storks in Lithuania convening before the start of their great migration to Africa (belated — these storks are somewhere in the Nile Delta by now)**
TO A TERRORIST
For the historical ache, the ache passed down
which finds its circumstance and becomes
the present ache, I offer this poem
without hope, knowing there's nothing,
not even revenge, which alleviates
a life like yours. I offer it as one
might offer his father's ashes
to the wind, a gesture
when there's nothing else to do.
Still, I must say to you:
I hate your good reasons.
I hate the hatefulness that makes you fall
in love with death, your own included.
Perhaps you're hating me now,
I who own my own house
and live in a country so muscular,
so smug, it thinks its terror is meant
only to mean well, and to protect.
Christ turned his singular cheek,
one man's holiness, another's absurdity.
Like you, the rest of us obey the sting,
the surge. I'm just speaking out loud
to cancel my silence. Consider it an old impulse,
doomed to become mere words.
The first poet probably spoke to thunder
and, for a while, believed
thunder had an ear and a choice.
~ Stephen Dunn
**
It’s sad to start on this note, continued elsewhere in this blog: at the moment, the forces of evil are gaining. Terrorism is finding new forms — and new ideologies, such as white power — in which to thrive. But we may still find some joy in sheer poetic excellence of this:
I offer [this poem] as one
might offer his father's ashes
to the wind, a gesture
when there's nothing else to do.
~ and of the final stanzas:
Christ turned his singular cheek,
one man's holiness, another's absurdity.
Like you, the rest of us obey the sting,
the surge. I'm just speaking out loud
to cancel my silence. Consider it an old impulse,
doomed to become mere words.
The first poet probably spoke to thunder
and, for a while, believed
thunder had an ear and a choice.
ABANDON HOPE
When Franz Wright first sent a few of his early poems to his famous father, James Wright wrote back: “So you are a poet. Welcome to hell.” Dante’s Canto III comes to mind, the inscription on the gate:
Through me the way into the suffering city,
through me the way into eternal pain . . .
Abandon hope, you who enter here.
It took me years of despair to come to see that the last words written on gate also pointed to the paradoxical way out of hell, especially the hell of trying to get published. “Abandon hope” — stop striving for consistent perfection, one masterpiece after another. More obvious: stop struggling for recognition, and enjoy the peaceful pleasure of concentrating on the work itself, on the beautiful unfolding of the creative process.
The poets’ hell was also mentioned by Milosz, but it wasn’t presented as the agony part of writing or as the frustrations of “marketing” one’s work. For Milosz, the hell of poets it was a part of the larger hell of artists and achievers: those who put the love of art (or the work they loved) ahead of the love for other human beings — the work ahead of life, as Yeats would put it, or “work ahead of family,” as popular media would phrase it, especially in articles meant for women readers.
Milosz said that Anna Kamińska was not an eminent poet; she was too good a good human being to become that. Her life was rich with human joys and suffering rather than creative agony and ecstasy. I would not dismiss Kamińska’s poetry quite so readily, but I know what Milosz implied: she was a large-hearted human being, so she put human love ahead of her love of poetry. She did not become obsessed by her creative work. But I'm getting away from Dante here, and the idea of abandoning hope as a way out of this dilemma, and many other troublesome situations as well.
Agony and ecstasy, the cross and the delight: the agony of poetry’s difficulty, the capriciousness of inspiration, waiting ten years for the right ending (now and then it’s precisely what happens), the impossibility of writing good work every time. And this before we even begin to lament the wounds in the struggle for recognition, the constant rejection and humiliation. “You die not knowing” if your work was any good, as Berryman says in Merwin’s poem.
For Franz Wright, there was also the problem of being regarded as “the wrong Wright,” the son not half the lyricist that his father was. “No magic,” I kept thinking when I read Franz’s poems. But all poets have the less personal but even more demanding mothers and fathers, the great poets whose best work set the standard.
Abandon hope: this is Buddhist and Taoism wisdom, but not exclusively so. Some Western thinkers have also discovered the bliss of dropping the striving, of dropping the self-flagellation with the whip of “Achieve! achieve!” They advise dropping the dream, the great ambition, and concentrating on “micro-ambition”: the task at hand, without thinking of the results. Against all the self-help books, they dare say, “Don’t have a dream!” Focus totally on what’s in front of you.
It’s also a matter of trust, of relinquishing conscious control. The best writing (and often knowing the best course of action in general) flows from the unconscious when it is ready, in its own time. Once writing ceased to be overwhelmingly important, I began to watch with pleasure how it emerges, one image leading to the next, one idea opening an infinity of ideas. That’s where the inner critic must awake and choose only the best — again, with as little struggle as possible, since choice too is part of the inspiration, and will come when it is ripe.
There is no circle of poets in Dante’s hell. Virgil is one of the noble pagans who dwell in Limbo. Brunetto Latino, Dante’s mentor, runs on the burning sand under a rain of fire as punishment for homosexuality. Most unforgettable is Bertran de Born, who holds his severed head like a lantern. But no one is in hell for dedication to his art rather than to god.
In Dante’s hell I’d probably find myself in the circle of the heretics. For Dante it meant those who denied the immortality of the soul, i.e. the afterlife. Those who dared to think for themselves and concluded that consciousness dies when the body dies, are doomed to live in open tombs filled with flame. After Judgment Day in the Valley of Josaphat near Jerusalem, the heretics, their bodies restored, will return to lie down in their tombs — but now the stone lid of the tomb will be shut.
