>
>I thought the main emphasis in Alison's post was on the invisibility of
>women as received commentators in the mass media during the global newsfest
>that the New York explosions released. That her points about male violence
>may be familiar enough to risk the role of cliché may be so but
>unfortunately they are also true. Depressingly so.
>
It wasn't the point I chose to address, perhaps because there were plenty
of women at the news desks and reporting from the street on this side
(altho the great talking heads at central were for the most part male).
What I was addressing was an instance of a wider phenomenon that troubles
me. Although we all experience the complexity of our own motivations it's
too easy to reduce any other to simple paradigms . I expect that most of us
do this fromn time to time within whatever group we happen to find
ourselves, and those who don't refrain from doing so by virtue of an effort
at self-censorship. Men compare notes and complain about women, women about
men, Muslims about Jews, Jews about Christians, Brits about USians, social
classes about each other, families about the family across the lane. That's
not likely to change much. What can and must change is confusing this with
thought.
Bush reduces the terrorists to rodents to be smoked from their holes, and
Gloria Borger in US News and World Report says we should stomp on these
cockroaches. Easier to kill if they're not human or fully human.
During the Gulf War the first American pilot to shoot down an Iraqi plane
was interviewed on television shortly after landing. He was asked to
describe the event, which he did. Then the interviewer said: "You must feel
pretty good right now." The pilot, who hadn't looked very cheerful from the
start, said that in fact he felt mostly sad. He had seen himself, he said,
in that pilot--they had the same training, they did the same job, and the
Iraqi probably had a wife and kid on the ground. It was a very moving
moment in the midst of all the celebratory slaughter. For the next several
weeks the interview was rebroadcast--but the part that had so moved me was
edited out.
I'm not accusing Alison of bloodymindedness. I assume she was speaking
carelessly. And I understand the desire to find simple explanations for
monstrous behavior, or for that matter for any human behavior. What I think
we have to live with is that much of human behavior is likely to remain a
mystery, and assuming otherwise, as individuals, genders, nations, etc., is
likely to get us in very serious trouble. In this case a group of educated
young men maintained a fixed homicidal and suicidal trajectory for several
years and carried out their missions in the face not just of an abstraction
like a building, which could have served to mask its human content, but in
the face of the passengers on those planes. To try to understand this, and
all other male violence, in terms of a simple psychosexual paradigm reduces
all of our dignities.
Mark
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