The personal is political

One of the reasons I'm interested in politics is that it is a fascinating way to observe both individual and social human behavior. I believe that we are now living in an era in which our behavior must evolve and adapt. That is scaring the shit out of a lot of people.

For example, Rep. Mo Brooks is scared because he's losing his white privileged position. So much so that he thinks there is a "war on whites."

This is a part of the war on whites that’s being launched by the Democratic Party. And the way in which they’re launching this war is by claiming that whites hate everybody else. It’s a part of the strategy that Barack Obama implemented in 2008, continued in 2012, where he divides us all on race, on sex, greed, envy, class warfare, all those kinds of things.

Lately we've gotten used to this kind of rhetoric - the kind that says that if you stand up for people of color you're attacking white people. Never mind that Barack Obama launched his political career saying things like this:

Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America there's the United States of America. There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America.

I get that Rep. Brooks is scared about the fact that soon white people will lose their majority status in this country, and that the presidency of Barack Obama symbolizes that change. But he's just going to have to adapt and reconcile himself to the death of normal.

Another example is what Rev. Mark Driscoll said in an on-line forum a few years ago. Do you think maybe he's more that a little bit scared of the role of women in todays world?

We live in a completely pussified nation.

We could get every man, real man as opposed to pussified James Dobson knock-off crying Promise Keeping homoerotic worship loving mama’s boy sensitive emasculated neutered exact male replica evangellyfish, and have a conference in a phone booth. It all began with Adam, the first of the pussified nation, who kept his mouth shut and watched everything fall headlong down the slippery slide of hell/feminism when he shut his mouth and listened to his wife who thought Satan was a good theologian when he should have lead [sic] her and exercised his delegated authority as king of the planet. As a result, he was cursed for listening to his wife and every man since has been his [sic] pussified sit quietly by and watch a nation of men be raised by bitter penis envying burned feministed single mothers who make sure that Johnny grows up to be a very nice woman who sits down to pee.

Its important to note that Rev. Driscoll was using a sock puppet in the on-line forum when he wrote that. I suspect it gave him the freedom to post his authentic feelings. Since he was outed as the author, he has apologized for his language, but not the sentiment expressed.

This season was messy and I sinned and cussed a lot, but God somehow drew a straight line with my crooked Philistine stick. I had a good mission, but some of my tactics were born out of anger and burnout...

Most people will immediately see Rev. Driscoll's misogyny in what he posted. But can you feel the fear as well? I find it palpable.

I'll grant you that Rep. Brooks and Rev. Driscoll have articulated the extreme. In doing so, they've also articulated the fear that is driving much of the reaction we're seeing politically. Republican leadership has been able to mobilize this fear to give them cover in implementing their strategy of obstruction. In many ways we're gridlocked politically because too many people are afraid of the change that is inevitable. IOW, the personal is political.

President Obama poses a deep threat to patriarchy

I found it fascinating that yesterday Russia's Deputy Prime Minister tweeted this:

We have different values and allies pic.twitter.com/aJ1312jJNx
— Dmitry Rogozin (@DRogozin) July 31, 2014

The truth is, he was just picking up on a meme that has been floating around our politics for a while now. For example, here's what Michael Crowley of TIME tweeted when Russia first went into Ukraine.

not a character judgment, but this does kind of capture the moment pic.twitter.com/aTTUVRLYqu
— Michael Crowley (@CrowleyTIME) March 1, 2014

This is the same message the Republicans send when they call our President weak on foreign policy and lefty purists used when they caricatured his dealings with Congress ( for example, remember when Michael Moore said that President Obama should take off his tutu and put on his boxing gloves?)

Here's how Adam Gopnik summarized the messages we've been hearing for years now:

Barack Obama is not a tough guy. Everybody rolls him. He’s a wimp, a weak sister; he won’t stand up for himself or his country. Vladimir Putin, a true tough guy, blows planes out of the air, won’t apologize, walks around half-naked. Life, it seems, is like a prison yard, and Obama cowers in a corner. “It would be a hellish thing to live with such timidity. … He’s scared of Vladimir Putin,” one Fox News contributor said about the President. But this kind of thing is not confined to the weirder fringes: Maureen Dowd pointed out a while ago that former fans of Obama “now make derogatory remarks about your manhood,” while the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page runs a kind of compendium of “weak sister” pieces every morning, urging the President, at one point, to make more “unambiguous threats”—making unambiguous threats evidently being the real man’s method of getting his way.

