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Men and their discontents

Dear Camille,
I would never join the Promise Keepers, but I'm puzzled by the negative press attention the organization gets. Most of PK's message seems to be about racial reconciliation and male familial responsibility. The same people who make these comments didn't dare make any negative comments about the Million Man March, even though Louis Farrakhan is an anti-Semite (and a loon). I'll be interested in your comments.
Puzzled

Dear Puzzled,
The Promise Keepers represent a genuine populist movement -- which of course the upper-middle-class liberal gatekeepers of the major media and special-interest groups are doing everything in their power to defame and destroy. The American left, with its condescending stereotypes of proletarian victimhood, has been out of touch with popular sentiment for 35 years.
I am enjoying tremendously the way the national spotlight on Patricia Ireland, president of the National Organization for Women, has coolly revealed her smug, arrogant and painfully limited processes of thought. As the most outspoken critic of the Promise Keepers, she overplayed her hand by appearing on too many back-to-back TV shows, where she came off priggish and paranoid. Her blatant hostility to and incomprehension of religion demonstrate why feminism, after its late-1960s resurgence, quickly lost three-quarters of its potential constituency among the great mass of ordinary women.
Like the poet Robert Bly's mythic "Iron John" back-to-nature movement in the early 1990s, which orthodox feminists glibly derided, the Promise Keepers have correctly diagnosed that the contemporary crisis in sexual relations is partly due to a failure of male nerve. The gradual transition after World War II from an industrial to a service-sector economy (from muscles to computers) has progressively distanced and compromised the definitions of manhood that once came so easily from the general culture.
The rise of women in the professional world in the past three decades (which had less to do with the organized women's movement -- despite widespread claims to the contrary -- than with the brash new spirit of my baby-boom generation) eroded men's traditional sense of identity as the family's primary protector and provider. The anti-military bias of the post-Vietnam years, as well as the nonstop bombardment of male-bashing from mainstream and academic feminism, has further weakened the social prestige of masculinity, which has survived only through the media proxies of competitive sports and action-adventure movies.
Masculinity, much as bitterly anti-male ideologues like Gloria Steinem, Marilyn French and Susan Faludi may detest and fear it, is something real, positive and, yes, natural. When it is denigrated and denied in a culture, boys spend a lifetime trying to be men. It is other men, not women, who set the rules of manhood. Women's complaints will always be endless, since men can never be women. Men who listen only to women have castrated themselves.
I think that the enormous rise in the incidence of male homosexuality in modern Western culture is partly due to a collapse of the father figures, which has led to gays' often tragically unfulfilled longing for male bonding. By inviting and encouraging emotional, tactile brotherhood among men (even as they overtly oppose homosexuality on biblical grounds), the Promise Keepers may be doing a great service to their sons and their sons' sons. By committing themselves to their families -- if they can honor their oaths -- they may halt the escalation of divorce that has broken so many homes and so many children's hearts.
Whether the Promise Keepers do indeed -- in Patricia Ireland's apocalyptic worst-case scenario -- portend a reactionary Christian assault on the body politic remains to be seen. History shows that massive spiritual revivals are a fundamental, recurrent element in culture. While vapid, chirpy gay activists congratulate themselves for the Great Lesbian Leap Forward of Ellen DeGeneres' coming out on prime-time TV, there may unfortunately be deep, slow-moving forces at work like those that led to Christianity's triumph over cosmopolitan, sexually permissive, but ethically weak late-paganism during the Roman empire. One person's "tolerance" is another person's "moral anarchy." Secular humanism, as evidenced by its slide into the nihilistic ironies of poststructuralism and postmodernism, may not be spiritually sufficient or sustaining for most people in an increasingly complex and impersonal age.
The Million Man March in Washington, D.C., two years ago -- an amazingly moving event on live TV (as well as on the eerily deserted streets of Philadelphia that day) -- was grotesquely minimized and distorted by the national newsmagazines and network news shows, which foolishly provided yet more proof that Muslim ideas and aspirations can rarely be presented fairly by the American media, with their in-house, lockstep biases. Since its origins in the 1930s, the Nation of Islam, despite its sometimes bloody internal conflicts, has done infinitely more good than harm in the African-American community and beyond.
Liberals have themselves to blame for their fascist and ultimately self-defeating attempt to silence Louis Farrakhan by disrupting and blocking his on-campus appearances in the 1980s, when the zeal for speech codes was intensifying. All that did was to drive his anti-Semitic sentiments underground, beneath the national radar screen, where they spread unchecked and unchallenged among working-class blacks. Despite Farrakhan's substantive and praiseworthy achievements among the poor and dispossessed, there is reason for urgent concern about his inner circle's perpetuation of inflammatory ancient stereotypes. For sweeping historical background, I recommend Joel Carmichael's "The Satanizing of the Jews: Origin and Development of Mystical Anti-Semitism" (1992).
The lazy media seem to think that anti-Semitism can be stopped by constantly flashing photographs of concentration camps, but without historical perspective, such appeals to emotion are strategically weak. What led to Hitler's obsession with "the Jewish problem"? We need more and better history courses at every level of American education. Objective facts -- whose existence is denied by the head-in-the-sand school of Michel Foucault -- are the only answer to propaganda.
Dear Professor Paglia,
Because you recently discussed her in this column I decided to read about the photographer Margaret Bourke-White. In one photograph of Bourke-White at work she is seen bravely positioned on one of the gargoyles of New York City's Chrysler building, 61 stories above ground, taking pictures of the New York skyline. She went as far as she could to see something never seen before, and to show it. She risked her life for art. That was 43 years ago. Today another skyscraper gargoyle plays an important role in art but the message is quite definitely not the same.
I'm sure you've seen the new video for "Anybody Seen My Baby" by the Rolling Stones. In it, Keith Richards plays his guitar on a gargoyle, high above New York's streets. He appears a solitary figure, fearless, cocky -- like the gargoyle, sly, a little nasty, dangerous. But according to VH1's "Pop-Up Videos," Richards' gargoyle is fake, a Hollywood construct approximately 18 feet in height. Richards' personal risk, unlike Bourke-White's, was minimal.
I'm not surprised to see fake, computer-generated techie fluff from a group like the Spice Girls -- I even appreciate it on a certain level -- but from a rock group like the Rolling Stones I expect rock-hard, deep and dark, nitty-gritty reality, and I think that requires some involvement from the artists. They seem to put no imaginative effort in their videos. There is no attempt toward greatness. No experimentation. No wandering beyond the limits. They hire boring, mediocre directors when there are a slew of inventive, original people out there, burning with bright ideas as they fade away into obscurity. Stan Brakhage is still alive, for instance. So instead of looking for Mick's "baby," why aren't they looking for the great undiscovered geniuses of film? Why are the Rolling Stones playing things so safe? Surely you, a Stones scholar, can shed some light on this subject.
Damion

