Other Topical Matters

I do wish I could write these posts earlier in the day, when my mind is fresher and sunnier, and I think more reasonable, than it is at night. But I can't.


I have kept out of commenting on the sexual harassment mania, which I don't consider myself as having much to do with anyway. I'd be happy enough if other guys would stop doing it, not because I am so virtuous, but because I am worried that for some men these harassing-type acts, which I am incapable of even mildly trying to engage in, kind of work, or at least have worked in the past, in the sense of achieving, or getting a lot closer to achieving what they want than men who are subject to the same lusts but are constrained to be appropriate and inoffensive on every occasion. Obviously the idea is that with very few and very special exceptions, the run of men should never even be thinking about these things in any work or ordinary social environment, especially ones that are supposed to be professional and serious. People presenting themselves as reasonable and enlightened seem to think this is a completely reasonable expectation to have, as are the base principles on which it has to be constructed. If this is not entirely right, it is obvious that under strong enough social pressure and coercion most people will outwardly at least conform to the expected behavior. Most people I am sure have always considered me to be a completely sexless and vitally dead person, if mostly an inoffensive one. Yet today even I was at the grocery store and when a woman I found attractive passed in front of me my brain as if involuntary launched into the intro to a 1970s disco song.









I caught myself fairly quickly and thought of this post I was working on and all of the scandals and how the juvenile, entitled mentality I was indulging in was the very scourge all the better people were so up in arms about and I suppressed the beat. At the same time I really do believe that the reasons I have never reached full adult emotional maturity, developed gravitas, was unable to or uninterested in pursuing a career with the necessary doggedness, all relate in some way to my never having been daring or aggressive in the pursuit of erotic desires.  Though I probably wouldn't bother doing it at my age now, there have been numerous occasions over the years where I wondered if I shouldn't be taking testosterone supplements or other drugs to increase my aggression, capacity for envelope-pushing, and all-around combativeness, qualities that, since I did not have them and was rarely able to get what I wanted not merely with women but in every important and contested area of life, seemed desirable to me.


I was almost certainly warped in these matters by the environment in which I grew up in the 1970s. I never witnessed anything explicitly sexual or, god forbid, was the subject of any abuse myself, but I certainly developed a sense, mostly from my father and his friends, that men who were brash and bright and alive enough were constant objects of feminine desire, and later on I suppose implicitly active participants in the great sensual arena. The scandalous thing to current sensibilities is that these men were all high school teachers. Several of them, including my father, ending up marrying or cohabitating with much younger former students, at least for a time. But this happened near the end. All through my childhood we constantly had my father's female students over at our house, frequently as baby sitters, but often for socializing. He was still pretty young at the time, as he is only 21 years or so older than I am, but he was married, and the talk with some of these girls struck me even as a young boy as pretty sophisticated and suggestive, much more so than anything I would have seen on television, and certainly more charged than any conversations he had with my mother, who was not a lively talker and endured these gatherings (which often included the other lecherous teachers and occasionally even a bright male student or two who my father liked) rather blankly. Many years after the fact it was suggested to me that the reason my father had rather suddenly moved to Maine in the mid-80s was spurred by a situation of this type that was no longer found tolerable, which I had been too self-absorbed to consider at the time, if I had even cared about it. By the early 90s he got out of teaching altogether and pursued several other careers with some success, as he has always been an energetic and forceful man, if many people would not consider him a decent or moral one. In temperament he actually has quite a bit in common with Trump, albeit obviously on a smaller scale.


It is now Friday night and I have to publish what I have. I have another tidbit to write about in relation to these cases but maybe I will address that in a shorter post. It involves one of the women who has come forward with allegations (one of the milder cases, for sure) who grew up in my neighborhood and went to my elementary school, and how what I know of how she and her family operated even 35-40 years ago colors my interpretation of her story, even though the guy accused was clearly in the wrong as far as it goes. Still, when I heard the name and read the accompanying story, it was not without a little eyeroll too. 

