Playing With the Big Boys

[Rootsie]

The experiences of my life have shown me that there is a level on which events unfold which we can only vaguely discern, and often only in retrospect.  I don’t want to cede a point to the Intelligent Designers, but I think their main problem is their weird notion of what “God” might be. For the rest of us, we intuit a certain connective logic that binds together seemingly unrelated events, and as the human beings we are, even ascribe morality to it, according to our tendencies. The Buddhists have the notion of Karma, but I could as well cite Newton: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. You can call it divine retribution, or you can call it physics, but…

a grieving mother camps out on a dusty road in Crawford, Texas.  She asks that the man who ordered her child off to die do her the respect of looking her in the eye. He refuses her. There’s hubris for you: how hard would it have been for him to jump in his truck (or limo) and drive down and meet her for five minutes, not as a political adversary but as her President? 

From that day on, from hurricane to hurricane to hurricane, indictment to indictment to indictment (the hurricane season may be winding down but there is no end in sight to the indictments), revelation to revelation  to revelation,  to faked memos, to torture,  to hidden gulags, to white phosphorus for crying out loud,  every new day has brought a further unraveling of every pretense and every lie.  O yes, the facts were all there, for any who cared enough to see, but all of a sudden it seems that a lot more people care.

The fact that I myself am a mother may explain why these thoughts have come to me. Each of us spins our own narrative, these stories by which we live…Nothing is more evocative for me than the image of a mother: the mother goddess, mother earth, the feminine principle, so woefully under-represented in the great movements of commerce and warfare and empire-craft.

Who cares about a simple little female asking her simple little questions? It is so easy to dismiss her. I believe women frustrate men in the way that we personalize the political, the way we ask annoying questions like: how can it be that my tax dollars are being devoted to the incineration of children, the humiliation of human flesh? The way that we insist on making the big connections, with intellects that don’t leave our passion behind. We learn that if we’re going to play with the Big Boys, we have to learn their lingo, and indulge them in what is to us their convoluted way of regarding the world.

I was at a conference whose purpose was to discuss a legislative agenda for the children of my state, a day of livable wage and healthcare reform and affordable housing and war on poverty and community action, in other words a conference of liberals, of for the most part good-hearted people sickened by the suffering they see and try to assuage. 

The night before, I viewed the Italian documentary which showed footage that gives evidence of the use of a napalm-like substance, white phosphorus, on the people of Fallujah by American forces one year ago. Appalling photos of blackened bodies with clothing in tact, footage of “Willy Pete” bombs cascading into neighborhoods, of stricken physicians and journalists reporting what they saw.

As we moved through our day laying out the disasters for the people of Vermont and strategizing about how to make alarmingly shrinking federal dollars stretch an already torn and ragged ‘safety net,’ all I could think of is how we are like scrawny chickens scratching at the last few kernels of corn while the big roosters stride across the planet dispensing untold horrors wherever they walk.  It is not even a question of being able to see how the ‘local’ is impacted by the ‘global’: the people with me are not fools. They know that the fact that 75 cents of every tax dollar is devoted to welfare programs for the military industrial complex is the ultimate culprit.  But this remained as the elephant in the room all day.  When I raised my hand in one of the workshops and laid out something along these lines, my remarks were met without comment.  Well of course, duh, but we can’t be concerning ourselves about that.  Be realistic, lady.  Act locally, do what you can… this is not the day to be talking about that.

I reflected for the rest of the day upon how many times I have spoken things that are obvious to me, and become known as the one who ‘wants to give it to the Man,’ the radical, the iconoclast… I have agonized a bit about whether there’s something about the way I present things that makes people uncomfortable and unwilling to engage what to me are the basic issues. A tremor of emotion can come into my voice…there is no mistaking how I think and feel about things…I am not politic.

In her book, Killing Rage:Ending Racism, scholar bell hooks says this:

  “…the vast majority of black folks who are subjected daily to forms of racial harassment have accepted this as one of the social conditions of our life in white supremacist patriarchy that we cannot change. This acceptance is a form of complicity…” 

In the same way, the failure to claim our rage, to fearlessly wed our concern for the children in our home place to the fate of all the world’s children makes us complicit in the criminal activities of patriarchal white supremacist governments and their corporate cronies who mangle children everywhere. There is no separating any of these issues out in the name of political expediency. Ultimately,  hooks points out, this failure is a gesture of despair. We’re saying we have given up on the possibility of ending racism, ending economic injustice, ending poverty. And this makes us gate-keepers, desperately trying to keep the worst of the wolves at bay, while we are in reality feeding them with our silence.

