I was surprised by Bill Moyers' recent show airing taped conversations between LBJ and his advisers about the Vietnam War. I had naively supposed that these men believed at least some of their Cold War rhetoric -- the 'Domino Theory', and so on. But it was clear from the tapes that everyone involved knew the war would be a disaster for all concerned. They saw with crystal clarity precisely what would happen. They knew the 'Domino Theory' was hokum (as events proved), and that the United States had nothing to gain by the war and much to lose.
None of them wanted to escalate. Yet they all kept coming up against the same -- apparently insuperable -- obstacle: if they didn't escalate the war the American people would think they were weak. Furthermore, they thought, the world would think America -- despite having the largest military establishment in the world and enough bombs to destroy every human being on the planet -- was weak for not attacking a small Third World nation with an infinitesimal fraction of our firepower.
This is what it means to be macho: you have to be a compulsive bully because of the fear of looking weak to other males with the same inner dread. In any potential conflict situation you're always too cowardly to make tough, intelligent choices. You kill anything that moves, you swagger and boast, you rush blindly into disaster ("theirs not to reason why/theirs but to do or die"), you never stop to think things through (that's 'dithering'), or respond to reality and change your mind (that's 'flip-flopping') You 'stay the course' no matter how idiotic that course may be, because you're scared silly that some other guy who's even more uptight about looking weak than you are will call you a wuss, wimp, sissy, or girly-man.
You don't have the guts to say, "Are you crazy? We're not going to do anything that stupid!"
To make matters worse, you don't even have the guts to save the next generation from the same blind stupidity and cowardice. You'll raise your son to be 'all boy', that is loud, obnoxious, insensitive, egocentric, arrogant, belligerent, and dull. From the moment of birth you will want to know what gender not only your kid but any other kid is, so if it's a boy you can train him properly to take his place in a bygone world of perpetual hand-to-hand combat. You'll talk louder to the infant, treat it more roughly, make sure it has the proper tunnel vision to function well in, say, 5th century Mongolia, or 9th century Scotland, or 20th century Somalia.
We live in a world today in which the problems we face are all planetary. Where hiding behind national boundaries is ultimately suicidal. A world in which conventional warfare -- army vs. army in pitched battle -- exists only in the movies, TV, and video games. A world in which women are outnumbering men not only in colleges, but in all the professions, because they aren't mentally crippled by the overwhelming irrelevancy of traditional male gender training -- a training that robs those imbued with it of the mental flexibility necessary to deal with the complex world we actually inhabit. Making boys macho today is condemning them to irrelevance.
(To understand the cultural paradigm shift we're undergoing today -- the shift that both Right-Wing fundamentalists and the Taliban have resisted so fiercely, see my website for information on The Chrysalis Effect: the Metamorphosis of Global Culture).
This won't make me popular - I put a lot (half?) of the blame right at the feet of women. Sure there was a time when brawn meant almost everything. That time has passed in much of the 1st world. Yet, at the top, where it counts, women are under-represented (anyone need data for that?). Sure there is the significant burden of gestation & nursing, but everyone has some excuse for why they fail to rise to their full capability. Its time for women to stop making excuses (well all of us really... another topic), destroy the glass ceiling and take the lead. Please!
Funny, and yet true.
I love men, I really do, but as long as they lead in a vacuum, we are ever victims to their tyrrany.
A strong sense of masculine pride or exhilarating sense of power or strength
From the article: "This is what it means to be macho: you have to be a compulsive bully because of the fear of looking weak to other males with the same inner dread."
Ivory tower elitists would argue that displaying power is optional, but I guess they never grew up as part of an economic class who feared incarceration for some petty offence. If you grew up under the shadow of the threat of your personal destruction by law enforcement, you'd see things differently.
Also, another false assumption is that machismo is a contrivance. It is not necessarily so, and furthermore, it doesn't even need a word, because authentic power is non-conceptual. Seeing an anti-masculine agenda stated so bluntly, and this time by men instead of women raises my level of vigilance. I am no chump and I have a social cortex as massive as Einstein's parietal lobes.
Most law enforcement personnel aren't a direct threat, but some are too aggressive or confuse the separation of the duties of law enforcement and the justice system. I just want to be clear so that it doesn't appear that I'm condemning the police. I definitely am not saying that because their work is necessary.
But those who take joy or are motivated financially or professionally by incentives for drug policy enforcement have a conflict of interests. Also, I disagree with the mission of the DEA and cases where drugs are the primary objective rather than the security of society.
Where illegal weapons and ammunition are used, conspicuously brandished, concealed and carried, or cached in substantial quantities, I do not make any defense for such groups. There should be no group challenging the monopoly on force which belongs to law enforcement. Security is the primary role of law enforcement, not drug policy enforcement.
Machismo, which used to increase a troop's hunting and gathering range (while also setting men up for a one in three chance of being brutally murdered by rival males) now threatens to destroy us as a species and a planet. If we don't find a way to use both nature and nurture to breed out violent male posturing and the mindless need to dominate, we'll soon be as plentiful as dinosaurs. We need to stop behaving like Chimps (nasty creatures!) and start behaving like Bonobos (make love, not war!) That means women need to take responsibility for transforming human culture by refusing to enable male violence. And we DO enable it : machismo would have disappeared eons ago if we didn't.
In some maddening way, the diplomatic relations between countries is apparently still conducted as a juvenile playground game where tits and tats are counted, tallied, and paid back in equal portion... Even as we all grow up and mature and learn to behave like adults, we continue to conduct foreign affairs as if we were all on a playground in grade school still.
Where does crazy risky behavior happen every day, robbing the entire world of the fruit of its labor ?
Where is another bastion of machismo and sexual harassment?
Wall Street.
Your articles together make a powerful trilogy of gender politics---I wonder if the 3 of you might join forces and create an article or series that reflects the "meeting of the minds" that your 3 different articles and foci suggest.