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The Complexities of #MeToo

The first wave of any movement is a blunt instrument and the #MeToo movement is no exception; the likes of Al Franken and Aziz Ansari have been caught in the rip current. (My sympathy for Franken waned once more women stepped forward and it became clear that his behavior revealed a pattern; nonetheless, a single grope is a different degree of behavior than the forcible rapes described by victims of Harvey Weinstein. And if society deemed it acceptable for women to respond to such an assault with one of their own, a knee to the groin, the jerk-level behavior of men would soon subside.)  

But women need to examine their own behavior as well. Camille Paglia, the controversial critic of feminism, pointed out years ago that there was something to the idea of “bad girls” such as the lone girl who goes off with a group of guys in the 60’s beach party movies. Her point was not that women deserve to be raped, but that women need to take responsibility for themselves. In the binge drinking culture of college campuses, expecting a guy who has been binge drinking as well to hold fast to his inhibitions while you black out is not responsible behavior. (I have not read anything other than headlines about Paglia’s recent controversial date rape comments and I am not addressing them here.) And needing to drink to give yourself permission to have a one-night stand points to another problem, women viewing themselves through a man’s lens.  It’s OK for a man to want casual sex, but not a woman. The childish comments of some younger female writers, responding to older women’s thoughts about the movement by calling them names and commenting on their looks illustrates the same point-- I’m prettier than you because I’m younger than you—men will be more attracted to me. Instead of seeing ourselves as victims in all situations, there are some where we, as adult women, can take care of ourselves, like kneeing the guy who gropes us.

But that’s where it gets tricky.  Kneeing some stranger may be OK, but not your boss at the office Christmas party. And what if the boss isn’t harassing you, but is genuinely attracted to you and wants to date you. Even the most socially skilled woman will have a hard time rejecting him in a way that doesn’t have lasting effects. Why? Because men, particularly older men, are not masters of their emotions. They’ve suppressed them, but suppression isn’t mastery. Many men I know can name only one emotion, “Oh you’re just bitter.” They have been taught from an early age that they should not cry, so when they are angry or scared or jealous, they’re not even aware of it. I’ve had men yell at me in meetings or withhold information until we’re in front of the client, all because they cannot abide me leading or having figured out something they didn’t or because they are frightened of doing something differently. It’s not just women who are emotional. Imagine a man, turned down by his subordinate, being asked by his peer about the woman. Would she be right for a certain project?  Or what about when she applies for a promotion? He shrugs in a noncommittal fashion or doesn’t say anything negative, but doesn’t show any enthusiasm either. He may think he’s being fair, but how can he, if he cannot recognize that he is still smarting from her rejection? The woman didn’t ask for this, but he has now affected her career, all because he is not self-aware. I rarely hear men talk about “working” on themselves. But men need to have a hard look at themselves and be able to identify what they’re feeling before they can answer an inquiry honestly about the quality of work done by a subordinate who has rejected them. What was Weinstein, if not vengeful, when he destroyed the careers of women who would not sleep with him?

The complexities of the #MeToo movement don’t involve just women distinguishing between levels of harassment. The culture will not change deep down until men can name their emotions, and women can stand outside themselves and understand how the culture has shaped them.

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Any bible study class is about dialectic. The foundation of Protestantism is interpreting the Bible for one’s self. That same dialectic needs to be applied elsewhere in everyday life.

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The Republican Magic Show

Magic, as any magician will tell you, is about misdirection; feint to the left, while making a move on the right. In 2004, when George W. Bush was running for president,  his attendance as a National Guard pilot was in question. He was a no show for twelve months from 1972 through 1973.  To distract the public, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a Republican PAC, attacked John Kerry’s record instead. Kerry, the Democratic nominee, was a decorated Vietnam veteran. The Swift Boaters condemned his conduct during the war as unreliable and untrustworthy; they claimed he put his men in danger; that he didn’t deserve the medals he’d earned. In short, despite the fact that he’d posted his military records on his website, they alleged that he was misrepresenting his service. With a series of TV ads, the Swift Boat Veterans conducted a successful smear campaign. After the ads, Kerry questioning Bush’s record would have played like a schoolyard scuffle. “Well he started it!” Kerry lost and the rest is history. (This, of course, was not the only reason Kerry lost. Bush, from a wealthy family and a political dynasty, was nonetheless more relatable while Kerry was considered too “patrician,” a charge that might not have stuck if he were less stiff.)