Where is the rage?  I unapologetically believe that it is long past time for women, women specifically  (and the men behind them) who are in touch with their inner Cassandra to step forward and amend the agenda.  Any legislative agenda that concerns itself with the social welfare must explicitly address Martin Luther King’s three ‘giant triplets’: racism, militarism, and capitalism.  It’s time to stop fiddling around at the edges of this monstrous evil. It’s time to call it the way it is.

There needs to be a conversation about why people we send to Congress and the Senate bow to politics as-they-are the minute they get there, patiently hearing out the ‘ideologues’ like myself before they in measured words explain ‘how things are done’. I am glad Vt. Congressman Bernie Sanders works on a humane domestic agenda, but where is he on this war? Where is he on those damn triplets?

Maybe there is something questionable about the way I view women’s perspective and women’s issues, but just let me say this. When we look at militarism, imperialism, capitalism, racism, we are looking at man-made constructs. For the most part when we speak of violence, ‘domestic violence,’ ‘sexual violence’, or what have you, we are talking about male violence. When evolutionary biologists of the 19th century sought to ‘prove’ the inferiority of blacks, they simply declared that black people’s brains were ‘almost as small’ as women’s.

There are a lot of  guys out there screaming their heads off about the current situation, along with some substantial women, but what I want to see is a conscious effort on the part of mothers and grandmothers and daughters and aunties everywhere to inject ourselves into this debate as women, with our womanish passions and our womanish concerns for propagation and nurturance, our womanish understanding of the work that really has value, such as caring for small children, caring for the elderly, caring for the earth. I want to see the fullness of womanly intellect elevated to a status beyond "there she goes again…”  The world is burning, and privileged people cling to their unalienable right to be comfortable. This is pathological. White supremacist patriarchy is pathological.

I’m not interested in female supremacy. I’m interested in gender balance. I think the future of the human species depends on it.

There is something inscrutable and immensely powerful about female voices.  Because our voices have been muted and stifled for so many millennia of human history, they take on a numinous resonance. Bush refused Cindy Sheehan, and now there’s talk about running her for President: a dead boy’s mother, speaking her womanly concern for the future of everybody’s kids.  Do I think his refusal to engage with her set in motion a cascade of events which will ultimately bring about his downfall? Nobody can prove me wrong, that’s for sure, and it has all the elements of Greek tragedy, don’t you think?  The Delphic Oracle may not be consulted anymore, but rest assured, she ain’t dead. Or be afraid, be very afraid, as the case may be.

We can’t even begin to speak of a personhood transcending gender until we engage the history and reality of female  oppression, just as we can’t get to ‘diversity’ without engaging racism.

[Rootsie]

The Mother of an Australian Soldier Writes to John Howard
reprinted from   http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10950.htm

Dear Prime Minister Howard,

11/11/05 "The Age" -- -- You would not have recognised our son, he was just another face in the group as you met members of the defence forces and their families in Darwin this year.

You would not have known of the pain trapped in my heart as he held me in his strong arms prior to his departure, reassuring me he would be OK.

I do not presume to speak for others but simply as a mother whose only son is deployed in Iraq. I feel betrayed and misled by you and your Government regarding the justification for the invasion of Iraq.

Time passes slowly for me, never more than in the early hours of the morning when unanswered questions, hopes and fears compete for time. Occasionally I am visited by despair. I despair when old men send young men to war, when those detained are mistreated and subjected to acts of humiliation, and the relative ease with which those with opposing views are labelled.

If I condone this behaviour, what can I expect in the event a member of the Australian Defence Force is detained? I wonder what the Iraqi definition of terrorism might be. Could ADF members be perceived as terrorists by some Iraqis? What might the consequences be?

If detained, would they be treated in accordance with international law, or an interpretation of the law created to justify the situation? Is there an Iraqi equivalent to Guantanamo Bay? These are the questions that haunt me in the early hours of the morning. I know fear can be irrational, real or perceived. This is my perception, my reality.

I think of the young lives extinguished in Iraq, and of the Iraqi civilians killed in the conflict. Every death represents the loss of somebody's son/daughter and perhaps somebody's father/mother, brother/sister, uncle/aunt, nephew/niece . . . I wonder about the futility of war.

I will light a candle as a symbol of hope - hope that those entrusted with the responsibility of leading nations will act with honesty, integrity and compassion in the interest of all humanity, hope for the safe return of defence force members, hope for the safe return of our son.

Copyright © 2005. The Age Company Ltd.

[three_sixty]

". . . One of the greatest obstacles in the essential task of overcoming narcissism concerns emotions.

