Angry white men and angry brown men

Two images expressing identical emotions--of anger and disempowerment. However, one expression of violence is outward, as the hand grasping the key chain with a cross-like emblem, suggests, while the other is internalized.

The fist, a synecdoche of the angry male in a new book called Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era, lashes out.

The bearded man in flames, on the other hand, looks inward. The second image represents a man burning up in totality. There is no symbolism here, but a blatant rendition of the fictional Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian man, whose death by self-immolation triggered off the Arab spring in 2010. Bouazizi is the principle character in Tahar Ben Jelloun's New Yorker fiction, By Fire (September 9, 2013). 

In Angry White Men, Michael Kimmel, a Sociology Professor at the State University of New York at Stonybrook, travels the nation and writes of working class white men of America who comprise an emerging class of disenfranchised males. They have lost their jobs, resist integrating into the new economy, have lost families and custody of their children, have impregnated girlfriends, whom they have then cast away as "sluts", and in general feel "betrayed by the country they love, discarded like trash on the side of the information superhighway."

Kimmel categorizes them as members of various organizations of "emasculated" (at the level of feeling) white males, like the KKK, the fringe NRA, The Father's Rights Movement (an offshoot of the Men's Right Movement). 

The men are justified in being angry, according to Kimmel, but they are unable to target the right sources that are responsible for their destitution and disempowerment in the first place--the corporate overlords, who have shipped their "masculine", i.e. manufacturing jobs overseas. The angry white men, rage, instead against women for allegedly "stealing American manhood." The angry white men, pissed upon and passed over by the current American economy, batter wives, blame ex-wives, subject girlfriends to domestic violence. 

There are no collective men in Ben Jalloun's story, but the voice of the main character, an unemployed youth in an unnamed Arab nation, could be said to be a representative voice of rising anger against the state. The story begins on a note of grim despair, with the young man returning home, alone and worried, after having buried his father at a cemetery. The son is struck less by grief than by the impending family obligation that as the oldest son of the family, he now has to fulfill.

The man is a college graduate with a degree in history. He is jobless and identified by the state as either a communist or an Islamist. The young man tries making a living as a fruit vendor, but he is persecuted by the police.

We get a hint that the polity of the nation is about to come apart, the youth are raging against the ruling class that is disconnected from the masses.

Anger is ubiquitous in this society. However, people seem to know who precisely are responsible for this state of affairs--the ruling class and their cronies. At one point in the story, the young man, kicked around by the police wants to speak to the town's Mayor. The Mayor refuses to talk to him. In a scene, the young man, lying prone on the ground because of a police attack on him, wishes he had a gun. If he had a gun, he would smash each and every person in the police department, he thinks. He would smash the government, he thinks. But he doesn't have a gun. 

The thought of the disempowered and the humiliated inevitably turn to violence, whether it be in America or in an Arab nation. But the important question is who should the gun be turned against. The guns of anger among the white males seems to be turned against the wrong target, while the anger among the folks in the story, By Fire, is pinpointed against the state.

In Angry White Men, Kimmel suggests that the average white American male's anger is the anger of a demographic that had taken its privilege for granted--the white male has occupied a position of social power by virtue of being white for years. Manufacturing has been a primary catalyst for the ascendancy of the white male in America, till the tides began to turn and manufacturing got booted out of the nation.

It's not a weakening of their gender-power that the angry white male should bemoan, says Kimmel, but the loss of the white male's class status. Women or "feminazism" hasn't triggered the average white American male's demotion from middle to fringe class; the corporations have.

The average white American man is not encouraged to immolate themselves to make a point, but in the book they are asked to be a little more discerning in identifying their enemies.

It's easy to beat up on the wife, who has suffered the same loss of class status, fallen into poverty perhaps, as her man. But it's hard to beat up on the system, because to beat up on the system would mean being unpatriotic or turning into the dreaded "Communist" which is the worst thing imaginable for a majority of the "plain" American Joes.

Does real patriotism lie in treating capitalism and its new form of ruthless profit-mongering as sacrosanct, or does real patriotism lie in rescuing the nation from the grip of such capitalism?

At the end of By Fire, the young man sets himself ablaze in front of the Mayor's office. There is a national uprising and the President flees the country. One nation, howsoever hobblingly, is on its path to freedom or a sliver of it.

Miss Utah's brain-fart

Hard as it is to give impromptu responses to tough social questions at beauty pageants, this particular question would understandably sound like the Sphinx's riddle to Ms. Utah.

In the 2013 Miss U.S.A. contest, Ms Utah wasn't able to solve the puzzle of why women get paid less than men for the same job, though statistically, women are the primary breadwinners in 40% of all American families today.

