Category: Justice

Male Illness not Mental Illness

.Reading time 5 minutes.

A better ImageAnother unarmed man shot for being black and having something in his hands.  Again, police feeling threatened and ending a life with no proof or cause.

#StephonClark #SayHisName

The problem is guns. It’s not about good guys or bad guys.  It’s not about “rights”.  It’s not about safety.  It’s not even completely about race. Human beings cannot be trusted with the power over life and death.  We don’t understand what we’re doing.  Yet we have this power.  We have the power through mechanical means to end each other’s lives in an instant and we have the power through biological means to begin life.  At both ends of this spectrum, we literally and figuratively f**k it up.

But the problem with guns is that they are the phalluses of the American mentality and frankly, no one (including many women) wants to give up their dick.  The more I have to process the issues of life and death as a religious professional in the United States, the more I’m convinced that the problem is and will always be male identity and the way men are socialized to believe that we are somehow the ones responsible for who lives and who dies.  The core of the sickness of toxic masculinity is the confusion we (primarily male cisgender beings) are taught about our power based on our physical strength and our sexual anatomy and potency.  We are taught by socialization and by the history we are shown, that it is desirable to be the “winner” at all costs; we must be dominant or project dominance in some way or we have lost.  Our history books are overwhelmingly about war and conflict (physical, geographical, political, financial and now technological) and those wars are usually named for the winners.  What is more shocking is that we are taught that unhindered access to sexual pleasure (including rape) is a natural consequence or “prize” of war. Sick.

If you “win” on Wall Street, you can pay for and pay off any sexual partner you desire.  If you “win” in terms of land ownership or turf conquest, you get all the sex partners that come with it.  If you “win” in technology, you can “get the girl” even though you are a complete nerd.  The president of the United States even said this in the Access Hollywood tape “when you’re a star [a winner] they let you do it. You can do anything*.”  And he “won” our election. 

*In truth, they don’t let you do anything, he just learned to ignore them resisting in horror and disgust.

Guns are the physical symbol of this brutal masculinity.  In our current equation, having a gun says that the person with that gun has more power because they can end your life.  So everyone should have a gun and by reasonable assessment, if everyone has a gun, no one will want to use it right?  Wrong. The playground rules of male identity say that everyone having a gun means that when one person in the toxic equation sees that yours is even a little bigger or more powerful or can shoot farther than theirs, they are probably going to try to get rid of you first so they can “win”.  “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours” turns into our current reality of endless school shootings, relentless fatal drug related and gang violence, domestic abuse that belies any civilized society and Stephon Clark being shot dead in his grandmother’s yard by police because they felt threatened by a cellphone.  In the most twisted way, everyone is trying to come out on top in their mind.  If you wonder why so many of the mass shooters are young white men, if you wonder why the violent drug trade in this country is overwhelmingly male dominated, if you wonder why there can even be a Martin Shkreli or a Brock Turner or a Donald Trump for that matter, don’t interrogate their “mental illness” interrogate their male illness first.

The problem is guns, and the problem is guns because they represent weaponized masculinity. God help us that we learn a different way to embody maleness because we will not fix our gun problem until we fix our guy problem first.

The Next Reformation?

.Reading time 7 minutes.

Trump Luther

I’m going to go out on a limb here.  What if Donald Trump is like a modern day Martin Luther?  What if the message he is putting in the world (mistrust, fear, isolation, dispassionate individualism) is the dawn of an entirely new era in Western civilization?  What if the social convulsions he has prompted ultimately have as much impact as the the resistance initiated by the father of Protestantism.  What if Trump is symbolic of the dawn of a new “religion?”  For many liberal Christians thinking like this is akin to blasphemy.  For the unchurched or the non-religiously engaged it may amount to a “so-what?”  I would ask both groups to put aside their reactions or biases momentarily and indulge the following reflection.

In 1517, when an obscure academic monk named Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg, Germany, he began a chain of events that are still playing out today regardless of one’s connection to Christianity or religion of any kind.  Some broad strokes of explanation may clarify this point.  Martin Luther had been compelled to post this document to open up the debate among clergy about the sale of “indulgences” (favors of grace) by the Pope (Leo X) to fund the rebuilding of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.  In highly simplified terms, the Pope was “selling” the best seats in the afterlife and Martin Luther, among others, was not having it.  Although first printed in Latin, the 95 Theses spread quickly among the clergy and educated classes.  The result was stern rebuke from the Catholic establishment which was followed by Martin Luther’s master stroke of resistance: publishing a simplified “sermon on indulgences” in the common people’s language, German.  This pamphlet went, what we would call today “viral.”

Although Martin Luther was excommunicated in 1521, his actions led to the eventual formation of an entire branch of Christianity in “protest” against Catholic authoritarianism (aka: Protestantism).  This religious shift, in turn resulted in the rethinking of the meaning of commodities, investment and the entire concept of “capital” (Capitalism) as well as affirming the effectiveness of the printed word in communicating and influencing the masses (Media).  From these basic elements it is not difficult to see the path to everything from the Atlantic slave trade and the Industrial Revolution to modern education, the internet and the entire United States Government.

Donald Trump is a conundrum.  As President of the United States he is Commander in Chief, yet he has continually portrayed himself as being above the law.  His “style” of “governing” can be characterized at best as whim driven and at worst as intentionally divisive, racist and patronizing.  In addition, by raising the surprisingly existential question “what is truth?” Trump has completely destabilized the foundation of the information economy in the midst of the information age.  A real danger in Trump is his ability to appeal to an unseen mass discontent, just like Martin Luther.  Trump has given a focal point to a social stance that while deeply unpopular with the liberal establishment, has a powerful resonance with a surprisingly large though somewhat invisible population that liberal elites are quick to dismiss.  What’s more, this man who has only ever been part of the 1%, has managed to affect his message in the language of “common” people and he has spoken directly to them.  He has galvanized public ideological supporters under the guise of political affiliation while courting a disturbing number of a-political and even politically opposed people who privately agree with his agenda, even though they might decry his more offensive rhetoric in public.  The most threatening aspect of Trump that mirrors the power of Martin Luther is his ability to champion a message of personal agency and independent responsibility that too many are willing to accept as a hallmark of “American-ness”…even if it is wearing a white hood and a swastika.  But where Martin Luther points toward a personal relationship and responsibility with God, Donald Trump glorifies a personal relationship and responsibility with money as power.  Any entity that attempts to interfere with, bleed off of or mediate this relationship, is portrayed as an impostor, alien, illegal or sacrilegious.  And so we get walls, bans, cancellations, tariffs, restrictions and limitations all designed to keep the relationship with the Trumpian deity pure.

I’m convinced that Donald Trump is not a President whose term will simply end in a few years.  There is no solution to Donald Trump because like the fire ignited by Martin Luther, Trump is the symptom of a deeper social trouble and not the trouble itself.  To be clear, by comparing Donald Trump and Martin Luther, I am not attempting to paint the 16th century monk as a villain or to take Protestantism or religion of any kind to task (although there are many who would point to the total history of religion as villainy.) Nor am I trying to paint #45 as ANY kind of saint or prophet.  I am only trying to raise awareness to the potentially far reaching impact of what Donald Trump represents.  It did not take a genius to write the 95 Theses, but Martin Luther’s ability to leverage his words broadly achieved maximum and lasting effect.  Donald Trump is no genius (‘very stable’ or otherwise), but he is singularly focused on leveraging public sentiment to maximum effect.  To paraphrase comedian and writer Jennifer Saunders, trying to deal with the ultimate impact of Donald Trump may be a bit like trying to get toothpaste back in the tube.