One might point out that the suffering would be greater if the heretics had some hope of getting out of the tomb and seeing “the sweet light” of earth. Then they’d be trying and trying, somewhat like Sisyphus, only to fail again and again. But without hope, they will not engage in useless struggle. Strange as it may sound, they’ll be at peace while consumed by the eternal flame.
*
Recently I’ve had another “abandon hope” experience — in a different context. This is not surprising: I am now in a different stage of life when matters such as career and ambition begin to recede — or have already receded — while health becomes a priority. Namely, I have resigned myself to being at least partly disabled.
I say “partly” because I am not in a wheelchair, and I can walk for about fifteen minutes or so without pain or so much fatigue that I need to sit down, apply my pain salve and get sufficient rest before I can continue. Normally I use a walker, but even with the walker, I can walk only for so long. But let me emphasize again — I am not in a wheelchair. To a healthy person, that will not sound like a triumph, but to those with limited mobility, it is.
I had more and more trouble walking before my surgery, but I didn’t consider myself “disabled.” After all, there was always the knee replacement surgery as my last resort — after recovering from it, I expected to be in the eighty percent (an inflated statistic, as I later discovered) of patients who regain “unlimited pain-free walking.” Instead, I ended up in the category of partial recovery. I can indeed walk without pain — as long as we are talking about walking from my desk to the kitchen or the bathroom — short distances on a soft, even surface. I can also do some minor gardening — watering, weeding — as long as I do it in short spurts. I can climb the stairs, be it awkwardly. I can stand long enough to chat with a neighbor. I can do some limited exercise that doesn’t require twisting or put my body weight on the prosthetic joint. These are genuine blessings.
At this point I can truly count those blessings and feel grateful. In early June, as I reached the anniversary of the surgery and it became clear that I would not be joining the lucky group of those who regain “unlimited pain-free walking” and are able to go dancing, bicycling, golfing, sight-seeing etc — in other words, doing a lot of activities other than running or jumping or strenuous mountain hiking. Even in my most daring fantasies, I certainly wasn’t counting on running or jumping. But I was counting on sightseeing — and going to Europe means a lot of walking. On a more daily basis, I was imagining taking nice long walks just in the streets, in the nearby parks, or occasionally on the beach. It never entered my head that getting out of the car on the driver’s side would require any special maneuvers. Above all, I was counting on being free of chronic pain.
The pain isn’t as bad now as a few months ago, when I had a setback (apparently due to bronchitis, which caused a general inflammation) and the pain was excruciating again, worse than before the surgery. Now it’s a steady dull discomfort, with about a half a dozen to a dozen bouts of sharp pain per day, depending on whether it’s a good day or a bad day (that’s just the simplest way of putting it: there are the good days and the bad days). My further blessing is that on a good day, the bouts of sharp pain subside fairly quickly when I apply my inexpensive salve (vastly superior to the expensive Rx salve), and take an occasional aspirin in the buffered form proved not to harm the stomach.
On a good day, I consider myself very lucky.
On a bad day, there is considerably more pain — disruptive, disabling pain that steals energy and the ability to think. On a bad day, I am reminded again of how limited my life has become now that I can walk only for short distances — my life shrinking as if in proportion. There are places I no longer go, events I can no longer attend. And I can’t help mourning the self I thought I’d regain — my hope for at least ten good years when I’d finally get to do certain things I was planning to do once able-bodied again. Again, that wasn’t anything spectacular — no plans to climb Mt. Everest or run the marathon.
But I no longer keep the number of at the suicide hotline next to my computer — I don’t want to be directed to a “pain clinic” where they’d just give me opiates. I’ve pretty much sampled all the anti-inflammatories there are — and besides, these days even rheumatologists seem to have given up on trying to fight inflammation, and just dispense opiates. I stick to trying to reduce inflammation. Above all, there is still room for joy and productivity even in my restricted life.
There is still some room for a modest further gain in function and maybe fewer daily bouts of sharp pain. But when it comes to “unlimited pain-free walking,” I have stopped tormenting myself with hope. That kind of doomed hope is not a “thing with feathers” as Dickinson called it. It’s a thing with claws.
*
Pema Chodron writes: “One of the most powerful teachings of the Buddhist tradition is that as long as you are wishing for things to change, they never will. As long as you’re wanting yourself to get better, you won’t. As long as you have an orientation toward the future, you can never just relax into what you already have . . . This simple ingredient of giving up hope is the most important ingredient for developing sanity and healing.”
When you give up hope, you stop thinking and saying “I want X.” And Buddha was right: when you want something and are not getting it, you suffer. When you stop wanting it — really stop wanting it — you stop suffering. It’s magical: I had to experience it to believe it.
I'm not saying that it’s always best to abandon hope anymore than I'm advocating clinging to hope at all costs. Sometimes hope is the best course; sometimes it’s the worst — even though parting with hope is almost always a crisis. The relief and serenity come afterwards.
Only some of my readers will understand what I mean by the kind of hope that’s a “thing with claws.” They are the ones who also understand the peace that can come once that kind of hope is abandoned.
