Care for each other

I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data yesterday. The spreadsheet had not been updated when I looked a week ago. It has now been updated to Friday. In the last four weeks the new cases per day peaked at 1325, 1558, 1733, and 1976. Cases are rising and are now above the peak in April of 2020. It was the rise to that first peak that prompted states, including Michigan, to issue lockdown orders. Now that the case rate is higher than a year ago Michigan’s Gov. Gretchen Whitmer says new government mandates are not in the plans. I take that to mean she has been thoroughly cowed by the Republican led legislature. Yeah, the legislature and state Supreme Court took away the law that allowed her to declare emergency measures. But there are other laws she could invoke. And she hasn’t. The leadership in both Wayne and Oakland Counties, the two most populous counties in Michigan, have issued mask mandates for schools. I’m glad someone is stepping up. Thankfully, deaths per day is not following what happened in March and April 2020. After several weeks with deaths per day mostly in the single digits, in the last three weeks deaths per day peaked at 15, 23, and 14. That compares to 170 deaths in each of two days in April 2020. Even if one doesn’t die from COVID it can be a nasty experience with symptoms lasting for months and perhaps for the rest of one’s life. Getting vaccinated is much easier, safer, and cheaper than trying to ease the symptoms of the virus. Back in January 2020 I wrote about the introduction to the book Stiffed, The Betrayal of the American Man by Susan Faludi, published in 1999. I wrote about a couple of the early chapters in April 2020. As I read through the book I intended to write about each chapter of the 600 page book. Yeah, that didn’t happen. This was my “car” book, one that I left in the car to read while waiting, such as before a movie or concert or in a doctor’s office. There weren’t movies or concerts in theaters to wait for, and I got tired of lugging a heavy book around, so I didn’t finish the 600 pages until a week ago. I also stopped carrying around a pencil to mark pages and passages of interest. That means I won’t have another eight posts to discuss each chapter. Instead I will touch on those chapters and then delve into the final chapter’s summary. Which will be similar to the first chapter and my first post in which Faludi laid out her basic ideas. In my second post I talked about Faludi’s chapter on work. That contrasted a shipyard that did great work with a space contractor where the men were lost in the corporate cubicle farm with no real understanding of how they fit into creating the final product. My third post was about the contrast between the Citadel, an all male school, and its first female student. The men didn’t want attention from the outside because they feared the world would not understand how comfortable they were taking care of each other and would assume they were all gay. That contrasted with the Spur Posse, whose members were after fame. Additional chapters were about: A group of Cleveland Browns fans trying to keep the team from skipping town and the betrayal they felt in the process. Corporate sports became interested in only money. The Promise Keepers organization, a national religious movement for men. There were both regional rallies held in stadiums and in-home groups of men supporting each other. Faludi sat in on one of these groups. The men talked about what they didn’t get from their fathers and how they tried to see Jesus as a father figure that met their needs. They found the second and third rallies in their area were the same as the first – the message didn’t build. The national organization fell apart. The local groups lost interest. Veterans of the Vietnam war talked about going to war to earn their manhood and how thoroughly the war failed to provide that. Faludi provides a strong indictment of that war and how disastrously it was waged. The men talked about having to deal with that disaster. I probably read that chapter more than a year ago so can’t fill in the details without spending more time than I’d like. That chapter was followed by one discussing how men were portrayed in movies. That also included a discussion of President Ronald Reagan, who many times acted as though he was still a character in one of his movies. Also in the discussion were the Rocky and Rambo movies and others like them. They were about a lone soldier out to save the world while trying to get confirmation from a superior officer. Both actor Sylvester Stallone and the scriptwriter had father issues they were trying to work through. Stallone tried to aim his acting in a different direction, but Hollywood and his fans didn’t let him. At the end of the book he is planning Rocky VI. The Branch Davidian complex in Waco, Texas is the next topic. More accurately, it is about the men who assemble at the site every year on the anniversary of the firestorm and why they feel the need to be there. The siege and fire were during Bill Clinton’s presidency. Yet the men were upset with Hillary Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno for emasculating men. They declared white men were the most discriminated against group in the country. The men tended to be troubled by two ideas that went wrong in this case. First is the idea that a man’s purpose is to protect women and children (even if the women don’t need that protection). Second is the idea that men, while not supposed to dominate (which some do quite well), they’re also not supposed to be dominated, which they saw Hillary and Reno doing. The next chapter was about males caught in a display culture. First up was Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins, the crew of Apollo 11 that landed on the moon. The problem was after the trip where NASA put them on display and paraded them around the world. All three of them became so sick of constantly being on display they quit NASA and never went into space again. Then there are three brothers trying to prefect their gangsta image. Yeah, there was some brutality associated with it, but that got you in front of the cameras. Which was the important thing. But that life either soured or didn’t pan out. The third aspect of display culture was men’s magazines shifting from how to be a man to how to display being a man. Interesting that this discussion included the early years of gay rights and magazines that supported gay men. Alas, they soon shifted to style magazines, a chance for corporations to market to gay men. The last chapter before the close was sixty pages about men in the porn industry. The industry wants one thing from their male stars and any hint of performance anxiety makes that one thing not happen. Along the way porn films are reduced from storylines that require actual acting to just the one act. Female stars rule the industry, so men who don’t do well in the industry blame women. In the closing chapter Faludi discussed her major themes. There was (and maybe still is, I haven’t asked a Millennial) a belief that if a man is loyal to the corporation the corporation will be loyal to the man. Corporate downsizing showed that not to be true. But behind that were men with abandonment issues with their fathers. The father was supposed to demonstrate to the son how to be a man. But the father was caught up at work and couldn’t show that to his son. How to be a man included things such as providing for a family and standing up for what is right and important. Yeah, there have always been fathers missing in action. A failing economy can prompt that. But the decades after WWII had unprecedented prosperity. Fathers had so much to pass on, and didn’t. That left the sons wondering why Dad was so silent. The culture had changed so that men were judged by ornamental terms of how sexy they were, whether they were known in the wider culture, or whether they were a winner. As for that last one, America has always been about winning – we “won the West.” Dominance and being first have always been prized and a times seemed to be all that mattered. Yeah, women are also defined by ornamentation, by glamour. But that has also seen a shift. It used to be something women did for fun and enjoyment. But the glamour industry stole the pleasure and made it a commodity. Mass media molded people into passive roles and emphasized consuming. In seeking a way out, a way to revolt, women had an advantage – the could identify an enemy, which was men, or at least patriarchy. Why aren’t men rising up against this betrayal? Part of the answer is men are taught to confront a problem – identify the enemy and defeat it. But in this case who is the enemy? Themselves? So maybe solving problems through confrontation is not the answer. What is then? Gay men might provide an example. When the AIDS pandemic hit gay men mobilized to take care of gay men. Quite quickly they built a network of clinics, drug buyer’s clubs, legal and psychological services, political action networks, transportation systems, home care, buddy visits, meal deliveries, and hospices. They had a job to do and did it. Yeah, gays teaching men how to be men. A way out of the mess is to forget about masculinity and focus on humanity. Don’t worry about being a man. Ignore the masculinity scorecard society has given men. Do the work of a man – which happens to be the same as the work of a woman. Thank you, feminism! And that work is social responsibility. That can be summed up easily: care for each other. Some men are becoming rebels through figuring out how to do just that.