Dear Damion,
I am delighted by your tribute to Margaret Bourke-White. But surely you don't mean that my idol, Keith Richards, whom I have called "the modern Coleridge," should be forced to walk the plank of a skyscraping gargoyle just for documentary grit? By that Draconian standard, stunt doubles would be out of work, and most of the Screen Actors Guild would be in traction or six feet under!
Alas, the artistic renaissance of rock videos seems long over, as testified by MTV's banal adolescent fare and VH1's vandalizing of videos with smarmy pop-up text. The Stones were masters of image when it mattered, through brilliant still photography in the 1960s and early '70s -- the brooding, grainy album covers by David Bailey; the colossal, charismatic posters with which I plastered my walls at home and work.
Thank you, thank you for mentioning the great Stan Brakhage! The experimental films that I saw in college (at the State University of New York at Binghamton from 1964 to 1968) had an enormous impact on my thinking and literally reconfigured my brain: Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, early Andy Warhol, Shirley Clarke. Clarke, who died last month, in fact visited our campus to present her just-released 1967 film, "A Portrait of Jason" (a pioneering documentary about a gay black male hustler) to a hushed, packed theater.
America's experimental film directors were true cultural radicals. My direct experience with their fascinatingly varied work made me all the more impatient with the tangled verbosity and aridity of European poststructuralism, which yuppified eggheads in academic mouse holes still confuse with authentic leftism.
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