**
This is what the things can teach us:
to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that before he can fly.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours
Abandoning hope works well when it means that you accept yourself as you are, “warts and all” — a Buddha with a disability, why not?
Jerusalem, the Valley of Josaphat, assumed to be the site of the Last Judgment. In the foreground, is that a cemetery?Mary: YOU CAN BECOME THE GHOST OF YOUR PROJECTED FUTURE SELF
I think peace and freedom come when you move the focus of your attention from the future to the present. If completely focused on attaining some future good, some dream of accomplishment, you miss all the riches of the present. It is as if you are constantly postponing your life, which will only happen when you get to some ideal point in the future. So you become the ghost of your projected future self, and expend all your energies struggling to embody those long distance dreams.
Happiness comes only in the present moment, the only place you can actually live. And in the work you do for the love of it, not for what it might earn or win. Releasing your stranglehold on ambitious hope does not mean despair — that is the result of disappointed ambition. In a paradoxical way, to cease the constant struggle and striving might actually allow the joy and fulfillment to occur.
Oriana:
I remember talking with friends once, years ago. I said, “If only I managed to let go of ambition, I’d be actually quite happy.” They stared at me with little comprehension. I don't think these good women understood the word "ambition." At the time I didn’t think I’d ever be able to let go of ambition — it seemed to me like a genetic disease I was born with.
But, behold the power of stages of life — it has finally happened, and yes, I'm pretty happy.
**
“Even the ghost of love can ground you wherever you’ve landed, even years after you’ve flung yourself away from it.” (? I don’t know who said it, but I couldn’t resist it — pardon my hunger for enchantment)
Oriana:
By coincidence, just recently I read a chapbook by a distant yet dear friend — all about an unconsummated love she experienced at 17. You may be tempted to say, "What's the big deal? Who among us at a proverbial "tender age" has not experienced etc etc" — but it *can* be very intense, it can be a big deal that stays with us forever — in a good way, like a guardian angel of that wistful longing that guards us from complete bitterness.
"Here is the terrible beauty of being in love: that you will know things together that no one else will know, that there are events that exist only in the commingling and exchange of memories.” ~ from an article in the New York Times
Oriana:
That’s why the second wife often feels jealous of the first wife — she knows that her husband and his first spouse had those precious shared experiences that created their own unique world.
NOT BIG BROTHER BUT BIG DADDY: HOW FASCISM WORKS
~ “Over the last 20 years, I've worried that gay rights might be killing our chances on climate crisis, I worried about fighting the coup AND fighting for a black or woman president at the same time, like fighting the ultimate battle with one hand off doing something else.
Reading a new book "How Fascism Works," I recognized how gay, women's and minority rights are frontline issues. Fascism is borne of the haves natural progression from privilege, to cozy detachment, to annoyance with all obstacles, to self-justification, to delusional self-assertion as the eternally entitled.
As such, fascism is the military reassertion of paternalistic authority, a pecker-based pecking order with the fascist leader as the supreme father figure.
Trump cult fascism fits the diagnosis perfectly. No wonder it marginalizes women, gays and minorities. It's not the bible but fascism that drives the misogyny and xenophobia.
Recognizing fascism as a militant absolutist reassertion of eternal god-ordained white male superiority gives me context. The fierce and fearful opposition to women, gays and minorities is part of a larger plan, to make us all the supplicating subordinates to not big brother but big daddy, the boorish, profligate monster-man who thinks he can do no wrong and therefore does lots of it.” ~ Jeremy Sherman
Oriana:
YES! Not Big Brother but Big Daddy — whether the one in the sky (heaven) or the god-chosen (in the eyes of his most ardent followers) earthly ruler.
Although Orwell made us used to the phrase "Big Brother," I think Jeremy is right: it's the Big Father. This may sound odd and unidiomatic, so Jeremy chose to say "Big Daddy," but this softens it. Fascism is about patriarchy and the absolute power of the Supreme Father.
The more I think about it, the more it seems about bullying and displays of dominance. It's all about power. Even when Jesus starts saying "My Father" (likely part of his schizophrenic delusions) instead of "The Lord", it's often in the context of how he, Jesus, can do "nothing" on his own, but his father does everything through him, as if controlling a drone.
This also fits with “strong-father” theory of the authoritarian personality. The judgmental, punitive father produces a son who finds it “just” to make others suffer. The bully, like the mafia boss, believes he’s meting out “justice.”
Still, I admire the insight that it’s not the bible but fascism that drives misogyny and xenophobia. To be sure, you can find misogyny and some xenophobia in the bible, but you also find the contrary, esp in the NT. The actions and teachings of Jesus are mainly friendly to women and the "other" in general — he's on the side of the outcast. Fascist leaders, including church leaders, can't have it, so they find ways to oppress the other and still pretend to be Christian — the utmost hypocrisy.
**
Mary: THE VAST AND DEEP RESERVOIR OF HATRED
I must share my apprehension about the Kavanaugh confirmation. It seems nothing will be allowed, and nothing will be enough, to stop the agenda of those in power now, and that agenda is to accomplish here what can only be described as a totalitarian state that will not even give lip service to democratic principles and the democratic state it has so gleefully dismantled. Any truth in opposition seems so quickly shuffled off as false, replaced by lies convenient to their agenda — no matter how preposterous and baseless those lies are. Maybe the final result will be loss of any capacity to distinguish truth at all, leaving us only with Big Daddy, as the last and loudest and impossible to oppose.
