, backing away from the gun.  My dad ran over, grabbed the gun to keep me away from it, and checked on my mom and sister.  As I said earlier, I’ve been around guns all my life.

Accidents happen, and there are twenty ways in retrospect to keep what happened from happening; but the truth is, shit happens.  And we learn from it.  My dad learned a lesson that day,and it’s a lesson our whole society needs to learn.  Toddler Age society, I mean.  The Gun-Society.  War Society.  Here is the lesson for the Mine-More-Now society of the Toddler Age:  Two-year-olds should not be allowed to handle guns.

I won’t participate in any war, and I will oppose the participation of others.  But that doesn’t mean that what I am saying now is a principle of pacifism.  What I am saying is that — regardless of how anyone feels about war — a society that has a lot of guns and thinks like a two-year-old is a very dangerous thing.

Media Infantilization

Before the advent of television and its electronic audio-visual grandchildren, people had a mix in their lives of the real and the simulated.  You cook a meal; that is real.  You watch someone cook a meal on television: you are watching simulacra — representations that are not the real thing.

Back in the day, say prior to World War II, people could occasionally go to a movie.  That was a big deal, that kind of entertainment.  As a percentage of your total time, this kind of simulacra was very small compared to how much time you spent paying attention to something real, something you were actually doing instead of passively observing.

Now, everyone seems hooked up to an electrical entertainment grid every waking moment.  They carry their teeny televisions around in their hands.  TVs are mounted in automobiles.  We are attached to these electronic glow-boxes everywhere, as I am when I write this.

Going back to my observations about toddlers, one of the characteristics of a toddler is the inability to separate representation from reality.  For actual toddlers, this is an essential developmental stage; but again, thinking like a toddler is not compatible with handling guns and such.  I contend that the increased exposure to simulacra has retarded our capacity to separate representation from reality.  So again, the metaphor is apt.  The ideology of consumer society is irresponsible and dangerous because it is childlike in a period when human beings carry guns, some of them uber-guns (intercontinental ballistic missiles, for example), that could lead to big accidents.  Really big ones.

Media has infantilized us.  It has turned grown-ups into children mentally.  Entertainment media have cocooned us in a techno-fantasy that tells us, Peter Pan like, that we never need to grow up.  Even with all our guns.  In fact, most of our boy techno-fantasies involve guns and the most dangerous techno-fantasy of them all – control.

When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things.  (1 Corinthians 13:11)

Would that it were so.

Revenge

If you want to trigger a celebration of conquest-masculinity, the best trigger is revenge.  If you want to see guns as instruments of redemptive violence, and if you want to see audiovisual media celebrating revenge with plenty of guns, check out all the films that can be categorized quite simply as “male revenge fantasies.”

Commando, Gladiator, Man on Fire, Ben Hur, Straw Dogs, Death Wish, Rolling Thunder, Collateral Damage, Braveheart, you name it.  The male revenge fantasy is always a hit.  Revenge is the license to return evil for evil and call it good.  The story line is, Man is affronted by other Man, who has done something terrible to a loved one.  Protagonist Man then wreaks deliciously cruel punishment on the Offender Man, and that violence leads to happiness.  Redemptive violence, this is called.  But is it sexual?

You bet your ass it is.  Think, for just one moment, about how often and easily people you have known have referred — with great schadenfreude — to a criminal getting what he deserves by being raped in prison.  People make jokes about it, because everyone in this culture is already in on the joke.  Rape is a crime when it is perpetrated on Us; but it is not a crime when it is perpetrated on Them.  It is payback.  Why?  Because it humiliates, and that humiliation is eroticized.  Rapists ejaculate into and on their victims.  I’m no medical doctor, but it is my understanding that before men can come, they have to be adequately aroused.

That criminal has it coming.  No pun intended.  We all get it.  We all understand that sex-is-aggression and aggression-is-sex.  No cop-outs with that stuff about rape isn’t about sex, it’s about power.  Rape is about power all right.  Rape is also about sex.  There is no real sex in the real world that is not inflected by power.  We talk about a victory of one person over another as the winner sodomizing the loser.  When we are cheated or betrayed, we say we have been “fucked.”  The word itself is used more often to express aggression than sex, and the sex it often expresses has nothing whatsoever to do with that romantic, friends-first, mutuality thing we associate with contented couples of all kinds.