One reasonable answer: because those primary breadwinners are under-educated, mostly poor (white, black and Hispanic) single mothers from broken homes, who work minimum wage jobs. They are "invisible," i.e. they don't count as "people."

How would folks like Ms. Utah have the key to such national secrets?

So, please, we shouldn't be laughing at Ms. Utah; she's a contestant for a beauty pageant and can't be blamed for the silly quest to find a perfect amalgamation of beauty, brains and social conscience on the part of the pageant organizers. 

A better question would have been: Why do Black women have blonde hair? What does THAT tell about our society?

The beauty pageant contestants aren't quite in the league of Hollywood actresses, like Anne Hathaway and Natalie Portman, who are very educated and highly informed and interested in the world around them.

Sad, that Ms. Utah won't win the crown simply because she said, "Make, education, better."

P.s. In real, psychological terms, what Miss Utah experienced was a "blank." Under a pressure to say the right thing, contestants in highly competitive contexts like the Miss U.S.A. Beauty Pageant, draw a blank in their brains, and what's released as a result is a "brain fart."

It happens to drones in the national Spelling Bee contest as well.

Rhetorical analysis

Part of my job in the classroom is to teach something called "rhetorical analysis."

Simply put, it's a task where the reader gets busy tearing apart an argument she doesn't like. It's the underlying ideology that is torn asunder, however the ideology is so enmeshed with the rhetoric that to get to one, it's important to start with the other.

Stanley Fish shows us how to do a rhetorical analyses of everything, ranging from a political speech, to Sarah Palin's "rogue" memoirs to the rhetoric of the Hunger Games, in his NYT "Opinionator" column.

But I find Fish's analyses to be a bit esoteric, so when I came upon Matt Taibbi's take on David Brooks' "boiler-plate jihad" against the Gay-marriage lobby's recent appeal to the Supreme Court to make a decision on legalizing same-sex, I jumped at it as a good example of rhetorical analysis.

I think Taibbi is particularly brilliant in getting to the heart of the matter in Brooks' rant against the need to legalize same-sex marriage. It's that Brooks' sees marriage as a "constraining" institution, which entails the loss of certain fundamental freedoms that individuals enjoy. He redefines marriage giving it a bit of a narrow scope. I've read opinion upon opinion meted out by this most dourest of conservatives on how marriage is not simply an officializing of a bond between two people who want to spend the rest of their lives together, but also some kind of an "institution" that requires the individual to compromise on unfettered individualism and settle for shared sacrifices. Brooks' does reduce marriage into a non-romantic ideal whose most important function--that's it, a "function" that makes marriage sound mechanistic--is to shore up communal living.

Technology: not "disruptive" but "reactionary"

I continue to enjoy Evegeny Morozov's dissenting voice against the blind adoption of innovative technology as the solution to, not just some, but all, social and political problems.

Reminds me of Neil Postman's prescient warning that in the United States, more than in any other developed nation, technology will displace culture. It's now slated to displace politics and even some fundamental substructures of society.

The most recent scandal is the evolving concept of "virtual incarceration," to solve the problem of overcrowding in prisons in the United States.

Morozov also speaks out against the foibles of Big Data here.

Be creative and collaborate...and be transparent

I enjoy reading Evgeny Morozov's guest column on the dark side of technophilia.

This weeks column brings to mind something I've been thinking of for a long time--the pervasive use of words with little meaning.

"Creativity" and "collaboration" are two such words that annoy me when used in a mindless way (and used in mindless ways they are).

In the context of technology, Morozov takes on the word "openness." Open, he says, is now a word that has a "lot of sex appeal," yet "very little analytical content." 

Openness is the latest opiate of the (i-pad totting) masses [...] Certified as “open,” the most heinous and suspicious ideas suddenly become acceptable. Even the Church of Scientology boasts of its “commitment to open communication. [...] Openness is today a powerful cult, a religion with its own dogmas. 

Then again,

For many institutions, “open” has become the new “green.” And in the same way that companies will “greenwash” their initiatives by invoking eco-friendly window dressing to hide less-palatable practices, there has also emerged a term to describe similar efforts to read “openness” into situations and environments where it doesn’t exist: “openwashing.”

I feel that like the "openness," "creativity" and "collaboration" have become powerful cults with their own set of dogmas. Be "creative" or perish, yet nobody can with pinpoint precision tell what constitutes creativity and what doesn't.

Bone-chilling compliance

A movie of our era, as noted by Frank Bruni.

