waagnfnp

Introduction

It is both a sad and alarming commentary on the present state of men’s character that so many have objected to legitimate feminist challenges, retreated, and finally lashed back. Instead of rising to the challenge, far too many males have regressed into an infantile and dangerous state combining the worst of traditional and modern masculine roles. For many men, a shameless arrogance thrown together with self-absorption has overwhelmed courage and compassion. This mutation has placed manhood, at least American manhood, in crisis. In the micro, there is the man who murders his wife and children before killing himself. In macro, there are political leaders who would be more comfortable destroying the earth than allowing women’s power to reside with men’s in mutual respect, peace, and benefit.

We need the opposite: men who will take the best of the traditional male, the providing, protecting, serving, and sacrificing, and integrate it with the equality-mindedness of the modern male.

Feminist awareness

After growing up on a on farm where girls and boys both fed the cows and washed dishes, my more formal, conscious feminist awakening came in college and graduate school. In university classrooms and on the street, I learned two crucial truths about feminism and its relation to male identity and well-being:
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…well yes you did get some kind of award for “Mostest Detailed Information on an Obscure Topic”. –JP Stormcrow

[D]on’t tempt me to go all photochemical on your ass. If you want detailed information on really obscure topics, I can bury you. –James Killus

Ozone is the key ingredient in photochemical smog. Air quality standards for smog are designed to limit ozone on the assumption that, if ozone is reduced, other photochemical smog constituents will also be reduced. While other air pollutants like carbon monoxide and fine particulates are, by and large, directly emitted, ozone is a “secondary air pollutant,” meaning that it is formed by chemical processes in the atmosphere.

There is, however, a natural background of ozone in the troposphere, the layer of air that contains 90% of the atmosphere, and the part of the atmosphere where we breathe, where weather happens, etc.
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One of the post-Firesign Theater “rock and roll comedy” groups was The Conception Corporation. They put out two albums, A Pause in the Disaster, and Conceptionland. Both were good for Progessive Radio play in the 60s, which is to say the early 70s. (As I understand it, there is a third, live album now available as well).

One of the cuts on Conceptionland was “Rock and Roll Classroom,” another “What if Freaks Ran Things?” idea (see also “Returned for Re-Grooving,” by Firesign Theater). In this case, what if high school were really hip, or at least trying to be?
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I read the story some years ago, in The Wall St. Journal, I think, in the first page center column where they put their “strange but true” features. It concerned an occurrence at a semiconductor plant in Indonesia.

The work was semi-skilled labor, of the sort that required close eye/hand coordination, for which the local native women were well suited. Much of it was done under the microscope. The overall situation was stressful: clean room standards, long hours of intense concentration. After some months the women began seeing things under the microscope. They called these things ghosts, and told the supervisors that the place had become haunted with the spirits of the dead.
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Past responses to my earlier blog essays on faith (http://www.waagnfnp.com/category/religion/progressive-faith-movement/) have made a secular case against institutional religion. Salman Rushdie in a recent Bill Moyers interview made an artistic and literary case against religious fundamentalism. My Jewish yoga teacher, Sandra, brings up the religious pluralist argument (in response to institutional Christianity in particular, which has seen fit to aggressively assert itself as the religion). Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have made the atheist argument with their respective books, The God Delusion and God Is Not Great (which are apparently the number one and two Amazon UK’s bestselling titles under “Religion and Spirituality” according to Harper’s Magazine, October 2007). Perhaps it is time to make a spiritual case against institutional Christianity from a non-institutional Christian mystic perspective.

First I must do so observing that Christianity as a form of faith is thoroughly conflicted, within its own widespread spiritual and religious body. The development of a fractured Christianity has emerged from powerful and fateful choices among various traditions within Christianity. One of the most powerful divergences was (and is) the cleaving between a “mystic” Christianity and a (let’s call it) “doctrinal” institutional Christianity.

Mystic Christianity emphasizes emulation of an historical Jesus, following of a sublime, eternal Christ, metaphorical understanding of Gospels, and the cultivated experience of spiritual truth embracing the totality of existence.
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One of the metaphors for this summer has been the use of the Bell Curve for describing the inherent properties of each of the tour stops, particularly the qualities of the attendees. Now that may or may not be fair, or accurate for that matter, it was our choice to use it and we (the select group of “professionals” who ventured forth from venue to venue in the quest for the holy grail of production) tended to understand what we meant by our applications of it across the breadth and depth of the western USA.

