Manning’s Moral Leadership

By virtue of his personal sacrifice on behalf of freedom and democracy, Bradley-Chelsea Manning has demonstrated moral leadership of a kind rarely seen these days, when official leadership is so commonly characterized by cowardice and corruption.

The government may think it’s making an example of Manning to discourage whistleblowing. Instead, Manning makes an example for everyone to follow, an example for ethical behavior— this is what an intact ethical compass looks like, people.

Make no mistake— Manning is a national treasure.

The Anti-choice Movement and Its Spirit of Kitch

 Milan Kundera:

“Kitsch" is a German word born in the middle of the sentimental nineteenth century, and from German is entered all Western languages. Repeated use, however, has obliterated its original metaphysical meaning: kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and figurative sense of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence. [Zenzoe bold]

If the anti-abortion zealot’s mental picture of the fetus is anything, it’s kitsch, that is, a visual and verbal conglomeration of shit-denying sentimentality. Disregarding whatever dire circumstance a fetus may inhabit, the fetus is, according to the abortion foe, innocent, defenseless, precious, helpless, unable to speak for herself, sacred, pure and nearly as holy and supreme as a human person can get. Certainly, as human persons go, its personhood surpasses that of its mother, if she can be said to be a person at all.

In keeping with the Spirit of Kitch, something called the “International Pro-Life Memorial and National Life Center” in Wichita promises to cast a spell of wonderment and awe in the hearts of all anti-choice zealots. Most thrilling, it “will be operated as a tax exempt 501C3 entity!”  Even more goosebump-inspiring, it will stand before a broad lawn decorated with a constellation of crosses, each representing a million dead fetuses.

It’s no surprise Christians claim the painter Thomas Kinkade, the King of Kitsch, as a “Christian ‘painter of light.’” Too bad he didn’t do a painting of the “unborn” in an idealized landscape, sleeping peacefully in the crook of the branch of a tree, surrounded by gentle waters and adorable creatures —and don’t forget the rainbow— all caught in a glowing atmosphere of light and dazzle.

That glowing atmosphere is exactly what the extreme Right yearns for, a world where women self-sacrifice to the needs of men and children, where proper women aren't sexual, where there's a place for everything and everything's in its place. The place for a fetus is in a uterus, and no fetus should be removed from its place; the place for women is in the kitchen or flat on her back either submitting to her husband or giving birth. Anything else is too messy and disgusting to contemplate.

Milan Kundera: 

Whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch. When I say “totalitarian,” what I mean is that everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished for life: every display of individualism (because a deviation from the collective is a spit in the eye of the smiling brotherhood); every doubt (because anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself); all irony (because in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously); and the mother who abandons her family or the man who prefers men to women, thereby calling into question the holy decree “Be fruitful and multiply.”  http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Milan_Kundera

After all, it is the brotherhood of white men we're talking about here and now, and the individualism inherent in the pro-choice position.

Healing from the Wars: Whatever It Takes

Picture this: I'm sitting on a chair this morning in the front office of Advanced Auto & Electric. I'm there to get the final repair and test needed after my first smog test failed. On my head sits my orange baseball cap, the one that reads, "01.20.09 - Bush's Last Day." Behind the chair on the wall hangs a bulletin board with all sorts of notes, pictures, keys, whatever, and placed boldly at center a poster reads, OBAMA YOU ARROGANT KNOW IT ALL/DON'T APOLOGIZE FOR/ THIS GREAT COUNTRY/THOSE OF US WHO SERVED AND DIED/DON'T DESERVE IT.

 As I wait for my car, I am reading Chris Hedges' book The World as It Is, Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress, a compilation of his TruthDig posts; and I'm on the chapter entitled, They Kill Alex. As I read, the ironic concurrency of me, my cap's message and that of the poster occurs to me. I'm thinking, someone should take a picture.

