I found myself thinking of Julie Phillips and Martha Nussbaum's reviews of Mansfield's Manliness when I read Joline Guiterrez Krueger's article in The Albuquerque Tribune ( Catholic Priest, Other Protestors, Sentenced in Santa Fe) the other day. Last Thursday US District Judge Don Svet sentenced Rev. John Dear for failing to comply with signs and directions when Dear and eight other antiwar activists occupied an elevator outside Sen. Pete Domenici's office in Sept 2006. The judge's sentence was relatively lenient in these days of harsh prison terms for activists of conscience. What caught my attention, though, was Krueger's reporting that the judge called Dear "a coward" and "no Gandhi." Why? Krueger's article suggests that the judge was incensed by a previous antiwar act:
“Mr. Dear, you frankly are a phony,” Svet said. “You preach nonviolence but you are the same man who took a hammer and a can of paint against a U.S. aircraft.”
As I recall, the activists who have wielded hammers and red paint against bombers do not actually damage the aircraft but rather do so to make a symbolic statement. The judge, apparently, is an ignoramus without any knowledge (much less understanding) of nonviolent activism: this explains his telling Dear that "you frankly are a phony," and his saying that Dear is "no Gandi."
But the charge of cowardice? That's what I don't get. It sounds illogical and irrational on its face.
Here in the US, we hear people labeled "cowards" by the media and government officials all the time. In some cases, the people so labeled are murderers or terrorists. I don't quite get the logic of that particular application of the characterization, except that for a simplistic notion that all Good Guys are heroes and all Bad Guys are cowards. But I really scratch my head when time and again the people so labeled are those who have had the temerity to stand up to the school-yard bully knowing that in doing so they've risked getting beaten to a pulp. In this case, on the one side---Judge Svet's side---we have a government that made more than 900 "false statements" (i.e., they told conscious lies) to justify devastating the lives and culture of several million people. On the other side, we have Dear's Pax Christi group, saying that that destruction and devastation is unjust and morally unacceptable. For me, allying oneself with the lying bully is the real act of cowardice.
I'm wondering: is it a "manliness" issue? I gather from Nussbaum's piece that John Wayne is now the exemplar for manliness. (Perceptions of gender just keep changing and changing, don't they...) Since the days of the Reagan Administration I've had it firmly in mind that the image of John Wayne (channeled through Ronald Reagan)---the man's man of a hero---is that of a thuggish bully who rides roughshod over everyone who gets in his way. Is it possible that people now think that the bully is the manly hero and anyone who thumbs their nose at the bully is, by definition, "unmanly"? Am I leaping to conclusions? Such reasoning doesn't square with the way the word "coward" was used when I was growing up, but as I've noted elsewhere, anything to do with gender is riddled with discursive instability. I wonder if the judge thinks that the nuns arrested for hitting the bomber with a hammer are cowards, too? Or do people who use the word in that way see it as applicable to men only?
It's a mystery-- to me, anyway. If anyone has any ideas about this, pray do enlighten me.
Showing posts with label manliness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label manliness. Show all posts
Monday, January 28, 2008
Friday, January 25, 2008
Julie Phillips on Boys' Liberation & Other Stuff
Last month this blog featured a couple dozen posts on what various Aqueductians had enjoyed reading, viewing, and listening to in 2007. Julie Phillips had intended to send me a contribution but ran out of time. I assured her I'd be happy to accept it late, and now, here it is.
She writes in an email to me:
I was going to send you an intro to my piece about The Dangerous Book for Boys, wasn’t I? I was looking at the people who’ve already weighed in on your blog. People are so good, they do their assignments right, they come up with useful stuff…
So I feel like I should add a couple of proper recommendations. One book that I really enjoyed last fall is the new Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods, which is already out in the UK and is coming out in the US in April. Its science fiction elements are not always all that strong or original (though I liked the robot sex), but it’s very angry and very funny, always a good combination.
And do you have books that have been sitting on your shelves, surrounded by a halo of respect and affection, for so long that you can’t remember what it was that you loved about them? I took down and reread an old Seal Press book, Tove Ditlevsen’s Early Spring, the other day, and now I remember what I loved about it. It’s by a poet who grew up in the slums of Copenhagen during the Depression, enduring miserable poverty and equally miserable parents, and what I enjoy and admire is the clarity with which she’s able to look back at herself and her surroundings. She writes with a funny kind of dispassionate understanding, with anger (and of course humor) boiling just under it. It’s the best book I know about a writer’s childhood.