Conservatives are in denial about men needing to lose some power.  Liberals are in denial that sex is about power at all.

I’m going to weigh in on this question, and weigh in as a Christian, but not in the way most might expect.  I’m not going to worry in the least about how and when people rub what parts together.  There’s not much about sexual couplings in the Gospels, taken as a whole.  There is a lot about power, though.  Everything in it is about a power struggle that involved this man (who we call the Christ), along with a lot of social rabble, challenging the power of both an empire and its native surrogate leaders.  Again, taken as a whole, the Gospels are tracts against the exercise of force and fraud against others.  They are consistent in the message that dying rich puts your soul at risk; and Jesus himself — who was sexually abstinent as far as we can tell (a very unmanly thing) — set out to undermine the very material foundation of domination, and the dominator masculinity that makes it possible.

News flash to Christians:  Jesus forbade retaliation.

If someone slaps you on the right cheek, offer the other cheek also. (Matthew 5:39)

Christians

Many of the most childish and reactionary people in the United States will insist that the United States is a Christian nation.  I beg to differ.  Most of the Christians I have encountered know little about their own scriptures, and much of what they are familiar with in the Gospel stories of the founder of our church they have torn out of context to get a different meaning.  They have learned to ignore the repeated warnings that being rich is an unfavorable state before God.  They have learned to ignore what Dorothy Day pointed out:  “The Gospel takes away our right, forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.”  They have learned to ignore that given the choice between violence and non-violence, Jesus chose the latter even as it resulted in his torture and execution.  They have forgotten that Jesus said, “Blessed are the  meek.”

Masculinity is not meek.

Most of all, they have forgotten what Christians proclaim as a political reality — that the risen Christ is sovereign.  Readers who are taken aback by that will understand now how serious I am when I say that the United States is not in fact a Christian nation. Readers who are taken aback by that may even agree with those who say we ought to be Americans first, and Christians second.  As Stanley Hauerwas has pointed out:  Even the churches in the United States are Americans first, and Christians second.  Being Christian means something different to me.  It means that I obey God before I obey the state; and if there is a conflict between obedience to God and obedience to the state, I will disobey the state.  My confession of faith is political.

Christ is sovereign.  War was abolished on the cross.  All the rest is disobedience.  Sovereign over each of us who make this proclamation.  Sovereign over the church — the community of believers.  Sovereign over nations, all nations, no exceptions.  Sovereign over and above the United States of America.

So if Jesus says not to kill, and the United States says to kill, we are obliged by this proclamation of Christ’s sovereignty to disobey the United States, because this nation is in a state of disobedience to God.  That is one Christian’s response to Veterans Day this year.

Are you listening, Christian brother Barack Obama?

He hath scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart.

He hath put down the mighty from their seat,

and hath exalted the humble.

He hath filled the hungry with good things;

and the rich he hath sent empty away. (Luke 1:51-53)

Now this may not sit well with conservative believers and liberal non-believers, this idea that we might refuse the civil religion –patriotism — as an idol, that we might consider ourselves Christian before we are American, that we might choose to disobey laws written by both liberals and conservatives; but this is my conviction as a Christian.  Romans 13 told us not to disobey the law for the hell of it; but Romans 12 (always left out when 13 is used to justify blind obedience to the state) calls Caesar to repentance, too.  We are called to obey civil authority as long as civil authority is not being disobedient to God.

The Gospels are not equivocal.  They say love your neighbor, even when the neighbor is an outsider (the Samaritan); and they say love your enemy.  War is not an acceptable practice for a Christian; and in every instance when Christian churches have supported, participated in, or acquiesced to war, those institutions were themselves in a state of disobedience to God.  Institutions are human, and like humans, they are broken and subject to corruption and rationalization.

I want to make an argument on Veterans Day this year, at 60 years old, as a Christian, about one major source of all this brokenness.  Conquest-masculinity.

Anti-Masculinity Jesus

Within the ambit of Christian theology, there is a peculiar term: “the scandal of particularity.”  If Jesus is the incarnation of God, then why does God choose a teenaged peasant woman in a backwater of a colony of the Roman Empire to raise this incarnation as a Palestinian Jewish boy in  a town of around 200 people?