When I first noticed the poster and its message, I affiliated the guy behind the counter with it and felt contempt for his ignorance about that whole "Obama apologized for America" lie Romney told over and over, and I hoped to get a chance to correct him. However, as I sat reading about Carlos Arredondo and his grief-stricken response to his son's death in Iraq, my imagination went to the second half of that poster's message, "...those of us who served and died don't deserve it," and I began to feel compassion for it. The reports about Obama's "apology" had no basis in fact; regardless, can you blame the vets and their families for needing to feel good about what to them was done for all the good reasons their country had given them for their sacrifices? I have compassion for that: denial on behalf of sanity, for to know the truth would mean soul-defeating dishonor. Only the most courageous manage to face the truth, and if some cannot face it, I'm not going to condemn them.

At home, I made a sandwich and sat down to see what C-Span was up to. Fittingly, a Senate Affairs Committee was holding a hearing on "Veterans Mental Health Care." The subject— PTSD and what to do about it.  I'd missed most of the questions and answers by the panel of experts, but I saw enough to know the most important suggestion never came up: If you want to heal American vets of the post-traumatic stress of war, STOP SENDING THEM THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE!!!

PTSD is not a "disorder;" it's a natural reaction to an abnormal situation. It's the WAR, stupid!

Women in Combat— This is Equality?

This is no joke, and yet the Facebook website proudly displaying this poster, a website dedicated to ground troops, received 629 “Likes” and 149 “Shares,” as of this writing, alongside a number of comments taking it as a joke. One comment suggested a backlash against women in combat to come, and I won’t be surprised if that backlash comes in the form of increased rapes, adding to the present epidemic of sexual assaults in the military. But let’s be clear: it’s not women in combat that will be responsible. The responsibility will be with men in combat with antiquated, macho, misogynistic attitudes, and a military system that bolsters them.

Women who join the military have another think coming if they think the military values equality. As it is in reality, the military is the last place a woman can expect to be treated as an equal. 

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57566084/pentagon-battling-military-rape-epidemic/

http://www.newsday.com/opinion/oped/bernard-will-the-military-finally-address-the-epidemic-of-sexual-assault-1.4504483

Steampunked

Beauty or Truth: Will I be Beautiful, or True?

 A beautiful person I know posted the following article at Facebook. My response, too long and contrary for Facebook, follows this brief quote:

“I've started telling my daughters I'm beautiful...

There are a lot of people like me. Women who know things. Women who have seen things. Women with diseases in their livers. There are a lot of women with scars on their arms and words that carry themselves like sparrows. There are women who were too big for this town, who had their backs bent carrying things like religion and a history that originated somewhere in the crook of a branch that extended over a stream. A place where a patch of the sky was visible through the leaves, where a little girl let her bare leg dangle too far down.

There are a lot of people like me, because we're all the same. We're all blood and electricity. We're lonely under the gaze of god. We're all wet with dew and swallowing hard against DO THIS, CONSUME, SHUT UP and BE AFRAID to die.

All of you women with lines on your brow, with cracks between your fingers… it's been a long winter. All of you, you are beautiful and so am I.”

And now for some stinkin’ thinkin’ because that’s what I’m good at and what’s beautiful about me.

Well, I admit the article brought a tear to the eye on first go ‘round, but then, because “denial ain't just a river in Egypt,” I decided it was nothing but Stuart Smalley on estrogen: “I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and, doggonit, I’m beautiful!”

Right: So we may not make the same money men make doing the same job; we may not have an Equal Rights Amendment yet; maybe glass ceilings still exist in two-thirds of companies across America; and perhaps some of us have scars across our chests where breasts used to be, because some big-Pharma poophead decided menopause needed a pill— but not to fret, we can always tell ourselves we’re beautiful. And that’s because, to quote another SNL fave, Fernando, “It is better to look good than to feel good."  Except that in this case, looking good IS feeling good, and if you can lie to yourself, you’re all the more appealing to the rest of us. That way we don’t have to think about all those other pesky realities, or feel guilty for not doing so; but, especially, that way we don’t have to kill you for being negative.