Before Obama, Republican presidents outspent their Democratic counterparts by spending large sums on the military instead of domestic programs; yet Republicans successfully paint the Democrats as “big government” and “tax and spend”.

Conservatives paint liberals as “elitist” while Trump’s cabinet is filled with billionaires. (Granted there is a distinction here. “Elitist” equates with intellectuals, and navel-gazers have always been the object of suspicion while conservative big business is about money, not intellect.)

And now we’ve entered Wonderland where the alternative right presents alt-facts; no longer content to just insinuate with vague terms like “untrustworthy”, they make up whatever suits them, like Trump’s baseless tweet that Obama wiretapped Trump Tower before the election. 

Conservatives may call liberals elitist and out of touch, but Republican presidents from Nixon on have shown little concern for the working class. Nixon who famously recorded everything, was caught on tape lauding a new concept, presented to him by John Ehrlichman, called “HMOs” whereby the insurance companies could profit and pay out less in benefits.

The Republican’s proposed tax cuts, according to their rhetoric, would give cuts across the board. According to the Tax Foundation, a non-partisan institute, while the bottom 80% of the population would save 7 to 9% in income depending on the amount of growth, the top 1% would save 12 to 20%, hardly progressive and hardly generous to those who work hard and need it the most.

Liberals may indeed be elitist. We may be naïve and condescending, but it’s liberals who wanted a larger stimulus package, including more money spent on infrastructure; it’s liberals who have tried to pass an infrastructure bill for the past eight years; and it’s liberals who passed the Affordable Care Act, to name a few.

So how did the Republicans, now so blatantly playing to Wall Street and their own self-interest, pull this off? How did the working class not see that it’s liberals, not conservatives that had their interests at heart? Conservatives, by their own admission, have hammered the liberal media to the point that they have de-legitimized responsible, serious journalism in favor of conspiracy theorists. But there is a deeper aspect to the conservatives’ success. We are an aspirational culture. Trump’s working class constituents don’t look at him and grumble; they want to be him. If Republicans say less regulation will benefit business, they see their family restaurant and imagine Ray Kroc and McDonald’s.    

So what’s the solution? It’s up to US citizens to keep the pressure on the Trump administration, and It falls to the Democrats to find their way back into the hearts and minds of voters, with not just a good agenda, and good deeds, but a better message that addresses the economic ills of the white working class, and somehow slips past the filters of talk radio.

But all of that is a band aid on the real problem. Trump’s ascension is the result of a legitimate disillusionment with an elite that wasn’t listening. But Trump’s ascension would not have been possible had the white working class, and not just the working class, but the college-educated, not been so willing to buy into his campaign’s lies. Too many were willing to believe James Comey’s slander that Hillary Clinton was “extremely careless” when in fact she and her staff had been extremely careful. A small amount of research and simple math belied that damning statement. Too many were willing to believe vague insinuations about the Clinton Foundation.  Would it have been better if the foundation stopped taking foreign donations during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state? Yes, but the foundation followed the law. Trump’s provocations were and are shameless, and in countries like Scotland or Germany with strict libel and slander laws, would be subject to criminal prosecution.  But in this country with its exception for public figures, he was allowed to rile up his supporters with statements like "I've become increasingly shocked by the vast scope of Hillary Clinton's criminality. It's criminality. Everybody knows it," and the crowds erupted with chants of "Lock her up!". Being allowed instead to say only that “the Clinton Foundation’s foreign donations appear to be improper” would hardly haven been rousing. Unfortunately, changes in libel law aren’t likely. The internet and talk radio would be impossible to police, and proponents of free speech would howl. So campaigns will continue to be brutal.  