There is no final answer to that.  It is something we accept and try to understand a little at a time.  A good deal of how we understand it is that Jesus-the-person was an observant Jew, and his life and mission are seen as a fulfillment of Jewish prophetic hopes – a messiah.

In 1st Century Roman-occupied Palestine, there was already a long history, among Romans, Greeks, Babylonians, Jews, and all the other people in the region, of warfare.  I have said that war shapes masculinity, because was has traditionally been an exclusively male practice.

What are the characteristics of effective war-fighters and war-mongers?  A good warrior must – above all else – be able to harden his heart against the enemy in order to kill the enemy without hesitation.  A good war-monger must be able to speak about then enemy in ways that harden the hearts of many to accept the killing.

Warrior masculinity demands men who are capable of cruelty, even when that capacity for cruelty extends from the battlefield to the polis to the home.  War forges a conquest masculinity that Jesus, in his words and by his very example, rejects all the way to its root.

My own argument within the Christian community is about masculinity, at least by inference. What John Howard Yoder called the Constantinian temptation was really a temptation to power, and specifically it was a temptation of men to participate in power that was the exclusive province of men.

Nothing in this early Jewish cult could have been more scandalous than its deep gender subversion — man who would die before he would kill an enemy; and no temptation would have been more powerful that the temptation to re-seize male prerogative.

Jesus actions rebuked male power in the empire (Rome), male power in the satraps (the chief priests and Herod), male power in the cultural monopolies (scribes and Pharisees), and male power among the warlike resisters (the zealots).  We read that he rebuked powers, but we ought to remember that in every single case, this was exclusively male power. It was naturalized male power, and so it became invisible in the sense that people didn’t feel the need to differentiate it as “male” power.

As far as we know, Jesus never demanded equal rights for women, but then we know that “rights” are an artifact of modernity, that “rights” are an invention of a later time, and we also need to know that discipleship for the Christian is not about rights at all, but that it is a discipl(ine) of the suffering servant.   Our community is called to be a community of service to others, of selflessness, and of reconciliation… or that’s what the Gospels teach at any rate. This applies to men and women in the faith, which I suspect is exactly what pulled church “fathers” toward the Constantinian temptation, the misrepresentation of “the lordship of Christ by identifying God’s cause in some way with the powers of the political establishment.”  Ivan Illich calls it the “criminalization of sin,” the perverse attempt to legislate the radical freedom Jesus taught that allowed love to transcend every previous social boundary.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.  (Galatians 3:28)

Just as many men today are engaged in a backlash against the political assertions of women, especially against the ways women’s declarations and demands have undermined their sense of themselves as men, this Jewish cult that not only had men and women working as co-apostles and eating together (taking communion) with the opposite sex who were not family (an immensely scandalous activity). More importantly perhaps, the behavioral expectations of the men who followed Christ were extremely woman-like according to the mores of the day. The men were expected to be humble, deferent, self-abnegating, and quick to serve. These were the qualities that were most prized… in women. We might imagine how much of a role-conflict this discipline created for its male adherents. And, of course, there was the most difficult aspect of discipleship of all, especially for men, and that was not fighting back when they were abused.

Imagine someone today telling their sons, no matter what anyone does to you, you are not to fight back.

Yet this was the very example of Christ.  From the point of view of the gender order, how much more scandalous could you get.  Not only were you not to fight back against your social superiors, you were not to fight back against anyone.

It is not so surprising then to learn that many of the converts in Rome were women at first, since this discipline was one to which they were already more well-socialized than their male counterparts.

Jesus himself ate with prostitutes, engaged women as equals in debate, and touched menstruating women in violation of the prevailing purity codes.  He risked his own life to stop the execution of a woman for adultery, calling her male executioners to account for their deep hypocrisy.  Women attended his execution and witnessed the resurrection.

In the eyes of many Roman authorities, early Christians came to be considered a “mischievous superstition,” in part because they preached the spiritual equality of men and women, a notion that was scandalous to Romans.  Paul typically greeted the various churches in his epistles with the phrase, “Brothers and Sisters.”