In womanland these days, the ultimate sin is negativity. You may imagine when you admit to a flaw you’re going to earn points for humility, honesty and transparency, but, sorry, it doesn’t work that way. Instead, you’re going to lose points: In this world, honesty equals negativity, and negative people just “bring us down.” That is to say, if you admit to not exactly being Perfection Unlimited, but, rather, that for you the beauty train long ago left the station, then everybody else will risk facing their own imperfections. After all, we’re holding on by the most tentative of threads to a self-esteem scratched into the wall of second-class citizenship. Unless we bolster ourselves with phony affirmations, thinking to outsmart the opposition, we’ll be unable to manage. But that way we tempt the evil eye, only to drop to the ground like Wile E. Coyote, having outsmarted ourselves instead.

Of course, yes, the “beautiful” word means beauty in spirit and deed. But why lie about that too? Sometimes I am not beautiful in that sense either. I’d say it’s better to feel good despite our imperfections, than to pretend we’re perfect. I’d say the author’s daughters would be better off hearing, “Mommy’s plump and saggy, sometimes cranky and complaining, but being perfect is not something humans do so well. What’s beautiful is to know that real perfection is always flawed, and that “beauty is truth, truth beauty,” as a wise poet named John Keats once wrote."

Beauty is so central to humans’ most cherished beliefs and pursuits, that Keats’s forceful lines seem to challenge important aspects of our very selves. Once the reader moves beyond this reaction, though, it becomes possible to see that Keats’s truth is liberating. If humans no longer need to strive to create the perfect beautiful form in whatever medium, then it frees them to be imperfect. Imperfection, in turn, liberates humans to make and remake art, and to recognize that one form dies with each individual death, and is then born again with each new birth– a common theme in poetry from the Romantic period. Bloom and Trilling refer to this realization as Keats’s “gift of tragic acceptance” (495), which the poet hands to the reader and urges him or her to accept and then contemplate. — http://www.articlemyriad.com/analysis-ode-grecian-urn-keats/

My own mother was Vivian-Leigh-beautiful, or as beautiful as any movie star I've ever seen. But she never felt the need to remind me of it. Instead, she seemed wholly unaware of her beauty, and I remember the advice she gave me once when I was in high school and getting ready for a party: "Fix yourself up, but then forget all about yourself once you get there."  I think her example served us far better than an "I am beautiful" attitude would have.  In her case, the truth was self-evident; to say more than that would have been bragging.

Discussion of "Killing Us Softly" Talk by Jean Kilbourne

 (This is part of a general discussion at Hartmann's forum on the objectification of women.)

http://thoughtmaybe.com/advertising-and-the-image-of-women/

Zenzoe wrote:

I could have used the video in my conversation with D_NATURED.  She makes lots of points that are relevant to that conversation about "tight young ass," "pussy," and the entire subject of the sexual objectification of women and girls; and in particular the influence advertising and media have on shaping and creating female sexual objectification as if it's normal. Her point that sex is both more important and less important than the media suggests is something I'd like to discuss further, given more time. Also, how the objectification of women in advertising correlates with violence against women.  That's important too, obviously.

D_NATURED wrote:

The video is utterly irrelevant to our conversation, Z. First of all, I've never advocated violence against women.

Zenzoe wrote:

Of course you don’t, and never did, advocate violence against women. But that you, in particular, are not violent toward women, nor do you advocate it, nor do you even ignore it as an issue, does not mean that sexist advertising does not correlate with violence against women.

Still, because I mentioned you and the terms you have used in the same paragraph where, at the end, I mention how advertising correlates with VAW, perhaps you felt the sting of yourself being associated with such. I’m sorry if such clumsy juxtaposition of words and ideas set you against the video from the get-go. I think, if you could bring yourself to take a second look at it, you might come away with a different impression. To my mind, she manages to give us the forest despite the trees, if you will: She gives us an insight about our own culture, one that is only possible if you stand far back and think critically about the culture she's showing you.