What is even harder for me to accept is the vast and deep reservoir of hatred these powers have uncovered and encouraged — hatred that seems to be given a platform and a legitimacy that gives it power and increases its danger. These are hatreds virulent as rabies, so hideous as to be almost unbelievable, as the howls of the “incels” for instance, and I wonder what of us will be left to survive these poisonous infections.
**
HOW FASCISM TODAY DIFFERS FROM THAT OF THE 1930s
~ "I would argue that current trends reflect a significant divergence from the dictatorships of the 1930s.
The fascist movements of that time prided themselves on being overtly antidemocratic, and those that came to power in Italy and Germany boasted that their regimes were totalitarian. The most original revelation of the current wave of authoritarians is that the construction of overtly antidemocratic dictatorships aspiring to totalitarianism is unnecessary for holding power. Perhaps the most apt designation of this new authoritarianism is the insidious term “illiberal democracy.” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have all discovered that opposition parties can be left in existence and elections can be held in order to provide a fig leaf of democratic legitimacy, while in reality elections pose scant challenge to their power. Truly dangerous opposition leaders are neutralized or eliminated one way or another.
Trump has shown unabashed admiration for these authoritarian leaders and great affinity for the major tenets of illiberal democracy. But others have paved the way in important respects. Republicans begin with a systemic advantage in electing senators and representatives, because the Democratic Party’s constituency has become heavily concentrated in big states and big cities.
By my calculation every currently serving Democratic senator represents roughly 3.65 million people; every Republican roughly 2.51 million. Put another way, the fifty senators from the twenty-five least populous states—twenty-nine of them Republicans—represent just over 16 percent of the American population, and thirty-four Republican senators—enough to block conviction on impeachment charges—represent states with a total of 21 percent of the American population.
In the five presidential elections of the twenty-first century, Democrats have won the popular vote four times. Two of these four (2000 and 2016) nonetheless produced Republican presidents, since the Electoral College reflects the same weighting toward small, more often Republican states as the Senate. Given the Supreme Court’s undermining of central provisions of the Voting Rights Act (Shelby County v. Holder), its refusal to take up current flagrant gerrymandering cases (Gill v. Whitford for Wisconsin; Benisek v. Lamone for Maryland), and its recent approval of the Ohio law purging its voting rolls (Husted v. Randolph Institute), it must be feared that the Court will in the future open the floodgates for even more egregious gerrymandering and voter suppression.” ~
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/10/25/suffocation-of-democracy/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR%20Democracy%20Pauli%20Murray%20Joe%20Frank&utm_content=NYR%20Democracy%20Pauli%20Murray%20Joe%20Frank+CID_204a4aa7a4c544ac17def33f6d578be5&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=The%20Suffocation%20of%20Democracy
"That buffoon," my mother invariably said. "How could a civilized country fall for that buffoon?" Well, he promised to make Germany great again. This is the most depressing article I’ve read in a while. All the Facebook triumphalism about the upcoming “blue wave” looks silly next to the strategies that make the popular vote irrelevant next to the iron-fist rule of a minority.
I got the first taste of this when someone on FB told me, before the 2016 election, “Your opinion is irrelevant. You live in California, so your vote doesn't count.” This wasn't the kind of lightning-strike revelation as T's statement about shooting someone on 5th Avenue and not losing any votes, but close — I immediately sensed it was true.
So much for remnant delusion about democracy.
*
“In 420 [Alcibiades] was elected one of the ten generals, and began those ambitious schemes that led Athens back into war. When the Assembly acclaimed him Timon the misanthrope rejoiced, predicting great calamities.” ~ Will Durant, The Suicide of Greece
**
THE RAGE OF INCELS
“Women are socialized from childhood to blame themselves if they feel undesirable, to believe that they will be unacceptable unless they spend time and money and mental effort being pretty and amenable and appealing to men. Conventional femininity teaches women to be good partners to men as a basic moral requirement: a woman should provide her man a support system, and be an ideal accessory for him, and it is her job to convince him, and the world, that she is good.
Men, like women, blame women if they feel undesirable. And, as women gain the economic and cultural power that allows them to be choosy about their partners, men have generated ideas about self-improvement that are sometimes inextricable from violent rage.
In the past few years, a subset of straight men calling themselves “incels” have constructed a violent political ideology around the injustice of young, beautiful women refusing to have sex with them. These men often subscribe to notions of white supremacy. They are, by their own judgment, mostly unattractive and socially inept. (They frequently call themselves “subhuman.”) They’re also diabolically misogynistic. “Society has become a place for worship of females and it’s so fucking wrong, they’re not Gods they are just a fucking cum-dumpster,” a typical rant on an incel message board reads. The idea that this misogyny is the real root of their failures with women does not appear to have occurred to them.
Incel stands for “involuntarily celibate,” but there are many people who would like to have sex and do not. (The term was coined by a queer Canadian woman, in the nineties.) Incels aren’t really looking for sex; they’re looking for absolute male supremacy. Sex, defined to them as dominion over female bodies, is just their preferred sort of proof.