It’s short, and you can order it on Amazon for 25 cents. Have you ever read it? You would like it.
Anyway, about my piece on The Dangerous Book for Boys, the only intro it really needs is that it’s partly a review of the Dutch/Flemish edition, and I wrote it for a local audience, so I found myself making all kinds of Dutch references, especially to the Dutch ambivalence about history. The Dutch feel uncomfortable teaching their own history. They associate it with national pride (which they don’t like: it reminds them too much of Nazi Germany). And they don’t like to look at the negative parts of their own colonial past. Now that they’re confronted with a large immigrant group, they don’t know what to do. Should immigrants be expected to care about Dutch history? If they don’t learn it, can they integrate into Dutch culture?
The essay is also about superheroes, pink toys, and why girls want to be librarians. In retrospect I think I made too much of an effort to respect this whole “boys will be boys” business, which I would like to think is, as one male friend of mine put it, just a “reactionary last gasp.” But I am a woman and don’t like to look less than understanding. It’s here
What has really put me off the boys’ liberation movement is a book called “Manliness,” in which “natural” male qualities are shown “naturally” to lead to sexism and George W. Bush. I wrote about that too, here.
Actually, the very best thing I’ve read lately is Martha C. Nussbaum’s review of “Manliness” in The New Republic. It’s online here. She takes the book and its author apart with a serene authority that’s a pleasure to see.
She writes in an email to me:
I was going to send you an intro to my piece about The Dangerous Book for Boys, wasn’t I? I was looking at the people who’ve already weighed in on your blog. People are so good, they do their assignments right, they come up with useful stuff…
So I feel like I should add a couple of proper recommendations. One book that I really enjoyed last fall is the new Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods, which is already out in the UK and is coming out in the US in April. Its science fiction elements are not always all that strong or original (though I liked the robot sex), but it’s very angry and very funny, always a good combination.
And do you have books that have been sitting on your shelves, surrounded by a halo of respect and affection, for so long that you can’t remember what it was that you loved about them? I took down and reread an old Seal Press book, Tove Ditlevsen’s Early Spring, the other day, and now I remember what I loved about it. It’s by a poet who grew up in the slums of Copenhagen during the Depression, enduring miserable poverty and equally miserable parents, and what I enjoy and admire is the clarity with which she’s able to look back at herself and her surroundings. She writes with a funny kind of dispassionate understanding, with anger (and of course humor) boiling just under it. It’s the best book I know about a writer’s childhood.
It’s short, and you can order it on Amazon for 25 cents. Have you ever read it? You would like it.
Anyway, about my piece on The Dangerous Book for Boys, the only intro it really needs is that it’s partly a review of the Dutch/Flemish edition, and I wrote it for a local audience, so I found myself making all kinds of Dutch references, especially to the Dutch ambivalence about history. The Dutch feel uncomfortable teaching their own history. They associate it with national pride (which they don’t like: it reminds them too much of Nazi Germany). And they don’t like to look at the negative parts of their own colonial past. Now that they’re confronted with a large immigrant group, they don’t know what to do. Should immigrants be expected to care about Dutch history? If they don’t learn it, can they integrate into Dutch culture?
The essay is also about superheroes, pink toys, and why girls want to be librarians. In retrospect I think I made too much of an effort to respect this whole “boys will be boys” business, which I would like to think is, as one male friend of mine put it, just a “reactionary last gasp.” But I am a woman and don’t like to look less than understanding. It’s here
What has really put me off the boys’ liberation movement is a book called “Manliness,” in which “natural” male qualities are shown “naturally” to lead to sexism and George W. Bush. I wrote about that too, here.
Actually, the very best thing I’ve read lately is Martha C. Nussbaum’s review of “Manliness” in The New Republic. It’s online here. She takes the book and its author apart with a serene authority that’s a pleasure to see.
+++++++++++++
Be sure to check out Julie' essays. They're well worth the read. (And now I'm going off to check out the Nussbaum piece, which I haven't yet read myself.
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