Thus, I disagree that the video is “utterly irrelevant to our conversation.” And by “our conversation” I don’t mean you, D., personally. I’m talking about the objectification of women generally. It’s only coincidence that you happened to defend the use of A.’s term “tight young ass,” but I understand your defense, and your attitude, and I accept that you don’t see such objectification as toxic in any way.

We have simply used such verbiage to move on to a more general discussion about our culture and its objectification of women. Please don’t take it as a personal attack. What we see in advertising is who we are as a distinct culture, one with ideals and messages wholly specific to ourselves as a society. It’s important to look at that objectively, but I think you know that.

D_NATURED wrote:

Secondly, the desire to have sex with attractive women pre-existed advertising and rightfully so. Sex is a biological necessity, advertising is a capitalist one. The only question is whether or not any woman feels she needs to live up to the ideal. That's a struggle to which many women are immune. Advertising merely attempts to tell us WHAT is "attractive" (and I agree, by the way, that much of it is impossible to attain, for the average woman), and is often in contrast to what nature would require.

Zenzoe wrote:

Well, here I have to remind you that “the ideal” is our culture’s ideal, and not the multiple ideals of femininity as manifested in various cultures around the world historically. That’s the understanding one needs to adopt while viewing the video. Behind the discussion about advertising must be the recognition of, the knowledge of, other cultures, and even our own culture’s varied and evolving notions of the ideal feminine.

You may recall that in ancient China the ideal of femininity had women binding their feet to conform to that culture’s male preferences. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_binding  In other cultures, a long neck on a woman signifies the feminine ideal, and so the women wear neck rings to elongate their necks.  In European cultures, hairy armpits are feminine, but here they're not.  In Peter Paul Ruben’s day, the heftier female was the ideal, and in that culture and other cultures our skinny ideal would have provoked revulsion and concern.

Remember Marilyn Monroe? (how could we forget?) Simone Signoret, the author, said Marilyn, in her off-camera life, rarely dressed in what she described as her “Marilyn getup.” There’s an anecdote where once Marilyn and two friends were walking through the streets of New York and Marilyn turned to her friends and said, “Do you want me to be her?” and then she took on the M.M. personality, and suddenly strangers on the street started to recognize her.

So there you have what some people refer to as the “female impersonation” that women have had to adopt to conform to male preferences within our own patriarchal culture. And we are still a patriarchal culture, D., in case you haven’t noticed.

Recently, I watched a favorite movie of mine from the 60’s again, a French movie that received an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film: A Man and a Woman. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Man_and_a_Woman  It was a bit of a shock, however, to notice in the observant eyes of my 2012 perspective what I hadn’t noticed back in the mid-60s when I didn’t have the distance required to see this clearly: Anouk Aimee’s (female lead) tamped-down, shy portrayal of a woman (not portrayal of a shy woman), that is, her female impersonation. In her own way, Anouk produced an act exactly comparable to the Marilyn act—a feminine ideal for her times, a lá French and not so funny, one designed not to threaten males with female self-assertion, or bold, overt intelligence or gumption.

You have to understand, though, I’ve had the exhilarating experience of being exposed to portrayals of a more liberated femininity by some of our current American actresses. For example, Mary McCormack’s portrayal of U.S. Federal Marshal, Mary Shannon, in the TV series In Plain Sight. There, you may see blond and gorgeous, but you’re also going to have to contend with a smart-mouth, feminist, dry-wit, mocking and utterly not inclined toward the use of feminine wiles as leverage, unless for conscious sarcastic or ironical effect. I cannot tell you how refreshing it is to witness such a violation of the stereotype. 

D_NATURED wrote:

The vast majority of those ads appeared to be the kind found in women's magazines, though, which implies that women are equal consumers of and participants in their own objectification. Could that be because women need to know what IS attractive, so they can fulfill their own natural desire to be pursued by men for the same ultimate purpose as those pursuing? Is the assumption of mine that women want to be pursued a media suggestion? Can you blame men for what sells to everyone? If enough women object to what the ads are saying, will the market not respond?

