Regina dentata

I was feeling better today. Trotted over to do my workout. Sun was out. Chatted with some guys I know. Moving along nicely. Pretty upbeat, which is a nice change from the last week or so.

Then comes one of the gym's patrons with his long-suffering trainer. And I couldn't blot him out.

He gabs endlessly while the trainer tries to get him to work out. And, as one of the other guys said, "If you overhear him, his conversations basically come down to, 'I'm right and you and everyone else is wrong and let me tell you why.'"

He is an exemplar of the Queen. And it just rubbed me the wrong way and actually made me a little queasy in the stomach. It's not just the style and the timbre of the voice, irritating enough, but the humorless narcissistic content of the rant and its emotional metamessage of shock and dismay and appallment at all the lower forms of life that he is so unjustly exposed to.

God, I don't want to belong to any group that he belongs to. Do they still have room with the androphiles?

Another impressive guy

Robert D. Kaplan, an American journalist who doesn't hate America.

A committed realist with values. I used to read him when I subscribed to The Atlantic Monthly, back before Michael Kelly died and before Jack Beatty and company turned it into yet another organ of Bush Derangement Syndrome.

I have learned much from his pieces on the state of the planet (The Coming Anarchy), on the real role of the media as modern inquisitors (The Media and Medievalism) and how a Western country with a Judeo-Christian tradition like America really has to to comport itself, not forgetting its Greco-Roman past (Warrior Politics). His latest is a description of the American military (Imperial Grunts).

Too lazy to craft a further blurb this morning, so here.

The Boomeronian Captivity of the Shrinks

Despite my affection for Jung, I have found little worth reading by his disciples in the last few years. What was once interesting and fertile now seems formulaic and predictable. Jungians rarely surprise me nowadays. Give them any cultural, political or social topic and the usual outcome is as follows:

This problem is the result of Shadow Projection and/or The Rejected Feminine. The solution is moral equivalence and/or feminization.

I wondered if this cognitive loop were a product of the Boomeronian Captivity of so many analysts or if it stemmed from Jung himself. Both, I suspect. Jung’s political sense was, how shall we say, not acute. Prescinding from the whole Nazi issue, he used to interpret the Cold War as merely some kind of internal split in the Western psyche, shadow projection, etc.

Despite Jungian pretensions to have progressed beyond the mass-mind of "the collective", they seem utterly unconscious of their embeddedness in the left hand side of it. One issue of a local Jungian publication bravely (ha!) placed George Bush and Osama Bin Laden on the same page, suggesting boldly (ha!) that there was some kind of equivalence. A frisson of “speaking truth to power” no doubt made everyone cum. That took about as much courage as telling Fred Phelps that the Pope and Satan were alike.

In the terms of philosopher John Kekes, Jungians have turned their psychology into an ideology: a tight set of concepts that are used to interpret every situation and provide the solution to the problem it constructs. They used to laugh at unimaginative and rigid Freudians for making the Oedipal complex the source of all mental illness. Now look at them.

My favorite Jungian writer, Anthony Stevens, who often will tell the truths that others of his tribe refuse to note, still falls into this loop, meme or trope... whatever... In Archetype Revisited: An Updated Natural History of the Self, he grandly observes that once upon a time, the West knew where evil was, in Nazi Europe or the Communist East, but in the absence of these, searched for a new Evil Other and found Islam. Am I to assume that the National Socialists and the International Socialists were not evil? Or that Islam is just a poorly understood form of ThirdWorld Quakerism?

Burns me, because what always attracted me to Jung was my sense that he accepted reality.

What the Jungian loop assumes is that in any conflict, both sides are equal. (And the Jungians, who transcend these primitive oppositions, are revealed as superior beings, of course, for pointing it out). And so analytical dialogue, amazingly, is the solution. To a hammer, every problem is a nail. I am used to this twaddle from the run of cocoon-dwelling analysts, with the accompanying moral narcissism, but Stevens is usually so otherwise acute. Disappointing.

I suggest that they and he consider the opposition of the Mongol Khan and the Arab Caliph around 1258, when Baghdad was sacked for 40 days and lay in ruins for centuries. Shadow projections may have abounded, and certainly the Feminine was kept in a harem…but so what?

Did it never occur to these people that shadow projection is not always causal? Or that real evil and real enemies exist? Or that psychology has severe limits to its usefulness? Planet Earth, anyone?

Totem animal

Been in a funk the last couple of weeks. Started when I lost my glasses. Hate it when I do that.

Moved to feeling irritable and irritated, lazy, circling, centrifugal, intermittent, eremetic, wasteful, even cowardly. Unhappy with myself, unhappy with the world...despite much evidence to the contrary. I think I'm a bit cyclothymic. Try to keep it all in perspective, not fight it too much, not give in completely.... walk around the paddock with the horse but not become a centaur, though I am tempted to be the conquistador some days.

I know from my history that I marginalize myself in every group I have ever belonged to. I try not to blame the groups too much now, knowing that I always do it. Wrote a poem years ago about the cycle of my exilic longing for home and then needing to escape it.

Feeling strongly my marginality to the city, to many of my countrymen, and to the tribe of gay men. Reading Androphilia and a lot of the gaymale responses to it has not helped, but has only given more language to my edge-dwelling. I feel paradoxically closeted here in the biggest ghetto in the world...well, if not numerically biggest, symbolically.

An outsider looking down from a rocky ledge.

Hence, the title above: totem animals.

