Paranoid Patriarchy...toxic masculinity...on the ballot November 3
While both anger and angst mount in the prelude to the presidential election in the U.S., pundits muse over polls, personalities, ideologies, platforms, and coffers. A penetrating ad here, a surprising endorsement there, a rally here, a virtual speech there…all of it engineered to capture both the imagination and the voting “X” of millions of voters.
And yet, from the perspective of an outsider, inexplicably
and clearly irrationally glued to the many screens, there is an underlying
dynamic driving the United States of America that, unless fully undressed, laid
bare, declared anathema for the last time, grieved, mourned and then cast
overboard, will continue to haunt the nation, and by proliferation, much of the
world. That dynamic is paranoid patriarchy, toxic masculinity, and the venal
seed of “intimidation” at its core.
For decades, it has been clear that how one perceives
the male, both ideal and less so, has played a significant role in determining
who occupies the Oval Office. In 2000, when advisers put Al Gore in a tan suit,
as a way to soften his image as ‘preacher,’ in comparison with George W. Bush’s
Texas swagger, something happened in my reporter’s gut that told me this was
not a good sign for Gore, my clear choice for president. In 2004, when Kerry
was pilloried in the swift-boat ads, once again the Republicans strutted their capacity,
willingness and surgical precision to ‘go for the jugular’ of the Viet Nam vet
and eventual war protester. Even in the midst of the Iraq war, yet still not recovered
from the devastation of 9/11, Bush was victorious. And then came Obama, the
Roman Candle of prophetic promise, the first black candidate with so much
charm, charisma, intellect, grace and an almost mythical aura and after John McCain
defended his integrity, authenticity and legitimacy in the face of a racist
Muslim charge, he triumphed over the former prisoner of war. The over-reach by
the McCain camp in selecting Palin contributed negatively to his demise at the
ballot box.
In 2012, when Obama faced Romney, and outed his recorded
embarrassment at a fund raiser, there was a tension between the
masculinity/power/ of the corporate elite against the intellectual elite on the
heels of an economic recovery on the horizon, following the 2008 collapse.
However power is perceived by the people is an integral, if highly subjective
and amorphous component, of the eventual outcome of the presidential race. Whether
that ‘power’ is deemed to be strong enough to stand on the world stage in the
face of world leaders, both allies and enemies, is more than a minimal
determinant of the result. And should one candidate actually ‘score’ a lethal
blow on the opponent, in the eyes of the people, as if the race were a re-enactment
of the traditional western movie, his poll numbers almost invariable rise. That
blow might come from an especially pungent ad, or from a debate line that stops
the opponent in his tracks. The candidate who both “wears” the uniform of power
in a manner than is congruent with the expectations, needs, aspirations and
fears of the majority of voters and expresses and incarnates both the image and
the words and the projected promise and hope of the people has an edge in the campaign.
The race for the White House is the apocryphal epitome
of how power is envisioned, how power is about to be deployed and how that power
is to serve, ironically and paradoxically, as a surrogate for the profound
feelings of powerlessness of the majority of people. Naturally, this symbol of
power, especially in a culture that is personality-addicted, star-gazed,
gossip-driven, and even if merely cardboard-cut-out sketched, takes on to a
large degree both the aspirations and the fears of the people.
Projection of both the ideals and worst fears of the
mass of people are, of course, the stuff of attitudes, beliefs and behaviours
that pull levers, mark ballots, write cheques and staff phone banks for
candidates. And projections are, by definition, unconscious, rendering the
whole process much more than is ever depicted by the empirical data in which
the national media tread water.
After seven decades of working for, beside, among, and
sometimes with various male teachers, coaches, principals, bosses, CEO’s,
bishops and archbishops, it is clear that the quality, the resilience, the
androgyny and the sheer confidence and spine of the male leaders, and thereby
their respective organizations, have been and continue to be in a struggle to
either replace or to find for the first time their individual spine.
Males, over the last half century, in families, schools,
churches, colleges and especially in corporations including the military, the justice
system, and the medical profession have demonstrated a missing and balancing
trait. Call it spine, or call it courage, or call it confidence, or call it
equanimity. And we/they have built their little empires on the quick-sand of
their paranoia. Of course, the degree and depth of this paranoia varies
significantly. Yet the most significant aspect of its ubiquity is its denial by
the very men whose deportment, attitudes and beliefs reveal it.
While the culture of the education edifice has tended
to integrate both men and women, at least in the classroom, to a far higher
degree than in many sectors, the culture of the military, the church and the
corporation is so tilted in the direction of paranoid patriarchy as to justify
the formal charge from a Canadian writer and law professor. Resurfacing in the
website, The Ink (September 22, 2020), the website authored by Anand Girdharadas,
Joel Bakan, author of the previously famous book and documentary entitled The
Corporation, in which he called big business psychopathic, Bakan has resurfaced
with The New Corporation in which he
argues that the psychopaths have learned fraudulent kindness.
Picking up on a story from a woman attending a book
signing, Girdharadas heard her words: What you are describing in your
book-these moves by corporations to hurt society while making show of doing
good—this is what abusive men do. They hurt you while telling you they love
you. I know this because I survived one.
He then recalled those words, upon learning of Bakan’s
latest project. His website pays tribute to Bakan in these words:
(Joel Bakan) has reported a sweeping story of how
corporations began to recognize their
reputation as abusers and began to hug their communities tighter while hurting
them more and more. The hugs enabled the hurt. The promises that things would
be different helped keep things the same.