Instead, In the long term, high schools must do a better job of teaching independent thought. Critical thinking and analysis are the skills necessary to protect democracy. A mandatory course should be taught by high school librarians with a section on sources; and another on principles of responsible journalism; and this should be wed with a mandatory debate course. Concepts such as arguments ad hominem must be taught so that an educated citizenry can see negative campaigning for what it is, and cast a critical eye on internet “news”. How can this be done without fears that it’s a tool of secular humanism? Look to the great Christian apologists.  Doubt and debate have always been part of the Christian faith. Logic and faith, or more aptly skepticism, the bogeyman of religion, and faith, need to be reconciled. Science and logic are not the enemy of religion. Any bible study class is about dialectic. The foundation of Protestantism is interpreting the Bible for one’s self. That same dialectic needs to be applied elsewhere in everyday life. All of this may seem a far cry from the Republican magic show, but imagine a campaign rally full of citizens not so easily riled by slogans, more detached, more willing to puncture rhetoric with pointed questions. Now that would be a spectacle to behold.  

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The writers of these articles failed to recognize the power that a protest has; it is a physical, visceral statement that no disembodied blog post can duplicate.

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The Power of Protests

After the Women's March, there was a negative spate of articles about the futility of protests. The writers had various reasons for their cynicism: one feared that the protests could not continue without a crackdown from the government, as happened in Russia; others that the issues were too varied; or that protest alone was ineffective, perhaps recalling the Occupy Wall Street movement which had no clear agenda.  

On the day of the March women and men around the world marched to show their support. Since then crowds amassed at the nation's airports to protest the Muslim ban; gays demonstrated at Stonewall; and Yemeni cabbies and shopkeepers carried out work stoppages and demonstrations.

It cost me nothing to participate in the Women's March, a few hours of my time and overcoming my unease in crowds, but the Yemenis has more at stake. Many had relatives who had completed their paperwork to come to the United States, a tedious, drawn out process, only to be denied entry at the last minute. They closed their shops from 12:00 to 8:00 despite the financial loss. And they come from countries where police keep files on protesters and may jail them without due process. In this country with its hysteria towards Islam, their fears of being targeted by the FBI or other agencies are well-founded. In short, they had to overcome their fear of speaking out to participate. But I would like to think that the Women's March, the sheer enormity of it, inspired them.

Since Trump's election, gays too have feared that a long fight so recently won, to be seen as equally deserving of the same rights and protections as heterosexuals, and more deeply than that, to be seen as normal, not a perversion of hetero sexuality, would be rescinded. After the fight for marriage equality, gays are well organized. They didn't need the Women's March to inspire them, but gays and straights, blacks and whites were demonstrating together. Trump may be the common enemy, but demonstrations brought them into the same physical space.

And there is another reason protests are effective. It is no accident that Trump is preoccupied with the size of the crowds at his inauguration. As a narcissist Trump needs to know that he is universally adored. Videos of the protests which are harder to doctor than photographs, are a blow to his fragile ego. The writers of these articles failed to recognize the power that a protest has; it is a physical, visceral statement that no disembodied blog post can duplicate.   

And marching empowers those who do it: to call their representatives; to volunteer for political campaigns, to give to causes that the government is threatening such as climate change, civil rights and religious freedom. The marchers will split up and support the issues dearest to them, whether it's police brutality and racism, gay rights, rescinding the Muslim travel ban, climate change, education or one of myriad other causes, but make no mistake about it, protests make a statement that is extremely effective. It publicly reminds those in government that the people will not tolerate the kind of power grabs that Trump and the Republicans are making. And it lets the congressmen who might otherwise remain silent know that their constituents support them.

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Oblivious is the new rude.

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The sidewalk is not a playground.

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iZombies!@#$%!!