Was chatting online with my new pal BDD --a complex and unusual guy who under other circumstances would be a kind of sexual icon for me, but for whom I instead feel a combination of things: curiosity-turned-into-personal-interest, respect, admiration, puzzlement, caution, affection and sympathy. We got into discussing totem animals and, to make a middling story even shorter, I remembered the Mountain Goat, who for years back in the 80's seemed to embody my life. And lately does again. Even though we don't know each other well, BDD is a quick and clever fellow on several levels and he strongly suggested I give the Goat , Oreamnos Americanus, a close look.

The Mountain Goat (Oreamnos americanus), also known as the Rocky Mountain Goat, is a large hoofed mammal found only in North America. Although it resembles a goat it is not a true goat, being in a different genus, related to the antelope. It resides at high elevations and is a sure-footed climber, often resting on rocky cliffs that predators cannot reach.

Not even a true goat, being in a different genus! Fits me.

And yet

Gender, like all archetypal realities, remains mysterious.

Mene mene tekel upharsin

Tony Blankley's article, Is There Writing On The Wall? pretty well lays out the fundamental divide these days: those of us who see "radical Islam" as a major threat to the West, and those who don't.

Every political decision -- from the Iraq war appropriation vote this week, to the Patriot Act, to the status of Guantanamo Prison, to NSA intercepts, to the presidential election -- is seen through our conceptual squint of the threat or non-threat from radical Islam.

And he points out that, once your side is chosen, you hardly ever find people who change their minds. My mind on this subject is laid out at some length in my Doppenganger blog, USMale.

What are men for? continued

Continued from 5 Feb 07. I assume that the evolutionary theory is correct and that the hunter-gatherer society is the primal human organization. “Reading” the male physically and socially, I am hypothesizing that the male gender is meant for three fundamental purposes: procreating, protecting the group from animal and human predators, and providing protein for them by hunting and fishing. Father/mate, warrior, hunter. As I've said, men are made for sex and violence.

I’ve reworked procreation, protection and protein --others say progenitor, protector and provider--into a more vivid, if less, polite alliterative triad: men are made for fucking, fighting and feeding.

We no longer live in hunter-gatherer societies but in vastly complex communities. Men’s purposes remain rooted, I maintain, in these three functions, but how they are enacted has changed.

It’s all written in the male body: the size, muscle and phallus, the specialization indicated in the male brain, and the attitudes and tendencies of the testosterone-endowed. I would expand the triad of fucking, fighting and feeding into power, courage and skill, flowing from the male body, the male heart, and the male brain. No one will accord manhood status to a male who is typically weak, fearful or inept.

Especially in complex societies, a man can compensate for deficits in the triad by specialization. A man with valued skill need not be especially strong or brave. A man with “heart” will be forgiven physical impairment or lack of skill. And a powerful man need not prove his courage or aptitude. But even now, a “man’s man” will show abundance of all three qualities.

Jarring juxtaposition

Came home last night after an evening of very friendly carnality, relaxed and in a better mood than I have been in for some time. Not surprising. Good give-and-take with a man of experience. The male animal is a wondrous beast.

Sat down to check my email and turned on the TV. Before I knew it, I was watching a program on Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge Communist regime in Cambodia in the 1970’s.

As my time and my memories of my evening of play and pleasure were specific, so the stories of those terrible years in “Democratic Kampuchea” were specific. Not only the grand statistics – almost 2 million killed in 5 years—but individual interviews with survivors, who told exactly what happened to them.

Not one…not one…of the leaders of that regime has ever been brought to justice. Wondrous beast indeed.

So…then I went to bed. Another night on Planet Earth.

A group of someones attacks a notsobright man

Taken from the wire services:

WEST SACRAMENTO Apr 18 A train engineer is hospitalized after officials say he was attacked by a mob that dragged him from an Amtrak train it had forced to stop by standing on the tracks.

An Amtrak official says the engineer on the Capitol Corridor train was en route from the San Francisco Bay area and approaching Sacramento when he encountered the group of people

Officials say after the stopping the train, the engineer opened the door, was pulled off and then assaulted with rocks and bottles. The engineer was taken to the UC Davis Medical Center with head injuries and possible internal injuries.

Union Pacific police arrested one person who is a minor. They are still looking for several other suspects. The city of West Sacramento is now working with Union Pacific to try and prevent more incidents like this.

My kweschun: If the characteristics of this "group of people" may not be mentioned ---and you can likely guess why-- why can the gender of the engineer be mentioned? Might not it contribute to the sexist impression that males are stupid enough to open a door to "a mob", which included in it at least "one person who is a minor"?

And the truth shall make you...annoying

Excellent article by mystery novelist Andrew Klavan in the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, on how giving up leftism allows you to stop the torturous lying endemic to the progressive worldview and to truthfully describe what you see in front of you. Plus, the price you pay for no longer being nice.

"The thing I like best about being a conservative is that I don’t have to lie. I don’t have to pretend that men and women are the same. I don’t have to declare that failed or oppressive cultures are as good as mine. I don’t have to say that everyone’s special or that the rich cause poverty or that all religions are a path to God. I don’t have to claim that a bad writer like Alice Walker is a good one or that a good writer like Toni Morrison is a great one. I don’t have to pretend that Islam means peace."

My irritation with contrived make-believe was one of the elements that led to my tranniesmogryphikation from a respectable, if eccentric, gay man into a Sith Lord worthy of strangulation by aging Buddhist civil rights lawyers and organizers of noontime concerts in churches (see post of 3.23.07).

Someone who knows me well recently told me he gets anxious that I might...well, basically what he was suggesting was that I might soon be advocating for the return of the Confederacy. This is one of the boundary taboo memes of leftism, that everyone to your right is a bigot and a Nazi. Keeps the flock corralled. As the phrase goes, "Don't even go there".