(Note: you should go read Gopnik's whole column because he proceeds to tear apart this notion of our need for a "tough guy.")

Its important to note the way this framing is tied to gender. Men are strong and women are weak. The worst insult to a man is to compare him to a woman. Some of you may have assumed that we'd gotten beyond all that in the 21st century. But we haven't. I'm here to say that the reason it persists is that, for too many of us, the cause of feminism has been reduced to reproductive freedom and equal pay. As important as those things are, we've lost sight of the big picture.

These things can be difficult to talk about because conversations usually devolve into caricatures and stereotypes about what it means to be masculine or feminine. Somewhere along our evolutionary path, some things got conflated that don't belong together:

Masculine = Dominance = Strength

Feminine = Nuturance = Weakness

Until we can unpack those things, we'll remain trapped in a patriarchal system that devalues women and demands that men prove their manliness via their ability to dominate.

Just as President Obama threatens the system of white supremacy, he is also challenging the notions we have absorbed from patriarchy. I have often written about how his power (or strength) is not based on dominance - but partnership, and he regularly talks about the importance of empathy (another way of expressing nuturance). Those are just a couple of examples of how he scrambles all those notions about masculinity and femininity from within the body of a man. That confuses a lot of people and triggers some deep fears about a challenge to the way we've come to expect the world to be ordered. In other words, he's dealing a death blow to the old patriarchal system.

So the next time someone accuses the President of being a "girly man," I'm thinking a great response would be, "Yes, isn't that wonderful! And what a strong girly man he is!" 

A strong woman is a woman who loves
strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly
terrified and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong
in words, in action, in connection, in feeling;
she is not strong as a stone but as a wolf
sucking her young. Strength is not in her, but she
enacts it as the wind fills a sail.

What comforts her is other's loving
her equally for the strength and for the weakness
from which it issues, lightning from a cloud.
Lightning stuns. In rain, the clouds disperse.
Only water of connection remains,
flowing through us. Strong is what we make together...

- Marge Piercy

Calling out the sexism

Recently I wrote about the fact that Fox New's obsession with the "wussification" of American not only degrades the feminine, it reinforces the equally patriarchal idea that boys/men need to prove their masculinity. And now along comes this commercial attempting to make the same point with a dash of humor.
Cute, huh? Gawd forbid that a manly man use a product that is designed for women! And if he does so by mistake...he's got a lot to prove. Some idiot at the Federalist felt the need to weigh in.

...we know, deep in our lizard brains, that men and women are different. We know that we are designed to complement one another. Women nurture, men conquer.

Woe be to the men who nurture and the women who conquer. Our "lizard brains" say that's all wrong. Perhaps its time for some evolution - for folks who believe in that kind of thing.

Last weekend, Brit Hume joined the bandwagon by suggesting that Gov. Chris Christie's bullying was merely him being a "guy's guy" and the negative reaction to it is all about the feminization of our culture.

We can all point and rage at this when it comes from Fox News and advertisers. But as I keep trying to point out, there is no daylight between this kind of thing and the obsession of some on the left who constantly say that President Obama needs to "man up" (most notable among them are people like Michael Moore, Bill Maher and Maureen Dowd).

I say its time for both men and women who embrace feminism to call this shit out no matter who is peddling it.

Bring on the wussification!

Recently Media Matters demonstrated how Fox News has been obsessed with the wussification of America. What I hear from that is a fear and rejection of all of the things that have traditionally been defined as feminine....nurturing, compassion, empathy. But lets be honest, its not just Fox News. Take a look at the commentary from both the left and right critiquing President Obama and you'll hear the constant extortions to "man up, grow some balls, etc." Its still true in this day and age that the worst insult to a man is to be compared to a girl (or even worse, a f***ot - an unmannly man).

Take a look at this trailer from a recent documentary titled The Mask You Live In to see the impact this has on boys.