The excerpt from the Bakan project on The Ink website
focuses on the huge sums of money being spent on an industry that teaches
corporations how to deal with the first signs of discontent among workers, in order
to ward off any and all initiatives that might lead to worker organization,
especially unions. In addition, it details the development of highly
sophisticated technology that monitors every move of every worker, in a
determined thrust to get more work out of every worker with, even chiding them
for going too slowly. Corporations have even generated computer games in which
each worker is placed in competition with his/her co-workers, on a screen displayed
in a supervisor’s office. They have also installed vending machines with
individual packets of pain killers on the workplace floor, so that workers can
continue to work, while in pain.
Patriarchic paranoia is such a radio-active component
of the North American culture, and is so embedded in the very ‘soil’ of that
culture, that given the public discourse about all things visible, measurable,
empirically verifiable, including poll numbers, profit and loss statements,
share prices, class sizes, parish sizes and collection plate numbers, sales
data, views and likes on any webpage, it is little wonder that it is rarely
mentioned in polite company. There are other reasons for its meager exposure.
The power structure is dominated by male figures, not only in numbers of persons, and in size of incomes
for the same work, but so are the premises on which the culture operates.
These observations, while exposed in Bakan’s The New
Corporation, have been carpeting the television and phone screens in epic
proportions since the day trump slid down that escalator to announce his
candidacy. One can reasonably assume a similar parallel culture in which he
operated his business venture bore the same signature of paranoia, mistreatment
of workers, tenants, potential purchasers, investors, and casino patrons. All
the while seducing the customer with the promise of care, trump has become the
master of not the deal, as he would have us believe, but rather the “seduction”.
And there are millions of Americans, polls put their numbers as high as 40%,
who have been steeped in the koolaid of this highly patriarchal, yet also profoundly
paranoid, masculinity.
Promises that vastly exceed delivery, character
assassinations that trumpet pugilistic muscle, pronouncements that prophesy
premature end of COVID-19, and the warped-speed delivery of vaccinations, the
efficacy of hydroxychloroquine and ingesting bleach, encasing children in
cages, trumpeting violence while masquerading as the law and order candidate…the
litany will be the subject of doctoral theses for decades…all of this as
evidence of an empty, frightened, paranoid man the worst representative of
masculinity to have sat in the Oval Office.
And
yet the travesty of this paranoid patriarchy is not confined to the Oval Office.
Like COVID-19 itself, it spreads itself through masks, meetings, phone calls,
video conferences, over dinners and drinks, across social media and into the stock
markets, the corporate board rooms, and into the ecclesial offices of priests,
bishops. It is not detectible by any known instruments to science, including
even the most advanced technologies tracking the movements, and even the
emotions of corporate workers. It is not measurable on the radar screens of
aircraft controllers, nor on the MIR machines in the most advanced hospitals, nor
through their CAT-scans. There is no therapeutic that mediates its influence,
especially among cells of men that congregate around the images and the personages
of power. There is no research project that is dedicated to producing immunity
to its ravages, and there is little hope that the millions of men currently
imprisoned in its leg-irons will even search for a key to unlock their own
encasement.
The NRA while not totally funded by paranoid
patriarchs, nevertheless, has a preponderance of paranoid patriarchs at its
head as does the current Department of Justice, led, tragically, by one of the
more surprising cultists. Clearly, the Department of Health and Human Services
has fallen prey to the overt and covert seduction, as has the COVID-19 task
force, along with the Republic male Senators who will confirm their hallowed
leader’s nomination for the Supreme Court. According to the latest revelations
from the inside of the Mueller Report, that group of investigators too fall
victim to the self-imposed emasculation in failing to probe trump’s tax returns
and to subpoena the ‘great man’ himself, in order to fully declare his obstruction
of justice.
Self-emasculation, among males, is merely the opposite
side of the same coin that carries the stench of the macho, narcissistic alpha
male. And the emasculated men are themselves, like many women, victims of the
paranoid patriarchy. They have become frightened that they will be exposed as
wimps but those very men who are themselves, addicted to the masking of their
own paranoia with bravado. And they give in to both the radical feminists and the
paranoid patriarchs.
“Real Women,” are those evangelical Christians whose
subservience to men is biblically based in their literal interpretation of
scripture and who cheer-lead their patriarchs blind to the paranoia that infects
their male identity. Radical feminists, on the other hand, so frighten many
already emasculated men in positions of authority and responsibility that they
can and do demand a kind of absolute, zero-tolerance set of rules and regulations
as their way of securing the personal safety and sanctity of their sisters and
their professional reputations and careers. Relationships between men and
women, in all formal and informal organizations, at the individual level, take
both parties to exist. And for the notion that inevitably and predictably, in
each case in which a complaint is filed, the male is the perpetrator, without full
investigation, is unconscionable. And too many men, whether emasculated or pontifical
or more likely both, want to escape any messiness that would attend any
investigation. Shame, embarrassment, public scorn and contempt is one of the
primary, if not the sole, avoidance of paranoid patriarchs. And that shame can be
either or both personal or organizational.
It would be unfair to the paranoid patriarchy to
divide the emasculated from the pontifical given that each trait depends,
darkly and sadly, on the other side of the coin. Domination as exhibited by men
like trump only masks deep and abiding insecurity and fear, while emasculation
prefers a more ‘contrite’ and potentially even more seductive an approach to
the world, to their careers and to the women in their lives.
Only if and when men come to full acknowledgement of
their/our fear, insecurities, and yes even paranoia, will they/we open to the gift
of authenticity that needs no bravado, dissembling, false promises, and suffocating
sycophancy. Nor with they/we depend on a mask of emasculation as our way of
saying we are not like those others who currently govern the United States.
Authentic masculinity, without doubt, is definitely on the ballot on November 3
and the world is watching.
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