During her speech, the camera panned out to an audience full of women in dresses and make up and jewelry. I suggest they weren't dressed by their husbands and boy friends that morning but, ultimately, by their mothers at childhood. Do you see where I'm going with this?

Zenzoe wrote:

Of course women are “equal consumers of and participants in their own objectification!” That’s the power of advertising. If it didn’t work on women, it wouldn’t be used by the men and women —advertisers— who consciously or unconsciously wish to demean women to sell products within this patriarchal, misogynistic culture.

And what IS attractive, again, is wholly determined by this culture at a very specific time and location within the history of human culture. What IS attractive, D., is determined by a vicious cycle of indoctrination and response, of wish, fantasy, and conformity.
The Barbie Doll didn’t evolve out of an empty context, after all. Barbie does not bear witness to a gender-neutral, liberated and equal society; just the opposite. It evolved not because of who and what we women really are, but who and what the chauvinist mind of capitalism and consumerism has projected as an ideal from its own perverted ideology. 

D_NATURED wrote:

I have no problem with recognizing the way we are manipulated by the media so that we can examine our own motivations and biases. Let us not ignore that some of our biases can not be intellectualized away or blamed on male oppression alone. I find it hard to believe that, even in Sweden, when a girl with an exceptional ass walks by, the men there do not care to look.

Zenzoe wrote:

I don’t know why you assume that (1) I think men are not biologically sexual and not sexually attracted to attractive women, and, (2), I blame all of this on male oppression, and, (3) that Sweden is not part of modern Western civilization, and (4) that I conflate men’s looking with men objectifying women. Sheesh, D., can you give me a break here? There’s a big difference between the two, and I wish you could see that. To look and enjoy is not necessarily to objectify. ;-)

D_NATURED wrote:

Besides, with all of these women on this planet that are not poreless size zeroes with perfect bone structure and giant tits, there is still an imperfect man who loves them. The fact that my wife, for instance, does not fit that ideal does not diminish my passion for her. She is still in possession of all of the things that make a woman sexually attractive as well as other intangibles. No ad can convince me that she does not deserve my love.

Zenzoe wrote:

Again, “poreless size zeroes with perfect bone structure and giant tits,” (and add to that unnaturally and dangerously thin), if it is an “ideal,” it is an ideal constructed within the context of a patriarchal, consumerist, sexist society; it is not an absolute, consistent-across-all-cultures ideal (thus, men and women are not wired biologically to love it). And furthermore, to address the issue of violence against women, it is an ideal that has dire consequences for girls and women. I first would suggest that even girls who starve themselves to the point of anorexia to live up to the ideal have had their self-esteem violated; the society that promotes the “ideal” of thinness also commits violence against women.

But let’s not pretend that consistent images in the media —and I absolutely disagree with the suggestion that the majority misogynistic advertising occurs in women’s magazines— of all the varied ways in which women can be degraded and even presented as prey, will not contribute to male violence against women. Consider Wrangler’s “We are Animals” ad campaign (Wrangler ads are found everywhere). http://www.ozonweb.com/en/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/wrangleranimals2.jpg http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/files/2008/08/wranglerad2.png 
 
So, there you see the notion of “we are animals,” not as a celebration of our mutual, erotic enjoyment within a context of sensuality and pleasure, but as a promotion of men as killers and women as prey; or men as killing animals and women as their dead prey. (and to think that ad campaign won all sorts of awards!) How much of this stuff, D., do you think springs naturally from the male psyche, rather than from the psyche of our deeply sick society?

And what makes you think images of that sort don’t register on the minds of less-ethical men than yourself, granting permission to them to violate women in the most horrific ways?

It’s wonderful that you’re able to rise above this crap. It’s great that you manage a fulfilling relationship with a real woman, that you’re not a superficial man who treats his wife as an object designed for his purposes alone. But your particular, individual case does not deny the truth the video presents, nor does it allow us to pretend that women and their objectification is not damaging to us all.