Second Fiddle

So I'm in Starbucks this morning, and among the many other people in the place with me were a mother and her young daughter. At one point, the mother answers her cell phone, and within a couple of minutes, the child, having become bored with not being the center of her mother's attention, takes to pounding on the arm of a nearby easy chair. After a couple minutes of this merry drumming, her mother looks up from her call, and asks her to stop.

"No." The child replies, without pausing.

This happened a couple more times, and the child drummed pretty much all through the mother's telephone call. Every time the mother would ask her to stop, the child would say "No," and continue on. It wasn't until the child realized the call was winding down that she relented.

When the mother finally finished her call, and confronted the child, she was clearly frustrated. But what did she expect? It was clear to me that the child had come to see her mother being on a phone call as a license to do as she pleased, since the mother was clearly unwilling to interrupt her call to intervene in whatever the child was doing. This isn't the kind of situation that develops overnight. It's going to be a good deal if work for the mother to re-establish her authority in the child's eyes. Making it clear that she's more important than the telephone might be a good start.

Soft Money

For me, Capitalism is merely a thing. It's not inherently good or bad. It simply is. Just, as H. L. Mencken pointed out, the trouble with Communism is the Communists and the trouble with Christianity is the Christians, the trouble with Capitalism is the Capitalists. It's hard to drum up support for a system that people feel is set up in such a way that it's impossible to win by telling them that they should be grateful for the opportunity to lose

But I suspect that what really bothers people about what passes for Capitalism in the United States is that "the 1%" (although, honestly, we're really talking more about the .01%) spend a little too much time claiming that they're being persecuted for "working their butts off," when they're really simply become very good at getting others to the heavy lifting for them. I think that they also but too much effort into blaming people who aren't like them, rather than showing people how it's done. Mark Twain noted that truly great people want to see you become great as well, and I think that we tend to lack that because our culture is driven by the (false) perception of scarcity.

In the end, it takes more than skill to be successful in America. I know plenty of people who have serious skills, but aren't regarded as successes (worst of all by themselves), because the combination of traits and circumstances that it takes is fairly complex. I think that part of the problem is the continued attempts by people to boil it down to nothing more than "skill and hard work" and then a tendency to sneer at people who aren't getting ahead and claiming it's because they're simply too dishonest to own up to their own laziness. The idea that the same traits that were venerated in small agrarian communities also cut the mustard in populous, advanced and technological societies that literally span continents sets a lot of people up for failure. But since they understand that they're doing what they were told to do, and playing by the rules as they understood them, it's no wonder that they look outside of themselves for answers - and often see conspiracies. But I think that a better solution is to have a better understanding of what the rules really are, not just what someone tells themselves to stroke their own ego.

But we don't teach economic literacy as a general skill here in the United States. It's possible to be considered well-educated, and never really have been taught the basics about how the economy that we're expected to live and function in works. Accordingly, for many of us, it's a black box. And I think that this allows for a level of economic judo - the wealthy are using the way we live our lives on a day-to-day basis against us, all the while telling us that the problem is that we aren't doing enough of what we're doing.

Differently Similar

By the time I was in my mid-to-late teens, I began to understand a curious paradox. When people, White or Black, sought to elevate themselves over others by invoking famous names, everyone was the same. They, and everyone that they identified with, were the same as the famous people whose names they would recite. The qualities that made the famous people famous and well respected were present in everyone who shared the "same" color skin. And everyone who wasn't like them was the same in being utterly different from the famous people. The qualities of the famous people were absent, because the skin color was different. Likewise, when they sought to denigrate others by invoking infamous names, the qualities that made people reviled and hated were also transmitted through skin color. But when it was pointed out that there were infamous people who shared a skin tone with them, then everyone was different, and the the failings that made their infamous people bad were limited to the infamous, and did not spread around to anyone else. People, I find, hold this particular brand of Doublethink in their heads quite easily.

I was reminded of this in the context of reactions to three rather sad episodes that have come to pass recently. The shootings perpetrated by Elliot Rodger in California, the revelation from Pakistan that a man whose pregnant wife was murdered by her family had in fact been married before - and had slain her so that he could re-marry and the gang-rape and murder of a pair of Indian girls from from the "untouchable" caste. The latter two stories both brought out internet commentators who made a show of wringing their hands before labeling the cases as proof that Pakistanis and Indians, respectively are all something less than human, and for one particularly spiteful person, less than animals. Yet they also maintained (because it was quickly brought up) that to tar all of America with the Elliot Rodger brush was to wrongly smear upstanding Americans. Because things are different here.

Humans, it has been said, do not scale well. We form into cliques and tribes, and once we have done so, seek to use that tribal identity as a means of proving our legitimacy to ourselves and others at the expense of those from other tribes. Even when we're supposedly fighting for our very existence against outside forces, we find it difficult to impossible to temper this habit. Of course, we are not all like this. But when we are different, sometimes we're still like everyone else.

The Male of the Species

Men typically route their feelings toward and competition with one another through women, [Eve Sedgwick, author of Between Men] says. Women become tools through which men show their power and worth to other men. Success with women is also an important part of men’s self-image—that’s a big part of what it means to “be a man.” [...] To him, women aren't people; they're markers of who is and who is not a man. If a woman chooses someone else, the thinking goes, that means Rodger and others like him are not men.
Noah Berlatsky “Elliot Rodger and Poisonous Ideals of Masculinity”

You see this dynamic at work, I think, in the stories of harassment that Amanda Hess relates over at Slate. Not having been present for any of those events, and being unable to read minds in any event, I can’t be sure, but it makes sense to me. It is logical to me that someone who needs to prove his worth and validity to himself is not going to have room for considerations of any others. In a society were men are not permitted to stray outside of fairly rigid boundaries of masculinity without a chorus of voices demanding to know what's wrong with them, it is no surprise that self-loathing often claims those who cannot compete their way within its confines.

And [Elliott Rodger] destroyed himself, too: that pitiful failed thing who was not a man.

How do we stop this? There are calls for relaxing laws against involuntarily committing people to psychiatric institutions, calls for more gun control, calls for harsher punishments for men show show abusive tendencies. I do not argue against any of these things. But maybe, in addition to them, we need a broader understanding of who a person can be, and still be a man. The desperate struggle for survival against the elements, animals and other tribes is mostly a thing of the past. While we may, in fact, sleep peacefully in our beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf, the fact remains that we do not need all men to be rough or ready to do violence. We can allow some of them be civilized, or even feminine, and not think less of them. We have that luxury. We should make better use of it. When the path for men from being “broken and wrong and failed” to feeling competent and masterful must go through obliviousness to, if not complete disrespect for, the thoughts, feelings and humanity of women (or anyone else), this situation is going to play itself out, over and over again.

To “be a man,” is, in it’s simplest form, to be the male of the species homo sapiens. Perhaps the best way to spare more people from becoming victims of another Elliot Rodger is to demand nothing more.

Looking Down

This is an odd photograph. It left me with the feeling that, even though I'm nowhere in it, that it's about me. Not because I see myself in the subject, but because of a nagging feeling that this is my relationship to the subject. Looking down from an aloof position, high above.