Robert E Lee and Others

While I am not angry about the Confederate statues being taken down, I am not exultant about it either. The responses I have upon each new episode of desecration indicates that I would prefer on the whole that some of them remain standing. It is true that they belong more to the Old America, in which the Civil War was an outsizedly meaningful event in the formation of the national character and mythology, than to the one that is coming into being, but if you are one of those people who retains a strong identification with that old bad America in spite of all its deficiencies, these memorials can have an arresting and even eerily alive quality. I recall when I was in Atlanta, a city that does not have a lot of visible reminders of its pre-1970s self, I was wandering over the grounds of the state house and found half buried among bushes a stone with a memorial on it to a veteran of the Confederacy who later become a judge and had a distinguished career in politics lasting into the 1910s at least. It was pointedly noted at the end of the testimonial that this gentleman was the embodiment of the spirit of the Old South, at which point, if you didn't know it before, you knew this was a very, very bad man, racist to the core, complacent in the face of injustice and all the rest of it, yet to me there was a certain force emanating from this old bronze plate that was more powerful than that of the perfectly pleasant and prosperous modern city I had spent the previous several hours walking around in. The scale of the war, of the death and destruction, the absolute and seemingly necessary quality of it and the acceptance of this as a fact largely on both sides during and for many years afterwards are circumstances that I cannot dismiss that easily, even admitting that the perpetuation of race-based slavery was a motivation for some portion of the most dogged of the fighters. Yet in the aftermath these were largely welcomed back by the men they had fought against as fellow Americans, and several of their leaders admitted more or less by the same to the pantheon of American heroes. The Hall of Fame for Great Americans in the Bronx, for example, an artifact of the early to mid 20th century (i.e. it figured prominently in the reference books of my childhood) that still exists, albeit in a neglected state, enshrined Robert E Lee as early as 1900 and Stonewall Jackson as late as 1955 (though the Hall has been largely forgotten since the 1970s, someone alerted New York governor Andrew Cuomo to the presence of the busts of the two Confederates there, which he has duly ordered removed, though I cannot tell if this order has been carried out yet).


Robert E Lee himself of course by 1950 had famously come to be considered by much of the establishment and book publishing class to be one of the most outstanding Americans of all time. Digging through some of my favorite childhood books that I have saved confirms that I and the many others who have weighed in on this were not deceived. Here is the opening paragraph of the Lee entry from the 1968 edition of the Illustrated World Encyclopedia, from which I have taken the reading list I record on my other blog:


"Robert Edward Lee is ranked among the greatest generals. He was one of the best-loved and respected men in American history. During the Civil War he commanded the Confederate army. Though defeated, he became a symbol of the highest courage and devotion."


Most of the books adopt a similar tone. If it were more convenient for me I would do a more extensive inventory of these testimonials, which are almost stupefying to read in the current environment. Here is another snippet from the IWE article, on the immediate aftermath of the surrender at Appomattox:


"When Lee returned from this historic meeting, his men met him with tears in their eyes. They all wanted to touch the hand of their beloved leader, and many men petted Traveller, Lee's big gray horse, which had been with him through the long and terrible years of the war."


While I know I am supposed to take a story like this and dismiss it as sentimental bull---t, even assuming there is as much as 10% in it that is remotely true, there is probably nothing more emotional, in the subdued post-cathartic sense, than the end of a massive war. People today--and I will even limit this to people whose backgrounds are somewhat similar to my own, since perhaps it is not reasonable to expect others to be moved by such scenes from American history--seem to me to be emotional in a histrionical sort of way, but not sentimental, and stories like this don't make much of an impression on them. The salient points that I absorbed about Robert E Lee in the course of my childhood go about as follows:


1. He was the greatest student in the history of West Point and was still held in reverence there as recently as the 1980s, in spite of the now oft-recited circumstance that he earned his greatest renown as the leader of an army opposed to the United States. I always had the impression that down to that time he had been the only cadet to graduate from the Academy without a single demerit, though there seems to be some dispute about that now.


2. His abilities and leadership in own time were as universally acknowledged and admired by significant men as those of almost anyone in recorded history. Most of the extant legends indicate that the men who served under him were unusually devoted to him even in defeat, and even when it was obvious that defeat was inevitable.


3. Though he is criticized endlessly by internet historians especially for his generalship skills, the consensus of him that I grew up with was that his was the most gifted military mind that this country had yet produced.


4. He was admired, in a similar manner to George Washington, with whom his life had many parallels, for his patrician bearing and manners. This is run down now because the social position and way of life out of which this arose is so bound up with slavery.


There are probably other things, but I'm going to end this post and move on. Maybe I will come back to it at some point. After all, I can't pretend that I am doing anything more than writing down musings and trying to get through this part of my life, if I ever get through it.


On the whole I am not persuaded that many of the qualities for which Lee was admired were not in fact admirable, and certainly I don't think he comes off terribly unfavorably in comparison with most contemporary leaders and powerful people. I do believe these latter are genuinely against slavery as a social institution, not that that is a particularly risky or otherwise inconvenient position to hold in present society.


For all their faults, the old books seem to have the intention, at least where the likes of me are concerned, of wanting their readers to grow up to be somewhat strong and successful men, the future backbone of a great and proud nation. Whatever role the correctors of the historical record envision people like me fulfilling in the future, it is clearly not as rousing or inspiring as this.




I couldn't even get to Stonewall Jackson, who was an interesting case himself. He was renowned for a piety that seems to have approached biblical intensity, yet he was a master of the arts of war. Of course the link between fanatical religious belief and a talent for military endeavors has a long history, one that seems to be underappreciated among the modern educated classes. The professed hatred of these people that has become fashionable I guess seems to be heartfelt enough in some cases. I should like to have it, since it appears to be empowering in those who do have it, but I don't seem to be able to be pushed to such an extreme position if I haven't started on that way from an early age.




I am going to try to get something up every Friday at least, even if it is only a fragment...