If we are ever going to free ourselves of the authoritarian impulses that rely on fear and oppression, we are going to have to free our boys from the expectation that their manhood is something they have to prove. Our human potential for nurturing, compassion and empathy are no more "feminine" than strength, courage, and toughness are "masculine."

Here's Riane Eisler explaining why that is so important.

I believe that the reason Fox News is concerned about wussification and so many political pundits are calling on President Obama to "man up" is that what it means to be a man or woman is in the process of changing and that is threatening whole belief systems that are built on these stereotypes. In many ways feminism has begun the process of freeing women from them, but we've lagged in understanding what that means for men.

And so now we have a leader of the free world who regularly challenges us to tackle the empathy deficit, is not afraid to lead from behind, and is completely comfortable with the use of soft power. In other words, he has no desire or need to prove his manhood to anyone. People entrenched in the old patterns and stereotypes are terribly uncomfortable with that and tend to get surprised when he also has the courage and strength to go after Osama bin Laden or just say "no" to Republicans about negotiating on the debt ceiling.

While we are culturally struggling with this kind of change, President Obama is providing a wonderful example to young men who are able to envision a world where boys don't have anything to prove anymore...one where it is ok to let someone touch their soul.

Men and Faminism

This is what men are capable of:

Revisiting the Master's Tools

Today I followed a tweet from Angry Black Lady to something she posted on Pinterest. Its the video of an interview with Alice Walker. Here's the quote ABL highlighted.

Part of the problem with western #feminists is that they take after their brothers and their fathers. And that's a real problem. And that is where, generally speaking, the loyalty is and the solidarity. So that the struggle for many of these women .. is to get what these men have, and to share it with them., And naturally that means that they don't connect very much or very deeply with women in the other cultures of the world. -- Alice Walker

That is some profound wisdom from Ms. Walker. It reminded me of Audre Lorde's reference to the master's tools...something I've been thinking about for a long time now. And so I thought I'd repost what I wrote about that a little over a year ago. 

One of the ways that Audre Lorde revolutionized many people's thinking about the white male heterosexual patriarchy was with statements like this:

For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.

She expounded on that in her book Sister Outsider.

As Paulo Freire shows so well in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressor's tactics, the oppressor's relationships.

It strikes me that over the years I've been trying to broadly identify the master's tools that have been "planted deep within each of us" and keep us from bringing about genuine change. I'd suspect that this process will continue throughout my lifetime. But perhaps its time to take a moment to reflect on my thoughts to date. So here are some of the master's tools I've identified in my own life.

Hierarchy/Dominance

For centuries now most of us have been taught that the world is ordered by hierarchy and that dominance over others is the only form of power. It was initially the writings about women's spirituality that opened my eyes to this one - particularly the work of Riane Eisler.

Underneath all the complex and seemingly random currents and crosscurrents, is the struggle between two very different ways of relating, of viewing our world and living in it. It is the struggle between two underlying possibilities for relations: the partnership model and the domination model.

I've written before about how a truly feminist movement could lead the way in understanding a world based on the power of partnership rather than hierarchy and dominance.

Objectification

The person who brought this one to my attention was Derrick Jensen in his book The Culture of Make Believe when he relayed a conversation he had with a friend about the similarities between hate groups and corporations.

He said, "They're cousins."

I just listened.

"Nobody talks about this," he said, "but they're branches from the same tree, different forms of the same cultural imperative..."

"Which is?"

"To rob the world of its subjectivity."

"Wait - " I said.

"Or to put this another way," he continued, " to turn everyone and everything into objects."

Robbing the world of its subjectivity means removing empathy and our feelings of mutuality. It means creating distance between "us" and "them." It is also what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was referring to when he said this:

We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

Inadequacy/Insufficiency

While the first two tools I've talked about relate mostly to our relationships with others, this one is rooted in how we see ourselves first - and then how we treat others. It has been nowhere better expressed than by Marianne Williamson (although often attributed to Nelson Mandela).

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Lynne Twist has also written powerfully about the concept of insufficiency/scarcity in her book titled The Soul of Money.

Whether we live in resource-poor circumstances or resource-rich ones, even if we're loaded with more money or goods or everything you could possibly dream of wanting or needing, we live with scarcity as an underlying assumption. It is an unquestioned, sometimes even unspoken, defining condition of life. It is not even that we necessarily experience a lack of something, but that scarcity as a chronic sense of inadequacy about life becomes the very place from which we think and act and live in the world. It shapes our deepest sense of ourselves, and becomes the lens through which we experience life...