The story: [...] set during one shift at a fictional fast-food restaurant called ChickWich, it imagines that the manager, a dowdy middle-aged woman, gets a call from someone who falsely claims to be a police officer. [...] The “officer” on the phone tells the manager that he has evidence that a young female employee of hers just stole money from a customer’s purse. Because the cops can’t get to the restaurant for a while, he says, the manager must detain the employee herself in a back room. He instructs her to check the young woman’s pockets and handbag for the stolen money. When that doesn’t turn up anything, he uses a mix of threats and praise to persuade her to do a strip-search. And that’s just the start. [...] The manager’s boyfriend later assumes the duties of watching over the detained employee. Cajoled and coached by the voice on the phone, he makes her do those jumping jacks, which are meant to dislodge any hidden loot. By the time he leaves the back room, he’s also been persuaded to spank and then sexually assault her.

The chill factor: the gullibility of ordinary people. A culture where a politician can run for office by claiming that there exists a form of rape that is "legitimate", and that a woman in the process of being raped can "shut down" or make her eggs immune to the overtures of an invading spermazoid, is a culture where gullibility has become a monstrous liability.

As Bruni says, we have dwindled into people who are willing to "trade the calm of certainty for the disquiet of doubt, or potentially hunkering down to the hard work of muddling through the elusive truth of things. Better simply to be told what’s what."

The voice on the phone is the voice of the slick marketer, slick, emphatic and highly persuasive, with that right amount of affected empathy that bring people to do as he commands.

Friendship: a refuge

Two recent films, Celeste and Jesse Forever and Mosquita Y Mari, explore friendship as a "refuge".

Set in Los Angeles, C & J is the story of a married couple who continue live in the same house as friends after they dissolve their marriage. Their living situation presents a conundrum as it can't be classified. As Manhola Dargis describes in her excellent review of the movie, Celeste and Jesse "have split up without moving on or out." 

As I read the review, I figured that there is something crucial that keeps Celeste and Jesse together and that "something" is friendship. 

Culturally friendship is either exalted as an empty coinage--everybody uses the word with very little understanding of the fact that friendship is, like marriage and family, an altogether specific kind of institution. 

Else, friendship is seen as a poor and wobbly substitute for the real kinds of relationships--one framed within the family or marriage. Even being boy or girl "friended" to somebody is considered to be more respectable than being simply "friended". 

As Aristotle himself would vouch, compared to marriage and family, the institution of friendship is predicated on absolute parity. Two friends (ideally) share a relationship of laterality, not verticality. 

Unlike marriage and family, friendship remains un formalized as a "relationship". There are family groups and marriage groups that fight for the preservation and political rights of these two institutions, but there are no pro-friendship groups. 

"Friend" sometimes is perceived as the lowest rung on the relationship ladder. When one wants to call a more "serious" relationship off, the usual excuse is, "let's stay friends."

Films like Celeste and Jesse Forever might help rectify the notion that to be in a relationship of friendship is to be a "loser". 

Dargis compliments Celeste and Jesse Forever for daring to come out 

[...] with a story about two people who, together and alone, express an ideal rarely seen in American movies: a man and woman whose equality is burnished in friendship, not just in bed and marriage.

The second film Mosquita y Mari is eons apart from the class structure in which Celeste and Jesse's friendship blossom (though both are set in Los Angeles). 

It's the story of two Hispanic adolescents Yolanda and Mari:

Yolanda, an A student, is the fiercely protected only child of a hard-working immigrant couple who have invested all their hopes in her and who continuously remind her of their sacrifices. The sullen, rebellious Mari is an illegal immigrant and a failing student who lives with her single mother and younger sister; she helps support the family by handing out fliers on the street. A sultry, tempestuous beauty, she is just becoming aware of her sexual power and puts on an air of arrogant bravado.

Yolanda wants to act as a buffer between the harsh world of male-sexual predators and Mari by taking Mari under her wings and giving her free lessons in geometry. 

In the process of spending long hours together--Yolanda and Mari become roommates--Yolanda finds herself falling in love with Mari. Or, at least she experiences strong feelings but isn't sure that Mari would or could return them. 

Yolanda keeps her feelings to herself.

The film doesn't get inside lesbian-love territories, nor is it a "coming out" narrative. It's a story of friendship as a genuine refuge from the onslaughts of an unpredictable and antagonistic world.

Heretics...

...are enormously valuable. They help society tack before we hit the rocks.

So writes journalist William Saletan while reviewing Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind (in the March 25 NY Times' Sunday Book Review).

I agree. Currently I am re visiting the Beat poets and I think that the "counter-culture" heretics. They were and are still valuable as critics of American consumerism.