Rumors about the new cult exaggerated the open commensality of the shared meal and easy contact between men and women into a popular rumor that the Christians were engaged in secret orgies. There was general alarm about the number of Roman women who joined the sect.

Little by little, masculinity was taken back into Christianity until men again subjugated women within the faith and men recovered their archetypical practice – war.  Even later, during the Reformation at the height of its iconoclasm, Protestants attacked the Roman Catholic Church for its continued veneration of Mary, Jesus’ mother, often on explicitly masculine grounds.  Even today, at one of the local Catholic churches, there stands a great, bold and colorful statue of Mary with her eyes full of determination and her foot pressed down firmly on a thick, writhing viper.  I can see how this image might disconcert a man who believed that physical courage is a gendered virtue.

Perhaps the most gender subversive aspect of the Gospels is what they leave us as a hierarchy of virtues. The valorization of courage in combat – venerated by the Romans, but also by the Hebrews with regard to King David and Maccabeus – was generally considered the epitome of virtue, the most arduous of virtues, and it was closed — by default — to women.

In the Gospels, virtue is embodied in suffering service, in courageous and confrontational nonviolence, and epitomized in martyrdom.  All these are as accessible to women as they are to men.

In this, the Gospels are a gender revolution, even if not self-consciously so. I believe that this revolution transcends the 1st through 3rd Centuries and that this – if the church is faithful – is still true today.  I believe this, because I believe that the most oppressive constructions of masculinity that correspond to the worst offenses of men against women (and against other men in the quest for conquest) have their deepest origins in war.

Irish former priest John Dominic Crossan said, “The church’s mission is to take the world back from the normalcy of civilization.”

Let me say something provocative but true about civilization.  Civilization has always been, always will be, and is now fundamentally predicated upon… war.  We tend to associate civilization – city-fication – with forms of high culture and manners, but the material reality of all civilizations is and has been the exploitation of weak people and their lands in the service of a powerful people.  True in Egypt.  True in Babylon.  True in Rome.  True in the British Empire.  True for America, now.

When Jesus began his mission, he first left civilization.  He turned around (what “repent” actually means), and headed to the wilderness.

I believe it took a man to tell men, show men, a different way to be men; and men were the most — are the most — broken of all people, because we are ripped away from our capacity to love by the obligations of masculinity.

Call to Repentance

On this Veterans Day, 2011, this deeply dishonest holiday, this day of turning the flag into an idol and the nation-state into a religion, as I am turning 60, and as a Christian, I need to confess and repent.  And I am making a call to repentance, not just to soldiers and former soldiers, but to many of my fellow men.

Do not thank me for my service.  You do not know what I did when I “served.”

I beat people.  I burned their houses.  I terrified children and old people.  I humiliated people.  I used racial epithets to dehumanize those I dominated.  I took human life.  And that was just as a soldier.  As a man, I have dominated, insulted, humiliated, and exploited women.  As a man, I have mocked the suffering of others.  I have policed masculinity in other men, including engaging in homophobia — perhaps the most powerful form of hatred as gender-policing.

This came at a cost, not to be measured against the costs of what I did to others, but at a cost.

In the accustomed comforts of consumer society, said Walter Brueggemann in The Prophetic Imagination, we have been numbed to the pain of others by a secular ideology that teaches us to harden our hearts.

Power depends on uncaring hearts to remain powerful.  “Compassion,” says Brueggemann, “constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural…”

He was moved with compassion.  (Matthew 9:36)

Hardening one’s heart is painful.  It takes an effort of will at first.  Learning it requires numbness.  Mab Segrest, in her book, Born to Belonging, calls this numbness “the anesthesia of power.”

When you see those besotted barfly veterans, bitter without knowing why, baleful against humanity in general, know that they are using their anesthetic.  There is pain under all that bitterness, the pain of loss, the loss of the capacity for love. The loss of love is the steep price of penultimate masculinity.

It was only grace that brought love back into my life.

Grace and forgiveness, two things you need every day.

On Veterans Day, 2011, this dishonest holiday when I am about to complete 60 years as a human, I have good news for men, for soldiers, for veterans.  We do not have to pay that price.  We can stop any time.  We can turn around.  We can repent.  We can learn to love again.  All we have to give up is power.

