Sep 25 2007
Ruminations on the State of Our World
As you can see, I’ve recently changed the “look and feel” of my site. The image isn’t an original from yours truly, but it seems apropos for the times we live in. Today (Saturday) as I looked out the door, I saw a sight you don’t usually see in Los Angeles. Large heavy dark clouds drifted overhead and the ground was wet from last night’s rain. You could smell the sweat of the desert clay fresh from the downpour. Like so many times these past few years, a weighty ominous feeling seemed to press down on me; the clouds reflecting my mood or my mood reacting to the rain clouds. I don’t know which.
Oftentimes I feel as though we’ve been cut adrift from our moorings and we’re drifting out into some vast unknown ocean leading somewhere or nowhere but knowing it could only end in tragedy. I’ve been silent these past couple months on this blog because I bemoan the state of America. I know with certainty that I am powerless over the destiny of the America I so desperately love, the America that I barely recognize anymore, now falling, so fragmented from her former glory…
… and yet there is still hope…
If God watches the watchmen, the watchmen do not watch in vain.
Earlier this week I decided to study at the local cafe. It’s a small establishment populated with wide-eyed college students and your typical rebellious artistic characters with more color in their hair than on their canvases. This place seated at the corner of our local community college is where I go to become anonymous, read and study. Most of the students are hunched over their triple-shot lattes, high on caffeine and mental overload, and they speak in these low secretive hushes. At times I get the sense I’ve just entered a library despite the constant 80’s and 90’s music playing over head.
I ordered one of my iced Americanos with a dash of vanilla syrup and settled comfortably at a long, diner-like counter with my book when snippets of a conversation next to jarred me from my book. They sat at a smallish, round glass table; a black woman and a white man.
I was content to ignore them and delve into my own studies, but that wasn’t going to be an option. The woman had a piercing voice that sliced neatly through the near silence. Half the cafe couldn’t help but hear them.
In the snippets I couldn’t ignore, I heard the man say, “I don’t think I’m bad looking. Why won’t you even consider me?”
His pleading set off a thirty minute tirade from the woman. She stirred in a mixture of hardcore emasculation, gratuitous cursing and sprinkled it with a racist victimology; all of which had the subtlety of a sledgehammer. She presented it all as her being cute and witty, and she wanted to show him that she’s a really strong woman. It was understood between both parties that she was above reproach because a) she was black and b) because she had ovaries. Her behavior was justified by who and what she is. Period.
It was one of the worse examples of feminist, multiculturalism gone Frankenstein.
Around twenty minutes into her tirade about his apparent idiocy and the idiocy of others, with her screeching over and over, “But I don’t understand!” I had the gumption to turn around and see just what this lady looked like. She wasn’t particularly beautiful, quite ordinary actually, and I noticed her seated flush and ramrod against the back of her chair with a self-satisfied half-grin on her countenance. The white man’s face was flushed red, unbelievingly still pleading for this woman’s favor even as she rained insult upon insult on his head.
I am saddened to say that this incident is far from unique. In fact, I see incidences similar to this every day. In movies, on TV shows, commercials, at work—virtually every level of society.
The issue of race aside, have we ever stopped to think what kind of society we are propagating when we we produce metallic, almost psuedo-men for women and then hold up that attitude and behavior up as the ideal feminine beauty? I find nothing feminine about it. I do not find it beautiful.
And what kind of men are we producing who squirm and whimper at the rapid insults of a woman? Is this kind of behavior attractive or sexy or desirable in a romantic partner? We see in movies and TV shows and in real life that the insulted male party, as incredulous as it seems, is expected to praise the woman for treating him like dirt. In modern-speak, she’s just being “strong”.
Cable TV’s number one show, The Closer, comes to mind. Here is a woman who deceives everyone, emasculates every man she confronts and everyone man under her command, and the TV show presents that as being sexy with her sweet Southern accent… Egads!
Another good example, if you can call such things “good”, is this supposed family fun movie called Ella Enchanted. It hit the theaters a few years ago, and it was billed as a family movie full of wonder and magic, but instead, viewers were be treated to two and a half hours of Anne Hathaway’s tongue-lashing belittlements at her Prince Charming. I turned it off half way through, especially when Mister Prince Charming showed delight in her obvious willfulness.
Did we ever stop to think what would happen if we reversed a patriarchal society into a matriarchal society? It would have to be uniformly hostile to the masculinity in all its forms.
Masculinity and manhood has degenerated down to dumb, grunting, violent human beings by popular culture. You will quickly come to the conclusion from watching an hour’s worth of TV that manhood is to be measured in the potential or active amount of violence one can inflict on other people. What we watch matters. I know of a whole host of young men who view violence as the measure of their manhood. How could they not? What else in their world tells them otherwise?
The only kind of men that gets semi-decent treatment are the feminine men (not effeminate, but feminine). Throw a dart on the movie screen. Chances are that the male protagonist of the story will be feminine. Tobey Maguire, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Luke Wilson, Ryan Phillippe, and Leonardo Di Caprio to name a few. With a few exceptions, the only masculine actors left on the silver screen are aging giants of the old guard, waiting to be retired. (Is it just me or are our modern male actors always skulking around with pouty faces, all grimace and frowns, as they go around whacking people? And these are the action “heroes” filling our stadium theaters?… oh joy…)
I’m sure the John Wayne’s of the world— the John Wayne’s who in real life bathed his children, raised them, wouldn’t utter a curse word in front of women and children, who drove the speed limit because men just don’t endanger the lives of others— I’m sure those kinds of men are still around. They’re just keeping their heads low to keep it from being lopped off.
You know, come to think of it, the next time I go to a cafe, I’ll be sure to plug my ears with an iPod and just enjoy my book and my Americano. I’m no John Wayne, but I think it’ll also be wise for me to keep my head low…
(More ruminations next week…)