If what incels wanted was sex, they might, for instance, value sex workers and wish to legalize sex work. But incels, being violent misogynists, often express extreme disgust at the idea of “whores.” Incels tend to direct hatred at things they think they desire; they are obsessed with female beauty but despise makeup as a form of fraud. Incel culture advises men to “looksmaxx” or “statusmaxx”—to improve their appearance, to make more money—in a way that presumes that women are not potential partners or worthy objects of possible affection but inconveniently sentient bodies that must be claimed through cold strategy. (They assume that men who treat women more respectfully are “white-knighting,” putting on a mockable façade of chivalry.)
When these tactics fail, as they are bound to do, the rage intensifies. Incels dream of beheading the sluts who wear short shorts but don’t want to be groped by strangers; they draw up elaborate scenarios in which women are auctioned off at age eighteen to the highest bidder; they call Elliot Rodger their Lord and Savior and feminists the female K.K.K. “Women are the ultimate cause of our suffering,” one poster on incels.me wrote recently. “They are the ones who have UNJUSTLY made our lives a living hell… We need to focus more on our hatred of women. Hatred is power.”
Earlier this month, Ross Douthat, in a column for the Times, wrote that society would soon enough “address the unhappiness of incels, be they angry and dangerous or simply depressed or despairing.” The column was ostensibly about the idea of sexual redistribution: if power is distributed unequally in society, and sex tends to follow those lines of power, how and what could we change to create a more equal world?
[But] incels are not actually interested in sexual redistribution; they don’t want sex to be distributed to anyone other than themselves. They don’t care about the sexual marginalization of trans people, or women who fall outside the boundaries of conventional attractiveness. (“Nothing with a pussy can be incel, ever. Someone will be desperate enough to fuck it . . . Men are lining up to fuck pigs, hippos, and ogres.”) What incels want is extremely limited and specific: they want unattractive, uncouth, and unpleasant misogynists to be able to have sex on demand with young, beautiful women. They believe that this is a natural right.
It is men, not women, who have shaped the contours of the incel predicament. It is male power, not female power, that has chained all of human society to the idea that women are decorative sexual objects, and that male worth is measured by how good-looking a woman they acquire. Women—and, specifically, feminists—are the architects of the body-positivity movement, the ones who have pushed for an expansive redefinition of what we consider attractive. “Feminism, far from being Rodger’s enemy,” Srinivasan wrote, “may well be the primary force resisting the very system that made him feel—as a short, clumsy, effeminate, interracial boy—inadequate.” Women, and L.G.B.T.Q. people, are the activists trying to make sex work legal and safe, to establish alternative arrangements of power and exchange in the sexual market.
We can’t redistribute women’s bodies as if they are a natural resource; they are the bodies we live in. We can redistribute the value we apportion to one another—something that the incels demand from others but refuse to do themselves. . . . Over the past week, I have read the incel boards looking for, and occasionally finding, proof of humanity, amid detailed fantasies of rape and murder and musings about what it would be like to assault one’s sister out of desperation. In spite of everything, women are still more willing to look for humanity in the incels than they are in [women].” ~
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-rage-of-the-incels?mbid=contentmarketing_facebook_citizennet_paid_culture_the-rage-of-the-incels_1-visit
A soldier reunited with his baby daughter — I’d rather post an image of the opposite of an incelOriana:
There used to be a song, “You’re nobody till somebody loves you.” I used to rebel at those lyrics — what about all the solitary geniuses who apparently failed at love or any form of close connection, but who still managed to make a great contribution? Newton, Spinoza, Schopenhauer — nobodies? Or, aside from the famous, what about the reclusive individuals who appear to function well enough, are good at their job, and have simply found a different way to be reasonably happy and productive?
The song may indeed be too extreme, but it shows that decades ago the belief in the primary importance of love and human connection was unquestioned. An isolated, loveless man was regarded as a failure, even if he managed to be financially successful. There was more romance than violence in the movies. Even war movies could be counted on to glorify romantic love.
An unloved man was usually shown as a pathetic human being — a Scrooge before his transformation. If the transformation failed to occur, he was generally a villain. And even villains were sometimes depicted as having a romantic side. A secret lifelong love? Better than never having loved at all.
But now we have some young men who claim to feel only hatred toward women. Women are to blame for their lack of erotic fulfillment — beautiful young women in particular. Women allegedly willfully deprive incels of what these men feel is their birthright, and women should be punished for that — humiliated, assaulted, even murdered. The men don’t see themselves as evil. It’s only women who are evil; men who dream of killing them see themselves as victims.
To be sure, these are extremists who are a small minority, but it’s troublesome that there appears to have been a general shift in the culture. Perhaps those old songs and movies glorified romantic love too much. But without love and connection — at least deep friendship — what are we? I shudder to think how common and open misogyny has become.
from another source:
~ “It’s age-old phenomenon. I found plenty of evidence of misogyny, from Roman poetry in the first century BC to Page 3 of the Sun. But it was bearable because equality legislation was coming thick and fast and job opportunities were opening up for women. I counted myself lucky that I had missed out on witch trials and the selling of captured women into slavery.
Woman-hating has come roaring back, borne on a tide of recession, economic uncertainty and religious extremism. In this country, we have just witnessed misogyny in its “jokey” form, prompted by May’s arrival at No 10 Downing Street. “Heel, Boys” declared the Sun, showing a pair of kitten heels trampling on the heads of six of her most senior colleagues. Haven’t you got a sense of humor, love? It revived memories of an old trope of Margaret Thatcher as the Conservative party’s dominatrix, confirming that some people cannot see a woman assuming power without thinking of men being humiliated. Tragically, the presence of women in powerful positions seems to unleash misogyny rather than curb it.