Some of that power is invisible, and we have to work on that, too.  Finding all the ways we exercise power over others, and surrendering that power.

It will take discipline and practice, because giving up the trappings of conquest-masculinity will feel unnatural to us. We won’t get it right, right away.  It will take humility and a daily re-dedication of willingness.  It will mean we have to drop our defenses and accept vulnerability.

Something I can say today about my own freedom, since that word gets a lot of Veterans Day play:  I know now that I never have to raise my voice or hand in anger again, no matter what.  If there is any redemption for men, it is in becoming peacemakers.

For me, this includes active opposition to war in all its forms; but we also need to make this a reality in our personal lives.  I want to suggest a simple starter program of peacemaking that you can use with everyone you meet.  Elders are supposed to confer simple wisdom if they have it, and I think this qualifies.

Don’t dominate.  Don’t retaliate.  Don’t humiliate.

With those three simple don’t's, you can make your little corner of the world a better place for yourself and everyone around you.  It isn’t everything we need to do, but it is a start on undoing what we never should have done.

To men who are Christians: I didn’t make up these rules.

Blessed are the peacemakers; for they shall be called the children of God.  (Matthew 5:9)

I know we are not alone.  Other towns are whistling through this graveyard, too.

Passed the people who walk, rain or shine or snow.  Street people, poor people, mentally ill people, people who live in various kinds of group homes.  They are walking in the rain today.  Lots of them are old.  Lots of old people with grim faces peer from front doors and porches.  The old with nothing left to do, watch.  They remind us of death; so we teach ourselves how to ignore them.  The young people with nothing to do are young people.  They want to be noticed, as all young people do.  If we ignore them long enough, they will do things that we can’t ignore.  Young people with nothing to do and something less calorie dense than hope to thrive on will put their hands on you if necessary to make you pay attention to them.  By and by.

I wonder if anyone has done an age demographic of our crisis.  Wonder what it would tell us.

The plague bacteria that swept through medieval Europe had been declared extinct just over a month ago. A quick google search reveals articles with headlines such as ‘Medieval plague bacteria strain probably extinct’ and ‘Black death strain extinct’. Few writers mentioned that the original research on which they reported was a technical paper first and foremost, and not a comprehensive investigation into the evolution of the Medieval plague.

It’s ironic that a study that was published last week shows that the Black Death is far from extinct. On the contrary. The plague bacteria that still infect thousands of people every year trace back their ancestry to the plagues of the fourteenth century. Interestingly, this new research was carried out by the same scientists that published the other plague study in August, so what has happened here?

In their first paper, researchers lead by Johannes Krause and Hendrik Poinar announced that they had successfully extracted and sequenced some DNA of a medieval strain of  Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague, from the teeth of a dozen Black Death victims. These remains had been excavated from the  East Smithfield burial grounds in London by the Museum of London Archaeology before. During the height of the London plague epidemic, between 1348 and 1349, thousands of bodies were buried at East Smithfield.

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Ghetto Humor

“Daddy, why do black people kill each other?”

“Practicing.”

I guess that’s black black-humor.  It also has a big grain of truth. People do most what they practice and practice most what they do… practice here meaning rehearsal or repetition, not a generalization of practical effort.  Hair cutters cut hair a lot; secretaries type; ditch diggers dig; paper shufflers shuffle papers; carpenters saw and hammer; bosses boss.

We also practice our attitudes, even though we apparently have little awareness how our culture inculcated those attitudes.

Yesterday I met Linda Farley, a local pastor, at the community donation garden to pick up some material s for a local upcoming event. While we were talking, she suddenly exclaimed delightedly bout the garden, that it was in motion. And it was. The breeze was making the plants dance, the birds were diving in and out, the butterflies were doing take-offs and landings, as were the bees.  Bees apparently love the flowers on bolted broccoli.

There for just a moment, we both stopped and did a little joy.  Earlier that day I was somewhat distressed that the content mill publisher where I make a little money is about to yank the carpet out from under its writers to take their money and run.  I can’t look for a job until the beginning of November, because we are closing on a house and I have work to do there.  My father-in-law is very ill and in and out of the hospital. My daughter, who stays with us along with her 17 month old daughter, is unhappily unemployed and looking in vain.