There is a blight upon us. In this the third millennium of the Common Era, bereft of Moses and Mohammed, Jesus and Siddhartha, who shall we turn to for courage?  Who shall soothe our fevered brows as we battle  the scourge that bedevils us? It is a bane that clogs the transportation of the underworld and turns the most ordinary of thoroughfares into an obstacle course.  

This bedevilment has a name: iZombies, those somnambulists that walk the earth with cataracts for eyes and deafness where ears should be; non-sentient beings these. They respond to no external stimuli, only to messages piped in from the ether.  They are tethered not to this earth but to non-existence, and see not what others see. They venture into the boulevards, bouncing off cyclists and pedicabs. They upend themselves in dust bins. They fall into open bulkheads; I witnessed one emerge unharmed, but with an even ghostlier aspect, covered from head-to-toe in white powder, having landed in a sack of flour. 

We cannot rid ourselves of them with stakes and crosses. Not even the finest Italian garlic will do.  No, there is only one cure: the complete cessation of all electrostatic impulse.  But I fear the hew and cry, the hysterical wringing of hands that will ensue, if the world is plunged back into darkness with only candles to light our way.  In a post-Edison, post-Jobs era (hereafter known as EJE), people will be forced to converse face-to-face.  Oh, the horror!   The horror!!

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The First Day of Spring

For most people it’s the vernal equinox that occurs on the 20th of March, but for me it occurred yesterday, February 21st.  I left work a few minutes early and as I trudged up the subway stairs in my neighborhood, I sensed a strange light.  I thought it was a movie shoot with big spotlights, a not uncommon sight.  As I climbed further I looked through the rails of the subway entrance and saw a food truck and figured that must be it.  But then I looked to the left and up in wonder.  A pink glow suffused the sky, not just at the horizon, but up past the buildings like a bottom-lit globe.  For the first time I could remember I marked the first evening of light in my neighborhood.  It was sprinkling.  I got out my umbrella.  Several blocks down I crossed the street and a woman pointed out a rainbow and we marveled at the light.  She saw it as a good omen for the weekend.  I did my errand, and a few minutes later, by the time I exited the store, the dark had descended and with it my mood.  I was cross again, and I knew then as now that winter isn’t over with predictions of more cold and snow.  This winter, for some reason (not just the weather) has worn on me more than most, as I try to face how much longer I will work, when I might be laid off, how to make use of the time left (not at work, but in my life), how much I can save and what I can reasonably accomplish.  And the grim weather has cast a pall on my thoughts that has been hard to shake off.  But that image, the pink glow, will stick with me, in a neural pathway that I will trod over and over until it is fixed in my mind.  Mother Nature sent me a small gift, a reminder not to give up.

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The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

Henry David Thoreau 

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Doing It in Pieces

Three weeks ago a couple in my neighborhood committed suicide.  To Gen X or Y or whatever generation worships irony, this situation was rife with it.  The couple hosted a radio show once a month called “The Pursuit of Happiness”; the wife had a masters’ degree in social work, and both husband and wife were life coaches.

The media reported that the husband explained in his suicide note that he could no longer watch his wife suffer.  Another article alluded to a long history of mental illness.  I have heard it said that people who become therapists are often looking for solutions to their own problems, but that doesn’t automatically mean the advice is bad.  (I read a parable once about an Indian couple that took their child to a wise man to ask his help.  They told him their child was eating too many sweets and was ruining his teeth.  He told them to come back in two weeks.  They were puzzled by his response, but they came back in two weeks and the wise man told them that he had to master his own sweet tooth first before he could help their son.)