Being the connection between people, and between people and the real world, emotions submerge a person wholly in reality. To understand the full knowledge imparted by an emotion, the connection between a person and the real world must be free and full. For the narcissist, this is difficult or impossible. The connection is tenuous, twisted, or even broken. As a result, the narcissistic self has to repress the knowledge imparted by emotions; it has to repress emotions. In other words, because the link between reality and a narcissistic model is not whole, the mechanism of emotion, with which human beings convey knowlege of the most profound nature to themselves and to one another, has to be suppressed, else reality and truth intrude too much and the self become threatened with deconstruction or annihilation.

This particularly applies to men. In many patriarchal societies, emotions in men have to be repressed because of the disruption they would otherwise cause to the operation of hierarchical, urban, organised society. But since girls, initially just as narcissistic as boys, can express their emotions in childhood and in later life, it is reasonable to assume that emotional repression is a key factor in perpetuating narcissism; and in Western society there is a received wisdom that suits this view, concerning the selfishness of men and their need for power.

To express emotions, a typical man would have to deconstruct part of his mental model of the world. This narcissistic model, built with the ethic of not communicating fully with the self, is afraid of emotion. Emotion would say too much. It would threaten those laboriously constructed items of past experience, which, made into a sort of whole in which the self is over-important because it is so precarious, must not be deconstructed. It is fear and shame that stop men becoming human beings.

Repressing emotions, particularly the humane and connective emotions such as sorrow and compassion, is an active mechanism for the perpetuation of narcissism. The expression and acceptance of a full range of emotions is essential if a person is to overcome their narcissism and become fully human.

The fields of history are littered with examples of men who were unusually reticent about expressing emotion, and it is no coincidence that these were the most narcissistic, the most violent or domineering of men: Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Napoleon, and so on. For such men, the repression of emotion in early life actually forged their selves as these developed, creating selves that were unconnected from reality and all other human beings. Once these selves had been formed, the self-preserving quality of narcissism, together with the inability of the conscious self to deconstruct or annihilate itself, meant that there was no turning back; emotions, and the knowledge they conveyed, could not be accepted.

This emotional retardation, which is, or leads to, humane or moral retardation (since such people are unable to communicate fully) means that narcissistic people often remain at a childish level of development. Human morals have as their base humanity's emotional constitution. I do not believe it is possible to achieve a moral position purely through the intellect.

Much work has been done on the moral development of children, and there is agreement that children follow a certain path; first, primitive 'black and white' morals, often relating to parental authority; second, a more 'fair' or 'equal' system, but one which still takes no account of circumstance; and lastly, as the highest possible state, morals based on human freedom and equivalence. This last is in effect a system completely lacking narcissism, in which it is understood that other people matter.

The narcissist, then, will frequently have childish morals. It is not surprising to note the absolute, fundamentalist quality of patriarchal religions; the rigid good/evil splits, the inability to accept circumstance, the severe authoritarianism, and so on. Patriarchal religions are childish because they were devised from the emotional perspective of the small boy.

The second major factor in preventing the overcoming of narcissism is lack of freedom during psychological development.

The requirements of patriarchal society, of the nuclear family, and of nations, usually means that children do not grow up in ideal environments. (They do not need to; just environments that allow sufficient freedom for proper development.) Any emotional problem among the family, any trauma unresolved by later emotional release or understanding, any defect in society such as appalling house design, local poverty, lack of educational facilities, racism, sexism, et al, can lead to selves that are not allowed freedom sufficient for the overcoming of narcissism.

Since the great majority of character is formed during childhood, this time deserves to receive the help, attention, resources and understanding that it needs.

It is living and experiencing life in an unfree, disjointed environment that is responsible for placing additional, often insuperable, obstacles in the face of the developing person. Narcissism cannot be overcome alone; it requires communities of people on the small scale, people who really care for one another, so that sufficient relationships be formed by the evolving person. Emotions never work on large scales because human beings are not large. They are small.

There may also be inbuilt reasons for not overcoming narcissism. Since the mind is rooted in the neurons of the brain, it is possible that some defects of the brain can cause problems. But this is not yet proven. There are also some psychological problems that can lead to narcissism

Given suitable conditions, the overcoming of narcissism and the development of an authentic self are inevitable. The human condition requires that people continually update their model of the world, and so the overcoming of initial narcissism is an inevitability, given the right environment. If society allows them, human beings try, by the very nature of consciousness, to create the most coherent and accurate model of reality possible; this is the same as saying they must, in the end, overcome their narcissism.

In summary, the dilemma of narcissism lies with the mechanism of consciousness. Because the typical mental defences of the narcissistic are learnt as the self is evolving, they cannot be deconstructed, that better and more humane structures appear, without effort. The lazy way is regrettably the easiest. However, the way of effort is the most rewarding. If narcissistic structures remain, they remain put or become more ingrained as life progresses. That is, narcissism is to a large extent self-perpetuating.

We can only end it by understanding it. . . "

source: http://www.geocities.com/Area51/2162/overcome.html