I’ve practiced worry all my life, so I’m really good at it.  I haven’t practiced joy all my life, so I need a lot of practice.

Somewhere recently, I’d heard that part of reclaiming our lives from worry is the practice of gratitude and joy.  In the Gospel of Matthew, I  read that worry is a lack of faith.

When I stopped to think about it yesterday, I realized that I have a great deal to be grateful for.  I know that raises the question for my agnostic friends about gratitude to whom; but I have an answer for that and I leave others who will at least acknowledge that gratitude is warranted (for butterflies, good health, a pleasant breeze, a well-cooked egg, a comfortable bed under a sound roof, grandchildren, etc.) to figure out where to direct that gratitude.  Before my conversion, I had adopted the habit of saying thank-you into space for at least three things every night before I went to bed.  (Caution: this was one practice that contributed to conversion.)  The point here, though, is that I began – in a small way to practice gratitude.

Every time I take a moment to admire a brilliant half-moon, feel the embrace of a child, take heart from the smile of a stranger, I have an opportunity to practice moments of joy.

In a culture that is based on simulation that makes it untrustworthy, scarcity that makes it competitive and envious, and alienation that makes its individuals lonely and angry and lost, we all have plenty of practice worrying, feeling put-upon, being amorphously agitated, driven, inadequate, confused (but fronting that we have it together), and out of touch with the Now.

As we are, for the most part, I believe we can have 20 things about which to be grateful and 20 opportunities for moments of joy in a day; and if we have one thing to worry about or one thing that is saddening or angering, we will forget the rest.  We practice what we do, and we do what we practice.

Even those of us who have taken on the role of world-changers now and again have copped to the idea that if we can only change the world, our hearts will change too.

I’m not at all sure of that any more.  If we are to reflect forward a better world, one where love is the currency and peace is the setting, then that projection has to be one that we embody as a living example.  We have to practice gratitude and joy.  Then we can form associations, even communities, where the people in them are practitioners of gratitude and joy.  And those communities can reflect forward – subverting the world of simulacra, alienation and scarcity – into a better world.

Various good, bad, scary, wonderful, interesting things happen in two months of cruising. I don’t have time even to summarise them right now. What I do want to write about is the strange, clever ugliness of urban culture as I saw it (with eyes rendered wider-open than usual from so much time in the quiet places) afresh on arrival.

Working on a nasty little conspicuous-fuel-consumer power boat in the marina was an ordinary middle-aged man. The ordinary man’s ordinary brown T-shirt had an extraordinarily unpleasant graphic on the back. Off-white lettering in two rows read:

I SUPPORT
SINGLE MOTHERS

and between the two rows of lettering was a line of silhouette illustrations of women stripping and pole dancing.

I felt that little shiver that you feel when you smell a whiff of genuine nastiness (if I call it “evil” it sounds so dramatic, so let’s settle for more mundane language: just plain nasty).

I’ve been trying ever since then to unpack that glimpse of unpleasantness. First off, the graphic acknowledges a fundamental truth of our good ol’ patriarchal culture. Single mothers are at a pretty serious disadvantage economically and socially. It is (even in these allegedly enlightened times) harder for a woman than for a man to find and keep a job that offers a steady living; and a woman with a child is particularly challenged by the need to perform wage labour to support herself and the child, conflicting with the child’s need for maternal care and presence.

In such a rigged system, a certain number of single mums do in fact turn to prostitution or “escort” work as a way to make money at a higher hourly wage than flipping burgers or running a cash register, and with more flexible hours. Similarly a certain number of poverty-class men (and some but fewer women) find that the military is the employer of last resort. Neither reality is something to be particularly proud of: the prostitution industry and the military both recruit via the poverty draft. That’s called “oppression” actually, and reams have been written about it: the poor get to do the dirty work, work that most people with wider choices choose not to do.

So what our “amusing” tee shirt in part says is that the wearer is at some level aware of this dynamic, knows that single mothers are economically vulnerable and may be coerced into prostitution by the structures of a patriarchal culture. In addition, he implicitly represents himself as a customer of the prostitution industry, “supporting” single mums by renting prostitutes or purchasing tickets for voyeurism events (i.e. opportunistically trading on the women’s social and financial predicament for his own sexual convenience).