This internal condition of scarcity, this mind-set of scarcity, lives at the very heart of our jealousies, our greed, our prejudice, and our arguments with life, and it is deeply embedded in our relationship with money.

Twist also talks about the antidote...a sense of sufficiency.

We each have the choice in any setting to step back and let go of the mind-set of scarcity. Once we let go of scarcity, we discover the surprising truth of sufficiency. By sufficiency, I don't mean a quantity of anything. Sufficiency isn't two steps up from poverty or one step short of abundance. It isn't a measure of barely enough or more than enough. Sufficiency isn't an amount at all. It is an experience, a context we generate, and a declaration, a knowing that there is enough, and that we are enough...

When we live in the context of sufficiency, we find a natural freedom and integrity. We engage in life from a sense of our own wholeness rather than a desperate longing to be complete...

When we let go of the chase for more, and consciously examine and experience the resources we already have, we discover our resources are deeper than we knew or imagined.

And so now I'll continue my journey to see and understand the master's tools at work in myself. But in the meantime, I'm convinced that if we promoted a sense of partnership, if we recognized our common mutuality, and if we embraced our own adequacy/sufficiency, we'd be well on our way towards the genuine revolutionary change Lorde talked about.

"Change is a motherf*cker when you run from it"

As the backlash develops to what Dr. William Barber II calls the "third reconstruction," I am reminded of how perceptively Derrick Jensen described what we're seeing these days in his book The Culture of Make Believe.

From the perspective of those who are entitled, the problems begin when those they despise do not go along with—and have the power and wherewithal to not go along with—the perceived entitlement...

Several times I have commented that hatred felt long and deeply enough no longer feels like hatred, but more like tradition, economics, religion, what have you. It is when those traditions are challenged, when the entitlement is threatened, when the masks of religion, economics, and so on are pulled away that hate transforms from its more seemingly sophisticated, "normal," chronic state—where those exploited are looked down upon, or despised—to a more acute and obvious manifestation. Hate becomes more perceptible when it is no longer normalized.

Another way to say all of this is that if the rhetoric of superiority works to maintain the entitlement, hatred and direct physical force remains underground. But when that rhetoric begins to fail, force and hatred waits in the wings, ready to explode.

In other words, this is not some new sexism, racism, homophobia that is showing its face. Its been there all along - disguised as tradition (Paula Deen) or religion (Mike Huckabee). What has changed is that women, people of color and LGBT are developing the "power and wherewithal to not go along with the perceived entitlement." Fear and hatred can no longer be normalized and are thus being exposed.

I think its important that we recognize this so that we see what is happening as the result of progress rather than feed our own fears about going backward. The beast is in its death throes and everyone - I mean EVERYONE - knows how this story is going to end eventually. That's what they're so afraid of.

America will soon belong to the men and women — white and black and Latino and Asian, Christian and Jew and Muslim and atheist, gay and straight — who can walk into a room and accept with real comfort the sensation that they are in a world of certain difference, that there are no real majorities, only pluralities and coalitions. The America in which it was otherwise is dying, thank god, and those who relied on entitlement and division to command power will either be obliged to accept the changes, or retreat to the gated communities from which they wish to wax nostalgic and brood on political irrelevance...

Hard times are still to come for all of us. Rear guard actions will be fought at every political crossroad. But make no mistake: Change is a motherfucker when you run from it. And right now, the conservative movement in America is fleeing from dramatic change that is certain and immutable...

Regardless of what happens with his second term, Barack Obama’s great victory has already been won: We are all the other now, in some sense... And now, normal isn’t white or straight or Christian. There is no normal. That word, too, means less with every moment. And those who continue to argue for such retrograde notions as a political reality will become less germane and more ridiculous with every passing year. 

A theme emerges when you take it all in

Perhaps you've noticed that I haven't been writing as much lately as I normally do. There's a reason for that. I've always said that my tendency is to pay attention to the big picture (if you're looking for a site to keep you up-to-the-minute on the latest news, this is definitely the wrong one to watch). This week big stories have been coming at us so fast that its impossible to have the time to digest them - much less reflect. Frankly, I'm exhausted just trying to keep up.