Misogyny has deep roots. It sometimes becomes dormant – usually when the economy is doing well – but it never really goes away. It is a mistake to regard it as just another form of abuse; it is a peculiarly intimate form of hatred, rooted in relationships carried on behind closed doors but that frequently spill over into the public world. (Racists rarely marry their victims but misogynists often do.)
Misogyny flourishes when politics become polarized, for a simple reason: it is as prevalent on the hard left as it is among religious extremists. . . . A day after Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader, the three great offices of state in his shadow cabinet were given to men. It came as no surprise to feminists, who know that the hard left rarely pays more than lip service to a movement it regards as a distraction from the struggle against imperialism. Nor am I surprised that Labour has become a poisonous environment for women MPs. Last week 45 of them signed a letter to Corbyn, demanding that he do more to stop harassment, vilification and intimidation.
I have watched these developments with outrage – and a weary sense of deja vu. Many brave women died for freedoms that are under attack once again, all over the world. And I am as offended by people who play down outbursts of misogyny as I am by those who unashamedly revel in it. After the murder of Jo Cox, I don’t want to hear anyone telling worried female MPs to toughen up or whining that they have received death threats, too.
Woman-hating should be a nasty anachronism, but it’s back and we have to confront it.” ~
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/28/woman-hating-has-come-roaring-back-we-must-confront-it
MANY EAST ASIAN WOMEN ARE REJECTING MARRIAGE
~ “Fertility in East Asia has fallen from 5.3 children per woman in the late 1960s to 1.6 now. In countries with the lowest marriage rates, the fertility rate is nearer 1.0. That is beginning to cause huge demographic problems, as populations age with startling speed. And there are other, less obvious issues. Marriage socializes men: it is associated with lower levels of testosterone and less criminal behavior. Less marriage might mean more crime.
Can marriage be revived in Asia? Maybe, if expectations of those roles of both sexes change; but shifting traditional attitudes is hard. Governments cannot legislate away popular prejudices. They can, though, encourage change. Relaxing divorce laws might, paradoxically, boost marriage. Women who now steer clear of wedlock might be more willing to tie the knot if they know it can be untied—not just because they can get out of the marriage if it doesn't work, but also because their freedom to leave might keep their husbands on their toes. Family law should give divorced women a more generous share of the couple's assets. Governments should also legislate to get employers to offer both maternal and paternal leave, and provide or subsidize child care. If taking on such expenses helped promote family life, it might reduce the burden on the state of looking after the old.” ~
(I can no longer retrieve the link to the article in The Economist, but there are similar articles on the Internet)
Oriana:
The model of marriage in which the wife is completely subjugated certainly needs to change before modern Asian women see marriage as an attractive option again. To a lesser extent, the West has the problem as well — a lot of women are now less willing to bear the sacrifices that come with marriage and child-bearing.
The answer to improving fertility seems to have been supplied by Sweden, which made having children “ridiculously easy” by providing abundant quality child care. That, rather than child-support payments, seems to have been the most important factor. Provide help with child-rearing — because it really “takes a village.”
SIMONE WEIL: LET’S ABOLISH ALL POLITICAL PARTIES
~ “On the Abolition of All Political Parties never apologizes for its radicalism, and never makes concessions to practical objections. The book proposes exactly what the title promises: Weil wants to get rid of them at once.
Certainly she’s thinking particularly of the Nazi Party in Germany, the international Communist Party based in Stalin’s USSR, and other infamously dictatorial parties of the 1940s. But she also bluntly declares that “totalitarianism is the original sin of all political parties,” not just the most menacing ones. She gives three reasons for this assessment: first, political parties exist primarily to “generate collective passions,” in order to bring out voters; second, parties apply pressure on members (such as elected officials) to conform to a set platform regardless of their conscience; and third, and most importantly, “the ultimate goal of any political party is its own growth, without limit.” Weil sees this desire for growth as inherently totalitarian.
Much of her hatred of political parties stems from her rejection of conformity, and she worries that the attitude of political partisanship has become pervasive in matters that aren’t exactly political. Weil decries intellectual tribalism in all its forms, observing that not even science and the arts are free. “Cubism and Surrealism were each a sort of party. […] To achieve celebrity, it is useful to be surrounded by a gang of admirers, all possessed by the partisan spirit.” But, in Weil’s view, this kind of conformity is intrinsic to political parties:
In fact — and with very few exceptions — when a man joins a party, he submissively adopts a mental attitude which he will express later on with words such as, “As a monarchist, as a Socialist, I think that…” It is so comfortable! It amounts to having no thoughts at all. Nothing is more comfortable than not having to think.