There is a cruel sarcasm to the use of “support” in this context, in the deliberate imitation of a liberal or progressive political slogan (I Support Fair Trade, etc.) based on goodwill, empathy, trying to do the right thing. But there is more, I think. Does anyone but me sense an implicit warning to partnered and married women contemplating motherhood or already there: This is what could happen to you if you break up with your male protector. You could become the vulnerable prey of men like me. You might have to turn tricks to feed your kid. So… better not piss off your man.

And lastly there is, as in all misogynist (and many other forms of “istic”) humour, a public display of Empathy Deficit Disorder (another candidate for my very own DSM-V). The wearer openly identifies himself as one who capitalises on, rather than sympathises with (as in the more sincere or conventional meaning of “support”), the economic and social disadvantages of single motherhood; he labels himself as unempathic, opportunistic or predatory in his attitude rather than genuinely supportive, helpful, or caring. Effectively, he brags about it.

This public rejection of caring or sympathy in favour of flaunting an empathy deficit is itself highly gendered: a man who would wear this shirt most likely believes that caring, sympathy and empathy are “sissy” and that “real men” are tough and have no time for losers; that vulnerability equals provocation or culpability; that the weak deserve to be exploited… and that the public profession of these attitudes identifies him as culturally male — a Real Man — and hence safe from brutality, contempt, and opportunistic predation at the hands of other men.

His t-shirt might as well read

I AM A REAL MAN
WOMEN ARE LOSERS
WORKS FOR ME

I never cease to be amazed by the way that genuine, rather shocking hatefulness and spite can be made socially acceptable by a thin mask of wit (wordplay, pun, mockery, etc). Particularly I never cease to be amazed by the way that this lipstick continues to work so well on the pig of sexism, even when most people nowadays are (somewhat) less fooled by it on the pig of racism. Trying to come up with an equally offensive and structurally similar T-shirt that would express race hatred, the best I could do was

I SUPPORT SCHOLARSHIPS
FOR FIRST NATIONS YOUTH

with the two rows of lettering separated by a canonical sketch of a Residential School.

I have a feeling that wearing that slogan in public, even among the fairly peaceful Salish of our area, might have got him beaten up; he probably wouldn’t take the risk. Insulting women, however — abrasively celebrating male power over women — is generally safe.

I’m not saying that up the coast, out on the edge, there are no patriarchal dickwits, that sailors and homesteaders never tell a scurrilous misogynist joke, that women are treated with respect and equality as soon as you get away from town. But I am saying that I don’t see that kind of shirt on the backs of the locals up the coast, and this is an aspect of “sophisticated urban culture” that I’m definitely not going to miss when we leave Nanaimo…

And while I’m on the subject: on my return, feminist friends drew my attention to the German business executive’s corporate-sponsored sex-party (held in Budapest, not in Germany) at which prostituted women were colour-coded by market value and stamped like library cards after each use, and a Toronto pub where the owner has installed urinals in the form of pouty, parted, red-lipsticked lips.

The pub owner said the urinals were intended to “spark laughter”. The official Munich Re newsletter described the prostitution party as “killer fun.” Well, ha bloody ha.

I know all the primatologists and neuroscientists will at this point nod sagely and point out that humour amongst us not-very-nice monkeys is merely suppressed or redirected hostility, that the majority of all recorded humour through the ages rests on elements of insult or schadenfreude, etc. — and therefore that humour is a predictable mode of expression for bigotry, xenophobia, paranoia, etc. But ya know what, even with my awareness of all that jazz… it still bothers me that bigotry mechanically, repetitively, tediously, smirkingly pretends it’s “just joking”; it still bothers me that this “jokeyness” is just one more infuriating aspect of not taking the humanity of the insulted persons seriously; and it still bothers me that even where we have — at great cost, with great and often heroic effort, and with limited success — made it uncool to flaunt one’s bigotry against the racially-defined Other, it’s still so completely acceptable to flaunt it against the sexually-defined Other.

Harumph. Welcome back to Civilisation.