Thus I offer this assessment of the Big Summer Classic (BSC) weekend held at Camp Zoe (near Eminence), Missouri the first weekend of August 2007:

Given the Bell Curve that represents the quality of an event in relation to the qualities of the people attending, BSC could be categorized as containing only the upper 3% and the lowest 3% of the spectrum of observable and experiential phenomena. There were stunning and amazing moments that represented the very best of what the summer had to offer; there were some of the most heinous and vile of experiences that no human being (or any other species for that matter) should ever have to be in the presence of anywhere anytime. There were brilliant and inspiring people doing good well, and there were some of the stupidest and most idiotic creatures inhabiting human skin.

And that was just a bit of it. Really.

And while I intend to get into more of that in part two, I do want to spend a moment of your reading time discoursing on one of the tragedies that became apparent over the weekend.
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I won the raffle at a party thrown by a job agency a while back, and one of the prizes was a gift certificate from Starbucks. I don’t drink coffee; a single glass of Coke at dinner is enough to move my sleep time back an hour or more. But Starbucks sells other stuff, so I had a cup of hot chocolate and bought the Dylan No Direction Home CD.

The PBS special on Dylan was directed by Scorsese, and covered Dylan’s career up to the point where he had his motorcycle accident. It feels important, somehow, that Dylan survived the accident, that he didn’t follow the “good career move” that got so many of the other 60s icons. Dylan was always the Trickster, so it also feels appropriate, and besides, living is better than dying. I don’t care how many mediocre albums he’s made since then, how many unmemorable songs. He’s alive; good for him.

One of the things that was very obvious, and left very unmentioned, in No Direction Home was how thoroughly ripped he was for much of the time.
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In his intriguing, if overly verbose, article on “Capitalist democracy: elective affinity or beguiling illusion” (Daedalus, Summer 2007, pp. 5-13), John Dunn states:

“This much is clear: while in America, Tom Paine and James Madison both imagined that that a commercial society could coexist happily with a representative republic, others elsewhere, from Filippo Buonarroti and the first Duke of Wellington in the 1830s to the Guild Socialist G.D.H. Cole in the 1920s, were just as certain that the inequalities generated by the market economy were incompatible with a truly democratic republic. (p. 5)

To this latter position I would add not only generated but sustained for the benefit of some over others. In the article, John Dunn mentions aristocracy and monarchy as counterpoints to democracy, but fails to follow up on oligarchy, the far more relevant (in my opinion) form of aristocratic “ruling” behavior in a capitalist democracy, and a problem in Greek and Roman times as well. Can a group of leaders so constituted as to view their interests (esp. economic) as either constitutive of or superior to the general public be entrusted with power in a democracy?
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I know a lot of amateur scholars, including myself (ask me about New York City circa 1911 sometime). Many of them concentrate a fair amount of their scholarly impulses on science fiction, and that includes my friend Douglas. He’s taken advantage of the fact that U.C. Berkeley has a collection of the papers of A.E. van Vogt, for example. He also tells me of a movie review of Metropolis written by H. G. Wells.

“Unprecedented” may be the word I might use to describe for the possibility that the Federal Reserve and government apparatchiks will baldly and simply overtly “change the score” on the economic scoreboard to both serve financiers and bail them out of their circular firing squad. [It’s been done in the past but covertly.] Yes homeowners who were duped into buying homes way beyond their means will suffer probable bankruptcy, but they don’t have much to lose in the sense that many didn’t have a down payment and some may have even extracted equity.

Financiers seems to have moved from a pyramid scheme to a game of “hot potato” or perhaps “musical chairs.” So filled with greed and hubris from the massive fees they could charge for every transaction and the cheap money merry-go-round provided by the private Federal Reserve Board, they gave out loans, sliced and diced them, repackaged them and shipped them out…to each other! In so doing they ended up screwing themselves as well as the American public.

Before, in the Depression and during wars, these same financiers and industrialist could stand to gain both power and money by allowing a contraction of supply and a stimulation of misery. But now their books are interconnected and they don’t really have someone to sucker, er, dump their liability on.
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