What’s interesting is that much of what Weil observes about partisanship anticipates the research cited decades later by Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels in their 2016 book, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. They describe party groupthink in similar, albeit less value-laden, terms:
~ A party constructs a conceptual viewpoint by which its voters can make sense of the political world. Sympathetic newspapers, magazine, websites, and television channels convey the framework to partisans. That framework identifies friend and enemies, it supplies talking points, and it tells people how to think and what to believe. ~
Achen and Bartels muster a range of data demonstrating that party identification often comes through identity, rather than ideology, validating Weil’s contention that party members usually defer to the party line rather than puzzle out issues on their own. For example, they present evidence that as the Democratic and Republican Parties began to polarize over the issue of abortion in the 1980s, many voters (particularly men) began to change their beliefs to match their party’s newly articulated platform. But their main point is that voters are drawn to a party for social identity reasons, and then — only after joining — begin to adopt the party’s ideological language, meaning their “partisanship often has little real ideological content.” Just like Weil contends.
After analyzing voter behavior, Achen and Bartels conclude that “[t]he evidence demonstrates that the great majority of citizens pay little attention to politics.” But, unlike Weil, this doesn’t trouble them. “Human beings are busy with their lives,” they write, pointing to careers, child care, and other drains on citizens’ free time. Achen and Bartels’s insouciance stands in sharp contrast from Weil’s insistence that thinking is a good in and of itself, necessary both for good citizenship and a meaningful life. It’s worth coming back to this, because the major difference between the two is that Achen and Bartels see political activity as in some way separate from people’s lives, and Weil does not.
Weil is rather ambivalent about democracy. Indeed, in On the Abolition of All Political Parties she insists: “Democracy, majority rule, are not good in themselves. They are merely means toward goodness.” One reason Weil abhors political parties and other collective organizations is that they represent “a reversal of the relation between means and ends.” She believes that people should lead their lives focused on the abstractions that carry the most ethical and moral weight — truth, beauty, justice, and, most importantly, God. For her, “[g]oodness alone is an end. Whatever belongs to the domain of facts pertains to the category of means.”
Achen and Bartels, like all political scientists — and most other inheritors of the liberal tradition, including the vast majority of contemporary American political actors — are almost exclusively interested in means, which is why they don’t object to people who choose to prioritize work and family commitments over political involvement. They see parties as an important tool of any “realistic” democracy, insisting that “policy making is a job for specialists,” and “interest groups and parties have to do the work.” Their reasoning is straightforward: parties are useful because they are effective.
Precisely because they are starting from such different places — Weil from a philosophical quest for the good, Achen and Bartels from an interest in following hard data — it is fascinating to see how much they overlap. For example, both see propaganda in similar ways. Weil, unsurprisingly, hates it. “The avowed purpose of propaganda is not to impart light, but to persuade,” she writes. But it is essential to the workings of parties: “All political parties make propaganda. A party that would not would disappear, since all its competitors practice it.”
Mexican fire agate. Someone commented, “The Thumb of Zeus.” If we put it this way, that’s poetry. If we make it the thumb of a dictator, or a mega-rich pastor of a mega-church, the human capacity for wrong worship reveals its disastrous quality. Weil is certainly correct here — all campaigning is designed to persuade, rather than “bring light.” But Achen and Bartels are also sensitive to the way campaigns can distort citizens’ views. Countering those who reason that the “wisdom of crowds” (where ordinary people’s misjudgments would essentially cancel each other out), they note that “[w]hen thousands or millions of voters […] are swayed by the same vivid campaign ad, no amount of aggregation will produce the requisite miracle.”
Since Weil is so virulently opposed to collective thinking, and to propaganda, it is unsurprising that her ban on parties come with serious restrictions on civil liberties. Weil bluntly proposes, “Whenever a circle of ideas and debate would be tempted to crystallize and create formal membership, the attempt should be repressed by law and punished.” She expects, and supports, informal political factions gravitating to journals and other publications. But even there, she sees the need for limits, writing, “At election time, if contributors to a journal are political candidates, it should be forbidden for them to invoke their connection with the journal, and it should be forbidden for the journal to endorse their candidacy.”
One can imagine Achen and Bartels responding by claiming that voters are not simply swayed by political propaganda, but by their own mistakes, and that this will render Weil’s efforts insufficient to create the kind of engaged populace she seeks. Citing the work of Philip Converse, who observed that most people “do not have meaningful beliefs, even on issues that have formed the basis for intense political controversy among elites for substantial periods of time,” Achen and Bartels argue that in surveys and other studies, many voters have a difficult time even sorting different policy ideas by their ideology (meaning they don’t know when a given proposal is considered a liberal or conservative idea), and that people’s views are highly unstable, changing frequently over time.
Even more pointedly, they make a case that voters often base their decisions on clearly irrational grounds. One particular example stands out: “Voters along the Jersey Shore punished the incumbent president, Woodrow Wilson, for the panic and economic dislocation stemming from a dramatic series of shark attacks in 1916, reducing his vote share there by as much as 10 percentage points.”
But Achen and Bartels’s primary thesis is that most voters are influenced not by shark-related panic but by group attachments. According to research they cite, “Even in the context of hot-button issues like race and abortion, it appears that most people make their party choices based on who they are rather than on what they think.” Weil expects this, noting, “The artificial crystallization into political parties coincides so little with genuine affinities that a member of parliament will often find himself disagreeing with a colleague from within his own party, and in complete agreement with a politician from another party.”
But Weil’s notion of citizenship — really of humanity — is an intellectually strict one, and is unsympathetic to the idea that people should let any kind of social group influence their decisions. For her, engagement is a moral good, in and of itself. From this perspective, the divisions that parties themselves promote are therefore responsible for voter ignorance.