In a video of one of couple’s broadcasts they talked about getting unstuck; about doing something that scares you every day; about learning to be comfortable with change.  Sound enough thinking, but I can’t help but wonder if the ultimate goal was wrong.  The billion dollar self-help industry may be so successful not because all this advice works, but because it doesn’t.  And this may be because we are aiming for the wrong things.  Full-out perpetual happiness isn’t achievable, not unless you were born a happy baby, one of those lucky few with wonderful brain chemistry and boundless optimism that allows you to float through life without the need for introspection.  A life that means something, of contentment isn’t less, nor is it “merely”; it might seem subdued in a culture that tortures us with physical perfection and happy endings, with a quest for unrealistic clarity and perfect resolutions in all situations, but it’s not; it’s simply different.  Like the blind man touching the elephant, self-help gurus offer exercises and advice to handle discrete situations, but the whole beast is something else entirely.  Finding one’s calling, one’ anchor, is the subject of another essay, but once each person finds what suits him the work has just begun.

Change is difficult; habits, including thought patterns are not easy to break.  The only advice that seems to work is to break the goal into pieces.  Now comes the next part, achieving that piece. Our intrepid pioneer hitches horse-blinders to his bridle to avoid distractions and the inevitable anxiety that comes with change, and hopes that he won’t fall off the precipice like Guy Dangerous on so many runs.  (Oh that I had his swagger.)  But there’s a corollary.   He doesn’t think of the task alone; he thinks about the task and the ultimate goal as the experts urge us to do.  “Keeping his eye on the prize” is supposed to help him stay focused.   But that advice has an unintended consequence.  It fills him with foreboding.   And as he tries to squelch his apprehension, he runs into another problem; if he achieves success, it is just as frightening; maintaining it is a tight rope he’ll fall off of, and no amount of analyzing that fear helps.  

The correct corollary is this.  DON’T think about tomorrow.  Think about today alone.  David Foster Wallace, in Infinite Jest, (whose beautifully drawn and infinitely flawed characters I will be sad to leave behind) describes it this way.  Drug counselor Don Gately, one year sober, is suffering through a gunshot wound without pain medication and one of the house residents visiting him, Joelle van Dyne, has just had this epiphany:

“’And why Pat in counselling keeps telling me to build a wall around each individual 24-hour period and not look over or back.  And not to count days.  Even when you get a chip for 14 or 30 days, not to add them up.  In counselling I’d just smile and nod.  Being polite.  But standing up there last night, I didn’t even share it aloud, but I realized suddenly that this was why I’d never been able to stay off the stuff for more than a couple of weeks.  I’d always break down, go back.  Freebase.

….

“‘[I]’d bunker up all white-knuckled and stay straight.  And count the days.  I was proud of each day I stayed off.    Each day seemed evidence of something, and I counted them.  I’d add them up.  Line them up end to end.    You know? ... And soon it would get… improbable.  As if each day was a car [Evil] Knievel has to clear.  One car, two cars.  By the time I’d get up to say like maybe about 14 cars, it would begin to seem like this staggering number.  Jumping over 14 cars.  And the rest of the year, looking ahead, hundreds and hundreds of cars, me in the air trying to clear them…. Who could do it?  How did I ever think anyone could do it that way?’”

And Gately, unable to speak because he has a tube down his throat, thinks about some of his own worst detox moments:

“His right side is past standing, but the hurt is nothing like the Bird’s hurt was.  He wonders, sometimes, if that’s what Ferocious Francis and the rest want him to walk toward.  Abiding again between heartbeats; tries to imagine what kind of impossible leap it would take to live that way all the time, by choice, straight: in the second, the Now, walled and contained between slow heartbeats. Ferocious Francis’s own sponsor, the nearly dead guy they wheel to White Flag and call Sarge, says it all the time.  It’s a gift, the Now: it’s AA’s real gift: it’s no accident they call it The Present.

….

“Abiding.  No one single instant of it was unendurable.  Here was a second right here:  he endured it.  What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering…. He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there.  Not let his head look over.  What’s unendurable is what his own head could make of it all.  What his head could report to him looking over and ahead and reporting.  But he could choose not to listen; he could treat his head like G. Day or R. Lenz: clueless noise.  He hadn’t quite gotten this before now, how it wasn’t just the matter of riding out the cravings for a Substance: everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed.” 