I think it would be helpful to list the big things that happened in the last few days:

1. The SCOTUS decision to basically gut the Voting Rights Act.
2. DOMA is unconstitutional and equal marriage returns to California.
3. The awakening of Texas Democrats with the Wendy Davis filibuster.
4. The Senate passes Comprehensive Immigration Reform 68-32 to shouts of "Yes We Can" from Dreamers in the gallery. Please proceed Speaker Boehner.
5. President Obama's trip to Africa and images like this.
6. Minority Leader Pelosi wants to craft the "John Lewis Voting Rights Act."
7. George Zimmerman's murder trial and the trashing of Rachel Jeantel.
8. The passive/aggressive embrace of victimhood by Southern white women as demonstrated by Paula Deen's racism and apology tour.

Does anyone else notice a theme? Yep. "There's something happening here" and its really important that we get the big picture right. 

"There's something happening here..."

As regular readers here know, I've been talking for awhile now about how what we're witnessing is the white male patriarchy in its death throes. Yesterday 5 Justices on the Supreme Court were the latest to lash out when they basically issued a ruling that guts the Voting Rights Act.

What I've also been suggesting is that we are in the midst of a third wave of a movement to remedy this country's original sin of slavery and racism. Of course the first was the Civil War that ended slavery and the second was the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950's and 60's that ended Jim Crow. In both of those movements white people gave African Americans legal standing. Over the course of the last 50 years, they've used those legal rights to raise themselves up. The challenge white people are facing today is that it is finally time to look African Americans (and other people of color) in the eye - face to face as equals. And even occasionally see them as our leaders. That's not going down real well. And so the dying beast is lashing out.

All of that came together in this fascinating video by Dr. William Barber II, President of the NC NAACP. I know most people won't take the time to listen to a 7 1/2 minute video. But you need to watch this and learn how what is happening RIGHT NOW is informed by our history.

In Rev. Dr. Barber's view, we are currently going through the third reconstruction. The first Reconstruction took place after the Civil War. Fusion politics — a governing coalition including Lincoln Republicans, freedmen and former slaves, and populists — made it possible for former slaves to become business, community, and political leaders. But fusion politics was snuffed out by a violent backlash, and replaced by Jim Crow laws that blocked African Americans from voting through poll taxes, impossible "tests," and terrorism.

In the 1960s, there was another attempt at reconstruction, better known as the Civil Rights Movement. The progress we made was met with another violent backlash, culminating in the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968.

Rev. Dr. Barber identifies the possibility of a third reconstruction, one that could actually succeed, with the launch of Barack Obama's campaign for president in 2008. Once again, this attempt at fusion politics has been met with a hateful backlash. The backlash against integration, equality, and trans-racial governing coalitions has, in all three instances, included attacks on voting rights of African Americans and other minorities. Rev. Barber believes that change is inevitable because of demographic shifts in America and the effectiveness of fusion politics.

Last night we saw a wonderful example of what fusion politics looks like in - of all places - the Texas legislature. Senator Wendy Davis - who owes her seat to a VRA Section 5 challenge - launched a real filibuster to stop a bill that would have stripped most women in Texas of their constitutional right to have an abortion. After standing in the senate well for hours without being able to sit or eat or drink, buoyed only by the crowds that had gathered to cheer her on, she put on a back brace - with an assist from a friend...Senator Rodney Ellis. Here's fusion politics in picture form folks.

That "assist" was against the rules of the filibuster - according to the Republicans in charge. It was one of "three strikes" against Davis that finally ended the filibuster. But in the remaining minutes of the session, the gallery crowd had a little fusion politics to play as well. They shouted until the clock ran out and defeated the bill. 

For quite a while now President Obama has been trying to light a fire under us - telling us that we need to engage as citizens in this democracy. I'd say its time we started watching the good people of Texas and the folks participating in North Carolina's Moral Monday movement. As the song says..."There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear."

Somebody noticed.

Something special is happening in Austin tonight: http://t.co/RpbnCbO6zw #StandWithWendy
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) June 26, 2013