Reformers impressed by Weil’s arguments but unwilling to give up parties altogether would be wise to draw upon Achen and Bartels’s findings and focus on empowering organized groups and smaller parties. Ideas such as ranked-choice voting and proportional representation offer good starting points.
But the real lesson of Weil’s work is that a democratic politics needs to be expansive, acknowledging that everyone is entitled to an equal stake in society and an equal say in how society works. In effect, democracy needs to be a system of principles, not a system of practices. Weil is far too idiosyncratic to offer a workable blueprint for society, but her ethical seriousness remains compelling, and she certainly forces readers to think hard about what it means to create a just society.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/party-of-one-democracy-political-parties-and-simone-weil/#!
Simone Weil, 1921*
THE NEVER-ENDING AMERICAN CIVIL WAR
~ “Trumpland is the modern-day incarnation of the 1860s Confederate South — a softer, gentler, nicer, smoother, smilier, more inclusive version, certainly, but still: scratch off the thin veneer of 21st-century civilization — and there it is. And so it goes, the never ending Civil War of the American political process.” ~ M. Iossel
Well, broadly speaking, in terms of white supremacy and male supremacy having become so blatant again . . . But no, we don’t sell human beings at auction anymore. I don’t accept the argument that the human trafficking still currently going on is “just as bad.” But that we are still fighting over the same issues is pretty amazing.
So perhaps the title “Gone with the Wind” got it in reverse? The answer that is currently “blowing in the wind” is certainly unpleasant. But winds do change, the young seem less attracted to the “God and Fatherland” and “Blood and Soil” ideologies (maybe I'm kidding myself), and every time a confederate statue comes down, we can take a breath of fresh hope.
*
“The destruction caused by hate-mongers is evident to anyone with a cursory knowledge of history; their ongoing influence is equally clear to viewers of the daily news. Through their rhetoric they fundamentally alter the swing of the pendulum in the conduct of human affairs from compromise to conflict, from inclusion to vilification, and from compassion to cruelty.” ~ Ian Hughes
~ “If there is ever a competition for best-named geological phenomenon, the Great Dying is surely a contender.
Over a relatively short period of time some 70% of vertebrates living on land and around 90% of ocean species were killed off. The end-Permian mass extinction, as it is more formally known, was quite simply the biggest disaster ever to hit life on Earth.
Until around a decade ago, the trigger for this deadliest of catastrophes 252 million years ago was often presented as the greatest murder mystery of all time, with scientists offering up some half a dozen “suspects”.
More recently, advances in dating techniques and new geological evidence have provided a very prominent smoking gun. Most earth scientists now agree the greatest of the Earth’s “Big Five” mass extinctions was triggered by 1 million years or so of intense volcanic activity.
Somewhere in the range of 5 million cubic km of lava spewed out across what is now northwestern Siberia – enough to cover the Earth’s surface to a depth of about 10 meters – and it did so shortly before the start of the mass extinction. This triggered the release of huge volumes of greenhouse gases that drove global warming and critically disrupted the Earth’s life support systems.
The death toll from the Siberian Traps was extreme. The effects were greatest in the oceans, especially on the sea floor.
Many groups were wiped out entirely, including one of the earliest known arthropod groups – the trilobites – as well as primitive rugose and tabulate corals, and the nut-shaped blastoid echinoderms – relatives of today’s sea urchins and starfish. Others, such as brachiopod shellfish, bryozoan “moss animals”, squid-like ammonoids, and flower-like crinoids, lost most of their species.
“The biggest extinction event we have in the history of life has a lot in common with the environmental changes occurring today and that we anticipate in the next 100 to 1,000 years,” he says. “In fact in the long run, it had a stimulating effect on ecosystem diversity, but the recovery took millions of years to kick in, so loss of diversity is not something that should be thought of as useful or relevant to human society.” ~
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20151218-when-a-volcanic-apocalypse-nearly-killed-life-on-earth
Crinoid lily; drawing by Ernst Haeckel**
NOTHING YOU FEEL OR THINK IS “SIN”
Maybe you don’t know what the nights are like
for people who can’t sleep.
They all feel guilty —
the old man, the young woman, the child.
They are driven through darkness
as though condemned,
their pale hands writhing; they’re twisted
like a pack of frenzied hounds.
What’s past lies still ahead,
and the future is finished.
~ Rilke, The Book of Hours
Oriana:
To me this is a description of toxic religion: the old man, the young woman, even the child — they all feel guilty. Judaism and Buddhism were such a relief: nothing you feel or think is "sin." You're responsible only for your actions.
The last couplet could be interpreted as a brilliant capsule summary of depression. You keep brooding over the past. There is no vision of the future, unless as even worse than the past.
The need for 24/7 praise (or so we were taught — we were created to praise him) was a big turn-off for me. Seemed like ignoble, insecure vanity, and appeasement of a capricious (or downright vicious) archaic tribal deity who's always on the edge of a tantrum — an angry god. Or, to be more realistic, like a heavy-drinking, unpredictable dictator — say, Stalin. Stalin had to be praised non-stop. Poets wrote “Odes to Stalin.” Now, the psalms have a better literary quality, at least in the King James translation, but the essence remains abject adulation. Because if he isn’t pleased, he just might strike you with a loathsome disease.
Ending on beauty:
“There is a silence more musical than any song.” ~ Christina Rossetti
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