Most of us don’t need to make changes that are so overtly dramatic; the habits we need to break are more insidious.  The twin sirens of comfort and stasis pull us towards entropy.  And the flow of time lulls us into thinking we will always have more of it.   I’ve always said procrastination is denying one’s own mortality.  Time is finite and ultimately we run out.  And to stop procrastinating puts us smack-dab in front of, squaring off with death.  Suddenly here we are, flush with it, facing it head on.  No wonder change is so frightening.  So as Don Gately and Joelle Van Dyne put it (and so much more eloquently than the self-help industry), put a wall around each day. 

It is a tragedy that Lynne Rosen and John Wittig backed themselves into a corner where suicide seemed the only solution, but good habits and happiness, or more aptly, meaning, the piecemeal and the whole, are illusive for all of us, and we can only honor their choice.  In those last moments, I hope they found peace.

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a section of a paper fan that spanned the entire window of the W Hotel on Union Square

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He hadn’t quite gotten this before now, how it wasn’t just the matter of riding out the cravings for a Substance: everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed.

The voice of Don Gately in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest

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                                                    from the wags at the local cupcake emporium

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The Mayors in My Neighborhood

When Martin Scorsese was making Taxi Driver and Mean Streets in the 1970’s, he probably didn’t think of them as documentaries, but as New York has become more gentrified, with more chain stores, in a word, more suburban and bland, it’s important to find what’s distinctive in each neighborhood.  In some, it’s the architecture, in some their history or ethnic makeup, but any neighborhood worth its salt has its greeters, the burgh’s unofficial mayors.

In mine there is Don, the fellow who sits in a low lawn chair on the avenue, outside the entrance to his building.  He holds a clipboard with a newspaper folded to a page with word puzzles and mouths “How are you”, with a big, crooked smile, to everyone trudging to and from work.

On my street, there is Marie, a short, older woman with a bobbed head of white in beautiful waves, who has lived on the street for over 50 years, (although my upstairs neighbors have her beat by a decade.) Marie always greets me with a smile and a “How are you, dear”, and we stop and chat.  In recent years she has begun to walk with a cane due to various ailments, but I have never heard her complain. Along with my upstairs neighbors she acts as the street’s historian.  When we had a street fair last summer, she said it was a first. 

Then there’s the town council, the people though not as ubiquitous, who add their own nip and tang to the mix.  There’s opera man who sings in a tremolo falsetto, so much so that my sister asked me one day about the woman she heard who sings opera.  There’s the photographer on my street, who wears big floppy hats and is always accompanied by Chaplin, her fouffy dog, a greeter in his own right.  Chaplin insists that his head by done up in a topknot each morning, much to his owner’s chagrin.  She is the only person who could take a good photograph of me, smiling no less!  She is a battery fully charged, spilling compliments and excess energy into the air.  At my diner, there are Burt and Ernie, two gentlemen who meet there on Saturdays, one built like a former biker, with a high, squeaky voice.  They discuss the issues of the day and then part ways.  And there is Robert who used to stop in at another diner that closed years ago.  The cook, Sergio, and the waitresses used to razz him, in a manner that let him know he belonged.  Robert walks with a roll-bounce that looks like stalking when you see his scowl, but when I say hello, his face lights up and sometimes he gives me a big hug.  We compare the colors in our outfits; he’ll comment how he hasn’t seen me for a long time; or mention that he’s on his way to work.  He must be in his 40’s now; he is proud of the job he holds and is the most enthused when he talks about bowling.

Sometimes I think I’d like to go back to the bad old days, when New York had more grit, and the subways were like the wild wild West, that is until I step onto a subway car with a crazy person.  That’s when I realize how long’s it been since I’ve had to be on my guard, watching where I looked (or not – not at the psychotics, not at the flashers, not at the addicts coming down off of crack). The trade off for safety seems to be blandness and that makes me wish for a little less homogeneity, or at least a few more mayors.  These are the mayors in my neighborhood.  Who are the mayors in yours?